 I hope you're having as good a time as we are. What an extraordinary set of talks already and we're just getting started so remember this afternoon there'll be the statue unveiling on the lawn the new plaza of the Stark County courthouse this evening this extraordinary symphony written by Chris Brubeck the son of the great jazz musician Dave Brubeck. Chris Brubeck has previously done historically based symphonic pieces on Iwo Jima on Ansel Adams and on Samuel Clemens Mark Twain. We commissioned him to write this piece on Theodore Roosevelt from the Badlands years. Its world premiere was last week Saturday night in Bismarck and it was an extraordinary experience and you're absolutely going to love it so if you if you weren't planning to come do plan to come we expect a packed house here tonight in this very space but now let me move on and we will we will not ask Ted White to reduce his talk at all we'll just get back on schedule during the noon hour. As Elliot West said last night this is one of those books that changes the way you think about some really important things the Eastern establishment and the Western experience I'm going to read the last passage from it here in just a moment. You have a long biography of G. Edward White in your brochure I won't go through all of it but it's fair to say that he's written a slew of books 14 already this one 1968 he's Harvard and Yale educated he's the David and Mary Harrison distinguished professor of law at the University of Virginia he clerked for Earl Warren I mean it's an amazing biography of accomplishments in a range of fields and Roosevelt Remington and Wister is just one area of his immense area addition I remember reading this book about five or six years ago and thinking this should be a foundation book for anyone who's doing anything involving Roosevelt or anyone interested in the in the in the origins of the mythos of the cowboy in the American West and the the open range here's a passage the last passage in the book from page 202 it was the Roosevelt generation that first called attention to a dilemma in American culture which is still present how to come to terms with metropolitan living while demonstrating the relevancy of alternative existences the search for freedom from a corporate and technological world still manifests itself in the arena of national politics as went in the flush of Barry Goldwater's triumph in 1964 pride filled delegates rose to denounce the eastern establishment whose yoke they had momentarily cast off perhaps perhaps such attempts to resist the tide of corporate professionalism are as fallacious as earlier desires to implant the yeoman farmer in the midst of technocratic America takes you right back to last night but they represent the same reluctance on the part of Americans to wholly embrace an urban and industrial society without positing alternatives to it perfect perfect analysis G. Edward White please welcome thank you clay and it's nice to be here and and I should say it's a little unusual experience for me because although my father was born in my not North Dakota this is the first time I've been in the state and and he ended up living in New England and in New York where I grew up and I only came to write the eastern establishment because as a graduate student in American Studies at Yale I wanted to write a biography of Owen Wister who his papers had just been released and were available at the Library of Congress and so I consulted people in the American Studies Department and was told pointedly that graduate students didn't do biographies at that point I one of the people that was important to me as a graduate student was Howard Lamar the famous Western historian and he suggested that I might be able to integrate my interest in Wister in a in a work on the American West because he had noted that in addition to Wister Theodore Roosevelt had grown up in the East and and gone out to the West at the same time so I went ahead I discovered that Frederick Remington although mainly known as an artist had also done some writings on the West so I decided to go ahead and write the dissertation and having done that I thought well gosh you know I I really don't see myself as a Western historian and so maybe I ought to try to find something else to do so I went to law school talk about not resisting the tide of corporate professionalism and and then found my way back into into legal academics and really haven't done any writing on Western history since I wrote a preface when the Eastern establishment was reissued in 1987 but that was just a way of thanking Howard Lamar and I didn't really add and I'm painfully aware on on preparing for this talk of how much has gone on and how much I failed to take into account when I was writing the Eastern establishment but I do agree with much of what Elliot West said last night that if we broaden the lens we can see Roosevelt's expedition to the Badlands and the ramifications of it for thinking about the figure of the cowboy in American culture we can see that perhaps in a different way so what I want to do this morning is to is to put three questions and see if we can explore them the the first question is why was cowboy life depicted by the principal persons who wrote about it in the way it was what why was it why was the representation of the cowboy so inaccurate in so many respects and why was cowboy why were cowboys chosen to be heroic figures when so much of their lives were were much more mundane secondly why did it take nearly a decade perhaps even over a decade from when ranching first got established in the years right after the Civil War for this myth of as I'm putting it of the cowboy to appear in in popular consciousness and why was the myth fashioned not by contemporaries contemporary residents of the ranching areas but by persons who lived in the east who journeyed out who experienced some intermittent excursions in the west Roosevelt being one of those and then who went back to the east and beginning in the 1880s developed this myth why didn't it happen right