The Western Image, Continued

Heather Cox Richardson

The classic version of the American Western hero is Louis L’Amour’s Flint. Flint is a westerner, adopted by a gunslinger, then educated at fancy eastern schools. He plays the eastern game, becoming a rich businessman in the cutthroat world of industry. But his life has a twist. The secret to his eastern success is that he listens to the little guy, the cabbie who hears a stock tip, the waitress who learns about a business takeover. He values them and their hard work; he treats them as equals.

When an eastern doctor incorrectly diagnoses Flint with cancer, he chucks over his fame as a robber baron to go back to his roots. There, he sticks up for the small ranchers against the big guys, backed by the eastern system. He wins, of course. He’s better with cards, guns, and women than any easterner ever born. And he’s a lot smarter.

Does this image still appeal to Americans?

This TV show (below), appropriately named Outlaw, starts this week.

The Enduring Power of the Cowboy Image

Heather Cox Richardson

Many years ago, I had the good luck to hear Werner Sollors illustrate the importance of cultural understanding in interpreting popular history. He did it by describing what a Martian would guess about American life

if his only source of information was The Brady Bunch.

The Martian would assume that American humans in the 1960s reproduced by cloning, Sollors guessed, since it was clear that the adults had no sexual contact. Male clones were always brunette and females blonde. And a Martian could easily conclude that humans kept older members of the species set off from the others in the kitchen, like a sort of pet.

I remembered Sollors’s talk recently when I discovered the new Old Spice advertising campaign. The ads have certainly hit a popular chord; the videos have gotten more than 12 million hits and have boosted sales of Old Spice by more than 107%.

And the ad campaign shows, again, just how much cultural understanding you need to make sense of popular history. This particular image plays on age-old popular stereotypes of the American West, with their heroic men and devoted women. But without that cultural knowledge, what on earth would a Martian examining modern American life through this image conclude?