Cowboys and Free Markets: Post-World War II Westerns and U.S. Hegemony

Abstract

This essay looks at the historical phenomenon of the western as a focal genre in postwar America. Through discussion of Howard Hawks's Red River and John Ford's My Darling Clementine , it shows how the western was well suited to convey important ideological rationales for postwar U.S. foreign policy, including the inevitability of American expansion and the strategies for hegemony that guided the Truman administration's foreign policy.