American Studies 101

1a Introduction to American Studies 101

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Welcome to American Studies 101. This is an introductory online course for students at California State University, Fullerton, and anyone else who stumbles on this website. CSUF students have a separate, private space for writing comments, but all readers are also welcome to leave comments here.

This is a theoretical course, but, because theory makes most sense in practice, we will focus on the subject of the frontier. You may have studied the frontier as "Manifest Destiny," or you may think of it as "the West" or "the Marlboro Man myth." Thase are overlapping yet distinct terms. We'll use all of them, but we'll start with the idea of the frontier -- partly because a lot of interesting American historians have been thinking about the frontier for a while. I believe that if you can understand the last century of scholars' varying approaches to the frontier, then you will understand American Studies theory.

We will begin with a classic speech by Frederick Jackson Turner that crystallized the myths that many people lived by. Then we'll consider alternate views of the frontier, doing theory in practice by circling around “the frontier,” considering issues of race, gender, region, environment, economics, government, popular culture, and the politics of public memory. If you do not already have the syllabus of assigned readings, you can click on this link for an older copy of the syllabus.

In order to consider the frontier from multiple angles, we will be using multiple sources, including photographs, paintings, postcards, amusement parks, advertisements, newspapers, movies, memoirs, music, and more. We will read an ethnography of rodeo queens and culminate with an investigative journalist exploring the fast food industry, because fast food has more to do with the frontier than you might think at first.

This is a course about learning to ask questions and learning critical thinking about ordinary Americans. So here's a taste of what's to come.

When I taught American Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I spent the first day of class showing my students images of diverse Americans, trying to persuade them that not all Americans resemble the Marlboro man. I don’t think I ever persuaded them, really.

As Cal State Fullerton students, you already know that this image is just an image. Still, it’s a powerful portrait of America's myth of itself: a lone man, independent, self-reliant, noble, conquering the great wilderness, and maybe getting throat cancer. I assume this image is familiar to many of you. It is not just an isolated advertisement but actually a pervasive mythic discourse, a collective conversation that frames the story. In this class, we will be examining this mythic discourse in its sources and its consequences.

Here are some questions to begin with.

RACE: why is the Marlboro man always portrayed as white, not Latino, Black, Native American, or Asian? Historically, one-third of American cowboys were actually Black or Latino. Why isn't that diversity part of the remembered myth?

CLASS: Why is the Marlboro Man always portrayed alone, or with one or two other workers, and never a crowd or a boss? What conditions of labor are implied here? Historically, cowboys were low-paid wage laborers driving cattle to the railroads to Chicago stockyards: why are cities and corporate industries rarely part of the picture?

GENDER: Why are there never (as far as I know) any women in any images of the Marlboro man? What sexuality is implied here? And what would be different if the Marlboro man were female, or even a little less John-Wayne like in his macho handsomeness?

GOVERNMENTAL POLITICS: Historically, the American west was largely undeveloped until there were government subsidies for railroads, irrigation, and other infrastructure. What would an image looked like that included the large role of government?

It is one assumption of this course that the stories we tell about ourselves matter. These stories may come in advertisements or novels or history textbooks or films or other pieces of popular culture, and they may seem trivial, but ideas like the Marlboro Man set up a standard of who is a noble American. The Marlboro-man standard is working-class, white, male, self-sufficient, macho. It leaves out a lot of people, but it affects us all, even if (maybe especially if) you are one of those people who are left out.

1b The Deep History of the Marlboro Man

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Beginning in the 1820s, James Fennimore Cooper wrote popular stories about Leatherstocking, a genteel explorer who was ambivalent about civilization and loved the freedoms of the forest. James Fennimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking,” may not look much like the Marlboro man to you, but notice that even by 1820, Americans were romanticizing their frontiersmen. They were already nostalgic for a sweetened version of their past. Leatherstocking lived on the frontier of upstate New York, instead of the Great Plains where the Marlboro Man roams, but Leatherstocking was still a figure of independence, a figure who lived close to Indians, a figure who became more civilized by living close to what was then called savages.

Thus, the character of Leatherstocking (or the Marlboro Man, or Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, John Wayne, and the many others in this post) is a patriotic figure who also reveals ambivalence about "civilization" as well as questions about which class is most noble and most American, questions of whether we should most admire plain workers or rich leaders. This is one important lesson of cultural studies: culture is powerful partly because it is ambiguous, offering multiple meanings to different readers.

George Caleb Bingham painted this oil on canvas painting called "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap" in 1851. Think about what this painting communicates. What is lit up, and why? What is this vision of American settlement? Why does the natural environment here look more menacing than inviting? And who gets left out?

To think deeply about culture, you can continually ask yourself the same questions raised in post 1a: what is the role of race, gender, class, and politics here?

The actual Daniel Boone settled the Kentucky frontier, tried to sell real-estate to others, and then ended up dispossesed and poor. When visitors asked about his exploits killing Indians, he said, “I am very sorry to say that I ever killed any, for they have always been kinder to me than the whites.” If he had to choose, he said he would “certainly prefer a state of nature to a state of civilization.”

This was painted long after the actual Daniel Boone had died. Bingham doesn’t show Boone's failed work as a real-estate investor, his ambivalence about invading Indian lands, or his stated reluctance to commit violence.

The actual Daniel Boone was never painted. He wasn’t a hero in his own lifetime. He was heroized later, in the 1850s, during an era of sectional strife, of north and south fighting vehemently over whether each new state would be slave or free. It was an era of growing industrialization, when factory work was beginning to spread across America. It was an era of tragic Indian policies, when thousands of Cherokees died during the brutal relocation of the Trail of Tears. This painting doesn’t show any of that messy reality. It looks back, nostalgically, to a time of supposedly-noble settlement. That is one message to take from these early myths of the American frontier: even in 1851, Americans were already longing for a past that they already simplified.

The other message is that images of the past are often actually about the present -- even if only in what they choose to ignore about the present. History is about current events.

A final lesson is that, like all popular myths, the myth of the frontier is deep. It seems to glorify America but also expresses ambivalence about who gets money and admiration.

Here is actor Fess Parker playing Daniel Boone -- or maybe Davy Crocket: honestly, I confuse the two in the 1950s television version of the frontier myth. My point in showing you this image is to remind you that the myth of the frontier was particularly popular in the 1950s, when your parents may remember playing “Cowboys and Indians,” wearing coonskin caps, or spending their Saturdays watching Tonto and the Lone Ranger. This is an image that seems to be about the 1820s or 1880s, but even in this television-still, you can see that the actors were really dressed in 1950s styles.

They were also reacting to 1950s issues. That was an era of growing civil rights strife – but this all-white image of the frontier pioneer ignores that. It was an era of the Cold War, when separating “good guys” from “bad guys” seemed especially important, and when the cowboy seemed to express part of what made Americans different from Russians. It was an era of narrowing gender roles, that the cowboy myth seemed to fulfill. It is an image that is easy to smile at now, but its power is actually profound and, when we think about it, can tell us as much about the 1950s when it was made as about the 1800s that it pretends to describe

"Little House on the Prairie" is a 1970s-era television show, based on a 1930s-era set of novels. Some of you may think that you learned about the frontier from "Little House on the Prairie." You didn't actually learn about the frontier: you learned Laura Ingalls Wilder's version of the frontier, which includes women and children instead of only the men like Leatherstocking or the Marlboro Man -- but Wilder's story is still an all-white version of the frontier tale, emphasizing independence over corporate or government or urban issues. Wilder actually wrote the books as part of her libertarian politics. It is quite far from the full version of the frontier -- and that is part of what makes it fascinating. That is also why we have 15 more weeks of class, to think about what other versions we can use to replace these now-hoary myths.

I love Ansel Adams's 1965 version of a Nebraska Highway. It doesn't include any people, so I can't criticize the racism, sexism, and classism that is in these other images. It is still part of the frontier myth, though. It makes me think of the optimistic hope in Horace Greeley’s famous 1865 advice: “Go west, young man, go west and grow up with the country.” It makes me think of all the great American road strories, from Huckleberry Finn to On the Road to "Thelma and Louise." It makes me think about how, even though I don’t much care for the Marlboro Man, I still find this image enticing. I am still intrigued by the open spaces of America, by the promise of a road-trip with friends, by the beauty of the natural environment -- and I have to keep reminding myself that I usually get to nature by driving a gas-guzzling vehicle on too much concrete, and that all of this is not natural but cultural.

The rest of this class is going to be one extended analysis of what’s at stake in all these frontier images.

2a Turner's Frontier Thesis

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This week's reading is Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" (1893) -- which is chapter one at this link.

Turner delivered his thesis lecture at the Chicago World's Fair Columbian Exposition of 1893, at one of the early meetings of the American Historical Association. Outside the gates of this fair, Buffalo Bill re-enacted his Wild West Show, in a piece of pop-culture entertainment that was also part of the frontier myth. That is not to denigrate Turner: he was a great writer and promoter. But like all historians, he was also drawing from the larger culture, including the Leatherstocking, Boone, and Buffalo Bill myths that preceded him. Turner's frontier thesis helped him become a professor at Harvard, the president of the American Historical Association, and the leading trainer of at least a generation of American historians.

"Turner's essay is the single most influential piece of writing in American history," John Mack Faragher wrote in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner. "The frontier thesis became the most familiar model of American history, the one learned in school, extolled by politicians, and screened each Saturday afternoon at the Bijou." So what is Turner's frontier thesis?

“The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization," Turner declared. “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character....

“Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file – the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer – and the frontier has passed by....

“And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history."

Before Turner, many history students had memorized European monarchs. Many Americans did not think there was much American history to study. Turner proposed a framework for studying the uniqueness of America through examining the character of America's pioneers.

Here is Turner, photographed next to his books. He had grown up in Wisconsin as it turned from a place for hunting and logging into a place for farming, and that experience affected his views.

As the quotes above show, Turner believed there was a sort of evolution, visible at Cumberland Gap: from the buffalo to the Indian to the fur-trader, cowboy, and then farmer. He believed that the force of westward expansion forged the American character. He believed there was such a thing as an American character, and that that character was individualistic, practical, militarily-skilled, and formed by economic opportunity and social mobility. He believed that westering American character helped secure our democracy.

“In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics...." By "race," here, Turner means a general white American, instead of a British-American, French-American, or Irish-American. Turner lived at a time when "Irish" and "French" were considered races. Turner doesn't seem to be speaking about Asian-Americans or Mexican-Americans or African-Americans, only about what we would now call Ethnic European Americans.

In 1893, Turner was worried because the 1890 census had declared the frontier closed. What would now provide the character-forming melting-pot of Americans? What would now provide that "opportunity for a competency" that had kept Americans from having many poor people? "So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power," Turner wrote, in another important sentence. 1893 was the beginning of a depression, it was a time of immense immigration, it was a time to worry about the closing of the frontier. Turner hints that we might need to find new frontiers:

“Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”

In some ways, Turner's theory is an extended prose caption to the painting we saw in post 1b, George Bingham's "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap" -- except that Bingham included women, and Turner doesn't.

There is much that Turner didn't see:

* He didn't consider the perspective of anyone not crossing Cumberland Gap; anyone for whom the west was actually the east (as it was for Asians) or the north (as it was for Mexicans) or the south (as it was for Canadians and some Russians), or just home (as it was for Native Americans).

* He didn't see that it was groups who settled the west, more than individuals: families, religious sects (especially Mormons, but also various utopians), and especially corporations (especially railroads).

* He didn't see that America's west relied on government subsidies for irrigation, transportation, and other infrastructure.

* He didn't see that cities were such an integral part of western expansion that Chicago and San Francisco came first, before the pioneer cowboy.

* He didn't notice women, children, or racial minorities

* And he didn't know (he couldn't know in 1893) that the government actually gave away more free land after 1890 than before.

Why am I assigning you something that has been subject to almost a century of debunking? Because Turner’s thesis still matters. Even if you had never read Turner’s thesis, you are probably familiar with the general story he tells: the nobility of the cowboy, the adventure of settlement, the importance of open space to the American character. It’s in every Marlboro Man ad, every western movie, every Boy Scouts meeting, every wilderness campground.

The myth is still with us, whether we are fans of John Wayne, fans of the anti-Wayne “Deadwood,” or bored by our culture's continual re-creation of westerns. The myth is with us in our assumptions about who is an average American, what is noble, who is trusted, how much government is good, what is our relationship to the environment. It is one of our founding myths and versions of it can be found everywhere from Disneyland to the daily newspaper.

It is a myth that has had powerful consequences, as we can see by considering Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th president -- the subject of the next blog post.

2b Teddy Roosevelt's Frontiers

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One way to think about the power of Turner's frontier thesis is to examine Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th president, who was in the White House from 1901-1909.

Here is a photo of Teddy Roosevelt, age 4, when he was sick from asthma. He wore glasses, but even at age 4, refused to wear them in portraits. His mother often dressed him in flowing pants or even skirt-like toddler clothes. He was a child of privilege, as this photo suggests, and a sickly child. Think about what image of masculinity is communicated in this portrait of TR and compare it to the next image.

This is TR when he was a student at Harvard, circa 1887, wearing his “sculling outfit.” Think about the choices he made: why is he topless and barefoot, why are his arms crossed and his mouth unsmiling, why has he grown himself this bushy mutton-chop beard? After his many feminized childhood portraits, TR chose, as a young adult, to emphasize a specific version of masculine toughness.

When TR started his political career as a New York state legislator, he was accused of being a “weakling,” “Jane-Dandy,” “exquisite” “Punkin-Lily,” and, in the most sexually explicit insult, “given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane.” He was accused of being what our current Governor might call a “girly-boy.” Photos like the one of TR at Harvard in his sculling outfit were part of his attempt to show that he was, in fact, a manly man.

In the mid-1880s, Teddy Roosevelt bought himself a ranch in South Dakota and wrote a book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), which exaggerated how long he actually spent on his ranch: it was only a few months at a time, but he made it seem like years. This is a photo of Theodore Roosevelt on his ranch. He wrote,

“It would electrify some of my friends who have accused me of representing the kid-glove element in politics if they could see me galloping over the plains, day in and day out, clad in a buckskin shirt and leather chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head.”

Think about his choices in this photo as well as that quote: he used a Mexican hat and saddle along with Indian-fringed clothing in order to assert his white manliness. He asserted his closeness to “savagery” in order to proclaim his ultimately civilized masculinity. He chose to promote this version of himself, instead of, say, his legislative work in New York.

After Turner, Teddy Roosevelt wrote a historical essay, “The Winning of the West” (1896) that adapted Turner’s thesis by declaring that “the American race” was forged on the frontier. According to TR, virile frontiersmen descended into savagery in order to defeat Indians and then rise up again to civilization, evolving a higher American civilization because of their experiences on the manly, savage frontier.

In 1899 he gave a lecture on "The Strenuous Life":

“In a perfectly peaceful and commercial civilization such as ours there is always a danger of laying too little stress upon the more virile virtues – upon the virtues which go to make up a race of statesmen and soldiers, of pioneers and explorers… These are the very qualities which are fostered by vigorous, manly out-of-door sports, such as mountaineering, big-game hunting, riding, shooting, rowing, football and kindred games.”

Like Frederick Jackson Turner, Roosevelt was concerned that the apparent closing of the frontier in the 1890s might affect the American character. To compensate, he promoted sports that were new in the 1890s, like football – and he eventually promoted US invasion of Cuba and the Philipines and beyond, in order to forge a “virile” “race” of Americans on some new frontier.

