For an element so firmly fixed in American culture, the frontier
myth is surprisingly flexible. How else to explain its having taken
two such different guises in the twentieth century - the
progressive, forward-looking politics of Rough Rider president
Teddy Roosevelt and the conservative, old-fashioned character and
Cold War politics of Ronald Reagan? This is the conundrum at the
heart of Cowboy Presidents, which explores the deployment and
consequent transformation of the frontier myth by four U.S.
presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan,
and George W. Bush. Behind the shape-shifting of this myth,
historian David A. Smith finds major events in American and world
history that have made various aspects of the 'Old West' frontier
more relevant, and more useful, for promoting radically different
political ideologies and agendas. And these divergent adaptations
of frontier symbolism have altered the frontier myth. Theodore
Roosevelt, with his vigorous pursuit of an activist federal
government, helped establish a version of the frontier myth that
today would be considered liberal. But then, Smith shows, a series
of events from the Lyndon Johnson through Jimmy Carter presidencies
- including Vietnam, race riots, and stagflation - seemed to give
the lie to the progressive frontier myth. In the wake of these
crises, Smith's analysis reveals, the entire structure and popular
representation of frontier symbols and images in American politics
shifted dramatically from left to right, and from liberal to
conservative, with profound implications for the history of
American thought and presidential politics. The now popular idea
that 'frontier American' leaders and politicians are naturally
Republicans with conservative ideals flows directly from the Reagan
era. Cowboy Presidents gives us a new, clarifying perspective on
how Americans shape and understand their national identity and
sense of purpose; at the same time, reflecting on the essential
mutability of a quintessentially national myth, the book suggests
that the next iteration of the frontier myth may well be on the
horizon.
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