8 Pop Culture Frontiers

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.


It is a myth that is still being debated, as you may have noticed in the recent revival of debate over the team name Redskins. One way to think about this issue of pop-cultural frontier memories is to consider the 2014 video below. The National Congress of American Indians produced this video, "Proud to Be," in order to communicate all of the names that America's indigenous peoples choose to be called. The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation paid for running this video as an advertisement during the NBA Finals, 2014, but just in case you did not see it on television, it is well worth watching now.

9 Disney's Frontiers

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

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

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

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.

Have you ever noticed how many California housing developments are called "Rancho"? Many of Southern California's mid-century suburbs advertised themselves with frontier imagery.

See how our class is starting to come full circle? The suburbs are related to the frontier, in weird ways worth disentangling. The suburbs and the frontier are also related to the fast food industry.

As Schlosser explains, 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. They all also disguised their assembly-line factory-like processes with appeals to mythical frontiers.

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 the post-world-war-II era. That was when the economy of Orange County boomed. As you'll recall, boom and bust economies are part of the frontier of America. Carl Karcher, Ray Kroc, and suburban developers all capitalized on that post-1945 boom. 

All these businesses, as is typical for the west, 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

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

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

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 at CSUF.

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 Mule and Yippee-yi-yay

As this course comes to an end, it is worth considering what you will take from this course. How does the history of the frontier still matter? How do the skills learned in this course apply beyond our specific subject matter?

Consider Mule, a man who was sleeping outdoors around Orange County in spring 2014, but has most recently been sighted in Ventura County as I type this. Mule believes in "living on the outside." He has been travelling around California and the west with his 3 mules for the last 30 years. There is a great six-minute documentary about Mule here. (Full disclosure: I am historical adviser for this documentary-in-process.)

Mule lives cheaply, spending about $60 a month on food for himself and his 3 mules, using his savings. He is occasionally arrested for illegal camping, but he argues that this is how he lives, not recreational, and therefore not technically camping. Some members of a facebook group for Mule voluntarily contribute to his legal expenses because they admire his way of life. Mule says he is "defending his freedom."

I find that students have extreme reactions to hearing Mule's story. Is he a hero, living a minimalist and environmental life? Or is he a freeloader, shirking work? Is he a modern-day cowboy? Or is he evidence that, as Turner predicted in 1893, the frontier is indeed closed?

His story resonates, I think, because it strikes so many familiar frontier themes of rugged individualism and exploring America's open spaces with one of the animals that did help settle the frontier -- yet it is incongruous to see him on suburban sidewalks and next to urban skyscrapers. Thinking about how you feel about Mule's choices may help you think about how you feel about the frontier itself and what you see as your own choices in America now, 121 years after Turner declared the frontier closed.

A second way to think about this class is to watch Jack in the Box's ad campaign from about 2010.



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, from Mule to this ad. 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 and thinking about Mule.

15b Politics Beyond the Voting Booth

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.