away why why were the people fashioning it not actually residents full-time residents of the of the west and then finally and and Elliot alluded to this last night as well finally what why does the idea of a western featuring cowboys featuring stock figures the occasional lawman the saloon keeper the desperado the vigilante the the native Americans in the background why does that western as we think of it why is that emerged as an important genre in American life when we can't say the same thing comparably about any other region if I if I employ the term western it has it has recognition in both in both books and films if I say the term eastern meaning a genre or southern or northern we're hard-pressed there may be representative novels or films of those regions but we can't think of anything stock why is it then that the western has occupied the central place well let's take them in order first the the mythical representation of the cowboy portrays him of course he's a male figure as independent self-reliant and somehow acquiring a virtue from being apart from civilization casting off the trappings of civilization and and occupying a more independent space secondly that the cowboy is a a self-sufficient figure living off the land foraging for himself finally that he has his own codes of law and justice which transcend the sort of more formal codes of civilization so on the range one settles things man-to-man and somehow the settlement is is virtuous if you look at the virginian a best-selling novel published by Owen Worcester a classmate of Roosevelt said Harvard in nineteen three the the the figure of the virginian embodies all of these sorts of virtues and and if you look at high noon the movie that is an adaptation of the virginian the gary cooper figure is is comparable well so much is left out in this portrait indeed almost everything important arguably about ranch life is left out now to understand that a little let's back up a little bit and and consider how ranching actually got started it is as Elliott said last night it is a product of the years after the United States acquires a huge amount of territory in not just the Louisiana purchase but the Mexican session you may remember that the Mexican session was the result of our war on Mexico and a number of people who were concerned about the spread of slavery opposed the war in Mexico because they felt that some of the areas which they thought that we would certainly acquire territory if we were successful in the Mexican war which we did and that that territory might be amenable for slavery and so since the major issue of the eighteen fifties is the interaction of slavery with westward expansion the Mexican war was a controversial episode but by eighteen sixty six that settled there is not going to be slavery in the territories and the territories have been acquired and they're opening up and so ranch life begins as part of this process there are also some other features of the process that are not portrayed in the so-called cowboy myth works one of them is the dispossession the displacement of the the forcible removal of Native American tribes when the Mexican secession is acquired and indeed when the Louisiana purchase before it is acquired most of the inhabitants of the territory that becomes the United States are Native American tribes and little by little they are driven from roots that settlers covet onto reservations and and sometimes with the through armed expeditions so part of the first step in establishing ranching is the dispersal of the tribes that inhabited the areas of the the next step is the discovery that longhorn cattle which had become popular for livestock in in the Texas area the southwest are capable of enduring the northern plains winters and so it's possible to move herds north into the area of the trans Mississippi west but because the land is arid in a fashion that it's not in the east of the Mississippi River because the land is arid the character of farming has to take different shape and so instead of large-scale farming with with plentiful access to water we get ranching which is which you can do in an arid area so once you get ranching and once you get the displacement of American tribes you create a need on at ranch as an enterprise you create a need for people to work on ranches to herd cattle and that's how the ranch hand emerges and a cowboy is really a hired ranch hand and cowboys are overwhelmingly young males and they are at this point in the 1870s many of them are civil war former participants in the civil war some of them are deserters from both the Union and and Confederate sides others are people who for domestic reasons decided that they didn't want to be accountable to the jurisdictions in which they lived and so they lit out for the territory forming the forming the basis of cowboy cowboys are quite in contrast to the idea of living sufficiently on the range cowboys come into town and stock up on provisions that are paid for by the people that hire them they go out and they stay with the cattle there is no particular evidence that they are to the extent that there are are records from cowboys describing their experiences it seems to be far from heroic and and so their life the the life of a cowboy is is quite in contrast to the to the myth and finally there's another development that goes on and is is extremely important in who fashions the myth right before right right after Theodore Roosevelt publishes a a book on the naval war of 1812 which he'd started as an undergraduate at Harvard College the same publisher that publishes that book publishes a book on the northern and Pacific Railroad and the northern Pacific Railroad first begins to extend its radius into Dakota territory in the early 1880s and Roosevelt gets extremely enthusiastic about riding out on the railroad and the reason he wants to ride out on the railroad and go into Dakota territory is because he wants to shoot big game he isn't he feels that the big game isn't going to be available anymore in the east and and he wants