THE MIND OF THE WEST by Eric Christensen

AUGUST 1997
T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`Images & Ideas of the West`

THE MIND OF THE WEST

Eric Christensen

At a Christmas party in Idaho a couple of years ago, I met a farmer who asked me what I do for a living. When I told him that I work for the Department of Energy, he sneered "A beer-a-crat!" His tone left no doubt that he considered bureaucrats to be on a par with horse thieves and politicians.

Only later did I learn that this man was a dairy farmer, and therefore should have been overjoyed at the existence of bureaucrats, a small army of whom operate solely for the benefit of the dairy industry. Indeed, dairy farmers receive federal largesse on a scale that rivals nearly any other special interest.

On any given day in the West, one might have a similar experience - a farmer, rancher, miner, or some other person whose livelihood depends on, or at least is greatly enhanced by, government handouts, loudly, and without apparent irony, denouncing government in all its forms. How can so many Westerners harbor such fervid anti-government feelings in a region whose economy depends so heavily on federal spending for, to name but a few programs, crop and water subsidies, below-cost sale of resources from federal lands, military spending, and rural electrification?

The answer is suggested in W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South, a classic study of another region where the dominant mythology powerfully distorts economic and social reality, often beyond recognition. Although Cash's work is now more than a half-century old, it still provides a remarkably useful model of Southern thinking, or at least the thinking of typical white Southerners of the lower and middle classes. This model parallels strikingly the traditional mindset of many Westerners, and the bitter lessons of Southern history likewise offer disturbing parallels to the history of the West.

In Cash's view, the first element of the Southern mind is the "savage ideal," an extreme and often violent form of individualism borne of conditions on the frontier and rekindled by the Civil War, which forced the South to rebuild its ruined economy in frontier-like conditions. The parallels to the Western mind, where the frontier never lurks far below the surface, are obvious.

The West's frontier mentality is exemplified by the strange case of Claude Dallas, a sociopathic hermit who murdered two Idaho Fish and Game officers in cold blood when they caught him poaching deer. Rather than being vilified as a killer of peace officers and a thief of public resources, as he deserved to be, Dallas became something of a folk hero who, by living off the land in isolated wilderness, embodied the symbolism of the long-lost mythical Western frontier. His murder of the Fish and Game officers was excused, and even celebrated, as the proper response to authorities who threatened to bring him into the modern world of limits on individual freedom.

In Cash's South, the savage ideal is overlain with a healthy layer of historical mythology, in which the antebellum South is transmogrified into a "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" of white-mansioned caricature, in which every man owned a manor house, a thousand acres of cotton land, and two hundred slaves. The gods of the Southern pantheon - Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest - achieved immortality in valiant, if futile, defense of these mythological values against the depredations of the Yankee in the Great Lost Cause of the Civil War (or, as it is often styled in the South, "The War of Northern Aggression"). In Cash's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, every young Southern boy dreams of what it must have been like to follow General Pickett across that wide Pennsylvania wheatfield on a steamy July day in 1863 as the High Tide of the Confederacy crashed against the rocks of the Yankee war machine. Indeed, Cash describes Margaret Mitchell's sentimental novel Gone With The Wind as "a sort of new confession of the Southern faith."

The fountainhead of these historical myths, of course, is the most powerful myth of all, White Supremacy, which gave rise to the South's most indefensible institution, slavery, and, after the war, to Jim Crow, the Klan, and George Wallace.

The West has its own mythology, what we might call "The Myth of the Marlboro Man," that functions in much the same way as the "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" myth. The Western mythology, much embellished by dime-store novels and Saturday afternoon cinema, is peopled by a larger-than-life group of rugged and solitary pioneers, animated by White Supremacy's first corollary, Manifest Destiny, who, sweeping westward in an irresistible wave, wrested the land from brutal savages and unforgiving Nature, making it safe for the creation of a nation of super-individualist yeoman farmers and ranchers.

Thus, every young Western boy dreams of what it must have been like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Custer at Little Big Horn, gallantly facing the unstoppable Savage tide. Or even more fancifully, he dreams that he is John Wayne, galloping full-speed across the silver screen toward the black-hatted bad guys, six-gun blazing in one hand, Winchester rifle blazing in the other, reins in his teeth, Stetson miraculously clinging to his head.

