American West
"My hill is further" – George Herbert, "The
Pilgrimage," line 31
The frontier in American history, according to Frederick Jackson Turner, is "the meeting point between savagery and civilization". The movement westward, amounting to a process of transforming the wilderness, created a mythology surrounding individual achievement, but it also encompassed and perpetuated such a vast range of traditional themes relating to the idea of community that its complexities and impact on the present day can hardly be touched on without inciting controversy and discord among scholars.
A series of frontiers, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including the Appalachians, the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the deserts of the southwest, challenged westward-moving Americans, but none of them proved indomitable. Ironically, the east-to-west (and south-to-north) dynamic of American expansionism effectively reversed the west-to-east (and north-to-south) movements of the earlier immigrants from Asia who crossed the Bering Strait and fanned out across the continent. Indeed, the American experience is full of such ironies. Another consists in how the responsibility for the peopling of the new world largely rested in the hands of religious zealots who adhered to a faith whose principal source documents failed to register the very lands they discovered and settled. A third irony relates to the vexatious quality of British rule in North America. The people of the 13 colonies were hampered in their aspirations to move westward by the Proclamation of 1763, English legislation restricting access to the lands beyond the Appalachians. The English feared loss of control over their American subjects and enacted this law, which ultimately proved futile and detrimental to their own mercantile interests.
By 1783, the same old problem had been transferred to the hands of American legislators, men from the eastern states, who eagerly sought ways to control migration, collect revenue, and preclude hostile relations with the Indians. The immediate solution – the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 -- established territories between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, thus preventing any eastern states from expanding westwards and, in a way, reasserting the fundamental equality of the original states. But the injunction against settlement nevertheless made the lands a source of temptation for explorers and of exploitation by frontiersmen and fur traders. Later, the lands were settled by farmers and craftsmen, mostly family units – like the Prescotts in "How the West Was Won" (1964) – who used their ingenuity to survive against the harsh, unsettled conditions of the western frontier. Only once small towns emerged, bringing the light of civilization into this hostile wilderness, did men and women trained in the learned professions move westward and settle alongside the pioneers and homesteaders. This pattern of settlement – pioneers first, scholars later -- is reflected in John Ford’s "Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962). Ransom Stoddard, a young, idealistic lawyer, is a late-comer to Shinbone, yet even at the point of his arrival he seems grotesquely out of place. His gradual assimilation into the town symbolizes the taming of the west’s more violent tendencies, and it serves to indicate how individual effort could unite with community spirit to create the unique quality that ineffably signifies western culture.
The next frontier was the formidable Mississippi River. At 2350 miles in length, the Mississippi is the second longest river in the United States, after its tributary the Missouri, which is 2700 miles in length. The two rivers join 20 miles north of St. Louis, traditionally considered one of the gateways to the west (others include Buffalo, Omaha, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh), and the Mississippi runs all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The Red River is another primary tributary, while the Yellowstone is a tributary of the Missouri River.
The Mississippi River led directly to the still-challenging region known as "the Great American Desert," a term first used by Stephen H. Long. In the words of Joel Oppenheimer: "This desolate stretch of land, called by some ‘the great plains,’ stretches across the western heart of America. It is not only hard to traverse, but also, due probably to the intense dryness and sundry allied atmospheric factors, seems to have affected not only the hearts and souls of the men who moved on it, but their very destinies also, and, indeed, that of America itself" (Oppenheimer, The Great American Desert, 1961).
With the passing of the Homestead Act in 1862, settlement of the west became a principal concern after the Civil War, second in socio-economic importance only to the process of reconstruction. The Civil War itself was fought not so much on the abstract principle of slavery – whether it was ignominious or an honorable tradition – but on the idea of extending it in the rapidly expanding interior of the nation or "midwest," the birthplace of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, the principal leaders of the Unionist forces. The balance of free states and slave states, one way or the other, was constantly under threat by the creation of new territories and new states. The expansionist policies of Jefferson and Polk led to the disintegration of the United States upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, who favored granting slave-free status to the lands west of the Mississippi River. The Civil War settled the issue once and for all, with new states entering the union as slave-free entities, and – as a byproduct of defeat – with the southern states losing their legal right to deal in slavery. The twin dynamics of the post-war era – Reconstruction in the south and the establishment of civilization in the western wilderness, "the Great American Desert" – reflected a new set of values that marked a new beginning for the country based on a new meaning for independence.