to get out and get a get a get trophies while they're still there so he becomes one of the early representatives of affluent Easterners who ride out on trains on hunting expeditions as the railroad gets established the railroad cultivates this sort of clientele and resorts spring up along the the lines from from the east coast cities to Chicago and west and people go out on expeditions and shoot or hunt and stay briefly and then come back and it is this group of people that fashions that ends up fashioning the myth one of the interesting features of the principal contributors to this myth fashioning is that they all have contacts with eastern publishers and some of their ventures are actually commissioned in advance Roosevelt's ranch life in the hunting trail is commissioned he he's actually making a living being a popular author at this point Frederick Remington who originally goes out himself comes into a New York office with some illustrations and from then on the the the the magazine commissions Remington to go out and paint and connections are drawn between Roosevelt's books and Remington's paintings Owen Worcester has a career as a nister novelist relatively unsuccessful career but ends up going out to Jackson Hole Wyoming and there develops the idea of of writing becoming a writing of on on the cowboy and and his life and and Worcester writes the Virginian when he's living in Savannah Georgia and and turns the Virginian into a kind of amalgamation of northern and southern romantic chivalric figures so this is a this is a depiction of a slice of American life that is significantly at odds with the experience of that life by the residents of it and the full-time those who full-time and our full-time inhabitants of the Trans Mississippi West and yet it becomes the basis for a kind of conception of the West though the Wild West if you will that becomes extremely popular and so Roosevelt is actually able to identify himself as a cowboy as a political figure he if one thinks about Roosevelt's political career he really is a what I would call a gentry reformer he he's interested in politics in New York State at a time when the municipal politics has been taken over by patronage and by urban machines such as boss tweed and Roosevelt is one of an unusual number of his social contemporaries mugwumps if you will who consider re-entering politics to clean it up to to to serve as a counterweight to the urban machines that are based on large numbers of immigrants to replace corruption with good government and although Roosevelt is in many respects in the 1880s a conventional Republican politician he's always on the the gentry reform side now in that sense his romanticization of the West goes hand-in-hand with his political goals in the East because both can be seen as critiques of commercial industrial patronage dominated immigrant influenced civilization that's grown up in urban and industrial centers in the East so although Roosevelt doesn't self-consciously link this up in a programmatic fashion he does link it up in a in what might be called a kind of mass appeal he presents himself simultaneously as a gentleman reformer and as a cowboy now the the cowboy part doesn't really take shape in politics until the Rough Riders episode and this introduces another theme that is part of one of the puzzles that when when one encounters this literature for the first time one is confronted with and that is why is there so much emphasis among the writers on how this experience in the West adds to one sense of masculinity why is why are people talking about how going out West makes one a real man or going out going out West is as as Remington put it the beat of hearty life and and the experiences of the West are pictured as often physical trials in which one shows one's physical prowess as a man why is why is there so much of that why does the congregationalist magazine in reviewing Roosevelt's the wilderness hunter in 1893 say the following the wilderness hunter by the way for those of you who don't know it is another collection of short stories short stories there some of them may be in fact stories episodes accounts of adventures that Roosevelt had shooting game and and and living in ranch territory it's very much like ranch life in the hunting trail and and here's what the congregationalist magazine says the man of social position and culture who can tramp for days at a time in the uninhabited mountains sleeping in the open air and depending for food solely upon his rifle sets an example of simple wholesome living which is of high value in counteracting the tendency toward effeminate effeminate nests so prevalent upon many of the young men of the present so look what's linked together in that excerpt first of all the man is a man of social position and culture but not withstanding that he can tramp for days at a time in the uninhabited mountains and sleep in the open air and depend for food solely on his rifle and in doing that he sets an example of simple wholesome living and that example is of high value why because it counteracts the tendency toward effeminate nests so prevalent upon many of the young men of the present so what you have here is a kind of rebel act by someone of social privilege living in the midst of effeminate corruption in the east who strikes out for himself and and shoots game with his rifle and lives in the open air and therefore sets a wholesome example now why it why especially because it's very unlikely that many of these people of social position and privilege did that basically they went out and hired people to help them shoot game and got trophies and came back at displayed them in metropolitan clubs or houses so why does congregationalist which has no particular dog in this fight why do they capture this particular image well at this point it looks as if what's going on is that the idea of going west in this fashion the idea of the cowboy and living the cowboy experience has gotten connected up to a sense of unease and disquiet and maybe critique that's emerging alongside