Both sets of regional myths seriously distort historical reality. Thus, as Cash points out, only a tiny percentage of Southerners ever belonged to the antebellum aristocracy. A white Southerner's ancestors were much more likely to be poor tenant farmers, or even poorer sharecroppers, living as near-serfs in the quasi-feudal world of the Southern plantation, or poor settlers relegated to small farms on the marginal soils forsaken by the planters. Similarly, a Westerner's forebears, if they lived in the West at all, were unlikely to have fit the Marlboro Man image. Rather, they were much more likely to be among the chronically underpaid hirelings who operated the mines and railroads owned by Eastern or European capitalists, or to be factory hands seeking refuge from the Dust Bowl at mills attracted by the New Deal's cheap hydropower.

These regional mindsets also produce devastating practical effects. For many Westerners, the ideology of the super-individualist is so strong that they simply cannot appreciate the beauty of the land around them. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, surely a true son of the West, states "I grew up imprisoned in the mythology of the individualistic West. I was surrounded by the stories and mythology of individuals who had conquered the West . . . I grew up in a culture . . . that was deaf to the sound, the mystery and the romance of the land." Thus, much of what makes the West unique and supports the vaunted Western lifestyle - its stark and soaring beauty - is undervalued or even ignored. As a Salmon, Idaho, rancher recently said of the spectacular Bitterroot Range, "To me these are all just damned mountains."

These regional mythologies powerfully affect the political system, as well. The South's ruling classes, in Cash's view, successfully thwarted periodic waves of populist discontent, and any threat to the established order, by appealing to well-worn Southern myths, and the fears that underlay and reinforced those myths: equality between the races and Yankee meddling. A close parallel can be seen in modern Western politics, where Western extractive industries seek to veil their interests in the Myth of the Marlboro Man. For instance, the ranching industry calls down the Myth in full force to thwart federal grazing reform, while in fact the largest beneficiaries of grazing subsidies include corporate giants like J.R. Simplot Company, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the Zenchiku Corporation of Japan. Hardly rugged individualists in the Marlboro Man image. And hardly good candidates for welfare.

Similarly, the mining industry thwarts reform of the 1872 mining law by dressing itself in the buckskin of the solitary pick-and-shovel prospector, when in fact it is overwhelming the product of pinstriped multinational conglomerates based in Toronto, Brussels or New York. Thus, the Clinton Administration's efforts to cut back on subsidies and giveaways that benefit entrenched western industries are not welcomed as a delivery to the promised land of bare-knuckles, individualist free enterprise, as one would expect if Western mythology matched with reality, but are decried as a "War on the West" by the region's politicians.

The regional mindset can have profound effects on the economic system as well. The South was so committed to its self-image as an agrarian power that for much of the Reconstruction era, it staked its future ever more heavily on cotton even as the price of cotton dropped steadily. The result was devastating. The South was drained of much of its capital. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, always on the economic margin, were driven deeper into poverty. As marginal lands were pushed into cotton production, the independent farmers who had once made a subsistence living, with a little left over for market, from these lands were thrust into a steadily decaying market system. Soils were depleted by the voracious demands of the cotton for soil nutrients, so that by the beginning of the Depression, over 75 million acres of Southern farmland had been degraded by erosion. The decline of King Cotton in the South echoed even to the opposition to the civil rights movement, much of which arose from the resentments of displaced white cotton mill workers and the politicians who capitalized on that resentment.

The parallel with recent Western history is again striking. Despite a sustained decline in the prices for raw materials over at least two decades, many Western politicians seem committed to the view of the West as a raw materials colony to be exploited for the benefit of the rest of the nation. Similarly, many Westerners, even in the face of a steadily declining demand for beef and an industry that, even in the best of times, generally operates on the narrowest of margins, seem to believe that the Myth of the Marlboro Man provides an exemption from the laws of ecological sustainability and economic viability. Single-minded reliance on these industries could well produce in the Twenty-First Century the kind of economic disaster that the South's single-minded reliance on cotton produced in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Perhaps the ultimate tragedy is that continued economic reliance on these traditional extractive industries could actually undercut the West's economic future by damaging its environment, thereby making it a less attractive destination for tourism, now the largest industry in the world, and for entrepreneurs who, freed from the necessity of living in cities by the information superhighway, will increasingly seek out Western locations that offer a clean environment and a high quality of life.