The mountains in the west rise from the monotonous terrain of the prairies almost without warning. Not surprisingly, however, they were perceived as obstacles first, and only later as scenic wonders; the primary motive to cross their labyrinthine system of peaks and valleys was to reach the fertile lands of the west, not to visit their majestic geological offerings. Between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the traveler encounters seemingly endless stretches of desert landscape. The four major deserts in this region – the Chihuahuan, the Sonoran, the Mojave, and the Great Basin – easily provide inspiration for poetic visions of desolation and waste:
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
(T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," 39-40)
Eliot associates prickly pear with humanity’s moral degeneration through loss of civilized values. In doing so, he taps into a long-standing tradition in which desert wandering and settlement in a promised land are respectively symbolized by the cactus rose and the "multifoliate rose" of civilization.
Strangely enough, the cactus evolved from the rose. It represents a natural adaptation to radically changed conditions in North America in comparatively recent times. The land itself reflects the impact of many other, often much older, occurrences, both gradual and catastrophic. The Laramide Orogeny, the episode of mountain-building that produced the Rockies, created, for example, just the right conditions for the gradual formation of the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. The Guadalupe Mountains in Texas originated as a fossil-bearing reef during the Permian era. As it happens, much of the American southwest resided under water in Permian times. Since that time, tectonic forces causing continental drift have drained the shallow seas, leaving vast deposits of salt, gypsum, and conglomerate, as well as a legacy of exposed rock in which the geologic history of the west can be read. As John McPhee has said, "The West is where the rocks are" (Basin and Range, p.14), making it a rock collector’s paradise.
The fact that much of the area was once under water has led biblical creationists – among others – to adduce the mythical flood described in Genesis, as well as its analogues in The Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as a catastrophic source of destruction throughout the world. This form of catastrophism lost its credibility with the publication of Charles Lyell’s seminal work, Principles of Geology in 1830. Lyell argued that we can explain past events as a result of geologic processes still operating today. This principle of uniformitarianism, in contrast to Bishop Ussher’s idea that the world was created by divine fiat in 4004 B.C., implied that the earth had been changing only gradually over millions of years. Significantly, Charles Darwin carried Lyell’s text with him on the Voyage of the Beagle and found in it the rationale for the timescale required by his theory of evolution. At Glen Rose, Texas, the antiquity of the earth can be proved by the existence of fossil dinosaur tracks in the sedimentary limestone bed of the Paluxy River. Not surprisingly, at the nearby Creation Research Center, creationists attempt to refute the time frame of the "old earth model" by pointing to what they claim are coextensive hominid and archosaurian tracks. Duane Gish, one of the foremost creationists, refuses to commit himself to this fallacy in his book, Dinosaurs: Those Terrible Lizards (1977); but he nevertheless maintains that the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, and contends that the "beasts" referred to in Genesis 1:25 were dinosaurs who suffered extinction as a result of a universal flood. Ironically, catastrophism has recently been revived as a tenable theory concerning radical changes on earth, particularly with respect to mass extinctions. Meteor Crater in Arizona testifies to the dramatic power of the primary mechanism of catastrophic change, the impact of iridium-rich extraterrestrial bodies on earth, though it itself likely did not signal any sudden changes – unlike the collision in the Yucatan Peninsula at the K-T Boundary 65 million years ago that ultimately caused the demise of the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, ichthysaurs, mososaurs, and pleisaurs, and the rise of mammals and proliferation of birds, the only surviving order of saurischian archosaurs; or the hypothetical one in the Permian era 225 million years ago that caused the "Great Dying" and the permanent loss of the trilobites, as well as the spectacular rise of the archosaurs.