In 1898, the American battleship “Maine” exploded in Havana harbor. It may have been due to improperly-stored gunpowder on board, but American newspapers, eager to sell copies, trumpeted the theory that evil Cuban Spaniards had attacked us. This media attention and Roosevelt’s own personal yearning for a new frontier helped launch the Spanish-American war, a 100-day-long war which John Hays called “a splendid little war.” It was a war that promised to heal the nation after the divisiveness of the Civil War, while it also promised to return health and vigor to the national body. Arguably, it was the war that launched US imperialism.

Here is a political cartoon from 1898, stirring up sentiment for the Spanish-American war. Think about this depiction of Spanish Cubans. What race are they shown as? What version of masculinity? What state of civilization? How does this racist caricature compare to TR’s own self-portrait of himself as a manly frontiersman?

To fight the “Spanish Brute,” Roosevelt rounded up a volunteer cavalry regiment of the manliest American men he could find. Where did he look for manly men? On the western frontier and at Harvard. This regiment was a combination of students and cowboys, educated Easterners from Harvard and “primitive” Westerners from ranches and mines, in a combination that Roosevelt hoped would express the heights of civilized vigor, what he called the most “peculiarly American” of Americans.

Roosevelt named his regiment “The Rough Riders,” after a fictional component of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Buffalo Bill dime novels that preceded the show. Here, life literally imitates art.

This photograph is by William Dunwiddie, titled “Colonel Roosevelt and His Rough Riders at the Top of San Juan Hill” (1898). Roosevelt brought reporters along with his Rough Riders for their adventure in Cuba. Today, we would call these “embedded reporters.” They publicized Roosevelt’s exploits in a way that helped promote his political career, launching him to become Governor of New York and then President of the U.S.

This lithograph by George Harris and Sons is titled, “Roosevelt and the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, July 1, 1898.” It is also a lie. Roosevelt wasn’t at the front of his regiment, waving his sword phallicly. In his own memoir of this battle, he describes being lost in the back of the pack, confused by the chaos of battle. His regiment’s flag was not waving gloriously in the background: the flag-waver was one of the first to fall in battle.

Think about what image of battle is communicated here, and how it contradicts with the murky reality that TR himself described. In his memoirs, TR wrote that it’s “astonishing what a limited area of vision and experience one has in the hurly-burly of a battle.” Roosevelt trumpeted his regiment’s triumphal advance up San Juan Hill, but they actually weren’t the first U.S. soldiers up that hill.

Here are the soldiers who actually won the battle of San Juan Hill. This is the U.S. 10th Cavalry, photographed in 1894 in Montana. They were a group of African-American soldiers who had been nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers” because they fought against Indians on America’s western frontier. Battle-hardened, they were the ones who picked up Teddy Roosevelt’s regiments' flag when it fell. They were the ones who first reached the top of San Juan Hill.

TR complained that, somehow, it was backwards for blacks to be better soldiers than the white manly men he had hand-picked from ranches and Harvard. There are no images of these black soldiers at San Juan Hill, despite the reporters who were there, repeatedly portraying Roosevelt. These African-American soldiers were not promoted in their own time the way Roosevelt promoted himself. These heroic soldiers were uncomfortable reminders to Roosevelt that the manliest of men might not be the white Harvard students or rich ranchers whom Roosevelt favored, that America might not be entirely unified around a single hero.

They remind me to be careful of sources, of the lithographs and news dispatches and even news photos of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” to continually ask, who’s left out, and why?

They remind me, ultimately, to think about who Turner’s frontier thesis – and Roosevelt’s popularization of that thesis – ultimately left out.

As president, Theodore Roosevelt led invasions of the Philipines, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, all to advance civilization and give a new generation of manly men a frontier experience, while triumphing over what TR considered effeminate “brown” races. This photo of Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 shows him resting his hand on the globe as if he owned it.

As president, TR was also concerned with immigration, especially limiting the number of Japanese allowed into America.

He worried about what he called “race suicide.” By that, TR meant that he feared that overcivilization would lead to over-restraint, which led to a declining birthrate among the wealthiest whites, while the “lesser” races of Italians, Irish, Russians, and others whom TR considered non-white kept having more children, threatening to overtake those whom TR considered white. We ourselves might say that urbanized middle-class people of any race tend to have fewer children than rural or working-class people, simply because it’s harder to raise middle-class children. It’s harder to pass on a higher class status to a next generation, so middle-class people in many times and places tend to have fewer kids. Roosevelt thought this was a terrible problem and urged wealthy white men to have a little less restraint and a lot more children. He called it “the warfare of the cradle.”

He wasn’t simply a blustering racist. He also helped found the American national park system and to promote Progressive policies of environmentalism. He is, ultimately, an example of what it looks like to take Turner’s frontier thesis as a guide to living life.

This final photo shows TR and son Kermit, on safari in Africa, in 1909 or 1910. After being US president, TR faced the problem of what to do next. What new frontier to conquer, to make himself a manly American character? He went to Africa to hunt big game. This photo shows him and his slightly-less-manly-appearing son, sitting atop a dead water buffalo. It does not show the 40 African porters they had hired to carry the equipment they required in order to be civilized hunters, including a porcelain bathtub, an assortment of literature, and enough ginger-snaps that TR could eat a cookie every night, during his bath.

I tell you these details not to mock a great president, but to realistically face America's past. I love it that TR ate a gingersnap before bedtime, even on safari. I regret it that TR himself couldn't see the manliness of the African porters who made his gingersnap-eating possible, or the African-American soldiers who actually conquered San Juan Hill. I wonder about TR's son, Kerwin, and what kinds of choices of masculinity poor Kerwin was limited to. I wonder what it smelled like, sitting on top of that water buffalo -- and who else, among Americans, are also overly driven by their own versions of Turner's frontier thesis myth.

3 Frontiers of Conquest

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This week, we're reading Patty Limerick's Legacy of Conquest, a spirited response to Turner. “Turner’s frontier rested on a single point of view; it required that the observer stand in the East and look to the West,” Limerick writes. What happens when we shift points of view? Limerick herself was born in the west, in Banning, California, one of the struggling desert cities that you may have driven past on your way to Palm Springs or Joshua Tree. Limerick’s parents ran a roadside stand selling dates to tourists. They encouraged her to dress as a cowgirl, so that passing tourists would pay to take her photo. What do you think: does any of that personal history enter into her view of the frontier west?

Limerick writes about all that Turner left out: non-English speakers, women, miners, urbanites, railroads, banks, and the problem of defining whenever "the frontier" closed. Patty Limerick chooses to avoid the term “frontier” altogether, preferring the term “conquest.”

In a preface to her re-issued book in 2007, Patty Limerick explains,

"The fuzzy and forgiving term ‘frontier’ had drawn our attention from what westward expansion had meant to native people, as well as citizens of the Mexican North, and to the natural environment. But a quick dose of honesty could cure this problem: accept the applicability of the sharp and honest term ‘conquest’ to the United States’s westward expansion, and national self-understanding would be beneficially enhanced."

What do you think? Is "conquest" a more "sharp and honest term" than frontier? By "conquest," it is important to understand that Limerick does not only mean the oft-depicted violence between whites and Indians, but also the far-less-binary contests between Anglos, Spanish, Mexicans, Asians, Blacks, Russians, Canadians, Mormons (I know, Mormons aren't a race or ethnicity like other groups on this list, but they faced their own discrimination in the west), different Indian tribes who fought each other (often allied with various Europeans who also fought each other), Portuguese, Chileans, and many other sub-groups who fought for claims to the American west. That list does not even include the many mixed-race mestizo settlers of the West. It is a huge challenge to comprehend the West's diversity, but understanding that diversity may help you understand the West's long history of competitions over who is a "real" Westerner.

While Patty Limerick uses the term "conquest," more recent scholars tend to prefer the term borderlands. To understand that term, consider one of many photos from Robert Runyon who photographed the Texas borderlands in the 1910s. This photo shows Mexican-American women standing in front of a Catholic church built with Native-American-inspired architecture in the desert southwest. What would Turner say? Nothing in this picture shows the “germ of American character” that Turner wrote about, at least not the British-German-Protestant version of the American character that Turner believed in. Instead, this is an image of cultural overlaps, borrowing and adapting. It is an image of women, religion, interracial cooperation, and the complexity of the actual frontier.

Like later borderlands scholars, Limerick emphasizes America’s west as a “meeting ground” of cultural diversity, where there were contests for legitimacy and cultural dominance and land-ownership (page 27), a place where the federal government first expanded its role, and a place where boom and bust economic cycles dominated. Think about that Limerick Thesis: does that fit with your own personal experience of California, or does Turner’s thesis fit better?

Limerick begins with an image of a frontier-woman eating endless cans of food because this image highlights connections between the frontier, corporate culture, and environmental degradation. Limerick ends her introduction with the parable of Louis L'Amour touting western “progress” in his Turner-style novels, while actually using a lawsuit to fight Indian-led development that threatened environmental degradation in his backyard. This reflects her belief that the west was settled not by lone, manly pioneers but by governments, legal rules, and contests over who was -- and is -- legitimate.

GOVERNMENT'S ROLE

In later chapters that you are not reading, Limerick emphasizes that "The two key frontier activities - the control of Indians and the distribution of land - were primarily federal responsibilities" (p. 82), contradicting the popular image of lone pioneers. Instead, "in Western affairs, business and government were interdependent and symbiotic" (p. 84), in a way that is not quite "corruption" only because it was so common and so central to the whole goal of settlement. In the nineteenth-century west, businessmen often became politicians, and even when they didn't, both businessmen and politicians aimed to exploit Western resources and so saw no real distinction between helping themselves to make money and helping America to expand.

To encourage the construction of transportation infrastructure, the federal government gave the railroads bonds and loan-guarantees (meaning that the corporations took almost no risk, but reaped almost all the profit), along with right-of-way lands (400 feet of land beside all the tracks), and, most controversially, large land grants of sections of land within ten miles of each track, to sell or to hold without paying any taxes. This shifted the tax burden from giant corporations to smaller farmers and ranchers. Between 1850 and 1875, the federal government gave the railway corporations 131 million acres of land. That means that the government gave away land as big as one-third of the entire state of California. Some of the people who passed laws favorable to railroad-owners -- such as California's former governor Leland Stanford -- also happened to be railroad owners. He became rich while his workers complained of receiving starvation wages.

This is part of what Limerick is thinking of when she writes, "In the early development of the Far West, five principal resources lay ready for exploitation: furs, farmland, timber, minerals, and federal money" (82).

Even today, the West receives more federal aid than the rest of the U.S., although westerners often declare that the West has a tradition of small-government independence. Such declarations are part of the historical amnesia of America.

REVISIONISM

When it first came out 20 years ago, Limerick’s book made many Americans, especially many westerners, astoundingly angry. Limerick was pilloried for being a “Revisionist Historian,” revising Turner’s “frontier” into her story of “conquest”. Limerick defended herself, explaining that all history is revision.

Every normal human being is forever recalculating, reorienting, reorganizing information and reaching for new understanding. Thus, if you know a historian who is not a revisionist, indeed, if you know any human being in any line of work who is not rethinking, reappraising, and revising his or her previous assumptions, then charity requires you to summon the paramedics and get that nonrevisionist examined fast, on the chance that there might still be time to get this party’s heart restarted. [Patty Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (W W Norton, 2002), page 17.]

In addition to accusations of writing “revisionist history,” Limerick was also accused of being “bleak,” emphasizing the dark spots of history over the glory. She replied that she actually intended to write an optimistic book about our messy, pluralistic past, hoping that it would help us face our messy, pluralistic present. Consider her concluding sentences: “We share the same region and its history, but we wait to be introduced. The serious exploration of the historical process that made us neighbors provides that introduction.”

What do you think: is there room for optimism in Limerick's work?

Limerick's work is a synthesis of new western history, relying on the research of scholars from Asian-American studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, History, Native American Studies, and Environmental Studies. Thus, Limerick is an example of the interdisciplinarity of American Studies -- but the story she tells is not as straightforward a story as Turner's. When you studied "Manifest Destiny" in school, you probably learned a version of the story closer to Turner's than Limerick's. When you learned about the "Big Four" railroad leaders, you probably did not also hear about the mostly-Asian workers who risked their lives to build America's railroads, or the story of the government granting huge land-grants to a few millionaires. What do you think: could the schools possibly teach Limerick's multicultural, multi-perspective version?

4 Western Settlement

2010-05-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

This week, each of you are reading different chapters from Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher's Frontiers: A Short History of the American West. You're each getting different information -- although, if you have the chance, I urge you to read all the early chapters on your own, because they raise interesting questions about where American history begins, who matters for history, and who the "savages" were during the times of European conquest.

Hine and Faragher show that the first parts of the current United States to be settled by Europeans were Florida and New Mexico, not New England as the story is often told. This basic historic fact helps reveal that the frontier was not only a westward movement, but a movement north from Mexico, south from Canada, and east from Asia. In their early chapters, Hine and Faragher highlight the role of governments and imperial contests; the role of racial diversity and mestizo mixing amongst many borderlands populations; and the role of women as guides, interpreters, wives, prostitutes, frontier businesswomen, and also justifications for conquest. They raise interesting points about various "frontiers of inclusion" which absorbed conquered people into citizenship, "frontiers of exclusion" which sought to expel or exterminate conquered peoples, and frontiers that fell somewhere between those two poles. It's fascinating stuff, worth reading.

Your task this week is to try to figure out what the story of western settlement should be.

The main question to consider is: does the information in Hine and Faragher support Turner's thesis, Limerick's thesis, or possibly a third thesis?

Does the information here concur with what you already knew, or add some new details or perspectives that change the story?
Think about what perspective Hine and Faragher take. Are these authors standing at Cumberland Gap like Turner, standing at a tourist-stall in Banning California like Limerick, or standing somewhere else? Whom do they pay attention to: politicians, business-people, or non-elites; whites or other races; men or women or children or some combination thereof?
Do Hine and Faragher depict western settlers as independent (Turner's view), or also dependent on government (Limerick's view), or perhaps some third way?
Do they depict the western settlers as Turnerian heroes or Limerickian conquesters or something else?
Do they show a frontier with Turner's opportunities for class mobility or a frontier of economic inequality?

Your earlier training may have taught you that academic writing should be objective, but here's one important insight to learn in college: no one is entirely objective. Everyone has biases. Good historians strive to thoughtfully consider evidence, but we cannot help but selectively choose our evidence, framed by the questions we ask, the people we consider to be important, the evidence we think about most, and the perspectives we hold.

Hine and Faragher are attempting to tell a complete story of the frontier, but you should understand after reading Turner and Limerick that the full story is in question. Learning to be a college-level critical reader means learning to think about the choices each author makes.

Your earlier history classes might have given you the impression that history involves memorizing names and dates, but college history is not about simple memorization. Especially in American Studies, college history is about learning to ask questions.

At CSUF, no American Studies class ever has a scantron test because we are not teaching you to memorize something for a multiple-choice exam; we are teaching you, instead, to analyze. This means that American Studies can start to feel frustrating. "Just tell us the answers," students sometimes tell me. "What was the frontier really like?" Hine and Faragher attempt to describe what the frontier was like, but it is up to you to analyze: what story are they telling? How else could this story be told?