The dominant mythology also produces infertile ground for intellectuals. For much of its history, the South's brainpower flowed steadily toward the great Yankee universities of the Northeast, and even overseas. In Cash's view, this was the result of the "patriotic will to hold rigidly to the ancient pattern [of the frontier], to repudiate innovation and novelty in thought and behavior, whatever came from outside and was felt as belonging to Yankeedom or alien parts." Intellectual pursuits were discouraged not only by a frontier tradition that valued the production of tangible assets - cotton, tobacco, timber - over the intangible products of most intellectual pursuits, but also by extreme intolerance of any idea that could be viewed as challenging the South's mythologized view of itself. Thus, as Cash recounts, Enoch M. Banks, a native Georgian, was dismissed from the University of Florida faculty in 1911 merely for saying that in the Civil War "the North was relatively in the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong."

Again, the parallel to the West is striking. For much of its history, the West's greatest intellectuals have sought refuge in the distant universities of the East. For instance, Bernard De Voto produced much of the most important work in Western history from his post at Harvard, thousands of miles and an intellectual world away from his Utah home, while Wallace Stegner led a revolution in Western literature from Stanford, which, as any Westerner will tell you, is located in California and ipso facto is not part of the True West. Even today, the West does not welcome ideas that challenge the Myth of the Marlboro Man. This is brought home by the almost hysterical reaction in much of the West to Frank and Deborah Popper's The Buffalo Commons. This book produced extreme hostility not because it contained flawed ideas. Indeed, many of its arguments are compelling. Rather, the Poppers made the mistake of being from Princeton, which is in New Jersey, the state which epitomizes the industrialized, urbanized, decadent East. To the Western mind, this automatically disqualified them from speaking on things Western, especially when what they say suggests that the High Plains ecologically cannot sustain the culture of the Marlboro Man.

A few hopeful signs suggest that the West may finally be beginning to loosen its intellectual strait jacket and to lay the foundation of, in Stegner's words, "a society to match the scenery." This is most evident in the recent blossoming of Western literature, which, like the Southern literature of the 1930's, has recently produced more work of measurable significance than any other region by ignoring the traditional regional mythology, or even openly challenging that mythology. It has almost reached the point in some parts of the West that, like Cash's South of 1940, "anybody who fired off a gun in the region was practically certain to kill an author."

A few weeks after The Mind of the South was published in 1941, W.J. Cash hanged himself in a Mexico City hotel room. Let us hope that a similar frank self-examination by Westerners does not produce similar results.

