A Response to Halloran’s 2007 Plenary Session:
Thought & Language along the Frontier West in the U.S.
as Shaper of U.S. Foreign Policy in the 21st Century

At the 2007 LCMND conference, plenary speaker Michael Halloran highlighted the specific ways in which the written accounts and monuments of the 1777 Battles of Saratoga shaped widely divergent national memories, language, and thinking. Halloran pointed out that patterns established at that time have continued to divide Americans from Britons and Canadians. During the question-and-answer period, I asked Halloran if Patrick Griffin's recent analysis of the notion of American exceptionalism, arising during the frontier experience of 1763-1832, had entered Halloran's analysis, as each seemed to complement the other.

In this paper, I seek to show how Halloran and Griffin intersect in their analyses of the 18th century, and I wish to couple them with Robert Kaplan's analysis of U.S. westward expansion in the 19th century to reveal much about U.S. commercial and military expansion in the 20th and 21 st centuries. While Halloran focuses on the clashes between organized armies on the better-known eastern front of the American Revolution—battles which, for our later purposes, we can view as trans-Atlantic in nature, Griffin, in his book American Leviathan , turns the spotlight on the lesser-known chaos and viciousness of the western frontier. We should note that the West at that time was western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. The pattern there became entrenched: traders and settlers took independent initiative and wielded brutal vigilantism. The military played catch-up and tried to intervene, often while using violence and being co-opted by settler politics to use violence against the natives. This pattern became the model for more than a century of expansion into the West in the U.S., from Pennsylvania to the West Coast. In contrast, Canada expanded in a more deliberate model of military/police establishment of governance (especially by the North West Mounted Police), followed by sanctioned settlement and trade.

Throughout this presentation, I'd like to emphasize the link between this year's conference theme of the West with last year's theme of language and memory by foregrounding Griffin's observation: “Myth not only makes contradictions manageable. It also forgets” (268). We heard a first-rate example of just this in Michael Halloran's plenary talk last year. This past July, I had the opportunity to see for myself how memory is shaped into myth at the Saratoga Battlefield when I took up Michael's invitation to tour the monuments with him. Colonel Daniel Morgan and his Virginia Riflemen's elimination of British General Simon Fraser are indeed glorified in a way that the facts do not fully support. The conclusion of Halloran's plenary speech resonates on those bloodied grounds—the site often termed the scene of the turning point of the American Revolution—and it informs the subsequent American past, present, and, I fear, future. Halloran writes,

The precise texture of the stories we tell about wars and warfare matters. American commemorative rhetoric has something to tell us about what it means to be an American…. understanding how American collective memory has been put to use in specific contexts may help us to understand the anxieties and the ambitions that have motivated us as a people.

It may be a cliché to say that the American people seem to be motivated by war, as they exude their anxieties and ambitions. What both Griffin and Kaplan make clear throughout their writings is that the U.S. West was in a perpetual state of war from the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 into the 20th century. The war’s front—known more pacifically as the frontier—kept moving westward. For the greater part of U.S. history, it seemed endless. Indeed, Kaplan points out that the perpetual war in the West shaped the United States, and particularly its military, more than any other war, in large part because the country was always engaged in it, even while it was engaged episodically with other wars, including the American Civil War. (The 1862 Dakota War in neighboring Minnesota is a classic example.) Says Kaplan,

…the Army's defining moment…was fighting the "Indians." The very location of Army bases in the heartland is a legacy of the Indian wars. Not only Fort Leavenworth but also other bases, such as Fort Riley and Fort Hays, in Kansas, and Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, were originally frontier posts…. "The Indian plains beyond Fort Riley have been replicated in all the wars we've fought since: World War Two, Desert Storm, Somalia," [Colonel] Jerry Morelock explained to me. "In our minds we're still the cavalry.

The pattern repeats itself today in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Green Zone in Baghdad and the Bagram base north of Kabul are today’s renditions of historic Fort Duquesne in Pennsylvania, Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and, closer to us, Fort Snelling in Minnesota and Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota, the last being the post from which George Custer and his 7th Cavalry set out to vanquish the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Such posts are the fortified safety zones from which the U.S. Army makes forays into the hostile territory. They stand in stark contrast to British barracks, which stand alongside residential areas both at home in Britain and in Basra. British troops live among the populations they patrol. American troops live apart and behind fortified walls. Physically, as well as mentally and emotionally, American posts manifest the attitude that it’s us against them, you’re either with us or against us. When we look at the West for its role in shaping memories, language, and current thinking, we need to keep in mind that war is the norm.

