Reagan and the West: How Jeffersonian Ideals Reached the 40th President

34 Historically Speaking · May/June 2006 Reagan and the West: How Jeffersonian Ideals Reached the 40th President Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen ^ onald Reagan made just a few ^ Westerns in a Hollywood career that spanned four decades and included leading roles in some fifty films. Yet in the perception ofhis own country and throughout the world (he was called "Ronnie Le Cowboy" in the French press), Reagan became synonymous with the Western film genre. It was not his cinematic career that sealed the association in the public mind, but his final significant role before leaving entertainment for politics as host of the popular early 1960s television series Death Valley Days. Yet Reagan relished the misconception that he was a Western star; he wore cowboy boots and a Stetson hat while entertaining on his mountaintop California ranch. The West, as understood in film and fiction rather than in history, was inseparable from Reagan's persona. It was also a source for many of his ideas, or rather, the filter through which many Jeffersonian ideals reached the 40th president. The narrative of American history was conceived in larger measure by Jefferson than any of the republic 's other founders, but its composition was left in large part to the storywriters who gave voice to Jefferson's vision on the blank pages of an imaginary West. Ronald Reagan was, in a sense, one of this narrative's final, largerthan -life characters. In his second and final autobiography, published two years after leaving the White House, Reagan quotes Jefferson no less than six times, especially on the danger of government encroachment on personal liberty. He even cites Jefferson as "the first American to frame a balanced-federal-budget-amendment ."1 But Jefferson is not mentioned in Reagan's previous autobiography, published in the 1960s as he was about to embark on a political career. This leads to the suspicion that Reagan invoked Jefferson ex-post facto tojustify the agenda of his presidency and burnish his legacy with the polish of one of the nation's founders. This is not to say that Reagan hadn't absorbed many of Jefferson's ideas. He may have been an unconscious Jeffersonian through much of his life, only discovering the roots of his worldview much later. By his own admission, Reagan cracked the books as little as possible in college, preferring football and dances to seminars and lectures . But Reagan could easily have derived many of the founder's ideas and sensibilities through the diffusion of Jeffersonian ideals in American popular culture. During Reagan's most impressionable years and in the early decades of his adulthood, few facets of American culture were more popular, and more suffused with Jefferson, than the Western genre of film and pulp fiction. Reagan never alluded to his moviegoing or reading habits as a boy in either autobiography , although he cited the popular Western author Zane Grey as a boyhood favorite in a personal letter.2 A passing recollection of his 1954 film Cattle Queen of Montana is also instructive. "Somehow working outdoors amid beautiful scenery and much of the time on horseback never has seemed like work to me. It's like getting paid for playing cowboys and Indians."3 Like most Americans of his generation, the Western mythos was in Reagan's blood.4 Cecil B. DeMille's hit The Squaw Man (1914), among the first films shot in Hollywood, helped move the previously unknown Southern California town to the center ofworld culture. The Squaw Man's story of a cultured Englishman who goes to America's West, marries a "primitive" American Indian, and sets up a ranch with her in the face of racial tension can be read as a Jeffersonian melodrama in which America's British heritage is transformed by the frontier experience . Raised as part of Virginia's planter gentry and afforded the best education and opportunities for advancement, Jefferson never traveled west of the Shenandoah Valley. But, in the words ofJefferson biographer Dumas Malone, "the great western country was a vivid reality in his mind."5 Inhabiting the West as imagined by Jefferson was one of the stock figures of Western fiction, the pioneer farmer. Jefferson composed...