Before the Second World War, American Westerns presented what later came to be seen as a "naive" view of what might be called white borderer culture and conflicts. The "good" of the Scots-Irish based and European immigrant and settler population was not just an underlying assumption but a central and explicit thesis in the Westerns, most of which were made by “poverty row” studios and distributed to rural and small-town theaters—and seen by the grandchildren of the very people portrayed. By the 1950s, this was

 no longer the case. The movie Western had moved from “poverty row” (abetting the demise of these poor-cousin studios) and firmly into the mainstream. Along with a changing social and political climate, better production values, actors, writers, and distribution led to a Western quite different from what had been presented before. Yet, though many of the Westerns of the 1950s are among the best the genre has ever seen, something is lost whenever a change of this magnitude occurs.

In this case, it was the people. Their protection once having been the rationale behind the Western, they now played—at best—the role of oppressor in scenarios where attention is turned to other problems, or had disappeared completely from consideration while questions of individualism and personal morality began to dominate the genre.

It is true, of course, that the negative side of rural and small-town Americans had been recognized earlier—witness the late and small example of the expulsion of dance-hall girl Dallas and alcoholic Doc Boone from town at the start of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)—but the essential “goodness” of the American people generally triumphed, as it also does in Stagecoach, where the passengers on the stagecoach, including Dallas and Boone, prove to be the “real” salt-of-the-earth Americans. After World War II, however, the “good” population began to disappear from sight in the Western.

Why?

Why, for example, was a cultural split added to The Magnificent Seven (John Sturgis, 1960), the Hollywood remake of Shichinin no samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)? In the original, the townspeople are simply poor and oppressed; they share a cultural background with the samurai they hire to protect them as well as with the people who are expected to see the film. In the remake the townspeople are alien—to their protectors and to most of their intended audience. Why? Why make it a Mexican town in need of protection by Americans?

There are two answers to this question, not contradictory, but different sides of the same coin, though only one has been adequately explored. Speaking of The Magnificent Seven along with The Alamo (John Wayne, 1960), Stanley Corkin says:

Both films… see the role of western heroes as geographically wide-ranging and the frontier itself as a place lacking not civilization per se but the correct manner of civilization and the necessary forces to define that state correctly. However, in keeping with the sense of national disquiet that preceded the presidential election of 1960 and upon which Kennedy built, both films are explicitly concerned with lands that are under the government of another nation.¹

In this view, the topic of the films isn’t really America or its population at all, but its place in the world, a re-affirmation of American strength and cohesion, projecting problems within to an external situation where they can be explored without too much self-criticism. As Richard Slotkin puts it, “The premise for The Magnificent Seven begins with the classic trope of American myth/ideology: the translation of class difference into racial difference, and the projection of an internal social conflict into a war beyond the borders.”² Rather than presenting the struggles of a borderer culture trying to put down roots and establish identity, these Westerns were now focused on external threats to what was, really, a mythical cohesive American culture (with attention subtly turned away from the people of this culture), on showing the strength of that culture, and on distinct visions of the type of person best representing American ideals.

On the other side of the coin, by contrast, the answer is that small-town Americans had fallen out of favor by 1960, out of favor with the “New York and Hollywood elite” (whose negative attitude continues today, with some calling the rest of the country the “flyover”). Filmmakers could no longer see a way of making the white townsfolk seem worthy of protection without being accused of a naïve and, eventually, racist viewpoint. For many, the McCarthy era of blacklists and low-level persecution, among other things (including the growing civil rights struggle), had soured the “everyday” American, though most continued to maintained their protective posture in terms of America and the world.

Of course, as I said, acknowledgement in movies of the dangers of the intolerant and the mob certainly predate the McCarthy period, but in the earlier era this was leavened by admiration for the spirit and strong belief that was imagined as the core or rural and small-town culture. Soon into the postwar period, however, films extolling the life of small-town and rural America were increasingly seen as naïve, as pap for television (unworthy of the movies), as The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) eventually were seen through their perpetual, annual holiday replays. With the increasing divisiveness associated with the civil rights movement on top of House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyite investigations, American intellectuals and artists felt increasingly alienated from what had once been considered the small-town “backbone” of America. In their eyes, the veneer of acceptance and toleration had been stripped away, revealing hate and venom beneath. Proving that a creative mind is one that can hold contradictory ideas simultaneously, they also saw America as the champion and exporter of all that is right and good.

So it was that (in the eyes of many filmmakers) the only farmers worth protecting, by 1960, were poor Mexicans or other non-whites, people who could learn from American example but who did not carry the racist, small-minded baggage that had become so associated in the minds of the elite with the average American. This was easier for the filmmaker, too, in that these non-American peoples could be shown as weaker, as less able, than it would have been possible to do with Anglo-Americans—that massive audience who just might have recognized a direct slap at them. So it is that The Magnificent Seven can be almost racist in its depiction of the Mexicans and absolutely elitist in a way that Shichinin no samurai, even with its recognition of the samurai as a distinct class, is not.