This doesn't mean that there are endless answers to the story of the frontier or to any past event. All history depends on evaluating evidence.

The difference between the authors we have read so far is that they ask different questions about the frontier and so they use different sources to look for answers. Like most historians in the 1890s, Turner didn't notice the evidence left by women and non-whites. Turner only quotes politicians and famous leaders. He only quotes the leading writers of his day, and that means that he only ends up seeing white men. After the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, historians like Patty Limerick wanted to add in evidence from other races. Limerick used evidence discovered by scholars speaking languages other than English. Next week, we will read cultural-studies scholar Barbara Berglund, who uses sources that earlier historians used to assume were unreliable, sources like restaurant menus and tourist memoirs, because Berglund wants to answer questions about daily life. Considering the contrast amongst these authors means understanding that history is not so much a set of permanent facts but a story that changes over time depending on who is asking the questions and choosing the evidence. We call that insight historiography.

As you read Hine and Faragher, think not only about simply memorizing their information, but also analyzing where they are historiographically.

5a Urban Frontiers, Gold Rush Frontiers, and Gender Frontiers

2010-05-26T10:14:00.001-07:00

Barbara Berglund looks at many things that Turner left out, including race, gender, and cities. She looks at hotels, restaurants, parks, and other spaces of daily, public culture in post-Gold Rush San Francisco. I love this work, partly for her frank confession that she used to be bored by the Gold Rush, and that instead of typical history, she's inspired by thinking about her own experiences riding the bus, going to discos, trying to dress as a chola, and fitting in at school.

My first question, this week, is what do you think Berglund means by "ordering the disorderly city"? She describes a "social fluidity" of racial diversity and class mixing in 1840s San Francisco, slowly (and never completely) replaced by the creation of hierarchies and separation. She writes about conquest, following Limerick's lead, and adds that "when San Franciscans sought to install the distinctly American social order that stood at the heart of the nation-making process on the city's cultural frontiers, it meant one that embodied nineteenth-century race, class, and gender norms as much or more than the democracy and individualism that Turner placed at the nation's core" (9). What do you think? Which historian is more persuasive to you: Turner or Berglund, and why?

Does it matter to you that "towns were the spearheads of the frontier" (Richard Wade, quoted in Berglund, 221) and that towns "were also the engines of conquest" (Berglund, 221)? What does that even mean? Why do you think Berglund keeps using terms like "empire" and "imperialism"? And how do you feel about some of her other key sentences:

"As one of America's first truly multiracial cities, San Francisco bequeaths a mixed legacy .... It requires acknowledging America's imperial past as well as its democratic past, its social conformity as well as rugged individualism, its hierarchy as well as egalitarianism...." (Berglund, 224-225)

"My hope is that taking a journey back into an exploration of the stories generated on San Francisco's nineteenth-century cultural frontiers will spur greater mindfulness about the power of twenty-first-century cultural frontiers that continue to shape the meanings we make about the human diversity that surrounds us" (Berglund, xiii).

While you're thinking about all that, I'll tell some of the rural Gold Rush story here, to complement the urban story that Berglund tells. Like Berglund, I agree that telling Gold Rush cliches is boring. It gets more interesting, to me, when I think about some of the main categories of American Studies analysis: race, gender, and class.

RACE
The California gold-diggers included Mexicans, Chileans, Chinese (each of whom brought important mining techniques from their homelands), Miwok Indians, various Europeans, and Anglo-Americans. The Anglo-Americans were newer residents of California than the Mexicans or the Miwoks, but those newcomer Anglos, astoundingly, leveled a heavy "Foreign Miner's Tax," on the Mexicans who were older residents. That tax meant that whites profited from mining far more easily than non-whites.

GENDER
In her terrific work, "Domestic Life in the Diggings," Susan Lee Johnson points out that the Miwoks and Mexicans tended to arrive at the gold-diggings with whole families and an established gender division of labor. Miwok women gathered acorns, Miwok men hunted for meat, and they enjoyed a decent diet. Anglo men, on the other hand, arrived with almost no Anglo women. This presented a problem: who would do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry? Many Anglo miners solved this problem by living in groups of 3-5 men, taking turns each week when one of those men would do the "women's" work. I feel as if that should become the plot of a sitcom, but it's not just a quirky piece of history: it reveals much about nineteenth-century gender roles. Male gold-miners found "women's" work so odious that no one did it for more than a week at a time. They did this "women's work" so poorly that many of them suffered from scurvy, a painful vitamin deficiency which left them exhausted, covered in sores, bleeding from their gums, and eventually losing their teeth. They just didn't eat fresh food.

Johnson notes that some French and Swiss gold-miners did planted lettuce. It's a simple, quick crop to grow and an easy cure for scurvy. None of the Anglos had thought of doing that, though, because lettuce-planting was considered women's work. Instead of bending their ideas of masculinity, they let their teeth fall out. The French and Swiss, apparently, had more open ideas of masculinity, so they avoided scurvy. I find this fascinating.

CLASS
Male miners also fed themselves by buying tortillas and tamales from entrepeneurial Mexican women. Remember that detail the next time someone says, "There were no women on the frontier" or the next time someone says, "Traditional women were housewives." They were, actually, often, businesswomen: running farms, ranches, brothels, restaurants, boarding-houses, laundries, groceries, midwifery practices, textile businesses, and more. Businesswomen and businessmen were actually some of the most successful people in the Gold Rush. It was more consistently profitable to sell shovels to gold-diggers than to actually dig for gold.

Mining corporations were successful, too, because after only a few years, almost any gold that an individual could pick up had been picked up. After 1854, it took huge amounts of capital to afford the advanced equipment for deep mining.

None of that gets into the popular memory of the Gold Rush, but, to me, it's important -- because ideas about race, gender, and class overlap. Whites justified their oppression of non-whites by pointing to what they saw as "uncivilized" gender roles: they thought Indian women worked too hard, and they thought this justified imposing white culture on Indians. Asian men found an economic niche -- after being violently persecuted out of most other jobs -- by performing work that had been seen as feminine: cooking and laundering, making a living in a harsh environment while also gaining a reputation as effeminate.

While biology usually makes us female or male, culture makes us feminine or masculine. By “feminine” or “masculine” I mean the whole array of habits and norms that get associated with female-ness or male-ness, and those norms change over time. Sex is biological, but gender is cultural. Gender norms change over time and are often disputed.

Anglo men on the gold rush frontier didn’t have their gender ideals sorted out yet. They divided up cooking duties in groups of men, but with great discomfort. Johnson concludes that the Gold Rush's racial mixing and gender-boundary-crossing can provide us with “a useable past,” perhaps offering models of more flexible gender roles today. This is close, too, to Berglund's point of view.

As Blake Allmendinger wrote in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, “Today, although the West may be settled, its meanings and boundaries remain unfixed and unsealed,” affecting issues from gender roles to immigration to environmentalism. Re-examining our past, truly looking at the cultural boundary-crossing of our history, means that, to Allmendiner, “Imagining the West is a transgressive act” (6).

That last quote is the key connection, but you need to think it out for yourself: what is transgressive about Berglund?

6 Frontiers of Industry

2010-05-26T10:13:00.001-07:00

This week, you are again choosing among several chapters in Hine and Faragher's book. All these chapters focus on the economics of the frontier from the 1850s to the 1920s. This week's blog will focus on chapter 10, since cowboys have come to dominate the image of the American west. You get to think for yourself whether these themes apply to the other chapters you are reading.
First, notice the borderlands "mixing and mingling" (page 121) of vaqueros and cowboys. I love the way that this week's reading points out that lariat, lasso, and rodeo are all Spanish words, while dogie is a West African word: the very language of cowboying shows the borderlands melange of American settlement. It wasn't always a peaceful intermixing, as you will see in the discussion of the destruction of the buffalo & the Indians who relied on buffalo, as well as the violence between Anglo cattlemen and Latino and Basque sheepherders. Still, its part of the American story.

Notice also the role of gender: as we learned in post 4, diverse women were present on the frontier not just as wives but as businesswomen, in this case "Cattle Queens." It wasn't always easy for them. In his study of diaries of settlers on the overland trails, Faragher has "found not a single woman who initiated the idea of moving, while nearly a third actively objected." Yet women were there. In the early twentieth-century, 20% of all homesteaders were single women. They suffered social isolation and domestic violence, but some of them prospered, too.

Notice the gender roles of men, too: carrying guns they mostly didn't know how to use, so that most gunshot wounds were accidental (125). It's fascinating what historians can learn from careful research.

Notice the theme of boom and bust cycles of the western economy, deeply intertwined with corporate industry, including the huge cattle companies, market towns, railroads, and meatpacking corporations. Notice how small cattle ranchers and some unionizing cowboys fared in the face of the power of big business. This, too, is part of the story of the west -- and one that perhaps applies best to other readings this week.

Notice the complex issues of race, issues that keep reoccuring in this course.

Hine and Faragher inform us that blacks and Hispanics comprised approximately ONE-THIRD of America’s cowboys in the 1880s. Think about that for a moment: one third of cowboys weren't white.

How does it change your image of cowboys to bring these men back in to the picture?

There is more than just racial diversity to understand here. Cowboys are icons of rugged American individualism (remember how the Marlboro man is not only always white, but also almost always alone) -- but actual cowboys depended on technological inventions: especially refrigerated railroad cars and industrialized meat-slaughter. Cowboys were tied in to a complex corporate capitalism: they were driving meat to giant stockyards, where the pigs would be made into versions of sausage and Spam, to help feed the growing residents of cities, who didn’t have time or space to raise and slaughter their own meat.

Cowboys are wage-laborers, glamorized by popular-culture memory, but hardly glamorous in their own time. If you have ever met an actual cowboy, you may already know this. The hardships of the work are far beyond the nostalgic mis-remembered myth that gets promoted on Dude Ranches to this day

Here are a couple comics based on movies and tv shows of the 1950s. Think about it: why don’t any of these show the black or Hispanic cowboys? Or any groups? Or businesswomen? Or the stockyards factories? Or the corporations of railroads, meatpacking, and stock-raising companies that supported this lifestyle? Why don’t these pictures look more like the historically diverse families who actually worked the range?

Think about what’s at stake here. What if the pop-culture view of the west was closer to Faragher's and Hines's research than to Turner’s historical mythmaking? What should a more accurate comic-book western look like?

5b The Cultural Construction of Race

2010-05-26T10:10:00.001-07:00

This may be the most important thing you ever learn in college: race is culturally constructed.

Americans often think that race is physical, stable, and real. But race is actually imagined. Babies are not born knowing their own race. Someone needed to tell you what race you were, and the first time you had to fill out a census form, maybe at the beginning of some standardized test in elementary school, someone probably needed to tell you that the name you had learned for your own race (white, maybe, or Vietnamese) mapped on to some other official name (like Caucasion or Asian) – even though those categories aren’t exactly the same. Americans have never agreed on where the lines between races are. Are Mexicans white? Is Latino a race? What race is a Middle Easterner? What about someone from Guam or Hawaii? No one has ever absolutely settled these questions, because these categories are fluid.

In the early 20th century, when citizenship was legally limited to "free white persons" or anyone born in the United States, U.S. courts actually tried to define race and found that they couldn't. In one case, a Japanese immigrant claimed he had pale skin and therefore deserved citizenship. The judge ruled that although the law said "white," it really meant Caucasian. Then a man from the Caucasian mountain range in India claimed that he was certainly Caucasian, and a different judge ruled that what the law really meant was white-skinned. It would be funny if it weren't so important: it kept non-European immigrants excluded from U.S. citizenship for far too long. Immigration law eventually changed between 1924 and 1965. But those earlier cases remind us that it is impossible to draw a fixed line around who counts as "white."

We are all part of the human race. We all share common ancestors with the first humans in Africa. We have created lines that divide us. Those lines of race pretend to be natural but they are artificial. They change over time and they change in between cultures.

Here's the second important thing to understand: Even though racial categories are imaginary, they have very real consequences. Ideas about race affect who gets what jobs, lives in what neighborhoods, gets tracked into which school classes, and more. In the past, ideas about race affected who got to vote, testify in court, marry, own land, or have other rights of citizenship.

Limerick, Hine, Faragher, and Berglund all challenge us to think about the many races who interacted on America's borderlands and frontiers. Consider the official 1781 census list of "Los Pobladores de Los Angeles," the original non-Indian settlers of Los Angeles:

Manuel Camero, age 30, race Mulatto, born in Nayarit, married to Maria Tomasa, a 24-year-old Mulatta. Jose Fernando de Valasco y Lara, age 50, race Spaniard, born in Spain, married to Maria Antonia Campos, a 23-year-old Indian; they had 3 children. Antonio Mesa, age 38, race Black, born in Sinaloa, married to Ana Gertrudis, a 27-year-old Mulatta; they have two children...

The list goes on. There was also a Filipino settler, Antonio Rodriguez, who arrived a few months after the census. There's a lot to think about on this seemingly-dry list. The racial categories (Mulatto, Mestizo, Spaniard) are different than the categories that are common today, and that is one reminder that race is cultural, not biological. Race changes: different cultures draw different racial boundaries between people. On this list, we see older racial categories, but we also see that only two of the 43 original settlers (the two "Spaniards") were what we would call white. All the others are what we might now call Mexican, Latino, Hispanic, African-American, Native American, or mixed-race. The founders of Los Angeles were mixed-race and largely dark-skinned. The more you think about that, the more you may begin to understand that history matters for the present, for who we call an "immigrant" or a "newcomer" or a "true Californian."

As Steve Pitti explains in his book The Devil in Silicon Valley, California history is a particularly good place to see the cultural construction of race. In California in the 1800s, people sorted themselves into racial categories that most of us probably no longer recognize: “Gente de razon” was a Mission Indian, distinct from “Gente Barbaros,” literally, a barbarian. “Californio” was a Mexican who claimed descent from Spanish settlers, even though many Californios had quite dark skin.

Consider this photo. What race do you think he is? His name is Pio Pico. He was governor of California in the 1840s. Do those details help you choose a race? If you remember your 4th-grade California history, you may recall that California was part of Mexico until 1849. Pio Pico was the last Mexican governor of California. But he didn't call himself Hispanic or Latino or any of the racial terms we use today. Pio Pico called himself "Californio," which to him meant descended from Spaniards, Europeans, whites.

Census records list his grandparents as "mestizo" and "mulatto." His dark skin and his facial features make me think he was part African-American, maybe part Native American, certainly what we would now call mixed-race. But he was also wealthy and politically powerful. He once owned more than half the current town of Whittier, along with portions of Camp Pendleton and more. You've probably noticed spaces near Fullerton named after him. There is a saying, "Wealth whitens," and in Pio Pico's case, it did -- at least until 1849, when Anglos took over the state and launched land disputes and legal cases, that, along with gambling debts, led Pio Pico to die in poverty.

Nowadays, few people use the term “Californio,” while many think of “Californians” as blonde surfers, not the Mexicans who first claimed this title. The racial categories have shifted over time. Race is culturally constructed. Pio Pico was white, and then he was not white.

Here's another example, this one drawn from Karen Leonard's Making Ethnic Choices. This is a wedding photo from 1917 of two sisters marrying two brothers. Their mother stands in the back, and their youngest sister sits in the front. What race are they? It's impossible to tell just by looking, of course. Their names may help: Anita Alvarez and Antonia Alvarez are marrying Gopal and Sher Singh. From those names, you may deduce that the women are Mexican-American. But what are the men?

