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Cowboy Presidents The Frontier Myth and U.S. Politics Since 1900
David A. Smith
Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2021 Hardcover. x+277 pages.
ISBN 978-0806168487. $36.95 / £29.95
Reviewed by Charles J.
Holden St. Mary’s College of Maryland
There is a particular moment worth
remembering from the Donald J. Trump presidency when the New York City-born
real estate mogul turned reality television star attempted to look tough before
his fanatical followers. Having been infected with the COVID-19 virus and
receiving the best medical treatment in the world, the weakened president was
then flown the short distance back to the White House. In a clearly-staged
moment made for television, he managed to climb a few steps to a portico where,
visibly out of breath, he turned to his admirers and, with a sneer, whipped off
his mask as if he personally had conquered the virus. Of all of Trump’s ludicrous
attempts at masculinity, this would have been a singularly pathetic, almost comical
moment had it not symbolized the shameful response by the president and his
followers to a disease that has killed over 600,000 fellow Americans. But as
historian David A. Smith demonstrates clearly in Cowboy Presidents: The
Frontier Myth and U.S. Politics Since 1900, various American presidents
have, for over a century now, felt compelled demonstrate a kind of can-do
toughness, even if for a surprisingly broad range of political objectives. One
would assume that projecting an image of masculine toughness would be the
special preserve of conservative presidents. Smith makes a convincing case that
it has also served progressive presidents well at times. The origins of frontier politics,
Smith argues, dates back to the late 1800s when Americans became obsessed with
the notion of the American frontier itself. The historian Frederick Jackson
Turner caused a stir among the intelligentsia with his 1893 essay, “The
Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner’s reading of American
history up to that point led him to conclude that it was the frontier
experience itself – the settling of new lands and the building of new local
communities in the westward drive of white Americans – that had forged a
uniquely American identity grounded in individualism, democracy, and
initiative. These characteristics, Turner concluded, had been essential to the
success of the American experiment. Turner’s rendering of American history
raised grave, existential concerns over the future of the nation when paired
with the announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890 that the frontier was
now “closed.” What would the American future hold if the frontier was no longer
there to forge the elements of American identity and success? Theodore
Roosevelt was the first American president to answer that question. Roosevelt’s personal story intersects
with Turner’s thesis in a powerful way. Shattered by the loss of his young wife
and mother – on the same day – Roosevelt moved out to the Dakota Territory in
the mid-1880s. The Dakota Territory offered Roosevelt the individualistic,
rugged, manly experience that he craved in his grief. But he also wrote
glowingly about what he experienced as the egalitarian, problem-solving,
community-minded ethos of the frontier – neighbors helping neighbors in their
time of need. Upon his return to political life first in New York state and then
eventually as president, he brought back with him a fervent belief in the
virtues of the frontier experience. If by the time he became president in
1901, the frontier was no longer an actual physical space, Roosevelt was
convinced that it could live on in a spiritual or psychological sense – the
frontier became an idea that could shape his progressive politics. Smith shows
how Roosevelt extolled the values inculcated by the frontier experience to make
the case for greater efforts by the federal government to preserve the land and
other natural resources of the West. Roosevelt’s trust-busting efforts to rein
in the power of industrialists and financiers were also done in the name of
fair play for the common man, another value he ascribed to the nation’s
frontier experience. Smith finds similar themes and
objectives in Lyndon Johnson’s evocation of the frontier – or the West
generally – in his efforts to forge his Great Society. In the mid-1900s,
Johnson, a Texan, perceived that the legal ground was shifting under the racist
foundation of white southern political power. As a result, Johnson began to
highlight his western (versus his southern) background, having grown up in the
Texas Hill Country. He purchased a fully functioning cattle ranch in 1951; on
went the cowboy hat for photos; and by 1964, his presidency was awash in cowboy
and western imagery. A New Dealer at the start of his political career in the
late 1930s, LBJ had seen how an active, empathetic federal government could
better the lives of the poor. The common folk of the Hill Country needed the
occasional helping hand and the New Deal obliged. Now as president, LBJ in the