The western migration of the American peoples, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, finds a powerful correlative in the movement of the sun from east to west in its daily quest across the sky. Although an illusion with geocentric implications – and the basis of a serious biblical error (see Joshua 10:12-13) – the idea of a moving sun is prevalent in classical literature (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 1-328) and probably underlies the myth of translatio imperii. The myth incorporates a theory of descent involving the displacement of specific heroes (Aeneas and Brutus) who symbolize the transference of culture from nation to nation over time – from the ancient Near East, to Greece, to Rome, to the British Isles, and inevitably -- according to Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West – to the United States of America. Once the Americans conquered the west all the way to the Pacific coast, their "manifest destiny" was fulfilled and the global circle that ostensibly began in the ancient east was finally closed.
The movements of the heroic wanderer encapsulate the historic transference of culture from the ancient east to modern west. As Milton aptly put it, the hero would find himself "bridging his way, Europe with Asia join’d" (Paradise Lost, 10.310). The foundation myth of translatio imperii, a prominent theme in the epic narratives of the occidental world, ultimately found expression in the founding of the United States of America and its gradual, but ineluctable, movement westward. The story of the Nixon family, which landed in Delaware from Great Britain, settled in Ohio, and finally moved to California, epitomizes the westward thrust of the nation. Their saga reflects the essential themes of the American experience, from the quest for contentment in a promised land, to the rise and fall of a tragic hero, and it reverberates with stirring reminders of both the frailty of the human condition and the transcendent qualities of the human spirit.
Butlerville, Indiana, is a typical small town in the Ohio Valley, itself a bridge or "middle kingdom," according to Turner, "between the East and the West". The birthplace of Hannah Milhaus Nixon, the town is exemplary of Hillary Clinton’s concept of the nurturing "village" that produces well-rounded individuals who can cope, in their years of maturity, with the ineluctable changes in the structure of society as time goes on. As Mrs. Clinton asserts, "each era gives birth to the village of the next generation" – unfortunately, the sedate, passive 50s unwittingly brought about the intense radicalism of the 60s and the malaise of the 70s, which in turn created the impersonal, competitive, and cynical milieu – experienced as a global phenomenon – which today substitutes for a nurturing village. Yet it is not surprising that the frontier finds its genesis in the dynamics of small-town America. When communities outgrew their limited land resources, they adapted by migrating west. Because small-town America grew up around the ideal of religious uniformity in the wilderness against a background of persecution, neither the idea of the frontier nor the idea of migration seemed particularly forbidding. Movement westward was the natural fulfillment of every social, political, and economic impulse of the American character.
Growth and the need for space energized the movement westward. The opportunity to purchase the vast tract of land known as "Louisiana" forced Jefferson into an odd dilemma: the circumstances proved all too inviting, but accepting Napoleon’s offer would contradict the principles laid out in the Constitution. There are no constitutional provisions for the purchase of new lands from foreign nations; there are only provisions for the creation of new states from existing lands and territories (Article IV, Section 3.1-2). Jefferson ultimately decided that extreme cases demanded subordination of the law in the strictest sense in favor of causes promoting the national good. As he remarked in a letter to his friend, John Dickinson, "The acquisition of New Orleans would of itself have been a great thing, as it would have ensured to our western brethren the means of exporting their produce" (August 9, 1803). But the acquisition turned out to be a far more sweeping diplomatic accomplishment than that, as the explorations of Lewis and Clark soon proved.
The theme of acting outside the strict letter of the law – exemplified by Jefferson’s pursuit of the Louisiana territory – provides a rational context for other questionable presidential conduct, including Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia and his Watergate-related injunctions. While the limits of power are circumscribed by the Constitution, violations continually take place without recrimination because the relation of the presidency to the socio-economic forces of American culture serves as a subtext for the definition of power in the country’s political structure. The issues at stake resided at the core of the Watergate scandal, and their exposure through the media and the prolonged hearings and systematic investigation into Nixon’s putative "breach of faith" brought America face-to-face with the dynamics of presidential power without ever revealing the possibility that the actions constituted necessary -- even Machiavellian -- responses to the conditions of the national psyche and temperament of the times.
