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How The West Was Won -
Again
Richard Weaver, in his discussion of forms and the concept of the
formal in Ideas Have Consequences, has this to say about the
custom and culture of the American frontier:
The American frontiersman was a type who emancipated himself from
culture by abandoning the settled institutions of the seaboard and the
European motherland. Reveling in the new absence of restraint, he
associated all kinds of forms with the machinery of oppression which
he had fled and was now preparing to oppose politically. His
emancipation left him impatient of symbolism, of indirect methods, and
even of those enclosures of privacy which all civilized communities
respect..The frontiersman was seeking a solvent of forms, and he found
his spokesman in such writers as Mark Twain, a large part of whose
work is simply [!!] a satire upon the more formal European way of
doing things.
I do not know whether Weaver, who spent nearly all his adult life
shut up in a tiny cluttered apartment in the shadow of the University
of Chicago, ever experienced the West, or not. Even if he did, the
American West of the 1940s and 50s was not the frontier as Twain
experienced it in the 1860s, when he traveled by stagecoach from
Missouri to Nevada Territory, a journey described (with some
stretchers, as he would have said) in Roughing It. Hannibal,
Missouri, was not exactly the frontier in Twain's time either; nor did
Twain himself, dressed in his white suit in his big house back in
Hartford, Connecticut, have much more than an imaginative experience
as a frontiersman. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,
finally, though the background of these novels is socially realistic
enough, are anti-romantic romances, inversions of Sir Walter Scott's
which, inside out as they are, contain to a considerable extent the
same outside and inside. (Huck is not without his own, simpler version
of Tom's chivalric code, as demonstrated by his actions on behalf of
females in distress: Peter Wilks's daughters, for example.) Greater,
because more intentional, insight into the ontological nature of the
frontier is provided by Laura Ingalls Wilder's fictionalized memoirs;
the novels of Willa Cather; Mari Sandoz's biography of her father,
Jules, who transplanted and cultivated many Europe-derived forms from
his native Switzerland; and Owen Wister's The Virginian which,
romance that it is, served to encode more elaborate frontier forms by
acknowledging the simpler existing ones and institutionalizing them in
the Western imagination.
The great divide in American literature-indeed, in American
culture-identified by Bernard De Voto in the 30s as "Paleface
versus Redskin," though not exclusively regional in nature, is
in fact largely so, reflecting the opposition between East and West.
It may be that Weaver had De Voto's distinction in mind when he made
his observations regarding the Westerner's impatience with symbolism
and his eagerness to dissolve forms. If so, it seems he wasn't looking
far beyond Twain and De Voto in making them. Redskin forms may be as
formal in their context as Paleface forms, while "primitive" cultures
are often more formal than "civilized" ones-Weaver's point exactly in
contrasting less "developed" thirteenth-century European thought and
custom with the twentieth-century American sort. It seems odd that
Richard Weaver, of all people, looking back upon post-Civil War
America, could see the Western frontiersmen, and not the Eastern and
Midwestern robber barons, Wall Street financiers, oil and railroad
tycoons, and press magnates, as the pioneers of the modern mass
society, the destroyer of traditional forms and ideals, whose
influence worked from West to East. Frontier culture--excluding the
gunmen, buffalo hunters, Indian fighters, and other rootless,
rapacious daredevils and adventurers-was strongly marked by a
formality borrowed from the various Indian cultures it came in contact
with, as well as, in the Southwest, by the highly formalized Spanish
civilization. (Harvey Fergusson's novel, The Conquest of Don
Pedro, about a Jewish pedlar from New York City who marries into a
wealthy Spanish family living in a small New Mexican town on the Rio
Grande, is an illustration of such influence.) What is more, settling
Western civilization looked to the East-nearly always an older,
honester, more civilized East than the one being formed by the Gilded
Age-and to the European home countries for its standards of culture,
learning, fashion, and etiquette. There is no more touching symbol of
civilized determination in Mrs. Wilder's "Little House" books than
Ma's china shepardess, brought by her from New England to the big
woods of Wisconsin, and from Wisconsin to a succession of ever more
remote and less civilized locations, from Kansas to Dakota Territory,
in each of which the statuette is the first item to be unpacked by
Caroline Ingalls and placed ceremonially upon the mantlepiece: a
petticoated figure softly glistening in the gloomy wilderness. The
modernizing East, not the settling-up West, was the growing enemy of
Western civilization, the civilized past: The revolutionary current
ran from East to West, not West to East. It has been doing so ever
since; until every region of the country, the West included, has
largely succumbed, by a process of homogenization and intimidation, to
the national mold-without-form that is the modern world.
As Richard Weaver uses the word, "form" consists of a "veil which
is half adornment, half concealment." Those who recognize and
appreciate forms, being capable of reflection, understand that "the
reality which excites us is an idea, of which the indirection, the
veiling, the withholding, is part." The barbarian, philistine,
frontiersman, on the other hand, cannot see that that knowledge of
material reality is a knowledge of death.The desire to get ever closer
to the source of physical sensation-this is the downward pull which
puts an end to ideational life. No education is worthy of the name
which fails to make the point that the world is best understood from a
certain distance or that the most elementary understanding requires a
degree of abstraction.
There is a difference between form and custom, all form being at
least in part customary, while not every custom is formal, a rung on
"the ladder of ascent." Apprehenders of form are always both conscious
and selfconscious-of the reality veiled by the form in the first
instance, of themselves in relationship to both form and reality in
the second. Monster truck rallies have nothing to do with form, they
are "formless;" rodeos have everything to do with it. So do hunting
camps, cattle roundups, brandings, and butcherings, county fairs, barn
dances, and ranch barbecues. The gradual replacement of these rituals
and the ritualistic gatherings accompanying them by rock concerts,
motorcycle rallies, stock car races, and the International Olympics
are part of the breakdown of the formative West under pressure from
the mob industrial society that leaches all forms and erodes them away
from each other.
