Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Williams' argument is that the key to American policy in the past seventy years can be found in the famous frontier thesis of Frederic Jackson Turner. An undeveloped hinterland into which capital could be poured was seen as the prerequisite for a prosperous economy, and--in the "crucial" panic decade of the 1890's--"Americans reacted to the threat of economic stagnation and the fear of social upheaval by turning abroad for new frontiers...
...frontiers" abroad were subjected to a peaceful economic expansions, an "anti-colonial commercial imperialism." To this was added--especially under Wilson and the two Roosevelts--a sense of moral mission, an "imperialism of idealism." The result was a policy of the Open Door, freedom and even protection for American business interests abroad. And the foreign "frontier" was wastefully ravaged much as the resources of the American West were depleted before conservation. American economic power was relied upon to "make the world safe for democracy" (safe, Williams says, for America...
...justice is the result of direct action, not of elaborate legality. A man's fate depends on his own choices and capacities, not on the vast impersonal forces of society or science. His motives are clearly this or that, unsullied by psychologizing (except, of course, in the Freudian frontier yarns). Moreover a man cannot be hagridden; if he wants to get away from women, there is all outdoors to hide in. And he is not talk-ridden, for silence is strength. Says Sociologist Philip Rieff: "How long since you used your fists? How long since you called the boss...
...Fighting Pimps. Courage the cowboys had-enough to "charge hell with a bucket of water." as somebody said-but they were not necessarily dangerous. The Colt single-action .45 (Peacemaker) and the Colt .44 (Frontier), the preferred pistols in the West, were clumsy objects; they weighed 3 lbs. 1 oz.. stretched 10¼ in. from butt to sight. To learn the quick draw with this blunderbuss took a lot of practice, and the man who could fire it accurately beyond 20 ft. was rare. Nevertheless, the best of the gunsharks-with the help of sawed barrels, tied triggers, shifted...
...Hanging Tree. A "psychological" horse opera suggesting that the American West was won on the couches of Vienna. But even as a frontier Freud, Gary Cooper remains Gary Cooper...