The recent scandal involving President Clinton’s sex life proved to be a ludicrous exercise in prosecutorial futility and comes across now as a sick parody of the far more profound aspects of presidential power exposed by Jefferson’s decision to undertake the Louisiana Purchase and by Nixon’s apparent errors in judgement, some of which – like the bombing of Cambodia, even though it provoked the Kent State massacre – now come across as brilliant exercises right out of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). A political leader who gains the upper hand and maintains control by resorting to ruthless conduct reveals both strength and power and offers a sound lesson in the "survival of the fittest" as a socio-economic imperative. A political leader who lets his adversaries get the upper hand soon discovers the reality of excess; as William Blake aptly put it, "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough" ("Proverbs of Hell," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). William Jefferson Clinton, instead of contemptuously lashing out at his persecutors, would have done well to consider Richard Nixon’s final words as president: "others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself". There is, it seems, a fine line between restraint and excess, and survival – even if it takes the form of a mythic return from the wilderness, as with Churchill or Nixon – depends on a shrewd balancing of the two.
Tenets of Aristotelian theory apply readily to the tragic figure of Richard Nixon, the King Lear of American politics – "a man / More sinned against than sinning" (Shakespeare, King Lear, 3.2.58-59). His amazing accomplishments sullied by the imbecility of the Watergate scandal, Nixon experienced a tragic downfall (metabasis), as he himself recognized in his parting speech on the day of his resignation: "only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain" (August 9, 1974). While it may be said that American society experienced catharsis through the protracted and systematic excoriation of their president, it may also be said that the inability of Nixon’s successors – Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton – to rise to his standard of greatness in the political arena has produced a wasteland in which the American people have desperately been waiting for a leader and savior – for "Godot," as it were – for the last 25 years.
A tragic hero, as defined by Aristotle, is "the kind of man who neither is distinguished for excellence and virtue, nor comes to grief on account of baseness and vice, but on account of some error (hamartia)" (Poetics, 13.3). Nixon’s hubris – often erroneously confused with satanic pride – took the form of narcissism (see Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography, p. 5). His lifelong tendency to collect and preserve things (such as the Watergate tapes) simultaneously satisfied his selfish compulsions and proved to be the cause of his undoing. JFK’s assassination, in contrast to Nixon’s downfall, cannot be regarded as tragic except in the most pedestrian sense of the word. The event provoked kinetic emotions – anger, pity, terror – instead of creating a Miltonic sense of calm ("calm of mind, all passion spent" – Samson Agonistes, 1758) or Joycean stasis whereby "whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings" is purged from the mind (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 204). It’s impossible to visit Dealey Plaza in Dallas without sensing the poignant waste of life that occurred there – but no feeling of purgation is felt because history has superimposed the comic image of Camelot on the Kennedy presidency despite revisionist assessment of the man himself that has cast him as a hedonistic pretender to greatness.
For Nixon, who lived into his eighties, the descent from the "highest mountain" must have seemed like the ignominious decline of King Lear. He fell, as it were, from the pinnacle of power to the baseness of the heath, exposed to the elements of the wilderness, not unlike the prairie homesteaders in their sod huts, and forced to confront the "loop’d and window’d raggedness" of humanity at its most wretched (King Lear, 3.4.31-34). In such a state, Nixon could no longer rely on existential "vital lies" (Becker, The Denial of Death) or the "myths we live by" (Campbell, Myths We Live By), much less his political skills or those of his "men," to help him find a way out of his final crisis; it is said that he experienced depression, only to embody T.S. Eliot’s dictum, "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality" (Eliot, "Burnt Norton," I, 44-45 ). But – unlike the unnamed lawyer in Anton Chekhov’s "The Bet," who couldn’t accept what he faced – Nixon finally conquered the dark side of himself, the wasteland, or heath, or wilderness, or heart of darkness, that Faustian nemesis, as it were, that had captured his soul, and ultimately transcended the archetypal realm of the psyche where "things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold" (Yeats, "The Second Coming," 3). He knew, as did Milton’s Satan, that "Long is the way/ And hard that out of Hell leads up to light" (Paradise Lost, 2.432-33). "Pour on," he might have said, quoting Lear; "I will endure" (King Lear, 3.4.18). From a brooding tragic hero, he transformed himself into the mythic phoenix and an heroic wanderer whose "footprints on the sand of time" (Longfellow, "Psalm of Life") – like those of Neil Armstrong on the moon, yet another frontier – are permanently fixed.