The Magnificent Seven is no isolated example. The blockbuster Western of the previous year, Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) also excludes American townspeople. Though there are two mentions of crowds of people in town, the only characters (aside from gunslingers and cowboys) given even the slightest prominence are the Mexican couple who own the hotel and, in a much briefer role, a Chinese undertaker. Hawks’s elitism shows up in a number of other films, but it is most explicit here, where John Wayne’s John T. Chance turns down help from Pat Wheeler (Ward Bond) and his men on the grounds that they are amateurs. Today, such elitist attitudes smack of the neoconservative acolytes of the late Leo Strauss, a group that Hawks (and both Wayne and Bond, for that matter) would be quite comfortable with. Strangely, it is also an attitude identified with the “New York liberal and media elite” that the true small-town conservatives have long felt they were bitterly opposing. This is John T. Chance as Walter Lippmann, but with John Dewey nowhere to be found.

Again, the trend leading to disparagement of the “average” small-town and rural white American (before the war, the prime audience for Westerns) in the Western arose hand-in-hand with HUAC investigations into Hollywood, the McCarthy anti-Communist scare, and the start of the Cold War. Americans, both elite and common, conservative and liberal, who had come together remarkably during World War II, now felt betrayed by the very people they had fought and worked with, shoulder to shoulder. It didn’t matter your class or political persuasion: you felt that people who had claimed to be your friends were now doing you wrong. The divide created has dominated the American political landscape ever since, with each side imagining the moral high ground for itself.

And it is no simple divide. The liberal elite, for example, often see the conflict as one between themselves and the conservative elite, who they see as lying to and manipulating a gullible populace—a fact that points obliquely to why they often write the populace out of the movies: when they do show rural and small-town populations, they end up depicting them negatively, pointing up their own contradictory feelings towards them.

Though the Hollywood blacklist was an abhorrent aberration, the conservative critics of Hollywood, then and now, do have a point: the film industry tends liberal. There’s nothing surprising about this: people involved in the arts generally are more willing to take certain types of risks, and risk is an inherently anti-conservative undertaking. Different callings attract different mindsets, anyway. Academia, where exploration of the unknown is supposed to be part of professional activity, is generally of a rather liberal bent. Business, on the other hand, where risk needs to be weighed much more carefully (given its greater consequences in economic arenas), leans to the conservative, as does government, where stability is the ultimate watchword. Still, media tend towards elitist sensibility, and it is, ultimately, a basic elitism that led to the degradation of the place of the small farmers and townspeople in the Western.

In High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) cannot find sufficient townspeople to support him, even for their own good. When Johnny Logan rides to Vienna's in response to her summons in Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), he passes below the dynamiting of a pass for the railroad and above a stagecoach robbery. They box him in, the new and the old, setting up a situation of riled-up townspeople he has no control over and a conflict between two groups caused by the events he witnesses, though neither group is directly involved in either. Made just two years after High Noon, Johnny Guitar shared its release year with Riding Shotgun (André De Toth, 1954), another Western where the townspeople turn on the hero, even if he is Randolph Scott.

The trend towards mistrust—and then exclusion—of white townspeople can be traced back at least to The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943), something of an anomaly for its time and rather a box-office failure. However, the movie is actually more sophisticated and more nuanced, than those denigrating the townspeople that follow. A lynch mob forms, yes, and the lynching is carried out, but the exploration is one of how this happens, not a simple, blanket condemnation of the participants. Also, The Ox-Bow Incident does not show leaders who are somehow better than the townspeople. If anything, they are as culpable.

None of these films could have been made before the start of the war. In fact, a film of The Ox-Bow Incident had been proposed since 1940, with no success. Even before the war, of course, some Americans worried about the impact of mob mentality—witness Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here—but the problems of economic depression and then external threat put off much consideration of this problem in film until the war was safely won.