mid-1960s sought to do the same through his ambitious Great Society efforts to
eliminate poverty and racial discrimination in American society. Johnson used
his rural Texas background to promote a frontier legend of neighbors helping
neighbors. Unfortunately for Johnson, the
conservative backlash against the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement,
and liberalism generally meant that his “neighbors helping neighbors” frontier
ideal soon fell on deaf ears. Right-wing political leaders like Richard Nixon,
Spiro Agnew, and Strom Thurmond, among others, made it clear that they did not
consider poor African Americans trapped in abandoned urban centers or the
antiwar protestors or the hippies their “neighbors.” The collapse of the
Johnson administration by the end of 1968, Smith argues, signaled the end of
the liberal frontier myth. Ronald Reagan, raised in a small
Midwestern town, like millions before him moved west to seek his fortune – although
in this case to Hollywood. Fittingly, Reagan, Smith notes, “paid little attention
to the historical West” [143]. A Hollywood insider for decades by the time he
won the 1980 presidential election, Reagan nonetheless sensed accurately that
the nation longed for a can-do, “western” man at the helm after the “long
national nightmare” of Watergate, the trauma of Vietnam, and then the ineptness
of the cardigan-sweatered Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s use of the frontier myth
emphasized rugged individualism and his handlers often filmed him riding horses
and chopping away brush on his California ranch. His campaign posters featured
an image of Reagan that bore a striking resemblance to the “Marlboro Man” ads
of the 1960s. The visual imagery of western individualism and masculinity
supported Reagan’s political philosophy that government was not the solution,
government was the problem. These images then helped his administration roll
back the New Deal-Great Society state in a number of areas. But perhaps its
lasting legacy rests in the cultural repercussions. Reagan’s use of the
frontier myth gave the growing conservative movement permission to not only reject
liberalism, but to mock it as effeminate and weak. Reagan’s western image and
libertarian rhetoric encouraged an attitude now widespread on the American
Right whereby norms, laws, facts and concern for others need not matter if one
is sufficiently “free” as an individual – and especially as a white man. George W. Bush, Smith argues, follows
closely in the Reagan / conservative frontier myth path. The young Bush spent
part of his childhood years raised in Texas, but he is part of a
long-established New England political family. Bush attended a private academy
in Massachusetts before receiving an Ivy League education at Yale and later at
Harvard Business School. But by virtue of his father becoming Reagan’s vice
president, George W. had a ringside seat to observe the political gains made by
embracing the conservative frontier myth. Bush, too, had his own ranch
(conveniently purchased on the eve of his 2000 presidential run) from which to
project a rugged, western image. Afraid of horses, Bush was a pickup-driving rancher
who was frequently filmed clearing brush to no particular purpose. Still, like
Reagan’s, the Bush presidency brimmed with cowboy imagery. But, Smith notes, of
the four presidents examined, “Bush was arguably the most contrived and
self-conscious” in his use of the frontier myth. (179) The Bush presidency had barely begun
when the nation was rocked by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Smith notes
how almost by muscle reflex, Bush invoked the language of the western, sneering
that the United States now wanted those who perpetrated or abetted these acts
of terror “dead or alive.” The ensuing “war on terror” also invoked a component
of the conservative frontier myth whereby a determined, “civilized” people
engaged in acts of violence against the savagery of the “uncivilized.” The righteous “can-do” optimism of the
frontier myth then fell apart spectacularly during Bush’s second term.
Americans in 2003 largely took the Bush Administration at its word that there
were bad guys in Iraq who also needed to feel the civilized might of American
military force. The Bush Administration’s word, however, turned out to be based
on ginned-up evidence of Iraq’s nuclear capability. Nonetheless, the Bush team
led the nation into a disastrous invasion that caused thousands of casualties,
trillions of dollars, and gave way to rise of ISIS. Over time, none of this
seemed justifiable, let alone honorable, to a growing number of Americans and
Bush left the presidency with abysmal approval ratings. It was one thing for George W. Bush to
build up a cowboy image on a false narrative and quite another to go to war on
false premises. Today, Smith concludes, the political use of the frontier myth
appears to be in a “state of recession” [220]. Indeed it is hard to foresee it
returning anytime soon, but he is certainly correct that we should not be
surprised if – or when – it somehow does.
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