The men in this photo are Sikhs from the Punjabi region of India and Pakistani. What racial category is that? In California in the 1910s, they were called "Hindoos", though their religion is not Hindi. They had traveled, following the routes of the British empire, seeking work. Like many immigrants, single men traveled first. Hundreds of Punjabi men settled in California's central valley in the early 1900s, finding work on California's giant farms. Like many immigrants, they hoped to later help bring over women -- but World War I interrupted immigration from the Punjab.

These men were in California, interested in getting married, but with no Punjabi Sikh women nearby. Their problem was exacerbated by anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriages in California then. So who could they marry? Several hundred of them all reached the same conclusion. They married Mexican-American women. We might consider that a different race, and therefore illegal under California's anti-miscegenation laws, but on their official marriage licenses, the clerk wrote, "Race: Brown."

You might think that's just silly. There is no race of brown. The point is, there is no race at all. We do not have a clearer understanding of race than any of the people in the past whose racial understanding now appear ridiculous to us. We keep imagining race and then we give these imagined categories real consequences like whether Pio Pico got to keep his fortune and whether the Singh brothers could get married.

As you keep thinking about it, you have to wonder: what race are the Singh-Alvarez children going to be? Their story, I think, is a frontier story worth remembering. It's a story of borderlands, even though it happened in the California Central Valley, a space that isn't geographically close to any international border. It's still a borderland, though, in the many people who migrated there from many directions. It's a place of mixing, adapting, and competing for power (what Patty Limerick called conquest). It's a space that lends much complication to Turner's thesis, but that may help explain your own family's history, perhaps.

This is part of what Limerick means when she declares, "The diversity of the west put a strain on the simpler varieties of racism" (Limerick, 260), and "The West was not where we escaped each other, but where we all met" (Limerick, 291).

7 Environmental Frontiers

2010-05-26T10:05:00.001-07:00

After 1853, the easy-to-find gold had been found in California, so the gold frontier required hydraulic mining: blasting water at mountains to turn the rock into crumbles that could be sifted for gold, in a much more technical, expensive, and environmentally-destructive process. Instead of independent prospectors hoping to strike it rich, hydraulic mining was led by corporations who hired wage laborers. Independent miners could not survive the corporate competition. Nearby farmers often could not survive the loss of the local water, or the polluted run-off from hydraulic mines.

Compare this image of the gold rush to what you already knew from elementary school, museums, or popular culture, which usually focuses on the brief 1849-1853 period of independent miners panning the rivers for gold. What do you think: why is that brief period remembered much more than this long-lasting corporate period? And how does the frontier look different when we start to think about the environmental consequences of it?

One visitor to a hydraulic mining site wrote, "Nature here reminds one of a princess fallen into the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for the jewels she wears."

Frontier settlement relied on extractive industries: extracting fur, lumber, feathers, gold, coal, grain, livestock, minerals, oil, and other natural resources for human profit. Much of this was destructive, especially in the early years of European settlement.

This photograph shows a pile of buffalo skulls around 1870. Buffalo were particularly easy to hunt: many people shot them from the windows of the new railway cars. Some used the bodies to provide food for railroad workers and used the hides to provide material for making factory conveyor belts – but other hunters just left the bodies to rot, collecting only skulls as trophies. The government paid hunters for each buffalo skull, because the U.S. government wanted to clear the land for farmers, and to drive out the Indians who depended on buffalo for food and clothing.

Buffalo were hunted so heavily that they were nearly driven to extinction, even though their numbers had been so enormous that they had once seemed to blanket the Great Plains. As you read in Ben Johnson, by 1900, herds that had numbered close to 40 million were reduced to a few remnants, mostly in Yellowstone Park and a few private ranches. What do you think: can we keep this photograph in mind along with the image of Turner's noble independent cowboy?

Americans' attitudes towards the frontier are, in part, attitudes towards wilderness. We can find these attitudes in art. Consider this painting: George Innes's "Lackawanna Valley" (Pennsylvania), 1855.

In this painting, the foreground shows a farmer reclining in a pastoral field. There are tree-stumps, suggesting that this field has recently been cleared, providing fuel for the railway and making space for a farmer, but it’s not an image of destruction. There are still plenty of trees left, and it’s a sunny day and a gentle landscape. In the mid-ground, a train puffs around a bend, but it is far enough away that its noise, smell, and speed doesn’t seem to startle the resting man. In fact, the train unifies the picture, as the tracks pull together the various elements, and the built environment seems to be a peaceful part of the natural environment. Further back, the round-roofed building is a factory, looking almost home-y, next to what might be a church and a village. In the background, mountains shimmer.

Actually, railroads used up so much wood that, in 1860, the U.S. had fewer trees than it has ever had, before or since. Most of our current forests are new growth. Some people resented this at the time, and the other impacts of the railroads which required unprecedented bureaucracy (it was railroads which actually standardized U.S. timekeeping), unprecedented relations with government (to encourage railroad building, the U.S. gave the railway corporations 204,688 sq. miles of land, which is equal to the size of one-third of California), unprecedented profits (the CA railway barons all amassed fortunes between $20 and $40 million), unprecedented power (railroads were resented for how they treated their laborers, and how they could set high prices on farmers reliant on railroad shipping.) This painting doesn’t tell that story, though. This painting welcomes the railroads as an almost-natural part of American progress.

Perhaps you can already guess: it was a railroad company that commissioned Innes to paint this flattering portrait.

Here’s a very different image of the railroads: In 1901, Frank Norris wrote a classic muckraking novel, accusing the railroad corporations of controlling Callifornia like a monstrous octopus strangling the people of this state. People resented railroad monopolies setting prices on shipping, bribing government officials, and harming people.

The novel is nearly hysteric in its language:

"All about the feeling of absolute peace and quiet and security and untroubled happiness and content seemed descending from the stars like a benediction…. But suddenly there was an interruption. Presley … had only time to jump back upon the embankment when, with a quivering of the earth, a locomotive, single, unattached, shot by him with a roar, filling the air with the reek of hot oil, vomiting smoke and sparks; its enormous eye, cyclopean, red, throwing a glare far in advance; shooting by in a sudden crash of confused thunder; filling the night with the terrific clamor of its iron hoofs.”

[A herd of sheep had been trampled beneath this railway car.] “The pathos of it was beyond expression. It was a slaughter, a massacre of innocents. The iron monster had charged dull into the midst, merciless, inexorable. To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence post; brains knocked out. Caugfht in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Underfoot it was terrible. The black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clinkers between the ties with a prolonged sucking murmur. Presle turned away, horror-stricken, sick at heart….

“Presley saw again in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible… leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless force, the ironhearted power, the monster, the colussus, the octopus.”

Railroads moved so much faster than almost anything else in the nineteenth-century that, when the first railway car took off on its demonstration ride in 1830 in Britain, some people thought it grew larger as it approached. It was only moving 30 miles per hour, but people then weren’t used to stepping out of the way of fast-moving machines. The Duke of Wellington did not step out of the way in time. His legs were crushed, and he died that evening. That was the first of many railway deaths. In Chicago in the 1880s, approximately one child a day lost a limb on the railway tracks: an average of 300 a year. Many of those children died.

Even given those facts, Frank Norris’s writing in this excerpt from The Octopus is a bit hysterical. He strategically chose to describe sheep, innocent and fluffy and white, and not, say, iguanas. The main character Presley and his fellow farmers and sheepherders seem entirely innocent, yet actually characters like Presley recently stole this land from Mexicans and Indians, relied on government subsidy for irrigation, and depended on technology like the railroad and telegraph to keep up their agribusiness. If the railroad was a monstrous, strangling octopus, it was also their main means of support, too.

The challenge is to see the railroads from Norris’s perspective AND Innes’s perspective, simultaneously. And this perspective:

Even as the railroads destroyed forests and herds of sheep, they also promoted wilderness. Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Bryce National Parks were all extensively encouraged by railroad corporations, who wanted to sell railway tickets to tourists. This image is the cover to a 1909 railroad schedule, using the slogan that railroads helped popularize. “See America First” encouraged wealthy Americans to tour the American west instead of the traditional tour of Europe. Thus, even as railroads destroyed the buffalo and other parts of the national environment, railroads also preserved national parks and a certain idea of wilderness. Holding all those perspectives in mind at once is the challenge of thoughtful history.

The artist Albert Bierstadt painted this view of Yosemite in 1850 for the railroad corporations, who wanted to promote travel to the west. Notice the lighting: Bierstadt portrayed the park dripping with a syrupy haze, as if to make it sweet. Notice the rock-shapes: the rocks are painted as smoother, slightly less threatening or novel than the actual rocks of Yosemite. Bierstadt was inspired by the Hudson River School of landscape painters, but he was moving away from the Hudson River (in New York State) and helping teach Americans how to view the west. He adjusted the strange landscape of Yosemite to make it look more familiar to easterners – but he also does show something that is recognizably Yosemite, grander than anything in the east. Paintings like his helped promote wilderness tourism and eventually the establishment of the national parks.

More significantly than altering the light and the rock-shapes, though, Bierstadt also chose not to portray any people in this park. Yosemite was actually occupied by Indians who fought for the right to remain there. When Yosemite National Park was established in 1864, new rules prohibited the Indians from gathering trout, clover, acorns, fruits, or berries. These rules disrupted the Indian's economy and forced them into waged labor for the park service. In the 1920s, Yosemite's administrator Charles Park declared that the Indians "should have long since been banished from the Park" because their eviction "would ease administration slightly; would eliminate the eyesore of the Indian village... and would remove the final influence operating against a pure status for Yosemite."

What Park and Bierstadt didn't understand is that there is very little "pure" nature that is untouched by humans. Thompson thought that the Indian village ruined the view. He wanted a view more like Bierstadt's painting -- but Bierstadt, too, had painted away the Indians.

Here's another image of the California landscape, by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1873. This image shows the "Modoc Indian War" in which Native Americans fought for the right to remain on their land. What do you think: which image should be on the cover of today's national parks brochure?

Here's another option: this photograph from around 1886 shows the colonists of the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth standing in front of the world’s largest living organism. They called it “The Karl Marx tree.” They were a group of labor activists, hunters, and radicals attempting to start socialism in the United States. They lived in tents, constructed a road into the forests of Central California, and hoped to support their commune by selling timber from the smaller trees. When they contacted the Southern Pacific Railroad to work out prices for shipping timber, the railroad leaders contacted the U.S. congress and had the boundaries of the brand-new Sequoia National Park altered in a way that evicted this small band of socialists. The Kaweah Colonists lost their homes, library, school, and five years’ worth of work on the road. The road they built remained the only road into the national park until the 1930s, but they were never paid for their labor. The trees that they had named Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau were renamed. The tree in this photograph is now known as the General Sherman Tree. You may have visited it, may have appreciated the incredible wilderness of Sequoia National Park, without ever noticing the trail called “Old Colony Road” or thinking about who was evicted to make this park.

Federal troops occupied many national parks soon after their formation, a remarkable use of federal power during peacetime. This picture of Sequoia National Park looks quaint, but think about how you would feel if federal troops came riding in to your backyard – especially if you were economically dependent on that backyard.

That is the story that Ben Johnson is telling this week.

As people like Teddy Roosevelt observed the closing of the frontier, the extinction of passenger pigeons and the logging of entire forests, they started to advocate for government-organized conservation. They believed that government professionals were necessary to protect nature from corporate greed and settler stupidity. Between 1864 and the 1890s, they established Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks, along with 24 million acres of national forests.

In these new preservation areas, the new government administrators outlawed the traditional subsistence practices of Native Americans and poor rural settlers. Residents had relied on hunting, fishing, cutting firewood, and gathering herbs and berries to supplement their diets, providing poor rural people with a safety net when crops failed or the economy wavered. Sometimes these residents might overuse the environment, but they often had their own morals, such as insisting people kill only what they needed to eat, never to sell.

The new national park administrators hated those local practices. They are “mere destroyers … tree-killers … spreading death and confusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever planted,” John Muir wrote. The government should “cast them out and make an end of them.” The government tried. They criminalized traditional practices, labeling the traditional habits of Indians and locals as “poaching” and “trespassing.” They sent federal troops in to the new national parks. When they found locals hunting, they fined them the equivalent of more than a month’s wages.

They did not learn until much later that local practices such as hunting deer actually helped keep wildlife in balance. Local practices like controlled burns helped keep forest fires from growing too large. The administrators thought they were protecting the land, but they were actually endangering it – and driving the local Indians and settlers into poverty.

This is Ansel Adams' photo, “Yosemite” (1940s). Unlike Bierstadt’s painting from a century earlier, Ansel Adams’s photographs are crisply focused, offering sharp lines and distinct color-contrast, creating a magisterial view of Yosemite’s Half Dome. Adams’s photographs are enormously popular in calendars, posters, cards, and more. Adams’s photos are part of what made me personally interested in visiting spaces like Yosemite. As a teenager, I had a poster of one of his photos on my wall – but now what I notice is that, for all his differences from Bierstadt’s romantic syrup, Adams also doesn’t include any people in his image. He doesn’t even include anything that people have obviously made: he chose to frame his photo in a way that hides the bridges, roads, and campsites that fill the Yosemite Valley.

Still, people have made this landscape. Yosemite Indians had used controlled burns to keep the trees smaller, to provide fields for wildlife, and to prevent brush from building up in a way that led to dangerously large fires. National Park administrators did not realize until recently that attempting to prevent all forest-fires actually contributes to eventually more destructive fires. The trees in this photo existed only in the early decades of the national park – not before, with the Indians, and not now, after massive fires have taught administrators to let some areas burn.

Other administrators decided in the 1920s that, since a national park exists for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, then the greatest good that could be done with the valley next to Yosemite Valley (called Hetch Hetchy) was to dam it, flood the valley, and use the water for the people of San Francisco. Before the dam, Hetch Hetchy had rocks as majestic as those of Yosemite. The fight against damming Hetch Hetchy helped launch the Sierra Club and the modern environmental movement. Yet the early Sierra Club led massive hikes of 50 or 150 people, trampling the land, littering, and not always contributing to what we now think of as sustainability.

Those stories are all meant to illustrate that people are in the land, whether we admit it or not. People are even in this photo, even though it takes some analysis to see their effects.

Thousands of tourists to Yosemite strive to take photos like Ansel Adams, but perhaps it would be more honest to include the road and cars and people and buildings, in order to better think about peoples’ roles in the environment

In some ways, Innes’s painting of the railroad in Lackawanna Valley might be a better way to think about the American environment than Bierstadt’s or Adams’s. Innes does not try to hide the man and man-made machines that continually affect the natural environment. He romanticizes the railroad, certainly, but he doesn’t ignore the railroads – and not ignoring the railroads is part of the challenge of thinking about America’s whole frontier, with all its people and its complex economy, continually extracting value from the land.

8 Pop Culture Frontiers

2010-05-26T10:03:00.001-07:00

After our first five classes, studying historians' approaches to the frontier, this next segment of class examines pop-culture approaches to the frontier. Yet the sections of class aren't easily segregated. All along, actually, we've been examining representations of the frontier. A history textbook is one representation and Disney's Frontierland is another representation. The difference is that your history textbook aspired to depend on facts, while Disney promotes fictive myths.