© The Raven Chronicles 1997

�

	AUGUST 1997		T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`Images & Ideas of the West`		THE MIND OF THE WEST Eric Christensen At a Christmas party in Idaho a couple of years ago, I met a farmer who asked me what I do for a living. When I told him that I work for the Department of Energy, he sneered "A beer-a-crat!" His tone left no doubt that he considered bureaucrats to be on a par with horse thieves and politicians. Only later did I learn that this man was a dairy farmer, and therefore should have been overjoyed at the existence of bureaucrats, a small army of whom operate solely for the benefit of the dairy industry. Indeed, dairy farmers receive federal largesse on a scale that rivals nearly any other special interest. On any given day in the West, one might have a similar experience - a farmer, rancher, miner, or some other person whose livelihood depends on, or at least is greatly enhanced by, government handouts, loudly, and without apparent irony, denouncing government in all its forms. How can so many Westerners harbor such fervid anti-government feelings in a region whose economy depends so heavily on federal spending for, to name but a few programs, crop and water subsidies, below-cost sale of resources from federal lands, military spending, and rural electrification? The answer is suggested in W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South, a classic study of another region where the dominant mythology powerfully distorts economic and social reality, often beyond recognition. Although Cash's work is now more than a half-century old, it still provides a remarkably useful model of Southern thinking, or at least the thinking of typical white Southerners of the lower and middle classes. This model parallels strikingly the traditional mindset of many Westerners, and the bitter lessons of Southern history likewise offer disturbing parallels to the history of the West. In Cash's view, the first element of the Southern mind is the "savage ideal," an extreme and often violent form of individualism borne of conditions on the frontier and rekindled by the Civil War, which forced the South to rebuild its ruined economy in frontier-like conditions. The parallels to the Western mind, where the frontier never lurks far below the surface, are obvious. The West's frontier mentality is exemplified by the strange case of Claude Dallas, a sociopathic hermit who murdered two Idaho Fish and Game officers in cold blood when they caught him poaching deer. Rather than being vilified as a killer of peace officers and a thief of public resources, as he deserved to be, Dallas became something of a folk hero who, by living off the land in isolated wilderness, embodied the symbolism of the long-lost mythical Western frontier. His murder of the Fish and Game officers was excused, and even celebrated, as the proper response to authorities who threatened to bring him into the modern world of limits on individual freedom. In Cash's South, the savage ideal is overlain with a healthy layer of historical mythology, in which the antebellum South is transmogrified into a "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" of white-mansioned caricature, in which every man owned a manor house, a thousand acres of cotton land, and two hundred slaves. The gods of the Southern pantheon - Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest - achieved immortality in valiant, if futile, defense of these mythological values against the depredations of the Yankee in the Great Lost Cause of the Civil War (or, as it is often styled in the South, "The War of Northern Aggression"). In Cash's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, every young Southern boy dreams of what it must have been like to follow General Pickett across that wide Pennsylvania wheatfield on a steamy July day in 1863 as the High Tide of the Confederacy crashed against the rocks of the Yankee war machine. Indeed, Cash describes Margaret Mitchell's sentimental novel Gone With The Wind as "a sort of new confession of the Southern faith." The fountainhead of these historical myths, of course, is the most powerful myth of all, White Supremacy, which gave rise to the South's most indefensible institution, slavery, and, after the war, to Jim Crow, the Klan, and George Wallace. The West has its own mythology, what we might call "The Myth of the Marlboro Man," that functions in much the same way as the "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land" myth. The Western mythology, much embellished by dime-store novels and Saturday afternoon cinema, is peopled by a larger-than-life group of rugged and solitary pioneers, animated by White Supremacy's first corollary, Manifest Destiny, who, sweeping westward in an irresistible wave, wrested the land from brutal savages and unforgiving Nature, making it safe for the creation of a nation of super-individualist yeoman farmers and ranchers. Thus, every young Western boy dreams of what it must have been like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Custer at Little Big Horn, gallantly facing the unstoppable Savage tide. Or even more fancifully, he dreams that he is John Wayne, galloping full-speed across the silver screen toward the black-hatted bad guys, six-gun blazing in one hand, Winchester rifle blazing in the other, reins in his teeth, Stetson miraculously clinging to his head. Both sets of regional myths seriously distort historical reality. Thus, as Cash points out, only a tiny percentage of Southerners ever belonged to the antebellum aristocracy. A white Southerner's ancestors were much more likely to be poor tenant farmers, or even poorer sharecroppers, living as near-serfs in the quasi-feudal world of the Southern plantation, or poor settlers relegated to small farms on the marginal soils forsaken by the planters. Similarly, a Westerner's forebears, if they lived in the West at all, were unlikely to have fit the Marlboro Man image. Rather, they were much more likely to be among the chronically underpaid hirelings who operated the mines and railroads owned by Eastern or European capitalists, or to be factory hands seeking refuge from the Dust Bowl at mills attracted by the New Deal's cheap hydropower. These regional mindsets also produce devastating practical effects. For many Westerners, the ideology of the super-individualist is so strong that they simply cannot appreciate the beauty of the land around them. