7 Environmental Frontiers

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.

Rondal Partridge's "Pave It and Paint it Green" (1965) and Bruce Davidson's "Campground No. 4, Yosemite National Park" (1966) are not as famous images of Yosemite. They are not what most tourists go to see. 

But I think they should be famous, because they are what you will see in Yosemite, and they reflect the truth that humans are part of 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 view. Like Partridge and Davison in their photos of Yosemite, Innes in his painting does not try to hide the man and man-made machines that continually affect the natural environment.Innes 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

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.