Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America Book

This was a reread. I remembered it as intellectually stimulating. But, first read in the mid-90s, I didn't remember details. Specifically, I didn't remember that some of my worldview comes from Slotkin. I remember once telling a Goodreads friend my ideas about America's manifest destiny vaulting the Pacific to include the Philippines and Japan and later to wash up on the shores of Korea and Vietnam. "Remember, you heard it from me first," I told her. But in fact Slotkin's early pages of Gunfighter Nation are about Theodore Roosevelt's progressive ideas of reviving the American myth of westward expansion by thrusting the country's power into the Pacific and into imperialism. Not my interpretation at all, but trace elements of Slotkin carried by me so long I'd forgotten its origins.

The book is brilliant, I think. It's the 3d volume of Slotkin's acclaimed trilogy which, beginning in 1600, traces our changing ideas of the frontier and how they developed into a national myth reflecting the meaning of and need for the westward movement. From the early colonial attitudes of savagery seen in Biblical terms through the influences of such icons as Daniel Boone and James Fenimore Cooper's fictions through the wagon train migrations, the spreading agrarianism, through the railroad expansions and the overwhelming of the Indians to the Custer myth being used as a symbol of the end of frontier. (It's Slotkin who's written that the most important fact of American history is its relation to race, by which he means Indians even more than African-Americans.) By 1890 the frontier was gone. Roosevelt saw a need to revive the spirit which began as a regeneration through violence.

Beginning there in history and beginning with his tabloid title, Slotkin leads us into a superb, comprehensive analysis of America's 20th century. Our culture, politics, and foreign policy can be seen, he writes, in the light of the authority the myth of the frontier holds on our imaginations. Dime novels helped keep the idea of the western frontier alive. Slotkin shows how Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows expanded into popular western novels and eventually such iconic moves as Shane and The Wild Bunch and how they express American character and foreign policy. His main idea is that at key moments of ideological stress in the century--race relations, for instance, or the Cold War--the frontier myth always provided language and structural devices defining a direction forward. If you're interested in the idea of the Old West, in the cultural and political history of America and how it's been shaped by our attitudes about the frontier, you'll find this fascinating. It's no stretch to say the book's full of fundamental truths.

It's dense with information and ways of seeing. Adorned as it is with the technological phraseology of myth, it's a formidable read which is complicated by Slotkin's style. He produces thick, heavy paragraphs constructed of long Proustian sentences layered with clause after clause and often shored up with a parenthesis or two. The paragraphs begin with an idea which flows through extrapolation, as if by gravity, into insight of great depth, so that paragraph endings carry great weight. There's page after page of this tight insight and argument after argument explaining point after point accumulating in a work of overriding analytic--here's that word again--brilliance.

For Slotkin as for many of us a watershed moment for American self-perception and purpose was the Vietnam War. I've read many books about most aspects of the war, but Slotkin--and I'd also forgotten this valuable element of the book--provides as clear a discussion and analysis of why we went there and why we failed as I've read anywhere. The last one-third of the book is mostly devoted to an analysis of Vietnam in the light of our frontier myth. The war is seen through our mythography of historical progress in terms of white European culture entering the terrain of primitive non-white cultures, the same impulsive thrust which drove us westward across America. As a continuation of the "savage warfare" with which we won the west, it was thought a necessary part of our competition with the Soviets during the Cold War.

The role of the hero is also discussed. We no longer have Daniel Boone or Custer. But Slotkin shows how the idea of them and others was developed and used by such leaders as Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan. And how the work of men like John Wayne or William S. Hart became so closely associated with our ideas of frontier myth that they helped to sustain it.

I regret that a review such as this only scratches the surface of such rich material. I can't recommend Gunfighter Nation enough. In fact, the entire trilogy. Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment are the 2 volumes preceding it.