living in an industrializing and urbanizing east and and and midwest cities that somehow this experience is is being portrayed as a as an escape from this now at this point the time frame the 1880s to the to the early 20th century becomes relevant because what's going on in in this period well first of all the civil war is over and there's an attempt to reconcile north and south by sort of bringing back by bringing back southerners into the union the the election of 1876 has settled the issue of reconstruction we're beginning we're for the first time a justice from the south is named as the Supreme Court of the United States Woodrow Wilson will be a southern president and so there's a sort of reintegration of of north and south and north and south northerners and southerners are in a sense both invited to consider what it's like to develop this new United States the trans Mississippi west out to the Pacific coast so there's both sides then have a stake in this and the experience seems to be one in which everybody can share now what exactly is that experience by the late 1890s the frontier the so-called frontier is closing by that is meant that as the territory of federal territories become developed there's fewer and fewer land areas that are described of as unsettled or unoccupied meaning that there's still largely areas in which American Indian tribes exist that are not allocated under reservations so the the idea of people occupying a space in between civilization and the frontier is vanishing and so this mythic space that the cowboy occupies becomes elevated becomes simultaneously a nostalgic and and romantic in addition the the historical representation of the actual process of how Americans went west from the 1780s on is beginning to be fashioned and indeed Roosevelt will be one of the fashioners in his multi-volume series of winning of the winning of the west so the winning of the west going west comes to be depicted as a kind of universalistic ritual of how of how American society has progressed from east to west from frontier to civilization conquering space building institutions like the railroad to help and the telegraph to help conquer that space turning vacant by vacant meaning occupied by Native American tribes land into profitable enterprises such as ranching and so it becomes a kind of elemental American experience so you appeal to sort of the the you'd appeal to a process that many Americans can look back to and say well that really is what developing America was all about and at the same time you ingest it with this idea of of a romantic escape from the east now how does masculinity factor in with the end of the Civil War is the end of the last armed conflict in which young males growing up can participate Roosevelt is born too late to fight in the Civil War and there is no war for the United States for another more than 30 years and and so a group of young male Americans whose fathers and whose grandfathers had the experience of fighting in a war are deprived of that option and so Roosevelt when when we have a a relatively minor skirmish with Spain which is escalated primarily by the United States into the Spanish American War Roosevelt just can't wait to fight he's been wanting to fight ever since he went to the Badlands somehow he's been wanting to have the experience now his his father did not serve in the Civil War but bought a substitute one could still do that and many Americans with means did it but you have at at one point over there's one statistic from Philadelphia that is particularly remarkable notwithstanding the the buying of substitutes half the adult population between the ages of 18 and 45 in the city of Philadelphia was participating in the Civil War so this is a experience that so many of Roosevelt's age contemporaries have had their fathers participated or at least were affected by it they didn't get the opportunity so it it somehow as if they need another experience to demonstrate their virility and so they escalate this idea of going out west and shooting game and and living off the land and acting as if they were a cowboy into that so it's it's a fascinating episode in the in American cultural history where a group of publicists craft a particular image which leaves out most of the significance of what's actually going on in the ranch experience of the Trans Mississippi West creates another image the image of displacing Indians and building railroads and and bringing cattle up for from Texas to to the plains it is largely ignored and in its place is put this romantic portrait of cowboy life and it is the romantic portrait of cowboy life that has endured now why is that what why is this sort of affinity for the Wild West genre well I again I think we have to go back to the fact that for so many of American families part of their heritage is the movement of their family from east to west either from Europe as immigrants settling or from staking out of claim initially in the east and moving west and moving further west and and what that has meant over time so when you see portraits that glamorize and dramatize the experience of doing that and at the same time experiences experiencing the kind of older vision of American of a wilderness society populated by strange beings where one had to forage off the land it it is an overwhelmingly attractive vision for readers who are for the most part not experiencing it so in the end it's it's it all starts the idea of the Western as special and having cultural significance that the other regional genres don't all starts with this particular episode and the fascinating thing about it for me it is that the people who fashion it and and the people who communicate messages that have cultural resonance are not the people who actually accurately observe what's going on thanks thank you Ted we're just about out of time and we want to catch up with me let's take nine or ten minutes for questions I have one that was sort of I think implicit in something you said so the Civil War is this cataclysmic national event in the