To understand how such happened—and how the West shaped a United States different from Canada—let’s go back to 1763, the establishment of the Line of Demarcation along the Appalachian Mountains, and the British Army’s withdrawal from the region to the west of the mountains, even as traders and settlers poured in. Griffin describes that time this way:

Between 1763 and 1795…westerners not only participated in a war of independence but engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in social relations, political allegiances, and assumptions about the relationship between individuals and individuals and society….On the frontier, that process [of revolution] was stripped down to its essence. In places like the Ohio valley, settlers struggled with the very stuff of revolution: violence, uncertainty, competition, disorder, and the frenzied and contradictory attempts to reestablish order….As westerners contended with one another in a Hobbesian world, they had to define who they were and what type of world they inhabited, and it was from this process that emerged stories and beliefs that we could…associate with the stuff of American exceptionalism. (11)

Stories and beliefs of American exceptionalism: If we are to understand the inherently violent us-against-them beliefs and the American stories that reinforce them, we need to recognize that they were formed in a West that was out of control. Part of the core American myth is the exceptional authority granted to Americans to impose control, namely their own, on those who get in the way. Deborah Madsen points out in her book American Exceptionalism that “Exceptionalism is above all a way of talking about American history and culture, it is a form of interpretation with its own language and logic” (2). In the logic of their Hobbesian world, U.S. Westerners defined themselves as inherently right and anyone in opposition as inherently wrong. It’s a logic worth fighting for until “our side’s” order is imposed and the opposition is eliminated.

We can see this logic in its most hideous form when we cast a look back at how U.S. Westerners treated the westerners who reached the West before them, namely indigenous Americans—the First Nations, in the parlance of Canada. In an article published last month in Prospect, Anatol Lieven observes,

The first defining character of the frontier was of course conflict with Native Americans, in which both sides committed appalling atrocities. This has bred in sections of the American tradition a capacity for ruthlessness and a taste for unqualified victory. The second was constant expansionism, often pushed for by the white frontier populations against the wishes of Washington administrations.

(Parenthetically, I should note that the title of this article is “Fighting John McCain.” We’ll examine 2008 presidential politics in a few moments.) When we see in our own lifetimes such atrocities as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, it’s important to look to their precedents in the American West in the Gnadenhütten massacre, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee. Griffin sums it up thus: “The British had to reckon with angry settlers intent on killing a people they regarded as uncivilized but redeemable.” Thirty years later, the U.S. government had to reckon with “settlers [who] had asserted their sovereignty, articulated a vision and program for change, and come to see Indians as essentially inferior or at least unfit to live among whites….Unlike the British, therefore, Americans proved willing to decimate the Indians to retain the West” (241). Just how willing Americans were is tallied up in William Osborn’s book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee.

The otherness of the Indians—the “them” in U.S. Westerners’ eyes—became the template for future adversaries, from the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, to Viet Nam, to Iraq, and possibly next to Iran. To those not raised and immersed in the milieu of U.S. Western myth, the view through those eyes does indeed seem exceptional—and exceptionally skewed. We can see an early example of this in an episode that Griffin quotes from “Narrative of John Heckewelder’s Journey to the Wabash in 1792”:

When Judge Symmes had proudly displayed the coat of arms of the United States to visiting Shawnees, explaining the significance of the symbols and how they demonstrated the peaceful intentions of the Americans, the visitors were appalled. One of the Shawnee captains responded, “Let me also give my explanation, perhaps it will come nearer to the truth than yours.” Why pick the eagle, he asked, if the government of the United States promised to act as an impartial arbiter in the West? He could think of “good, innocent birds” that would be more appropriate. “There is the dove,” he argued, “which would not do harm to the smallest creature.” The eagle, however, was “the largest of all birds and the enemy of all birds. He is proud, because he is conscious of his size and strength.” The eagle, he continued, “looks down disparagingly upon all birds.” Talons spoke of the bird’s “hostility.” Worse still were the implements of war the eagle held in its talons, arrows and rods. “Now tell me,” he asked, “have I not spoken the truth?” (269)

Not said here is that the eagle, as many of you probably know, is sacred to Native Americans. Though recorded in 1792, this interpretation of official U.S. symbols and their intentions is one that we can easily imagine being voiced today. Indeed, the difference between Judge Symmes’s interpretation and the Shawnee captain’s interpretation captures the differing views of Americans themselves and can be detected in the soundbites and debates of the current U.S. presidential election. It replicates the divide between the Western frontier mentality and the Eastern trans-Atlantic mindset.

Throughout his book, Griffin makes the case that the truly enduring regional divide emerging from the American Revolution was not North vs. South, as most American history books would have it, but East vs. West. In the U.S., Easterners, unlike Westerners, were often dubious of Western settlers’ self-righteous claims. Osborn points to New York Times editorials between 1860 to 1890, which, reflecting a view common in the East, “generally supported the Indian causes and concluded that most instances of open conflict between Indians and settlers were caused by settler injustice” (3).

Let’s move ahead to 2008. Viewed through Griffin’s prism, we see one set of presidential/vice-presidential candidates as both literal and mythic representatives of the U.S. West, indeed, from two of the last four states to pass from frontier territory to statehood, Arizona and Alaska. Their views, whether they realize it or not, are saturated with the American Leviathan mindset originating in the us-vs.-them attitude of the early frontier. In contrast, we see that their opponents hail physically from Illinois and Delaware; their mindset is imbued with a more-often Eastern sense of relationships, diplomacy, we’re-all-in-this-together.