What fascinates me is how much the myths affect the history and vice versa. Myths draw power by making claims to authentic historic truth -- and myths also affect what historic stories we tell. As today's reading from Hine and Faragher explains, to anthropologists, myths mean "the body of tales, fables, and fantasies that help a people make sense of their history." We need some way to make sense of history, otherwise historians would just accumulate random facts instead of stories. Yet we need to also be alert, as historians, to avoid falling into cliched myths.

Today's reading covers some ground we have already considered in this blog (especially in day one), revisiting Leatherstocking, Bierstadt, Buffalo Bill, and others who gave cultural context to Turner's frontier thesis.

As your reading points out, images like Emmanuel Leutze's "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way" are full of "stereotypes: frontiersmen shouldering their rifles... a stoic pioneer bride...a buckskinned Boone-like frontier farmer, joyously indicating the destination [in an] allegorical visualization of expansionist plans for the postwar west." You know these stereotypes because you yourself have seen them both in western movies and typical textbooks. You should know by now, too, how much is left out: the people who already existed in the land to which these pioneers are heading, the borderlands mixing of races and blending of gender roles, the government subsidies and corporate entanglements that enabled this settlement, the environmental impact of extractive industries of settlement, the many complexities of conquest.

The myth of Leutze, Leatherstocking, Crockett, Buffalo Bill, and Turner isn't exactly accurate. Yet it is powerful and that power is fascinating.

The heroes of western tales tend to be working-class men, close to nature, who pave the way for other less-natural, less-admirable, more "civilized" men. This myth actually suggests a criticism of civilization, even while it also celebrates western "Progress."

Artist Frederic Remington painted this image, while Owen Wister wrote about it, Teddy Roosevelt tried to live it, and Buffalo Bill especially made money from it. Even some Indians made money from it, performing with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Versions of this myth filled dime novels, comic books, and the first movie, whose poster is below.

This myth was questioned in the 1930s, but rekindled in the 1950s, with new layers. That's the subject of your second reading, Michael Steiner's article about Disney's "Frontierland," in which Steiner considers the power of the image that Disney promotes.

9 Disney's Frontiers

2010-05-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

Today, we're reading CSUF professor Mike Steiner analyzing Disneyland. You can use Steiner as a model for how to think about the frontier in popular culture, the task of your next midterm essay. Here are some of Steiner's observations:

"Endlessly malleable for every need, the frontier has far more power as an ongoing story than it did as an actual experience."

"Frontier nostalgia is often mixed with anxiety. People yearn for the things they annihilate."

"Remodeling what was often a dirty, brutal, chaotic experience into the cleanest, happiest, most predictable place on earth became [Disney's] mission."

"Frontierland was carefully choreographed so that guests could feel they were actors in a movie... Replicas of nature meant to be more satisfying than the real thing, such perfectly predictable adventures supply a sense of mastery and reassurance."

"today's monotone enclave is a shelter from the multicultural world swirling around it... A soothing realm of safe adventures, Frontierland offers sanctuary from the true frontier of ethnic interaction and raucous uncertainty that roars beyond the berm in the streets of Anaheim and throughout Southern California."

"Frontierland and Tomorrowland represented a tug of war between the glorious past and the promising future .... This dynamic relationship has sagged ever since."

Disney strived to make us "forget about the death of the frontier and our complicity in that process.."

There's a lot to think about in those sentences. Consider the issues Steiner raises:

What does it mean that Disney bulldozed small-town Anaheim in order to build his nostalgic replica of small-town America?
Does it matter that Disney's mania for control means that workers are not allowed to wear non-white socks, grow hair below their ears (for men), or otherwise deviate from the image of cleancut 1950s teenager that the Disney corporation seeks to promote?
Does it matter that most Disney workers would have to pay at least six hours' worth of wages to buy one admissions ticket to the park? (They don't actually have to pay admission, of course, but they do have to pay rent somewhere in Orange County.)
How does Disney "allow us to safely reenact the myth of redemption in the wilderness, airbrushing powerful ambiguities that haunt this gripping story"?
Why did Disney shift from hiring a few non-white performers in subservient roles in the 1950s (Aunt Jemima, Zoro, a mariachi band, and Indian dancers) to, by the 1960s, promoting a "race-neutral" all-white-appearing cast, with dancing Indians replaced by dancing robots?
Why do Europeans and Asians literally buy this image of America?

In the 1970s, Cal State Fullerton used to promote itself as "The closest college in the world to Disneyland." It's an ironic slogan, considering the anti-intellectualism that Steiner highlights at Disneyland. Mike Steiner himself is a professor in Cal State Fullerton's American Studies department. His office is next to mine, if you want to meet him. His article is a great example of how to think about the many frontiers here in the land surrounding John Wayne Airport. I'll leave you with a final quote from Steiner:

"The pyramids of buffalo skulls and rusted automobiles; the corpses stacked like cordwood at Block Island and Wounded Knee; the dust bowl and the mushroom cloud -- such painful features quickly dissolve in favor of the ever-compelling vision of America as 'a geography of hope'..."

The challenge is to remember those pyramids of buffalo skulls while also carefully analyzing the power of Disney's whitewashed frontierland. I am looking forward to your discussion-board postings on this subject.

10 Rodeo Queens

2010-05-26T09:59:00.001-07:00

Today we're reading selections from Joan Burbick's ethnography of rodeo queens. "Ethnography" is a scholarly technique in which anthropolgists visit a particular culture, listening and observing and seeking to understand that culture's logic. Ethnography began with western anthropologists visiting supposedly "primitive" people in remote spaces like Samoa or Papua New Guinea. More recent scholars like Joan Burbick use the anthropological techniques of ethnography on people closer to home -- and they strive, too, to be conscious of their own roles as listeners and observers. Because American Studies is interdisciplinary, this anthropological approach is yet another strategy we can use to help us learn about ourselves.

Yet, as an ethnographer, Joan Burbick is such a careful listener and lyrical writer that it may be possible to enjoy her story while missing her deeper points. Consider some quotes:

"As I started talking to rodeo queens ... I quickly realized their memories and lives were forcing me to rethink the history and culture of the West.... The West is a tenacious symbol of power and freedom ... [but there are] tensions between mythmaking and ordinary life."

How does that frame her story that begins with the smell of the paper mill, and her description of gritty bold Dorothy, the 1935 rodeo queen whose horses were all sold for dog food? One of Burbick's crucial sentences is: "I was not prepared for so much pain." Think about this. What pain is she documenting?

In addition to using anthropology, Burbick also used history to put the pop-culture of rodeo into a wider perspective. She retells the story of Turner and Buffalo Bill who popularized the image of a frontier just when America was urbanizing and diversifying, at the turn of the twentieth century. "Out of this intense demographic change, the white, Anglo-Saxon cowboy and the red Indian emerged as convenient action heroes. These simplified stick figures propagated a frontier mythology that hid both the systemic violence of conquest and the modern incorporation of land and labor." In the 1930s, during the land loss of people like Dorothy, rodeo grew even more popular -- but the people whom Burbick talks to add complexity to the "stick figures" of the myth. They also emphasize the business side of it: "even as it tries to link itself to a pastoral, nostalgic, premodern America of ranch life, it courts the dollar sign. Rodeo is big business."

We are skipping her middle chapters, but I encourage you to seek out her book, since it's a fascinating portrait tracing what changed in the twentieth century for rodeo queens of varying races and classes. See if you can pick up the thread of her story in the chapter we read on the 1980s. What has changed between Dorothy's bold and rebellious horsemanship of the 1930s and the current rodeo, where "Each horse took hours of care, as did the women's hair"?

By the 1980s, America's rural west was staggering under high rates of domestic violence, unemployment, and poor health. "In this context, nostalgia became defiant... Nostalgia became a substitute for facing and solving the hurtful and complex realities of home." Nostalgia became especially popular among white conservative Christians, touting "values" that Burbick finds "slippery and vague." She ends her chapter with a description of women violently dressing sheep into "humiliating" costumes of femaleness. How does that vision reflect on the idea of "values" or on the human rodeo queens, who, like the sheep, are dressed into a vision of artificial femaleness?

You read about some parents calling rodeo "a wholesome dream," but is it wholesome, in Burbick's portrait?

Think about Lee Ann, the queen who wasn't allowed to rebel even with a few strands of hair; think about Erica, the queen who was told her family wasn't rich enough; and think about Katie, the queen who was pressured so much she quit, then died in a car accident. By the 1980s, being a rodeo queen required thousands of dollars in costumes and travel to try-outs, plus hours of training to learn the "constant vigilance" required to "perform as corporate icons, moral beacons, and pretty Barbie dolls." I was tempted to squeeze in Burbick's chapter about the Las-Vegas-ification of the rodeo, with rhinestones and commercialization and artificiality piled on what had already always been a commercialized and artificial ritual -- but there was no room, and I hope you will get the idea even from the few chapters here.

The Indians whom we meet in her last chapter seem less unhappy than the contemporary white rodeo queens, because at least the Indians are aware of the entire performance, and laughing about it: "It's time to play Indian." That sentence may be a joke, but it's also frightening. Burbick concludes with dismay at "the limited number of roles the rodeo had for people to play... the rural West was reduced to pasteboard cutouts for mass consumption." Do you notice any connections between Burbick's description of the rodeo and last week's reading about Disneyland?

Consider again these lines from her preface:

"I live in a place that is neither an escape nor a nostalgic refuge from the pressures of the modern world. My West has its problems.... I live in a place both scarred by systemic violence and sustained by daily human effort. Scratch the surface, and layers of racial and ethnic injustice emerge next to an unbridled desire to build a home and nurture the land."

And these lines from her conclusion:

"Can the West produce a cultural ritual [that would] be willing to listen to neighbors who live on reservations, work in the apple orchards, or pump gas? Is it possible to move the tale away from a monolithic telling, droning on and on like a dream machine, silencing all critical thought?"

Bringing back critical thought is Burbick's goal, and the goal of this class. I am looking forward to hearing your own critical thoughts about the ritual of the rodeo.

11 Frontiers in Vietnam

2010-05-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

Richard Slotkin argues that the myth of the frontier is one of those narrative stories that runs through American culture, from 1820s Leatherstocking to 1970s John Wayne. It is a myth in which American men find masculine renewal by separating from the settled areas, venturing into the wilderness where they regress to savagery in order to fight with savages, then emerge having progressed towards a higher, American civilization. This myth has many iterations, one of which was Turner's thesis. This myth is what Slotkin called in an earlier work Regeneration through Violence.

This myth has political consequences: compressing historic stories (that's what Burbick called "cardboard cutouts" in day 12 of our class), promoting gender stereotypes, soaking up class resentments, hiding non-binary racial politics, and racializing class differences. As if that weren't enough consequences, Slotkin argues that in its mid-twentieth-century versions, the frontier myth also helped lead America to the Vietnam War.

Notice Slotkin's epigram from journalist Michael Herr, who wrote in Dispatches in 1977: "... might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter..."

That's a lot to digest. What does the 1840s Indian removal policy (the Trail of Tears) have to do with the bitterly divisive war in Asia that America slipped into in the 1960s and 70s?

The chapter we are reading from Slotkin begins with John F. Kennedy's "Turnerian" view of new frontiers, with frontiers that replace Turner's hope that free land would be a safety valve with a new 1960s hope that endless growth would be a safety valve. Kennedy's vision of a "new frontier" helped him get elected because it was part of a whole 1960s-era discourse about frontiers, including 1960s blockbuster movie Westerns starring Charlton Heston and John Wayne. Slotkin offers a thoughtful close reading of those movies and the way those fictions functioned in a dialogue with actual people in Vietnam. There is much subtlety here, especially in the way Slotkin traces disillusionment with this myth after Americans became appalled at their own brutality in the My Lai massacre.

The best way, I think, to help you think about it is to show you some of the powerful images of Vietnam that Americans saw on their own nightly news in the 1960s and early 1970s:

Normally, I analyze the images I show you, but no caption that I write can match the horror of those images as they are. So here's all I'm going to say: keep those images in mind while considering some statements from actual Vietnam vets.

Captain Robert B. Johnson, in Congressional testimony in 1971, explained the violence of this war as:

"First, the underlying rational policy, that is, that the only good gook is a dead gook. Very similar to the only good Indian is a dead Indian and the only good nigger is a dead nigger.... We used the term 'Indian county'" to describe Vietnam.

When asked what that meant, he elaborated:

"I guess it means different things to different people. It's like there are savages out there, there are gooks out there. In the same way we slaughtered the Indian's buffalo, we would slaughter the water buffalo in Vietnam."

That's a strong parallel, and strong evidence to persuade me to agree with Slotkin and Kerr's idea that America's frontier myths motivated some of America's Vietnam soldiers.

In 1990, Vietnam veteran Ben Chitty reflected thoughtfully on the way this myth had worked for him.

"By the time we were drafted or enlisted to fight in Vietnam, we had already been indoctrinated for that war since childhood by the mythology of America. One myth we soaked up was "cowboys and Indians" - the long saga telling how white Europeans carved a great nation out of a land inhabited by savages. But when we went to war, it wasn't much like the movies. Not much of a script. The guys in white hats weren't winning, and weren't the good guys anyway. The victims weren't grateful. Death wasn't noble. War was mostly confusing and sometimes terrifying. At best, we survived to come back.

"War taught us some things. We learned that politicians tell lies, and call themselves "patriots," that the "national interest" usually means someone can make a lot of money…. But Vietnam had another, harder lesson for us. We saw the "American way of life" from a different angle, at the edge of the empire. We enforced it, made it work. Nations occupied. Populations terrorized and decimated. Countrysides laid waste. Societies and cultures destroyed. For what? So that people would fear us, and learn that opposing the United States government meant poverty, misery, and death. So that corporations could keep making money. So that colonels and commanders could become generals and admirals. So that politicians could get re-elected.

"Back in the world, home looked different. The country we served - it turned out to be a racist nation from the very beginning, when the indigenous peoples were killed to clear the land, and Africans enslaved and transported to work the newly-cleared land. The system we defended - it was set up so that a lot of people had to be poor so that a few could get rich, and poor and working people, our own families and friends, had to squabble over fewer and fewer opportunities. … It produced masterpieces of machinery which no one could control, and stripped and poisoned the land to protect and increase the margin of profit. What a world to come home to.

"Then when we looked again at our own history, our war in Indochina turned out to be an all-American war. The Dominican Republic, Korea, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico: American soldiers fought in all these countries, occupying some, annexing others, installing puppet regimes in the rest, extending or defending an empire. A bitter irony - we had wanted to serve: we wanted to be patriots. African Americans whose parents couldn't vote; Chicanos and Puerto Ricans whose culture dissolved into assimilated poverty. Poor and working-class whites tracked into the draft instead of college or the National Guard. Native Americans proving they too were "real" Americans. The real war - it turned out - was here at home too, and we had been on the wrong side.

"If this country is ever to be the kind of country we wanted to serve, it has to change."

This is powerful stuff here. It's one reason I focused this class on the frontier: because actual everyday Americans have been thinking about the life-and-death politics of what might seem to be simply popular culture. Of course, not every Vietnam vet came home like Ben Chitty, disillusioned with the war and disillusioned with their own country's myths, but many did, and this is the week when we listen to them in order to think about the surprising power of popular culture, historic memory, and the frontier myth.