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, surely a true son of the West, states "I grew up imprisoned in the mythology of the individualistic West. I was surrounded by the stories and mythology of individuals who had conquered the West . . . I grew up in a culture . . . that was deaf to the sound, the mystery and the romance of the land." Thus, much of what makes the West unique and supports the vaunted Western lifestyle - its stark and soaring beauty - is undervalued or even ignored. As a Salmon, Idaho, rancher recently said of the spectacular Bitterroot Range, "To me these are all just damned mountains." These regional mythologies powerfully affect the political system, as well. The South's ruling classes, in Cash's view, successfully thwarted periodic waves of populist discontent, and any threat to the established order, by appealing to well-worn Southern myths, and the fears that underlay and reinforced those myths: equality between the races and Yankee meddling. A close parallel can be seen in modern Western politics, where Western extractive industries seek to veil their interests in the Myth of the Marlboro Man. For instance, the ranching industry calls down the Myth in full force to thwart federal grazing reform, while in fact the largest beneficiaries of grazing subsidies include corporate giants like J.R. Simplot Company, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the Zenchiku Corporation of Japan. Hardly rugged individualists in the Marlboro Man image. And hardly good candidates for welfare. Similarly, the mining industry thwarts reform of the 1872 mining law by dressing itself in the buckskin of the solitary pick-and-shovel prospector, when in fact it is overwhelming the product of pinstriped multinational conglomerates based in Toronto, Brussels or New York. Thus, the Clinton Administration's efforts to cut back on subsidies and giveaways that benefit entrenched western industries are not welcomed as a delivery to the promised land of bare-knuckles, individualist free enterprise, as one would expect if Western mythology matched with reality, but are decried as a "War on the West" by the region's politicians. The regional mindset can have profound effects on the economic system as well. The South was so committed to its self-image as an agrarian power that for much of the Reconstruction era, it staked its future ever more heavily on cotton even as the price of cotton dropped steadily. The result was devastating. The South was drained of much of its capital. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, always on the economic margin, were driven deeper into poverty. As marginal lands were pushed into cotton production, the independent farmers who had once made a subsistence living, with a little left over for market, from these lands were thrust into a steadily decaying market system. Soils were depleted by the voracious demands of the cotton for soil nutrients, so that by the beginning of the Depression, over 75 million acres of Southern farmland had been degraded by erosion. The decline of King Cotton in the South echoed even to the opposition to the civil rights movement, much of which arose from the resentments of displaced white cotton mill workers and the politicians who capitalized on that resentment. The parallel with recent Western history is again striking. Despite a sustained decline in the prices for raw materials over at least two decades, many Western politicians seem committed to the view of the West as a raw materials colony to be exploited for the benefit of the rest of the nation. Similarly, many Westerners, even in the face of a steadily declining demand for beef and an industry that, even in the best of times, generally operates on the narrowest of margins, seem to believe that the Myth of the Marlboro Man provides an exemption from the laws of ecological sustainability and economic viability. Single-minded reliance on these industries could well produce in the Twenty-First Century the kind of economic disaster that the South's single-minded reliance on cotton produced in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Perhaps the ultimate tragedy is that continued economic reliance on these traditional extractive industries could actually undercut the West's economic future by damaging its environment, thereby making it a less attractive destination for tourism, now the largest industry in the world, and for entrepreneurs who, freed from the necessity of living in cities by the information superhighway, will increasingly seek out Western locations that offer a clean environment and a high quality of life. The dominant mythology also produces infertile ground for intellectuals. For much of its history, the South's brainpower flowed steadily toward the great Yankee universities of the Northeast, and even overseas. In Cash's view, this was the result of the "patriotic will to hold rigidly to the ancient pattern [of the frontier], to repudiate innovation and novelty in thought and behavior, whatever came from outside and was felt as belonging to Yankeedom or alien parts." Intellectual pursuits were discouraged not only by a frontier tradition that valued the production of tangible assets - cotton, tobacco, timber - over the intangible products of most intellectual pursuits, but also by extreme intolerance of any idea that could be viewed as challenging the South's mythologized view of itself. Thus, as Cash recounts, Enoch M. Banks, a native Georgian, was dismissed from the University of Florida faculty in 1911 merely for saying that in the Civil War "the North was relatively in the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong." Again, the parallel to the West is striking. For much of its history, the West's greatest intellectuals have sought refuge in the distant universities of the East. For instance, Bernard De Voto produced much of the most important work in Western history from his post at Harvard, thousands of miles and an intellectual world away from his Utah home, while Wallace Stegner led a revolution in Western literature from Stanford, which, as any Westerner will tell you, is located in California and ipso facto is not part of the True West. Even today, the West does not welcome ideas that challenge the Myth of the Marlboro Man. This is brought home by the almost hysterical reaction in much of the West to Frank and Deborah Popper's The Buffalo Commons. This book produced extreme hostility not because it contained flawed ideas. Indeed, many of its arguments are compelling. Rather, the Poppers made the mistake of being from Princeton, which is in New Jersey, the state which epitomizes the industrialized, urbanized, decadent East. To the Western mind, this automatically disqualified them from speaking on things Western, especially when what they say suggests that the High Plains ecologically cannot sustain the culture of the Marlboro Man. A few hopeful signs suggest that the West may finally be beginning to loosen its intellectual strait jacket and to lay the foundation of, in Stegner's words, "a society to match the scenery." This is most evident in the recent blossoming of Western literature, which, like the Southern literature of the 1930's, has recently produced more work of measurable significance than any other region by ignoring the traditional regional mythology, or even openly challenging that mythology. It has almost reached the point in some parts of the West that, like Cash's South of 1940, "anybody who fired off a gun in the region was practically certain to kill an author." A few weeks after The Mind of the South was published in 1941, W.J. Cash hanged himself in a Mexico City hotel room. Let us hope that a similar frank self-examination by Westerners does not produce similar results.
			© The Raven Chronicles 1997