Love Lost and Won – an American Destiny

Westward Ho!

There is one invariable symptom of a nation entering into senescence and decline: it begins to place a negative value on the past.  Things that were once noble and good are re-examined and reappraised in the light of contemporary concerns.  Old certainties vanish as history is reinterpreted through the perspective of minorities, outsiders and victims; the losers are now the winners and the winners cover themselves in shame for past wrongs.  

With the almost complete dominance of Marxist and liberal thought through much of western academia, the process has advanced rapidly since the end of the Second World War.  Who would dare write poetry in praise of the British Empire; who would now write in the style of Rudyard Kipling, now that we are one with Nineveh and Tyre?  Lest we forget; at last we forget.

I do have a case in mind, not from British history, not from the history of the British Empire, but from the history of America.  If one were to ask what is it that defines modern America I'm sure people would answer in various ways.  For some it would be the principles of freedom and rugged self-determination dating from the Revolutionary War; for others it would be the Civil War, a cathartic moment that established a new birth of freedom; for still others it might be a more recent birth of freedom, following the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.  

For me there is only one answer - Manifest Destiny, the history of the expansion into the West; the West itself, those plains, valleys and mountains where a new spirit was carved by courageous pioneers.  Here the old freedom was cast anew in determination, in suffering, in courage and in intrepid self-reliance.  One's destiny was in one's own hands.  There was no fallback. The price of failure was high; the price of success even higher.

But even here that process of guilt and re-evaluation has long been at work.  The history of the West began to be the history of the victims. For some those pioneers were no longer part of a great and noble enterprise but destroyers of an indigenous Eden. They came into the Red Garden; they made a desert and called it progress.

The expression of guilt took many forms, in printed and visual media.  In books we have Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a classic of re-evaluation, and 500 Nations.  In films we have Dances with Wolves.  In documentaries we have How the West was Lost and The Way West.  Stephen Aron, writing a paper for the American Historical Association, said that in scholarly circles, "the West as America" quickly became synonymous with a "new western history"; detractors claimed this history had rewritten the past as a course in "failure studies." They were quite right of course.  A new mythology was created of the noble savage and the rapacious white man. Just remember those troglodytes in uniforms at the end of Costner's epic myth-making.  

But there have been some who have made a valiant attempt to redress the balance.  I had occasion recently to recall the work of Ken Burns, the documentary film maker, whose visual history of the Civil War achieved viewing figures undreamed of for this kind of show.  He also made The West, a series in eight parts covering various aspects of a compelling story.  The task he set himself was straightforward: "For too long we celebrated a lily-white version of the West: sturdy pioneers fighting savage Native Americans," but of late "we have subscribed to a history in which the European contribution was entirely bankrupt and everything Native Americans did was perfect."

The West was broadcast here when I was in high school.  I loved it; I simply loved it. The whole thing was absolutely fascinating. How I identified with those pioneers and trail blazers, the men and women who opened up the West under the most trying conditions imaginable.  

What I loved most of all was Love!  It was touched on in episode eight, and became a leitmotiv for the whole series; it was the story of one John Love, a pioneer of Scottish descent, who, along with Ethel Waxham, his wife, established a ranch in a remote Wyoming valley. The drama of this couple’s lives was told, and movingly told, by actors reading from their correspondence.

It's heart-breaking and exhilarating at one and the same time.  They faced adversity hard upon adversity.  On one occasion a flood ruined all the improvements they had made on their Wyoming ranch.  With natural disaster came a human one, with the bank foreclosing on a loan that they had taken out to raise sheep.  Nothing daunted, John simply wrote in wry humour that it was a case of Love's labour lost, an allusion to Shakespeare’s play of the same name.  

But they rebuilt, time and time and time again, against all adversity.  Neither of them lost the taste for what Ethel called the "ranchiest of ranchy life."  It was a tale, their son later said, of all the "survivors" who stuck it out. It was a theme Burns picked up on, as Aron said in review, serving the Loves as a tribute to the grit of westerners, to the persevering spirit that allowed so many, if not to triumph over adversity, then at least to battle it to a stalemate.

That for me is the spirit of America. Life is struggle and the most important thing is to not necessarily to triumph but just to fight, fight and fight again. No state, no welfare, no handouts, just a spirit of marvellous and wonderful independence. John Love and Ethel Waxham stand for me as symbols of all that is noble in the American past, all that is noble in the frontier spirit, all that is noble in those pathfinders and trail blazers.  Their destiny was manifest; their destiny was their own.  It is an American destiny.  

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’