UPDATE: When I first wrote this in 2009, I thought the frontier myth had faded a bit. I thought few young people in the 21st-century watch John Wayne westerns any more. Our current military tends to name equipment after Indians -- Blackhawk helicopters, Tomahawk missiles -- oddly acknowledging the warrior prowess of tribes whom our military once fought. Native Americans now join the U.S. army in large numbers disproportionate to their population.

I thought Slotkin might be outdated. Then, on May 1, 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, the Navy Seals sent a coded message to President Obama: "Geronimo EKIA," Geronimo Enemy Killed In Action. The Navy's code-name for Osama bin Laden, it turns out, was Geronimo. Geronimo was an Apache leader famous for eluding capture, a man who supposedly had the ability to walk without leaving footprints. The military code-name might almost make sense, except that Indians are no longer supposed to be seen as terrorist enemies. Many Native Americans were outraged by the code-name Geronimo. Historian Karl Jacoby writes best about the historic implications of this coded name for Osama bin Laden.

What do you think? Are we still haunted by mis-remembered Indian wars? Does it matter that Osama's code-name was Geronimo?

12 Assembly-Line Frontiers

2010-05-26T09:53:00.001-07:00

We are entering the third part of this course, in which you read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. We are moving away from the stereotypical frontier of western movies or borderlands conquest, but we are not moving as far as it might seem. Eric Schlosser’s book begins with the image of fast-food deliveries to the heavily-armored air force base inside Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs. “It looks like the backdrop of an old Hollywood western,” Schlosser writes, “And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine” (1). He implies that this is not the western story the movies lead us to expect. It’s not Turner’s frontier myth – but, by now in this class, you should be able to recognize this portrait of Cheyenne Mountain as ALSO a western story, even though it doesn't look like a John-Wayne movie. It’s a story that shares many themes with the first half of our class. It’s a story of environmental plunder, reliance on technology, government involvement alongside proclamations of capitalist independence, hopes for economic mobility alongside realities of class stratification, and myriad issues of conquest and historical forgetfulness.

This week, we’ll focus on assembly-line frontiers. Next week will be issues of economics, then issues of government. In studying pop culture such as fast food, there’s always a danger of studying it trivially – but Schlosser makes it significant by making connections to the same issues of frontier analysis that we have been using throughout this class.

America's first assembly lines were actually disassembly lines, disassembling hogs and cattle in order to turn them into sausage and steak. Starting in Chicago in the 1860s, up to 300 workmen would work on a single pig, each doing a small task again and again, in a form of corporate labor efficiency that helped feed America's urbanizing population while also providing a reason for all those cattle drives, providing employment for America's cowboys. The stereotypical frontier myth focuses only on the cowboys out on the open range, not on this corporate assembly-line to which the cows were being driven: but both are necessary parts of the story.

In the 1910s, Henry Ford adapted the techniques of meatpacking disassembly lines to create his automobile assembly line. The workers stand still while cars move past them on a conveyor belt. The workers lose control over the pace of work, they lose much of the variety in their workday, and they also lose control over training new workers. The corporation gets a standardized, efficient product. The workers hated Ford's assembly line. They quit so often that Ford had to hire and train an entire new workforce two to three times each year.

So Ford added another side to the assembly line: he offered his workers $5 a day, more than twice the going wage. Their work-hours might be painfully monotonous, but the high pay offered the compensation of a worthwhile leisure time. Ford did this not because he was a philanthropist (he wasn't), but because he wanted to save the money he had been spending on constantly replacing workers. He also wanted his workers to be able to afford to buy the cars they were making, in order to keep his business thriving. This is what scholars call Fordism, and it is what some scholars say is the key to understanding America. Fordism convinced workers to give up power over production and focus their hopes on consumption. Fordism blurred class lines between working-class and the middle-class. Although most of us no longer work on assembly lines, many of us still live lives affected by Fordism, lives where we're not sure if we're middle-class or working-class, lives where we look for satisfactions in the area of consumption, not production. We sell our weekdays to pay for our weekends.

"Build houses like Fords," recommended Edward Filene, a department-store businessman who was actually a philanthropist too. Filene wanted to make houses as efficiently and cheaply as Ford had made his automobiles. But bringing assembly-line efficiencies to home-building is challenging, mostly because houses can't move on a conveyor belt. Still, by the 1940s several mass-builders figured out ways to create houses like Fords. In Levittown on the East Coast and Lakewood on the West Coast, mass developments sprung up. You may already know Lakewood: it's not too far from Fullerton. Here is a series of photos that Lakewood's developers hired William Garnett to take. They show the assembly-line fashion of building as teams of workers moved over the land, each doing a separate task, grading, framing, and completing the houses. There were only four models of houses, interspersed randomly, stretching out to the horizon. Neighbors would often face the mirror image of their own house.

Carl Karcher declares at the end of chapter one that he believes in "progress," paving over the orange groves. To you, are these photos of Lakewood "progress"?

Is this a town that you would want to live in? Many commenters were appalled by these photos of Lakewood. It seemed to lack true community, true history, or true diversity (blacks were banned until the 1960s, although Jews and Okies and other not-quite-whites were allowed in). Elites found it easy to critique the monotony of Lakewood: it seemed to be the opposite of frontier individualism. But defenders explained that, despite the monotonous construction, the actual residents could bring humanity to this corporate landscape, and they truly the appreciated the opportunity for less-wealthy people to have a home of their own with a yard.

D. J. Waldie has written a lyrical, award-winning memoir about growing up in Lakewood, Holy Land, that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the story of America's suburbanization. He describes Garnett's famous photos:

The photographs celebrate house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls fragile as unearthed bone.

Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible

...

The photographs look down before the moving vans arrived, and before you and I learned to play hide-and-seek beneath the poisonous oleander trees.

That is slippery language: poisonous trees, terrible and beautiful. What is Waldie's attitude toward this kind of mass-built subdivision? What is your own?

Life Magazine staged this photo of moving day in Lakewood, 1950. (Life offered the moving vans free publicity: notice how each moving company's name is carefully visible.) Lakewood's residents didn't actually all move in at exactly the same moment. Still, it seemed like an instant town, like the earlier western boomtowns, though this time the residents were not mining gold, just seeking golden sunshine and a backyard. We can see this as a new version of Turner's frontier, seeking a bungalow with a backyard barbecue instead of a farm-lot or mining-claim, seeking a place of consumption instead of a place of production, but still seeking a little bit of land of one's own, and still hoping that land-ownership might lead to upward mobility, this time through rising housing prices instead of through farming or mining.

As Schlosser explains, these postwar American suburbs were "the architectural equivalent of fast food" (60). Subdivisions, like fast-food restaurants, used techniques of assembly-line labor: breaking down work into its simplest forms, hiring cheap labor to do repetitive tasks in order to make a mass-produced, homogeneous, sanitary, highly-promoted, affordable product for consumers. In Schlosser's view, suburbs, fast-food, and also Disneyland all aspired to be "factories of fun." Disneyland was built not long after Lakewood, and in the same area, seeking to capitalize on the new highways crisscrossing what had been farm land.

The 1950s frontiers of suburbs, Disneyland, and fast food each profited from each other, synergistically - even though Walt Disney actually turned down Ray Kroc when he first sought to build a McDonalds at Disneyland. Disneyland, like America's fast food industry depended on the car-culture that Ford had started and the suburban leisure-oriented culture that was mushrooming around Southern California in the 1950s.

For most of you, the post-1945 period is probably when your family came to Orange County, not in the covered wagons of the 1880s but in the cars and then airplanes of post-world-war-II. It was when the economy of Orange County boomed. Carl Karcher, Ray Kroc, and others capitalized on that boom.

All these businesses, as is typical for the west, also all relied on hidden government subsidies. The highways that brought commuters to suburbs, amusement parks, and fast-food restaurants had been built as a defense project, as you can see from the label of this 1956 map. The original goal of interstate highways was to help people evacuate cities quickly in case of nuclear war. The original residents of Lakewood were largely employed by the McDonnell-Douglass factory, making military airplanes for the U.S. government, at a location that seemed safely outside of the nuclear fallout area around Los Angeles. This synergy of private corporations depending on government and military funding is part of what Schlosser evokes in his opening scene of Cheyenne Mountain, and it is part of the story of America's west.

It should make the openness of this Ansel Addam photo from week one now seem different, now that you can think together about the open space of the frontier and the confined space of the assembly line, and the ways that both are dependent on the other -- and the ways that both create the landscape in which you yourself probably live.

13 Meritocracy Myth

2010-05-26T09:51:00.001-07:00

We have been focusing on the myth of the American frontier, but this week I want to begin with another myth that has immense power in America: the myth of meritocracy. Meritocracy is the belief that people with talent will be rewarded with positions of power. Each of us probably knows some very smart person who has not gotten the chance to rise to the job she or he deserves, but despite the counter-examples in our own lives, most of us still believe that America is an equal-opportunity employer. We keep getting shocked to discover lingering sexism, racism, age-ism (it's harder for older people to get hired), weight-ism (it's harder for fat people to get hired), old-boy-networking, and other structural prejudices.

America is a country of immense opportunity, but in America's past, some time-periods have offered more opportunities than others. That is why, I think, there is so much interest in the early gold rush, when any hardworking person with a shovel could hope to find gold, instead of the later gold rush, after 1854, when only large corporations with access to immense capital could afford the technology required for hydraulic mining. The idea of meritocracy is part of what's appealing about the whole frontier myth, what Turner called "the opportunity for a competency" available to anyone willing to work hard on America's wide-open land.

In California, the post-World-War-II period was a second gold rush. It was a time of immense growth, a time when an outsider like Carl Karcher could work his way to the top, despite being born to a sharecropper and dropping out of school in 8th grade. Schlosser starts his book with the success stories of outsiders like Carl Karcher and Ray Krok; it's an appealing way to draw readers in. But by this week you have also read about the long hours, limited power, and less-pleasant labor conditions for the teen workers at fast food restaurants. Those are conditions some of you know first-hand. What do you think: is there anything that makes these hardworking teens different from a young Ray Kroc or a young Carl Karcher? Is America's fast-food industry still a meritocracy, where hard workers can rise to positions of power and wealth?

What if Ray Kroc or Carl Karcher were a franchisee, those with $1.5 million to invest but still drastically limited control over their businesses? In chapter 4, the story of Dave Feamster is not as positive a story as the stories of chapter one. Chapter 5 begins with the success story of potato-farmer J. R. Simplot, who made a fortune in the 1940s and 1950s by making smart decisions that got him on the upward-moving escalator of the same expanding (and government-subsidized) postwar economy that helped Karcher and Kroc rise to wealth -- but what about a small farmer today? What about the ranchers we meet in chapter 6, forced to take second jobs, struggling with economic and environmental and political forces that are pushing them towards what Schlosser calls "endangered species" status. Is it a meritocracy for them?

What about the migrant workers in Greeley, Colorado, whom we meet in chapters 7 and 8, living in sparse conditions, working dangerous jobs whose high turnover means that many workers never get health insurance or vacations: can any of them rise to executive status? And what do you think of Schlosser's argument that the government subsidizes corporate meatpacking, both by giving corporations taxbreaks for which they're ungrateful, letting them off the hook of corporate responsibility, and then also picking up the slack of healthcare, housing, schooling, and more that corporations shirk?

Part of the way that Schlosser finds depth in the superficial McDonald's hamburger is by tracing these economic and political ties, introducing us to everyone whose labor goes in to our 99-cent meal. He also draws consistent connections between economics and government. You might assume that cultural studies is limited to studying the culture only, analyzing just the artwork on a Happy Meal container -- but good cultural studies consistently thinks about economics and government and issues of power that are always intertwined with our culture.

So for this week, my major cultural question is about meritocracy. If Ray Kroc or Carl Karcher were born today, do you think they would be able to start a wildly successful restaurant chain? Are the frontier-like economic possibilities still as open as they were for Kroc and Karcher in the 1950s?

Of course, there are many other issues to discuss in the chapters you read this week. I hope you will bring up other issues on our discussion board -- I simply wanted to point out to you that cultural studies has an important economic dimension, that frontiers aren't the only American myth we can question, and that Schlosser's book has changed tone considerably since the first chapter.

14 Governmental Frontiers

2010-05-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

In post 13, we began to think about economics. Today, our main subject will be the role of government, especially the role of government in the "free" market.

Here's the main question to think about: do you see any parallels between Schlosser & Limerick? Think back to the governmental role that we read about on day 3, in Patty Limerick's history. Then think about Schlosser's perspective. In his introduction, Schlosser wrote:

The political philosophy that now prevails in so much of the West - with its demand for lower taxes, smaller government, an unbridled free market - stands in total contradiction to the region's true economic underpinnings. No other region of the United States has been so dependent on government subsidies for so long, from the nineteenth-century construction of its railroads to the twentieth-century financing of its military bases and dams. One historian has described the federal government's 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in 'interstate socialism' -- a phrase that aptly describes how the West was really won. (Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 7-8).

But what is socialist about the fast food industry? As Schlosser reiterates on page 111, in his portrait of potato-baron J. R. Simplot, "Simplot displays the contradictory traits that have guided the economic development of the American West, the odd mixture of rugged individualism and a dependence upon public land and resources." Simplot got his first major break selling onion powder to the U.S. Army, before selling frozen french fries to McDonalds. It's not quite socialist, but it is what Schlosser calls an "oligopsony"(page 117) - a market in which a few huge players exert undue influence. These huge players seem to be private companies, but they have myriad, subtle, public ties.

As Schlosser explained in chapter two, corporations lobby for low taxes, which mean that the public schools struggle for funding, so then corporations step in with special edutainment sponsorship deals for schools that are really disguised advertisements -- and that allow the corporations to then take even more tax write-offs. The same process with schools happens for parks: when public governments can't fund adequate parks, McDonalds introduces its private playlands. Since foods eaten in childhood will become "comfort foods" for a lifetime, McDonalds hopes that appealing to children will create lifelong consumers.

Yet beyond this clever tax-deductible advertising, fast food has many more deep government ties. Fast food is an industry that took advantage of government subsidies for researching food science for the military, as well as subsidies for highway construction and suburbanization and farm fertilizer and farm commodities. Despite accepting all those government handouts, the fast food industry also fights against government oversight, opposing any increase in the minimum wage, any restrictions on advertising to children, or any improvement in the laws to maintain worker health and food safety.

In a parallel book, journalist Michael Pollan reports on Iowa farmers who tell Pollan that their corn crop is "a welfare queen." (Michael Pollan, Omnivore's Dilemma, page 41). U.S. farm subsidies give billions a year to agribusiness, to encourage farmers to grow more and more corn, to make cheaper food available to consumers. All that government-subsidised corn gets used to fatten up beef-cows quickly, even though cattle aren't evolutionarily capable of digesting corn, and the corn-diet leads them to an increasing number of diseases. It's still the cheapest way to make hamburgers. It also goes into high-fructose corn-syrup that sweetens our sodas and hamburger buns, as well as other corn-derived chemicals that go into so much processed food: diglicerides, dextrose, lecithin, corn starch. Chemists breaking down the atomic content of a McDonalds meal measure the soda as 100 percent corn, milk shake is 78 percent corn, salad dressing is 65 percent corn, chicken nuggets are 56 percent corn, cheeseburger is 52 percent corn, and even the fries are 23 percent corn (mostly because they're cooked in corn oil -- if this perplexes you, Pollan explains it wonderfully in his book, chapter 7). You may think you're eating a balanced meal, but it's mostly government-subsidized cheap corn, disguised into other flavors, so that your stomach doesn't know quite how much it's eating, and the industry can sell you even more. The problems for consumer's health, the cow's health, the cow-workers, and the farming environment are hidden. As Schlosser writes, "The real price never appears on the menu" (Schlosser, 9).