The American West, like every other region of the country, has been
nationalized to the degree that it no longer presents a distinctively
Western public face to the nation. The face it does show is bland,
blended, managerial, rationalistic-a construct of the new urban and
suburbanized West. It retains another, inward turned face, however:
rough, still fierce at times, unkempt and uncombed, independent,
uncompromising, and contemptuous; the face of the rural West in which
the frontier legacy lives on. The first is the face of Dick Cheney;
the second, of Edward Abbey. The Cheney face is the face familiar to
Washington, D.C., and the national media; the Abbey face the one Old
Westerners recognize themselves in. ABBEY LIVES! as the bumper sticker
says, even though Cactus Ed is fourteen years in his grave. Cheney
doesn't, though he is alive and powerful and represents, probably, the
future of the Rocky Mountain West. Unless something can be-and is-done
about it, and soon.
As maybe it can. Things, although pretty bad, still are better out
here than elsewhere. And the process of erosion might yet be arrested,
even reversed, if an awareness of the nationalizing threat could be
heightened, and the West's sense of cultural separatism renewed. In
most situations of this kind, the solution is cultural, rather than
political; in this instance, political action is more likely the
answer, at least short-term. The nature of that action is suggested by
the huge agglomeration of red political entities (called "counties,"
but who remembers?) covering the Rocky Mountain West-the old American
Desert-as indicated in that electoral map published in USA Today
following the 2000 presidential election.
Some years ago, I printed in this space an essay called "Twelve
Westerners," arguing that the West as a geographic and cultural region
has been historically disadvantaged by its lack of an intellectual
tradition-a political intellectual tradition especially. Where, I
asked, are its Jeffersons, its Randolphs, its Fitzsimmons-its John C.
Calhoun? I emphasize Calhoun, for the reason that his carefully
developed doctrine of concurrent majorities is what the American West
today is in desperate need of, Calhoun's solution seeming to have been
designed precisely to address its current crisis.
The famous map in red-and-blue was our fire siren in the night. In
a nation comprised of two opposing and unreconcilable cultures, urban
and rural, the urban one has, under the present Constitutional system,
the numbers and therefore the votes to swamp electorally what it
perceives as the rural enemy, and reconstruct it in its own image. It
is only a matter of time and numbers before the thing happens. The
rural culture, though in possession of by far the larger portion of
U.S. territory, sees its minority status enhanced by one election, and
one census, after another. It is the permanent shrinking minority,
with whom the majority can and will never concur. The minority
interest, therefore, must ensure that its right to concurrence
with the will of the majority be recognized, and assured. For the
custom and culture of the red counties to survive-and thrive-a
political means must be found adequate to protect the social and
political culture (the forms) of that minority.
What is the reasonable and likely means toward that end? John
Remington Graham, in his book The Consent of the Governed
Revisited (cf. Chronicles, April 2003), gives the answer:
changing the national "form of government"-revolution, in plainspeak.
But not subversion, in the sense Richard Weaver understood the term,
"the taking away of degree;" a reversion, rather, to the origins of
government, as accomplished by the drawing of the Magna Carta, the
Glorious Revolution in England, and the American "Revolution," which
dissolved the sovereign people's allegiance to the British crown.
Graham writes:
The right [to the withdrawl of consent] is universal, rooted in
natural law and legal tradition-a right of peaceable and lawful
revolution..it is a right necessary in extraordinary circumstances for
every free and civilized people.whenever they have entered into
federal relations with neighboring peoples for mutual advantage.
Without it, federal relations are too dangerous to consider.
Today is the time, once again, for revolution-the demand for the
return to the origins of American government. What could this mean,
other than the summoning of a Second Constitutional Convention charged
with the task of redrawing the Constitution of 1789 to fit the
national reality of 2003-not by "reinterpreting" that document in its
existing form, as proponents of a "living Constitution" have been
doing since Lincoln's presidency, but by altering it in ways
that guarantee explicitly both the rights of numerical minorities and
the interests of less populous, wealthy, and politically powerful
regions, and return the United States of America to its federal
principles.
Well before the Florida vote was certified in the 2000 election,
Senator Hillary Clinton announced her intention to introduce a
legislative bill that would scrap the Electoral College and provide
for the election of President and Vice President by popular
nation-wide vote. Whether the Senator from New York ever followed up
on her promise or not, hers was the triumphalist voice speaking, the
voice of the tyrannical majority baying for the sound of shredding
paper. (Other majoritarians, including politicians and journalists,
insisted that the day of equal Senate representation for each of the
fifty states was past.) And so the majoritarian Left, in its usual shy
and self-effacing way, is already demanding fundamental constitutional
change of a kind that would consolidate its present advantage, and
ensure its eventual hegemony. The South, softened up by Yankee money,
Yankee influence, and Yankee bodies, is probably too corrupted already
to answer the challenge; it is up to Western politicians-governors,
Congressmen, state legislators, county commissioners--to assert the
revolutionary agenda by convoking a regional convention for the
purpose of demanding a national constitutional one, and pressing the
matter.
The West (we are cheerfully reminded, almost on a daily basis, by
its enemies) is growing: It is home to tens of millions now, no longer
a region of one-horse towns and single-representative states. The flip
side of the growth coin is enhanced political clout, making the West
politically unignorable-at last. If it chooses to wield that clout
now, before it is too late, it might have an outside chance at
least of winning back itself--along with, perhaps, something of what
remains of the rest of the country.
Here is something to think about. The West doesn't need its own
Calhoun; just enough brave, independent, and determined men to take
their stand on ideas that seemed defeated forever in 1865.
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