American Farmer: The Birth of a Myth
From Heel to Hero
American cultural identity began to coalesce around the “settlement” of the west at the beginning of the 20th century. The country both celebrated and mourned the closing of the American frontier, the demise of the fearsome-yet-admirable noble savage, and the disappearing wildness of the empire’s most recent conquests. Where once cowboys and homesteaders were a White underclass that powerful Anglo-descended Whites were happy to send toward the setting sun into the unforgiving maw of brutal winters, hard sod, hail, tornadoes, and Indigenous people determined to protect their children; the dawn of the 20th century saw that underclass elevated as exemplars of American toughness and grit, rewarded with full membership in the spectrum of Whiteness. Meanwhile the nation grappled with a new kind of people-problem: emancipated slaves who were exercising their newfound freedom in unexpected and distasteful ways, and a host of dispossessed Indigenous people for whom no one ever made a plan.
In the years immediately following emancipation, former slaves capitalized on their numerical parity with Whites to avail themselves of representative democracy. They entered the ranks of elected government after the Civil War at rates that haven’t been seen since. Whites responded to this with a campaign of organized, state-sponsored terror. Black…
