Historians know that the “Myth of the Frontier” has been a consistent part of American language and culture for well more than two centuries at least. Stephen Mexal’s book “Reading for Liberalism” has aged well since its 2013 publication, and he discusses how frontier myth tropes and narratives still flourish today. Mexal considers the ways post-Civil War California writing about “the wild West” blended with liberalism and the idolization of individuality (what he terms “liberal selfhood”) (4.1.1.).
Just 16 years ago, President Bush ’43 characterized our ally Pakistan as “wild country … wilder than the Wild West,” and he literally stated we wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Sen. John McCain once claimed that withdrawing from the Iraq War would create a “Wild West for terrorists” there (presaging the emergence of ISIS).
We have to return to John Locke and John Stuart Mill to begin thinking about Classical Liberalism, to study all their rhetoric about the “sacred individual” and the sacrosanct “rights” of the individual. This enables us to identify results such as the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Mexal points out that in today’s 21st century, we can also note their writings “were all shot through the prism of imperial conquest” (p. viii). Great Britain’s Empire controlled great swaths of the Earth, including South Africa, Australia and Canada — and, of course, Mill himself worked for the British East India Co., which colonized India for the United Kingdom.
Like Thomas Hobbes before him in “Leviathan” (1651), Locke began his manuscripts on governmental origins with a view of wilderness (raw nature), where he believed the human inhabitants had the most personal liberty and freedom. Like many Englishmen, Locke acknowledged “the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America” as a primitive stone age where the sacred “individual” was uninhibited by civilization’s laws (“Second Treatise of Government,” par. 37, 1689). Yet he knew with Hobbes and with J.S. Mill that the individual citizen had to surrender several “liberties” in order that “European civilization” could rule and spread (colonialization).
Bret Harte’s 1868 The Overland Monthly magazine was intended to create a California “writing aesthetic” that stressed the wild and was also directly modeled on the East Coast’s prominent The Atlantic and Harper’s magazines (McClure’s in the 1890s). However, the Bavarian money man behind Overland, Anton Roman, also wanted tangible land development and profits. This illustrates the fascinating contradiction behind the ambitious Overland Monthly (economic: literary) as well as the more political differences between a bourgeois capitalism as opposed to respect for wilder lands and their indigenous denizens (urbanization: indigenous humans).
With Harte’s great editing and genius short stories (e.g., “The Luck of Roaring Camp”), the soon-to-be nationally recognized Overland Monthly delivered both, and made the very contradictions attractive. The Overland Monthly introduced western writers such as Mary Austin, Mark Twain and Jack London; it idealized the California wilderness and simultaneously showed that inevitable “civilization” would limit wilderness as well as restrain the atomistic individual.
By the 1860s, western writers realized more than Locke that their bewitching wilderness was the most exciting arena for the freedom-loving individual. However, the railroads and factories of the Industrial Revolution would restrict wild zones (and in practice would also require moving the indigenous people out of all the areas the white settlers desired). What one group termed “manifest destiny” today we would call western imperialism.
Locke, the father of liberalism, could even detect how wild “is synonymous with both ‘uncultivated’ as well as ‘excessively free,’ thereby concluding that maximum individual freedom is attained in the wilderness — but this also poses a problem for civil society (government and rules for all). Liberal democracy has always had this tension between the needs of the many (the society, government) and the ’selfish’ wishes of the unique individual. I’ve always termed this “the Problem of the One and the Many.”
In the lead photograph, we see the original cover of the Overland, and grizzly bears certainly were active throughout California in the 1860s and 1870s. In the artwork, we witness a menacing grizzly snarling at us as it boldly stands on iron railroad tracks, the very symbol of civilizing western “progress” in California. (The transcontinental railroad was only completed in May 1869, and this 1868 cover highlights that impending accomplishment by depicting the wild’s fiercest mammal growling at the locomotive of Progress.) Compare the grizzly bear shown on our California state flag shown in profile and in a submissive posture. (California’s last grizzly was murdered in 1920.)
The great western writers imagine the “state of nature” ultimately as the freest place possible, glorying in the lack of trails and the existence of ferocious predators like enraged grizzlies, yet they always go back to civilization for their social comforts, the opera, business, bars, the coffee house, schools, books and periodicals. After “Roughing It” (1872), Twain’s travelers always return to civilization, and so did Kit Carson.
We can tell that images of the American West are crucial to the way many people imagine “liberalism” and liberal democracy still today.
Early Overland writers fixed their gazes on an imagined, long-lost West, and very consciously played up the haunting contrast and romantic pain of losing this very Garden of Eden in front of them.
Harte wrote about this in his very first 1868 editorial titled “How the Grizzly Came to Be On the Masthead of the Overland Monthly”; he promised that the bear, “a symbol of local primitive barbarism,” would soon be wiped out by the “engine of civilization” (Mexal, p. 227). Yet Harte, great writer that he is, openly romanticizes nature and sounds a sad minor chord using nostalgic tones.
Similar to London and others, he manipulates the sorrow of the West’s fading natural glory and effortlessly evokes both melancholy and celebratory qualities. Some examples are the passing of the last cowboy, pseudo-romanticizing indigenous peoples, Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential 1893 “Frontier Thesis” that the American frontier was dead, or Southern Heritage lore (with its false “Myth of the Lost Cause”).
How we personally envision the “old American West” matters more than we may realize. In the raid to assassinate bin Laden, he had been given Geronimo as his code name (!). When events are cast in such metaphoric terms as “winning of the West” for white settlers, citizens sometimes fail to think carefully about the national decisions to dispose of humans already dwelling there.
Linking a civilization’s imperial projects to “liberalism,” as the Overland openly did (that “development” would be led by white settlers, of course), implicitly led to the California we know today with its 40-plus million inhabitants and enormous cities.
Viewpoints of wilderness and the West vary, and there are some binaries (or opposites) which these outlooks stir, such as
settled — wild civilized — savage evolved — primitive
Mexal contends that deploying a phrase like “the wild West” includes a presumption that this wildness of course will need settling and eventual civilizing in Anglo-European terms. Liberal selfhood requires itself to reduce or even finally eliminate wilderness, and also to rid itself of primitive or barbaric behavior.
I’ve also written elsewhere about the absurdity of these views, and we are today far from the outdated Victorian anthropology of E.B. Tylor, who established the clearly racist progression of savagery —>barbarism (better)—>civilization (the best = European-based Western Civilization). In my book “Trails Into Tomorrow,” I define local indigenous Chumash societies as full “civilizations” with no need to justify themselves to academic anthropologists or anyone (“Chumash Civilization,” pp. 170 – 171).
Liberalism in these ways became a tool of empire, hence the vast majority in North America speak English or Spanish, both European languages. There is a dialectic at work here, where European-based elites travel west across North America, fall in love with beautiful California, especially its wild paradisical quality, and simultaneously wallow in a pathetic nostalgia predicting that western civilization will overwhelm our region’s golden wilderness.
4.1.1.
Stephen Mexal, “Reading for Liberalism — The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), the George Bush quote is on p. 6; Simon Schama, “Landscape and Memory” (1995); list of Overland writers — Mark Twain, Mary Austin, Frank Norris, Jack London, Willa Cather, Ina Coolbrith, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte. Dan McCaslin, “Trails Into Tomorrow” (2021, available here).