The analyses in this vein are just now starting to appear. Arizona’s Senator McCain managed to revive his Republican Party perhaps not so much by picking a woman as his running mate but by echoing the myths of old when he chose the governor of the state that calls itself “The Last Frontier.” This moose-skinning hunter lives in the American Leviathan vigilante mode, as we learn in this month’s first issue of The Nation in Patricia J. Williams’s article “Sarah Palin’s Frontier Justice.” She rounds out the team of show-‘em-who’s-right warriors as we learn in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, whose cover features a photo of John McCain and the headline “Why War Is His Answer.” (The cover story is written by Jeffrey Goldberg and titled “The Wars of John McCain.”) Lieven’s article in Prospect, titled “Fighting John McCain,” notes his family’s long history of taking up arms and traces his ancestors back to the very Scots-Irish settlers that Griffin demonstrates made up the bulk of those who transgressed the British Line of Demarcation along the Appalachians and created such mayhem on the western side. Says Lieven, “The American frontier's lawlessness, high levels of violence among white males and ferocious conflicts with the Native Americans perpetuated this [Scots-Irish] culture [of McCain’s] into modern US society.” We do ourselves a disservice if we underestimate the power of this culture and the myths it created during the American Revolution and perpetuates to this day. As Griffin points out,

What had been peripheral and murky ways of understanding human difference became unambiguous and central to American concepts of society and inclusion and exclusion. What had been ephemeral ideas about the participation of common people in society became the bedrock of the American nation. And what had been unresolved arrangements about rights to land would find resolution. The Revolution did more than canonize change, nor was it an uneventful piece of a broader pattern of colonial continuities; it made the ephemeral permanent, the marginal fundamental, the ambiguous clear, and the fluid definitive. (13)

He continues,

…the pressures that inspired Indian hating did not descend from the top down, but arose from the bottom up. To see this irony as part and parcel of a “populist” impulse misses the point. In fact, that a Janus-faced people created a contradictory settlement goes to the heart of the meaning of the American Revolution and is as American as any frontier myth. (16)

As Americans contemplate which direction to take in the imminent election, what they are choosing between, as much as anything, is a myth that celebrates a story of themselves as exceptionally heroic and righteous vs. a story that admits grievous flaws and a reality that demands reliance on others. Is it any wonder that so many are attracted to the former?

The underlying frontier mindset of many Americans has been revealed hideously since the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq—and not merely through the behavior displayed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Writing in Esquire magazine a couple months after 9/11, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations Walter Russell Mead drew a parallel between “hotheaded Arab fanatics” and 19th century Apache, Cree, and Sioux warriors, saying,

we will crush them . . . We have crushed whole peoples before . . . cultures and lives remain shattered a century after the brutal wars that suppressed the last fiery embers of Indian resistance. . . . The American goal in many of the Indian wars wasn't simply to take land or force the leaders to sign a treaty; it was to crush the spirit of the whole people to the point where not even the strongest, most impassioned nineteen-year olds dared saddle up their horses.

American destiny may be more manifest than most U.S. citizens would care to admit. For the truth of that destiny, we can turn to the poets. In a prose conclusion to his book of poetry The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems against the Iraq War, Minnesota poet Robert Bly writes,

We know from Vietnam that the violence men witness or perform remains trapped in their bodies. That suffering Martín Prechtel has called “unmetabolized grief”. To metabolize such grief would mean bringing the body slowly and gradually to absorb the grief into its own system, as it might some sort of poison. But the veterans of the Civil War received no such help. Once the Civil War was over, soldiers on both sides simply took off their uniforms. Some went west and became Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing of war can do to a human being. When the violent grief is unmetabolized, it demands to be repeated. One could say that we now have a compulsion to repeat the killing. Our Westerns have made that clear for decades. (45)

Note

I would like to thank Michael Halloran and John Peacock for their enthusiastic support while reviewing this paper and suggesting material that helped illustrate the paper’s points.

Works Cited

Bly, Robert. The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems against the Iraq War. St. Paul, MN: Ally Press, 2004.

Goldberg, Jeffrey. “The Wars of John McCain.” The Atlantic Monthly Oct. 2008: 40+.

Griffin, Patrick. American Leviathan . New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.

Halloran, Michael. “Remembering the Battles of Saratoga: ad Bellum Purificandum. ” Revisiting the Past through Rhetorics of Memory and Amnesia: Selected Papers from the 50th Meeting of the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota. Ed. Dale Sullivan. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (in press).

Kaplan, Robert D. “Fort Leavenworth and the Eclipse of Nationhood.” The Atlantic Monthly Sept. 1996: 74+. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/leaven/leaven.htm Retrieved 26 June 2008.

Lieven, Anatol. “Fighting John McCain.” Prospect August 2008. http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2008/fighting_john_mccain_7638 Retrieved 15 Sept. 2008.

Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism . Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.

Mead, Walter Russell. “War Comes to America: Notes from the Next War.” Esquire 1 Nov. 2001. http://www.esquire.com/war-comes-america-0901?click=main_sr

Osborn, William M. The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee. New York: Random House, 2000.

Williams, Patricia J., “Sarah Palin's Frontier Justice.” The Nation 3 Sept. 2008. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080915/williams_palin Retrieved 15 Sept. 2008.