Though they come from across the political spectrum, the new, postwar films did begin to address questions being raised through HUAC and Joe McCarthy, questions about the role of the populace—and all of them come to the conclusion that the people are unable to take care of themselves on their own—a repudiation of John Dewey’s belief that the people, given education and information, can best handle their own affairs. Both left and right were tending towards an elitism that disregards the populace, leading to situations such as that of High Noon, where the film can be read as a polemic for disparate political points of view, as long as they are elitist, not populist. Trying to put this in the best light possible, Lee Clark Mitchell writes:

Yet less important than pedigreeing any single reading of plot is the need to recognize how closely [screenwriter Carl] Foreman's liberal polemic resembles the arguments of those he attacked. McCarthy viewed liberals as responsible for selling out the nation; opponents instead viewed him as the threat to fundamental freedoms. But pro- and anti-McCarthyites shared a conviction as deep as anything dividing them: that the true enemy was civic complacency. And this capacity to provoke a common assessment of America's current malaise explains much of the film's appeal. No matter one's political stripe, all agree that the citizens of Hadleyville have regressed to a state of infantile dependency, requiring a paternal figure to protect them.³

Even Shane (George Stevens, 1953), which does provide a sympathetic picture of small farmers faced with the anger of a cattleman who sees them encroaching on his range, says that it is the hired professional, ultimately, who will decide the issue—unless another professional, one who has, in this case, turned sentimental, blocks him. Here, however, we see a more direct reflection of the attitudes of the prewar (and postwar television) Western, where the hero often really does play the role of savior. And this is probably why many of us who grew up in the postwar period, nursed on television Westerns, found Shane, when we discovered it (for the most part in the 1960s, when we had developed our own “sophisticated” vision of film), naïve and annoying. Mitchell calls the film "a distillation of the Western itself, glorifying the larger social processes of American history in a glowingly nostalgic mode."⁴ More accurately, it is a distillation of what had been the Western itself, glorifying something that had become increasingly problematic, especially in the more intellectually-oriented corners of American society. It promoted a Jeffersonian ideal that was increasingly seen as naïve and passé, especially in a dangerous world where Lippmann’s “realist” vision dominated. He writes:

Every democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are incompatible with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of masses is such that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather blindly….

The democrats had caught sight of a dazzling possibility, that every human being should rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations. With what they knew of the art of government, they could, no more than Aristotle before them, conceive a society of autonomous individuals, expect an enclosed and simple one. They could, then, select no other premise if they were to reach the conclusion that all the people could spontaneously manage their public affairs.⁵

That was written soon after the end of World War I. It took another generation, but Lippmann’s attitude had become the underpinning of beliefs on both left and right by the end of World War II. The people, once viewed as so strong and able, were now seen as weak, as needing guidance:

Whether a conservative bemoaned liberal deviance from the constitutional framework of limited government or a liberal faulted Eisenhower with inaction and drift, political criticism, like the intellectual-social criticism of rampant conformity and individual anxiety, connoted dissatisfaction with an America that had lost all sense of direction and purpose. America, it was believed, could ill afford such weaknesses at a time when the rest of the world either challenged or depended upon U.S. leadership.⁶

Such an attitude moves concern from the people to the leaders, for it is there that (in this view) any possible action or progress originates.

Though the dangers of the mob had been obvious to American intellectuals, artists, and elite long before World War II, few of these people had felt its ire personally and generally viewed the “common person” with affection, though tempered with condescension. Even the intellectuals attracted to communism and the idealistic left of the 1930s had believed that theirs was a task of converting essentially good-hearted people—that the real enemy lay elsewhere. Again, though there had long been persecuted Americans (lynchings were far too much a commonplace), they had not previously included the educated and artistic elite. Now, however, they did—figuratively, at least. To make matters worse, the persecutors and persecuted had recently made common cause against Germans and Japanese (and few had raised a peep about the internment of the Nisei). The betrayal felt by the American left in this new situation was intense—and it soon began to show up in the movies in, as I said, an industry that (like most relating to the arts) relies on creative impulses that tend to come from people of liberal bent. And not simply in Westerns: Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer, 1960) may present as negative a portrayal of small-town Americans as can be found anywhere, an indication of just how great the divide between the two Americas was becoming.

The cultural and political split that one sees today between small-town/rural America and urban America (with the suburbs, as usual, somewhere in the middle), though as old as the oldest city, was exacerbated by McCarthyism after World War II and abetted by an entertainment industry shaken by the related controversies that threatened to tear it apart. The industry was changed in ways still evident, residual resentment towards small-town attitudes still showing up in film, reflecting a feeling that it was the “red state” Americans (and not another faction of the elite) who were the cause of McCarthyite and HUAC persecutions—and who continue to want to attack the intellectual and artistic communities of the country.

¹Corkin, Stanley, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 180.

²Slotkin, Richard, Gunfighter Nation: The myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, originally published in 1992), 475.

³Mitchell, Lee Clark, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 192.

⁴Mitchell, 193.

⁵Lippman, Walter, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922 ), 272.

⁶Lenihan, John, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 116-117

Discuss this article!

About the Author: Aaron Barlow teaches English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn. He is a Columbia School of Journalism Sulzberger Fellow, ePluribus Media Director and Editor. He is also the author of The Rise of the Blogosphere and Blogging America, both from Praeger Publishers.

ePluribus Media Contributors: roxy, jenn718