Freethought on the American Frontier ed. by Fred Whitehead, Verle Muhrer

Abstract

Reviews 265 interpretation, and imaginative projection continuously interlock with the po­ litical and material processes of social existence.” In this volume, as in its predecessors, Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment, Slotkin deals specifically with the effect of ‘The Myth of the Frontier” on American racial, social, and, to a much larger extent, international policies. The book is essential reading for anyone concerned not only with the Western but with where America is, how it got there, and where it is going. It contains an impressive—indeed staggering—amount of information drawn from primary and secondary sources which take more than sixty pages to list. The argument is carefully and consistently pursued and thoroughly illustrated and documented. However, Slotkin is so relentless in pursuit of his thesis—that white male America tends to put everything in terms of racial issues to be resolved by violence—that he begins to resemble the figure of the Indian-hater who recurs in Western myth. A Lakota? Bang. A Shawnee? Bang. Doesn’t make any differ­ ence: the only good Western novel or film is the one in his sights. The texture and the distribution of the war-paint don’t really matter. After a few hundred pages ofwatching this reductive pot-shooting, all butthe mostpoliticallycorrect willwant to take to the woods. And hisfinal call for a new, interracial and multi­ cultural myth to animate and unify the country does not inspire much confi­ dence. Slotkin iscorrect that institutionalized violence iseasiest to implement in a waragainst “savages”who cannot be accorded the protection ofnormal civilized restraints. Americans should not minimize our country’s guilt, but neither should we hog it. In 1981, I was shown a large and beautiful synagogue in southern Hungary. There were no Jews to fill it. And the current fighting in Bosnia isfurther evidence that Slotkin iswrong to see “savagewar”as peculiarly American. Of course, in the early 1980s, American country and western music wasvery popular in Yugoslavia. . . . ROBERT MURRAYDAVIS University ofOklahoma FreethoughtontheAmericanFrontier. Edited byFredWhitehead and Verle Muhrer. (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992. 314 pages, $24.95.) “Frontier”here means the St. Louis-centered Midwest from 1861 through 1918. With flexibility, that is, since exceptions reach back to the 1820s and forward to the 1980s, and include writers who never lived west of the Appala­ chians (Oliver Wendell Holmes) nor south of Canada (Robert Service), and several others who spent nearly all their careers outside the Midwest (such as Harlem’s Langston Hughes, California/Connecticut’s Mark Twain, and Scodand’sRobert Owen). 266 Western American Literature “Freethought”here covers anti-Christian and a small sampling ofpolitically radical writings from figures major and obscure. With flexibility, that is, since accredited agnostics like Robert Ingersoll are joined by mildly satirical but devout believers like Vachel Lindsay. Thejuxtaposition offreethought and the frontier has analytic possibilities, to be sure. What features of early midwestern America were particularly hospi­ table to heterodoxy? Immigration patterns, local economies, denominational styles, open societies, agrarian individualism, distance from D. C., cheap land, educational patterns at all levels—did any ofthese define issues, pose conflicts, offer opportunities? What events, careers, and movements are illuminated by such connections? How are our understandings ofnational trends enriched by instances from the hinterlands? But the twenty-one-page introduction avoids all such obvious questions, and fails to provide the focused rationale required for a successful anthology. It assumes an amorphous, anachronistic Turnerian environmentalism while (in­ credibly) at the same time claiming commonalitywith the “Gang ofFour”who are promoting a new western history. With an almost evangelistic fervor, too, the editors offer their collected writers as warriors in a noble crusade for freedom from repression, as important in its own way as the contemporary antislavery movement. In short, this is a disparate collection ofwritings of some importance and interest individually, most of which fulfill the special anticlerical canons of a consciously radical publisher. There islimited interest here for WLAmembers, with but five of the thirty-seven writers to be found among the 380 authors treated in Richard Etulain’sA BibliographicalGuidetotheStudy ofWesternAmerican Literature. LEE NASH GeorgeFox College Bret Harte. By Gary Scharnhorst. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. 152 pages, $21.95.) For readers wondering what could...