mid-century and in binding the north and south back together culturally by creating is it is it true that by developing this myth of the cowboy it leaves out the actual reality of the Western movement which was a prolonged struggle over the advancement of slavery you've sort of replaced the narrative with a much more agreeable one yeah the the virginian in in Owen Wister's novel never talks about that never talks about the this I mean the it it it may be misunderstood or not fully appreciated by histories of popular histories of the Civil War how the crucial concern of when the when north and south were deteriorating in the 1840s and 50s the crucial concern was not with slavery but with the expansion of slavery because slavery changed from a position where it was expected to die out to a position after our purchase of Louisiana where it was expected to flourish in some regions and so all of a sudden north and south is confronted with not this well this is maybe a slightly embarrassing but after all awkward and and and and temporarily contingent experiment to one that could could continue to define America into the 20th century and so that issue not so much slavery itself is what makes who settles these territories so fraught and and basically the political parties cannot solve the issue and that's why in effect we there's a breakdown we have the Civil War after that is removed it's kind of like there's a release and so and and we can forget ultimately and by the 1880s people are making a big effort to forget there's a kind of a rehabilitation of Southerners and and the cowboy in an indirect way the cowboy myth literature is part of that question yes here hold looking back at the magazines cartoons and seeing the articles of the century and Harvard and Schridner's mission they sent writers and artists out to this area to do stories but there were also stories had geographic almost about missionaries and gold prospectors and the soldiers of course and others towards them do you think let me just quickly try to paraphrase that they're competing other narratives that could have been assumed as the central myth of the West gold-seeking and so on why did this one compete with those and so effective a fashion well of course you can't be you can't be Natty Bumpo in North Dakota because it's too arid Natty Bumpo is a hunter and a trapper and a in a tracker and I think aridity is part of the story I think that the one of the reasons that cowboys become so fascinating is because for many Easterners going out and seeing this landscape is exotic and they just think it's not like seeing the woods in the Adirondacks or the woods in in Southeast Georgia that this is a different sort of landscape and it's much harder to live on at least it's perceived as much harder to live on so you have to be much more of a man to survive this inhospitable climate something I can understand after coming to this careful yeah it's a Connecticut Yankee question I mean is this a way to un-Americanize popular stories from the European tradition you know I I've done some work on Holmes and one of the fascinating things I found out about when Holmes went to the civil went into the Civil War he enlisted he was a very enthusiastic participant and then he gets wounded three times and and he thinks about leaving and he writes a letter to one of his friends and he says if I didn't think that this war was part of the great chivalric crusade for mankind I would think twice about staying in and he and his Harvard contemporaries think of themselves as a species of knights going out to do battle so in a way this is a kind of revival of it revival of that sort of she got the again the Virginian is an emblematic figure he's he's got all the chivalric virtues he's he's loyal to women and and he he does battle for their cause he's honest and upright and true and and so that's drawing on a myth but it's fashioning it in a distinct way minus a one yes I was Two years before that, I nearly died, nothing wrong with it. Then I got seriously ill, and my attorney said, oh, there's so much complications. I said, I'm not ready to move again ever, minister. I've been in Davidson, and you know what? Look at me, I'm absolutely in excellent health. I'm nice to my mom. And there are all these two fine men around. And it's all true. Eda, thank you. A personal memoir restored by the West. That could be just natural selection, of course. Let me ask you one last question. I'm so tempted to get into Jefferson. You're at Mr. Jefferson's University. I'd love to know what he would have thought of all of this. But let me ask you a different sort of question. You know, you didn't have time to go into too much about Remington and Wister and exactly the way in which they fashioned this mythos. But we know that it happened, and we're the beneficiaries of it. It didn't happen instantly. I mean, Mark Hanna could say that damned cowboy is now the president of this country. To what extent did they know what they were creating? You know, we've had several discussions about Roosevelt's self-consciousness. I really don't think he was a very self-conscious person. I think he was a strategic politician and certainly aware of the publicity angles. But I don't think he thinks this is mythic at all. He may dress up as a cowboy for political reasons. But I think he thinks his portraits of the West are true. And that's the way it really was. And I think he thinks that he got better for being in Dakota and he undoubtedly did get better. But whether that was going to be true across the board for all people who read Roosevelt was perhaps another matter. Let me just say, and I wish we had more time, but you'll be able to talk with Mr. White at lunch. And later, unfortunately, the book, The Eastern Establishment of the Western Experiences, not here, but there's a sign-up form out at the bookstore. And you can sign up for it and the book will be sent to you. But your short book on Oliver Wendell Holmes is here and you'd be happy to sign it, I'm sure. Thank you very much for that great lecture.