The role of government in Schlosser's story is a particularly complex one. The government works to insure food safety and worker safety. Governmental anti-monopoly laws should protect small businesses from giant corporations. Government investigates mob involvement in meatpacking, scale-tampering among meatpackers, price-fixing, mis-labeling, the disposal of toxic waste from the meatpacking corporations and giant agribusinesses, and, most importantly for public health, the periodic e. coli outbreaks in food. Yet again and again in Schlosser’s story, the U.S. government seems ineffective at protecting small businesses, independent ranchers, the lowest workers, or even all food consumers.

You will read next that American meatpackers prefer working on days when the meat is prepared for export to the European Union, because those are the days when E.U. laws insure that the work is most humane and injuries are rarest (page 265). The U.S. government laws have been gutted, in Schlosser's investigation, especially in the 1980s, and corrupted by corporate lobbyists, ineffective enforcement, and corporate lying – especially about meatpacking corporation's own abysmal safety records.

Some might conclude from this that government is ineffective, and should be minimized. Yet we can’t exist without the government. Each of us cannot independently test our own food for e. coli. We need the government to test our food for us, and the story is bigger even than that. Each of us alone cannot do much to protect decent people like Kenny Robbins (read his story beginning on page 187) from profit-hungry corporations that don’t care about Kenny’s health or safety.

This is one irony of the book: it takes government intervention to insure a truly competitive market, with full disclosure and fair competition. Without adequate government laws, Schlosser reports, half a million ranchers have gone out of business in the last decade. Chicken-farmers have lost their independence to the relentless forces of the mcnugget. Meatpacking workers are losing limbs. Hank, the hero of chapter six, and a sort of modern-day version of the Marlboro Man, ends up killing himself.

The government failed Hank. It failed to regulate the construction of Colorado Springs, so that the city’s poorly-planned water-runoff now destroys Hank’s land. The government did attempt to give tax breaks to conservationists, but these laws ended up favoring wealthy tourists instead of struggling working ranchers like Hank. Most of all, the government failed to prevent mergers among meat-buyers, so Hank no longer has much choice whom to sell his cattle to, and thus very little ability to negotiate a decent price. The government fails Hank, but the solution Schlosser implies is not less government but more.

Schlosser also shows us the government working well: antitrust laws in the 1920s made sure that ranchers had a variety of buyers for cattle. But by the 1980s, the government stopped enforcing these laws as well. The government failed to limit a string of mergers and consolidations that led to monopoly capitalism, so that only two or three companies control most of the market for French-fries, chicken, or beef. This monopolistic (or oligoptic) economy means that farmers aren't dealing with a truly free market. The chicken-farmers especially seem eerily similar to the franchisees we read about earlier, assuming all the economic risks but getting little control, little freedom, and little profit. The story Schlosser tells is one in which more and more of the people working to bring us our McDonald’s Happy Meal end up being “cogs in the great machine” (the title of chapter seven) trapped in an economy of huge consolidated corporations, in which independent farmers or meatpacking employees can’t negotiate equally with giant processing companies.

The western myth of independence actually hurts the potato farmers (“independent to the point of poverty,” Bert Moulton tells Schlosser on page 118), and the cattle-ranchers, who don't use the government as cleverly as Simplot, Karcher, and the other early fast-food entrepeneurs did. As Schlosser argues,

Indeed, the ranchers most likely to be in financial trouble today are the ones who live the life and embody the values supposedly at the heart of the American West. They are independent and self-sufficient, cherish their freedom, believe in hard work – and as a result are now paying the price. (145).

After the “IBP revolution” in meatpacking, the non-unionized de-skilled meatpacking workers seem to have the least independence of all: free only to quit every few months, and sometimes to sue the corporations that injure them. As Schlosser will point out in his conclusion:

Many of America’s greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks, the construction of dams, bridges, roads, churches, schools, and universities. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two)… (261).

Schlosser encourages us to look beyond myths of the free market to understand the real forces at work, what he calls the “relentless drive for conformity and cheapness” of consolidated corporations which actually create a lack of freedom.

Nevertheless, Schlosser concludes that we have some freedom, not as fast-food workers but as consumers. We have the freedom to choose to consume In’N’Out instead of McDonalds, or slow food instead of fast. Government pressure may have failed recently, but consumer pressure can still be powerful, getting fast-food industries to serve healthier, more environmental, more diverse food. No one forces us to eat any fast food, anyway, although all that marketing to children -- and creating comfort foods for life -- is a bit coercive. Still, Schlosser concludes, “Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way,” which might mean choosing not to have any fast food at all.

Will you? Will this book change how you eat? I am curious about that, and about your ideas of government involvement in the market. I am looking forward to this week’s blackboard discussion-board.

15 Patriotism

2010-05-26T09:42:00.001-07:00

Today, our blog will move away from Fast Food Nation in particular to reflect on the whole semester in general. This reflection is in two parts: questions of patriotism, and then questions of theory.

Many of you have been posting reflections about patriotism all semester. The Marlboro Man is patriotic, you have written, and the people who promote Turner's frontier myth do so out of patriotism. I have no idea what the word "patriotic" means to you in these sentences. Really, I have no idea whether the fictional Marlboro Man character is a good citizen or not. The word "patriotism" seems like a full word, but it can be quite empty.

Some Orange-County public-school teachers, in the 1960s, were attacked for teaching unpatriotic, liberal versions of American history. The people who organized these attacks went on to organize the new right that dominated late-twentieth-century American politics, helping to elect Nixon and then Reagan. Your county is actually surprisingly powerful in national politics, and surprisingly significant -- but that is a story for another time. Here, I am interested in what this meant for Orange-County history classes.

In response to those early-60s attacks, I think that many of the history classes in your local school system retreated to a very narrow version of patriotism, limiting themselves to relaying only the positive aspects of our past. You probably learned about slavery, but not about coerced labor in California's missions, or about sweatshops. Overall in my CSUF classes, a surprising number of students have never heard of Japanese internment. I think this is a shame, partly because I believe, with George Santayana, that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

For some people coming out of the Orange-County public school system, the fuller perspectives offered in an American Studies class can be shocking. Some people call this field "Un-American Studies." So I want to tell you as clearly as I can that I feel a patriotic love of America. To explain this, I am going to dare to disagree with Shakespeare: I don't think love is blind.

Lust is blind. Immature love is blind. But I believe that real love, mature love, is a love that knows the loved one's faults and still loves.

So for me, knowing America's faults does not keep me from loving America. For me, actually, the faults are part of what I love. I love that this country has the freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry that we can honestly explore our past. I even love that Americans, in the past, have not always acted on our highest ideals of "we believe all men are created equal." Our failure to consistently live up to that pledge means that our ideals are high ideals, worth striving for. It means that our ancestors are humans, not Gods. They are worth learning from. Their struggles with diversity, with environmental issues, with limited perspectives, with economics, and more, may help illuminate our own struggles with similar issues.

As young children, you may have thought your parents were perfect. As adolescents, you probably discovered that your parents have faults. As adults, now, many of you will reach the maturity to still love your parents, faults and all. That kind of maturity to love your imperfect parents is the same kind of maturity that I mean when I talk about mature love of country. That's the kind of patriotism that I believe American Studies promotes, at its best.

So what else have we learned this semester, beyond a new twist on traditional patriotism?

Your midsemester evaluation asked what you think you will remember a year from now. Many answered that you will forget most names and dates. A few of your classmates will remember Disneyland, because they have a personal connection, or rodeo queens because they found that reading fascinating. By now, some will remember a distaste for fast food. One person wrote that what he/she learned was "time management," because this class was burdensomely challenging -- but that same person added, "Also seeing something from another's perspective, comsidering the variety of questions and respsonses." That is the deepest thing I want you to remember.

I expect you to forget names and dates -- but I hope you will remember that smart college history goes far deeper than memorizing names and dates. Here's what one of you wrote you will remember:

Race is made up, there are a lot of myths, conquest more than frontier, images are deeper than they look. Especially that my ideas are okay as long as they are proved and analyzed.

That's an excellent synopsis of my goals for this class. I hope that's what many of you will take with you, and eventually teach to others, too. You are now all historians.

We focused on the frontier so that you could see how history works, following the historical debate about the frontier, using varieties of evidence and a multitude of perspectives. I hope you understand that American Studies often focuses on many other issues, not just the frontier. You can take dozens of other American Studies classes and never hear Frederick Jackson Turner's name again. I hope that some of you will indeed be inspired to take other American Studies courses.

Yet whether you take other formal courses or not, I hope you will keep using the kind of thinking you have learned in this course: asking questions, assessing evidence, looking from multiple perspectives, honoring diversity, and experiencing what might be a new kind of patriotism.

15a Yippee-yi-yay

2010-05-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally, Jack in the Box has a recent ad campaign that eerily sums up themes from our entire class.

This video mocks the whole cowboy theme, suggesting that myths of the American frontier are now reduced to only jokes. Yet as American Studies students, you probably realize that jokes are not trivial: jokes can be interesting windows onto cultural concerns.

I don't know about you, but after watching that video, I can't get that silly "Yippee-yah-ay" song out of my head. Ads are designed that way, of course, attempting to embed themselves in our brain, but the power of that silly cowboy song suggests that there is still some power to the American cowboy myth. We're not the 1950s generation obsessed with John Wayne and his myths, but we're not entirely free of the frontier myth either. We can't ignore it, because it's already in our heads. All we can do is analyze it.

This video features midget cowboys, partly to mock the stereotypical strong masculinity of the John Wayne myth, and perhaps even to make an American-Studies-like point about the diversity of actual cowboys. Yet I don't think this video intends to promote diversity. There are gender issues here: instead of making midgets sexy like John Wayne, the video shows them singing in unsexy chipmunks-like voices. There are also racial issues here: as far as I can tell, all the midget cowboys are white. Even in a video that questions the cowboy mystique, the myth of all-white cowboys gets reproduced.

Beyond race and gender lie other issues of production. The video is suggesting that it's funny to think that miniature burgers come from miniature cattle and miniature people. Perhaps the joke is on us, who don't really know where our burgers come from. According to the youtube commentators, cattle and prairie dogs aren't often in the same landscape: this video confuses Minnesota corn-country than with southwestern cattle-country, and therefore, the commenters declare, the video makes no sense -- as if the video were ever supposed to make factual sense. The humor of the senselessness is mocking all the Jack in the Box customers who don't truly know where their burgers come from. The Jack in the Box corporation probably doesn't want you to read Schlosser's chapters about where our burgers truly do come from, yet, ironically, this very video suggests the need for Schlosser's analysis.

The existence of miniature burgers also hints at our precarious economic times. It's a clever way for Jack in the Box to package less meat under more bun, selling us mostly puffed air. The ad distracts us from that economic point by showing us midgets semi-yodelling. That's an astoundingly clever distraction -- yet none of these points about economics, food production, environment, diversity, and race and gender represenation are ever fully buried.

American Studies lets us think about those buried issues in this ad. American Studies aims to let you think about any piece of culture deeply. The goal of American Studies is not to ruin the joke or ruin your lunch -- though I understand how that could happen. Really, my goal is not to ruin your life but to add greater meaning to the daily culture that's all around us.

So go forth and analyze, while humming yippee-yah-ay.

15b Politics Beyond the Voting Booth

2010-05-26T09:38:00.001-07:00

It might not be apparent to you, but American Studies 101 actually isn't supposed to be a class about American frontiers. It is a class about American Studies theory. We just chose the frontier in order to put theory into practice, to make theory more concrete. Now that we have reached the end of the semester, we need to step back to think about what we have learned more theoretically.

Honestly, American Studies risks becoming trivial. Studying the lives of everyday Americans and using diverse cultural sources -- often pop-cultural sources -- we risk being accused of insignificance. It would be insignificant if Schlosser just traced the colors of the McDonald's logo or if Slotkin just listed John Wayne's movies. What makes these quotidian subjects important is the way that each author on our syllabus asks thoughtful questions about seemingly-superficial subjects.

Those questions are the kinds of questions that you yourself asked in your second essays, finding surprisingly deep meanings in "Oregon Trail," "Borat," "Hannah Montana," and the restaurant Claimjumper.

Those questions are the heart of American Studies theory. They are questions about our culture's role in identity formation, creating norms of race, gender, class, sexuality, region, citizenship, and more. They are questions untying the web that links culture to economics and governance. They are questions linking the past to the present by examining the politics of public memory. They are questions seeking multiple perspectives, continually wondering who is left out and how we can think beyond the boxes that we are given. They are, most deeply, questions about politics -- but this is not the politics of simply voting Democratic or Republican on the second Tuesday in November. Instead, American Studies investigates the everyday politics of power. American Studies is the study of politics beyond the voting booth. That doesn't mean that we don't also, sometimes, study the voting booths. We have mentioned several presidents and wars in this class. You must have noticed by now, though, that we often look at issues that don't just involve presidents and wars; we also find significance in a Happy Meal.

That is what I hope you will remember from this course. American Studies, in the end, is not a set of facts but a style of looking at the world, asking questions and examining connections.

We have spent a lot of time insulting Frederick Jackson Turner this semester. Slightly unfairly, we have used Turner to stand in for a frontier myth promoted by many people (including Leatherstocking and Teddy Roosevelt before Turner ever gave his speech) and we have taken poor Turner to task for not understanding everything that the next 118 years of historians figured out after him. Turner didn't understand the role of racial politics, gender roles, environmental extraction, urbanization, governmental policy, corporate economics, and more in creating what he saw as the independent, macho American frontiersman. Subsequent historians -- all of our syllabus since Turner -- have explored what Turner left out, and hopefully taught you all to look at many issues from multiple perspectives.

Despite all our Turner-bashing, there were some things that Turner did get right. Turner challenged American historians to study less-famous Americans, not just the leading politicians. Turner attempted to theorize connections between issues of culture, history, economics, politics, and the lives of ordinary Americans. Above all, Turner believed that historians must study the past not for its own sake but for how it affects the present. Limerick quotes Turner in her introduction: "The antiquarian strives to bring back the past for the sake of the past [while] the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past. The goal of the antiquarian is the dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present" (Turner, 1891, quoted in Limerick, 17). That is our goal, too: American Studies strives to connect the past to your present.

If you remember nothing else from this class, I hope you remember that good history is about the present. Good history is not about memorizing facts, but about learning to ask thoughtful questions. And it can be about you yourself, whether or not you are white, male, heterosexual, interested in the History Channel, or not.

Since you have learned to ask questions and to look for what is left out, I hope that you have noticed how much is left out of this course, too. We focused on the time period 1850 to the present, omitting much of American history. We focused on the frontier, omitting many other important American issues. We tried to use diverse sources -- poems, paintings, photographs, literature, diaries, movies, amusement parks, interviews, advertisements, rodeos, and the entire fast food experience -- but we did not use every possible variety of source: we left out music, most video-games, and much more. The only way to compensate for those many gaps is to explore other American Studies courses and to keep asking questions on your own. I hope you will.