The phoenix is a unique creature whose cyclic life pattern encompasses the essential structure of falling and rising, self-destruction and resurrection – in Shakespeare’s words, "the younger rises when the old doth fall" (King Lear, 3.3.23). The return of Richard Nixon took the form of widespread recognition of his considerable impact in the realm of foreign affairs, coupled with a new status as the preeminent elder statesmen in the political arena. In retrospect, Kennedy and Nixon come across not only as Aristotelian but also as Homeric opposites – the one, dying young and achieving "glory" (kleos), like Achilles, stands as a complete comic figure; the other, living long enough to experience a "return" (nostos), remains, like Odysseus, only an ephemeral tragic figure.
The post-war era, continuing to the present day, may be regarded as the Age of Nixon. It was Nixon – first elected to Congress in 1946 – who, as president, initiated the process that ineluctably led to the rise of American supremacy in the post-Cold War era. Nixon brought an end to the Vietnam war; he established détente with the Soviet Union; he opened China to diplomatic and economic relations with the west. Unfortunately, only Clinton among Nixon’s five successors has come to understand the historical necessity of America’s leadership at the frontier of international cooperation and global peace. But Nixon’s influence has not vanished with his disappearance from the arena. Nixon dreamed of establishing a new political party, one that would bring together the interests of moderate Republicans and centralist Democrats. In this post-extremist age (note the recent passing of Barry Goldwater), both mainstream parties can look to Nixon as the progenitor of their current political agendas.
America’s vigorous foreign policy under Nixon – in contrast to the isolationism of the pre-war "reluctant belligerent" Roosevelt – arises in part from the closing of the frontier. The fervour to expand has remained a dominant theme in twentieth-century America, but the impulse to control territory has increasingly found expression in the invasion of foreign lands. Ironically, this tendency to move outward is the very thing that generated American paranoia during the Cold War. The Roswell Incident in 1947, as well as the many science fiction films dealing with "invasion" crises – notably, "War of the Worlds" (1953) and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) – emphatically reflect America’s preoccupation with protecting the lands it itself acquired through invasion for the purposes of expansion and survival.
Nixon’s tragic fall and phoenix-like revival make him the perfect latter-day exemplar of the Darwinian premise of "survival of the fittest". The westward expansion of the United States, particularly as an expression of Manifest Destiny, the quasi-religious pursuit of the shifting American frontier, as described by John O’Sullivan in 1845, also may be perceived as an application of the theory of "descent with modification through natural selection" -- as promulgated in The Origin of Species (1859) -- to the social sphere, albeit in a more wide-ranging sense. (See Herbert Spencer, "Theory of Population," Westminster Review, April, 1852, a study inspired – like the work of Charles Darwin and H.R. Wallace – on Malthus’ Essay on the Principles of Population). Herbert Spencer associated the Theory of Evolution with the idea of progress – a favorite Victorian subject – and thereby managed to establish Darwinism as a "paradigm" or revolutionary scientific advance adapted to the social realm. Thomas Kuhn identified Copernicanism as the first "paradigm" in this sense – Darwinism, however, ultimately proved the most powerful. Success in the so-called "struggle for existence" initially referred to individual progress based on intellectual fitness in a competitive world; according to Thorstein Veblen, for example, aggressive tendencies served as prerequisites for selective admission into the "leisure class". In the United States, Social Darwinism presupposed a decline in the early American cult of the individual, especially in communities in the west during the period of expansion, although other social forces also came into play that ultimately transformed the impersonal wilderness into a civilized repository of democratic values. In Europe, the Darwinian paradigm gradually came to fortify the idea of "might is right" (originally expounded by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, Book 1, 338-339) and even to justify racist extremism. Nixon, as late as the 1960s, equated "the Silent Majority" with the fittest sector of American society, perhaps because he identified with their origins, aspirations, and values. Today, more than ever, after surviving more than 200 years of restless movement, they would come to understand, as did Nixon himself, this one piece of wisdom from Sophocles: "Only after the glow of sunset can you know how glorious the day has been".