Heather Cox Richardson

​ Read: 06/2020

​ Having been born and spent my childhood within a mile or so of the boyhood home of General Stonewall Jackson (Jackson’s Mill), I feel I’ve been rather steeped in, if not a Confederate, but certainly a Republican mind-set for most of my life. In fact, I was a registered Republican until just last year, whereupon the advent of the bestial Trump and his slouching toward Washington D.C. precipitated my official migration to the left, not that I’d ever voted for a Republican before then. Democratic candidates had always appealed to me, but up until the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans hadn’t repulsed me.

​ Now, I am sorry to say, a certain strain certainly does.

​ As we live through this moment of pandemic and witness the emergence of the Black Lives Matter phenomenon (on the heels of the MeToo movement), it was viscerally compelling to follow Richardson’s argument tracking from Goldwater campaign back to the Civil War to end up back in our own disjointed times with the same underlying ideologies at play.

​ At the heart of the book lies a conceit that white, propertied men should be the ones to make decisions with regard to society. In effect, they are first among “equals,” and as long as that premise goes observed and unchallenged, then government will run according to God’s plan. “Government was not designed to promote equality of opportunity by guaranteeing equality before the law. Rather such meddling interfererd with the ability of a few to arrange society as they saw fit; they, and they alone, truly junderstood what was best for everyone.” (p. 200)

​ It’s an ugly notion, one at odds with the ideals of our founding documents, but this… I would say belief, but belief is too weak a word, this certainty, this hubristic principle to which men lay claim has been apparent, celebrated, and bought into as an a priori power for thousands of years, and I have witnessed it first hand all of my life in my own family. My female cousins were expected to do the dishes. I was exempt. Who was I, as a boy, to question this divine order? Why it would be sacrilege to question such a clear manifestation of God’s will. Man was created in the image of his Maker, and woman was created from the rib of man. Clear enough.

​What shocks is the recollection of a civil war fought on American soil. A war fought not for some notion of “states rights” but for the rights of some people to enslave other people and call them property. Our nation barely survived that conflict, costing a total somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 lives.

​ By the beginning of that war, the government had expanded its territory into what we now recognize as the United States, and Richardson argues that the ideology of the South, though defeated in 1865, drifted westward, transitioning from the ideal of the yeoman farmer to the rugged, mythical cowboy, who only wanted freedom and had no need of oppressive government rules to curtail the expression of his will. As former slaves were denigrated as lazy, now regular Americans could be compared with the cowboy and found to be wanting and weak, looking for handouts. (p. 111)

​ She digs a bit into the history of William Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” and here she crosses paths with Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland. Buffalo Bill is a performer but also an icon. He embodies the myth of cowboy, the fantasy of the cowboy, but that image is sufficient to influence the popular imagination, and then an historian by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner delivers a paper in 1893 at the Chicago Fair (“White City”) wherein he formulates the invention of the “western individualist.”

​ Individualism is masculine. Men don’t need help.They don’t need to collaborate. They need space and freedom to do as they please.