Week 5 The 1930s and the Changing Frontier

2009-02-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

When did the frontier close? Turner thought that the frontier closed in 1890, citing the federal census definition of people per acre. Limerick argued that there was more continuity than discontinuity around 1890s, especially because more federal land was distributed after 1890 than before -- and also because there are now fewer people per acre in much of the west than there were in 1890. Limerick also pointed out that there may not be one definable closing of the frontier.

But this week's reading by John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine argues that the 1930s were actually a significant turning point in the history of the American frontier.

In the 1930s, decades of overplowing the Great Plains led to the environmental crisis known as the "Dust Bowl," when wind tore off the topsoil, 24 million farm acres turned to desert, and the rural west was faced with economic collapse. Farmers moved from the Great Plains states in desperate search of work in California. This image by Dorothea Lange shows some of the desperation of the Dust Bowl refugees, a very different pioneer image than those that Turner wrote about. If you're still looking for a subject for your second midterm, consider the 1940 movie, "Grapes of Wrath." It's a different vision of the frontier than Turner ever had, but it is still a vision of westering in hopes of economic mobility.

The federal government responded to the crisis of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl with new farming laws and new funding for giant development projects, such as the Hoover Dam, which provided construction work, electricity, and industrial development. (It also led to the dominance of Henry J. Kaiser's Kaiser Corporation, a building contractor who eventually designed the healthcare that many of you now use.)

The government has always been involved in subsidizing the west, including funding Indian removal, railroad development, government land-sales, and irrigation projects that were all crucial to European settlement of the American west.

"During any week, some Western politician or businessman will deliver a speech celebrating the ideal of regional independence," Limerick wrote in Legacy of Conquest, but that politician or businessman will be historically ignorant, supporting Turner's myth that slid into John Wayne's acting, while ignoring the long history of western dependence on the government and corporations. Limerick concluded, "Especially in the American West, where the federal government, outside capital, and the market have always been powerful factors of change, the limits on personal autonomy do not seem like news. And yet ... in a region where human interdependence has been self-evident, Westerners have woven a net of denial."

In the 1930s, though, it was hard to deny the corporate and governmental forces that built the monumental Hoover Dam, which was then the world's largest concrete structure and largest electric-power generator. Look at that photo of the Hoover Dam and think of how much it contradicts Turner.

The 1930s, our reading points out, also marked a change in Indian policy, from forced assimilation to slightly more respect for Native traditions. Here is a 1970 image from Judy Baca's "Great Wall of Los Angeles" mural, showing Indians interacting with government agents and market agents. After 1934, Indians on reservations were finally allowed to speak their own language, elect their own leaders, practice their own religions, and raise their own children. (Before that, Indian children were removed from their families and placed in boarding schools that hoped to assimilate them into a different norm.) For Indians, 1934 was certainly a turning point in western history.

Another turning point: after 1935, the federal government stopped selling off or giving away public lands, lands which the government had been distributing since 1784. This, according to your reading in Faragher and Hine, "truly marked the passing of the nation's long era of frontier settlement."

Yet Limerick points not to land distribution but to tourism and nostalgia as indicators of the end of the frontier. Here is a 1931 photo of the rededication of Mission San Diego. After the mid-1800s, many California missions had crumbled with neglect. In the 1920s, automobile tourists and white Anglos eager to promote California history recreated the missions as tourism spots.

El Camino Real is not really the route of the padres: that route varied with the seasons, and was privately owned by the 1920s. The El Camino Real that we drive on today is a recreation of a mythic past, promoted by a white woman who owned a concrete company and the only bell-foundry west of the Rockies. El Camino Real was designed to pass as many shops as possible, while nostalgizing a version of California past -- a version that happened to ignore many Indians and Mexicans of the present.

The 1920s and 30s was also when California schools began to teach mission history. When you were in 4th grade, you probably built your own mission. Did it include the whipping posts or mass graves? Did it include the automobiles or tourists? Trying to see that complete view of our past is the challenge of college history and especially American Studies.

The 1930s was one turning point. The 1940s, with the wartime economy, was another. We'll read about that later, especially when we study Disneyland and Fast Food Nation. Different scholars have differing perspectives, and you should eventually reach your own perspective, while thinking about both continuity and change in America's western frontier.

Week 7 Putting American Studies into Practice

2009-02-16T11:14:00.000-08:00

Now that you have read other scholars' ideas about the frontier, now you get to start to reach your own conclusions.

This week, we're looking at photos of the west and paintings of the west. It might seem that photos are fact and paintings are fiction, but actually every image is framed in a way that reflects the artists' biased perspectives and that invites us to ask more questions.

So, as you look at the images this week, consider:

- What surprises you?

- Where are the issues of racial formation, gender-role formation, borderlands blending, environment and extractive industries, active federal government, and group-politics that we have been learning to think about?

- As a whole, do these images uphold Turner's frontier thesis or the revisions of that thesis that we have been reading in Limerick, Johnson, and this blog?

- Museum curators selected these images. What view of the west do you think the museum curators wanted you to take away?

Analyzing images might seem like easy reading this week, but it actually requires careful thinking. Here's an example: a photograph titled, "A member of Clarence King's geologic exploration of the 40th parallel," showing the man surveying Shoshone Canyon and Falls, Idaho territory, 1868.

At first glance, this looks like a triumphant lone white explorer, claiming land named after an apparently-vanished Indian tribe. The man is dwarfed by the landscape -- as Turner wrote he would be -- yet he is also perched atop an outcrop, claiming dominion, suggesting Turner's thesis that eventually, this man's encounter with wilderness will make him into a ruling American.

Yet he is not alone. There are three other tiny figures on the outcrop, looking almost like rocks themselves. The photographer is there, too, invisible but implied, and perched even higher than the exploring men. The photographer had to have carried dozens of pounds of cumbersome photographic equipment and chemicals to this outcrop. The explorer and photographer are both subsidized by the government. It only looks like an image of a lone white Turnerian explorer until you think about the structures of technology, governance, cooperation, and erasure that created this photo. What seemed Turnerian actually turns out not to be Turnerian.

It's even more interesting when you know, as historians do, that Clarence King the white explorer, also lived a double-life in which he pretended to be "James Todd," a black Pullman porter. King the scientist was white and a leading western explorer, but he seems to have preferred dark-skinned women (that was one reason he liked to be sent on scientific expeditions in places like Hawaii). In 1888, he got married in New York City to a former slave, Ada Copeland, and told her he was black. They had 5 children together, and he didn't reveal his true identity to his wife until he was on his deathbed, in 1901. His personal story is a particularly strange example of the kind of racial slippages that happened on America's many frontiers.

But you don't need to know that interesting historic backstory in order to do more visual analysis. Here's another example of visual analysis, this time of Elbridge Burbank's painting of "Ho-me-hep-no-my," a Tewa/Hopi Indian woman in 1904.

At first glance, this seems to contradict Turner's view of aggressive Indians who eventually vanished, as well as Turner's vision of a male-only frontier. This woman has a traditional haircut, somehow simultaneously bobbed and braided; she wears a blanket; and she looks unthreateningly to the side.

It seems a respectful image, except that it tells us more about Burbank the painter than Ho-me-hep-no-my. Burbank chose to pose Ho-me-hep-no-my like a mug-shot, all alone, outside of community or any identifying landscape. He chose to cut off her hands, suggesting helplessness. He chose to paint a relatively older woman, implying a dying race. This is an image of European superiority pretending to be respectful of Indians. This is actually an image that Turner might support.

Burbank chose to portray someone in relatively traditional clothes (not, say, jeans or overalls), yet the ribbons and cotton and colors she wears are European-influenced. Native dyes were rarely that bright red, and native clothing was rarely cotton. This is an image of borderlands blending, despite its intentions to portray a "pure" Indian.

Thus, both the photo and the painting can be viewed as supporting Turner and opposing him, depending on how much you think about the artist's choices and assumptions. There is much more for you all to discuss on this week's Blackboard discussion board.

This is another way for you to review what we have just read in the first six weeks of class. This is also a way of practicing the interdisciplinarity of American Studies: combining techniques from art history, ethnic history, and history. This is also all a warm-up for your second midterm, in which you get to select your own document of frontier culture and analyze it.

Week 4, Making Sense of Blake Allmendinger's Red Fringed Cowboy Boots

2009-02-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

This week we're thinking about gender on the frontier by reading Susan Lee Johnson's dense article, "Domestic Life in the Diggings," and then Blake Allmendinger and Valerie Matsumoto's quirky introduction to that article and others, in their anthology, Over the Edge: Remapping the American West.

Johnson is challenging. To begin with, you need to understand two incredibly important theories of American Studies:
1. Race is culturally constructed. (That was the point of the previous post.)
2. Gender is culturally constructed.

While biology makes us all female or male (almost all – a very few babies are born with both a penis and vagina, but that’s a rare exception), anyway, biology usually makes us female or male, but culture makes us feminine or masculine. By “feminine” or “masculine” I mean the whole array of habits and norms that get associated with female-ness or male-ness, and those norms change over time. It’s not biology, it’s culture.

In the United States, skinny men who showed self-restraint were considered the most macho, manly, masculine men until about 1890, when adventurousness and muscularity became newer signs of modern masculinity. We saw a bit of that change in week 2's analysis of Teddy Roosevelt. This gender change was related to economic changes, to the decline in physical labor and the rise of corporate work. It was related to fears over what Turner called the closing of the frontier. It's a fascinating case of how gender ideals can change over time. If your own family includes different cultures, you might have noticed that what is considered masculine or feminine can vary by cultures.

Gender ideals of masculinity and feminity vary over time and place and culture, while biological ideals of male-ness and female-ness are more set. You need to understand that in order to understand Susan Lee Johnson's question: What were gender ideals like on the California gold-rush frontier? Why did some men actually suffer scurvy (a painful vitamin deficiency) instead of simply planting easy-to-grow lettuce around their cabins? That question is raised at the bottom of page 113, and to me it is the crux of Susan Lee Johnson’s article.

Johnson's answer is nuanced by ethnicity, race, and class. In her detailed research, it turns out that French men were more likely to plant lettuce and other vegetables on the California frontier, because their French masculinity had more room for lettuce-planting types of domesticity. Mexican men were more likely to arrive in California with women who would do the lettuce-planting for them, along with other cooking and food-preparation -- while those Mexican women also launched entrepreneurial businesses. Miwok Indian families already had their gendered division of labor sorted out with divisions of which sex did different tasks of food-gathering and preparation (women gathering acorns, men gathering meat, and a more balanced diet already established than that of the newer immigrants).

Anglo men on the gold rush frontier didn’t have their gender ideals sorted out yet. They divided up cooking duties in groups of 2 to 5 men, but with mixed results. I keep thinking that this would make a fascinating sitcom, a kind of “Three’s Company” for the gold rush. Long before sitcoms, the actual men of the gold rush associated what they saw as mixed-up gender roles with a world-upside-down and with the life of animals -- notice all the quotes describing living like dogs or pigs -- and with the lives of other races. One of the things that this language reveals is that these men assumed women and non-white races were closer to animals.

This brings us back to the cultural construction of race. If you haven't already read Week 3's blog, "The cultural construction of race," now's a good time to do that.

Welcome back to week 4.

On the California gold-rush frontier, the racial categories included Miwok Indians (some from missions, some not), Mexicans (some who considered themselves white and Spanish, some who didn’t), Chileans (who held themselves quite distinct from Mexicans, and were looked down upon by Mexicans), various Europeans (who had their own ideas of who was on top, and who thought that Irish actually looked black), African-Americans, Anglos, and Chinese. It's not quite our current list of races, and that's the point: racial categories are culturally constructed.

Once you have digested that both gender and race are culturally constructed, then you are ready for Susan Lee Johnson’s deepest point: especially on the California frontier, categories of race overlapped with the categories of gender. Chinese men opened laundries, took on work as cooks and servants, and performed other jobs that were perceived as women’s work. Here we see some of the deep history that means that Chinese men still don’t often ever appear as macho or sexy in American movies. On the gold rush frontier, Mexican women opened businesses, selling tortillas and making profits that were associated with men’s work. Miwok women were perceived as working harder than men, in a perception that allowed Anglos to look down on all Miwoks.

Here's an image to help you think about this issue. This is an undated color postcard printed in San Francisco and titled "The Honeymoon of the Chinese and the Coon." This postcard makes the woman look unfeminine, showing her smoking a pipe and disrecpectfully calling her a "coon." The postcard makes the man look unmanly, living in a house that is poorly repaired. This "honeymoon" doesn't look restful or romantic. And who is the child standing in the front: a servant, a neighbor, or their bastard child whom they just legitimized by getting married? Apparently the child was too insignificant for the postcard-labelers to even mention. I find this postcard offensive and fascinating. It helps me think about how ideas about gender can overlap with ideas about race and with opportunities for labor.

That is Johnson's point: ideas of race and gender overlap with issues of power, with who makes money and who assumes the right to rule.

Consider Johnson’s conclusion:

As time went by in the Southern Mines, Anglo American men … found more reliable ways to assert dominance in the diggings. And as even more time went by, and as the Gold Rush passed into popular memory, Anglo Americans, particularly Anglo American men, found ways to claim the event as a past that was entirely their own. In so doing, they buried a past in which paroxysms of gender and race brought daily discomfort to participants, but also glimpses of whole new worlds of possibility. (Johnson, page 126)

So what does it mean to remember that Chileans, Chinese, Mexican, Miwok, French, and Anglo all interacted in the gold mines – and shifted gender roles too? Johnson concludes that all this mixing and gender-boundary-crossing can provide us with “a useable past,” perhaps offering models of more flexible gender roles today. This is much more optimistic than last week’s reading which traced the racialized language that various groups used to try to legitimize their auhtority in the west. Johnson chose not to include the massacres in the gold-mining camps when Anglos invaded Indian or Chinese camps, burning and killing and driving non-whites out.

Which is your view of the west: optimistic mixing, or pessimistic conquest, or something else? And does Turner's frontier thesis fit with either of those views?

Finally, I promised I'd get to those alligator boots. What does all this have to do with the very different writing in Blake Allmendinger and Valerie Matsumoto’s “Introduction.”? To me, Allmendinger’s fringed red alligator cowboy boots and his delight in his self-selected gay campy frontier are a reminder that “each of us makes up the West for ourselves,” selecting history and identifying boundaries that fit our own needs (page 2).

But we have to be careful: it's not entirely made up. I won't ever tell you that the west was settled by one-armed midgets with purple polka-dots, because it wasn't. We each make up our own analysis, but we base that analysis on evidence. We use material culture (alligator boots), visual evidence (postcards, photos), letters, diaries, news reports, labor records, and more. We gather up evidence, we ask careful questions, and then we recognize that we each create our own conclusions.

Similarly, Matsumoto’s personal story of growing up Japanese in Nogales is a reminder to all of us that, especially on borders, “boundaries – whether geographic or cultural – [are] powerful, arbitrary, and shifting.” (3). That's an important insight. Allmendinger expands on it: “Today, although the West may be settled, its meanings and boundaries remain unfixed and unsealed,” affecting issues from immigration to environmentalism. Matsumoto and Allmendinger explain that their collection of academic essays “views the West through a cockeyed kaleidoscope” (6) because “community [is] a dynamic, often messy, process” (11) and “Imagining the West is a transgressive act” (6).

That last quote is the key connection, but you need to think it out for yourself: what is transgressive about Johnson's re-examining of the California Gold Rush?