. . . I am not a king, have laid no kingdoms waste. . . .
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial? . . . .
Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.
Blow horns of victory now . . . .
Conrad Aiken, “Tetélestai”
Collected Poems, 2nd ed.
Oxford University Press, Cpp. 296, 298
We talked of war. JOHNSON: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea. . . . The impression is universal: yet it is strange.” . . . . Such was his cool reflection in his study; but whenever he was warmed . . . he, like other philosophers, whose minds are impregnated with poetical fancy, caught the common enthusiasm for splendid renown.
Boswell’s Life, 1778, aetat. 69
Modern Library ed., II, p. 191-192
When the old tales of Western Courage got written down their values were already antique. This is another problem with the Western and masculinist focus on gut-checks and violence; a problem, that is, beyond its actual, sociological antiqueness. The accounts of it that throng our Western culture are phony from the start.
After all, it is mainly the civilized—the “citizen-ized,” those of high standing living in town—who can read and write, and can record the alleged deeds, not the illiterate and rural aristocracy itself, which leaves such stuff to priests and bards and especially to posterity. The writings of the civilized Mediterranean had of course audiences mainly non-aristocratic, the Many of the Greek city states and the plebs of the Roman Republic. And yet the writings taught in the schools to the boys patrician or plebeian represented as I have noted an archaic, physically Courageous, wholly aristocratic virtue. For the Greeks it was Homer and for the Romans it was translations and then imitations of Homer such as Ennius and Virgil. Cicero was a lawyer, not a soldier. Yet he told his brother that his “childhood dream” was expressed in the lines from The Iliad, Glaucus telling what his father had said to him in sending him off to Troy, “Always be the best [aristeuein, compare “aristocratic”], my boy, the bravest.”[1]
Which is to say that our cultural vocabulary for the chief pagan virtue in the West isn’t fresh news from the front, any front. The vocabulary of Courageous heroism is sociologically inauthentic, reworked over centuries, belated, secondary, not based, as historians say, on primary sources. Homer was imagining a warrior society long gone, about five centuries gone. He himself lived in an eastern Aegean culture radically less knightly and more workaday than the one he imagined. “The resulting picture,” writes Hanson, “is an amalgam-mosaic spanning five hundred years. . . ; it may not reflect an actual historical society at all.”[2]
So usually. A little after Homer wrote, in the 6th century BC, a redactor in the style of Deuteronomy looked back on Joshua the berserk nomad marching up to the walls of Jericho back, far, far back, in the 13th century BC, a little before Troy fell. The mythical Aeneas, counting from the actual date of the fall of Troy, would have died more than a thousand years before he was imagined by Virgil as a model of archaic piety. Beowulf of the Spear Danes lived if he did centuries before his literate cousins in far-off Saxon England set down a version of his tale. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century crafted the knightly stories, and in the 15th Thomas Malory perfected them, about a King Arthur who flourished, if ever, perhaps in Wales around 540 AD.
The Icelandic sagas prove the rule, at its edges. The historical Gunnar was killed in a siege of his house about (perhaps exactly) 990 AD and his ally Njal burned in a similar siege about 1011 (the site can be visited still). But the saga-writer, though he creates in the Hemingwayesque restraint of saga prose an impression of reporting from the scene, was looking back on the events from 1275 or so, from an Iceland thoroughly Christianized and commercial. The Icelandic sagas “must be thought of as historical novels rather than histories,” R. I. Page warns. “Their authenticity must be continually questioned. The Viking historian must feed on more austere fare.”[3] Some think that the sagas can be fed on still, as documents of an oral tradition carrying fact. To the contrary, Jesse Byock points out, the “bookprosist” view of the sagas was to some degree a result of 19th-century Icelandic nationalism eager to see the century and a half of saga-writing not as merely the writing down of traditions but as “one of the most powerful literary moments in recorded history,” in the words of the leader of this view. [4] Compare the 200-year dispute over the authorship of Homer.
The stories of Joshua or King Arthur are still more clearly “historical novels.” The days of yore are doubly so:
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.
Nor of course do we post-mediaevals live in societies led by literal aristocracies of fighting men. So why, one might ask, should we go on being governed in our ethics by aristocratic virtues characteristic of such men? True: only Walpole among 18th-century prime ministers of England was without literally aristocratic blood on a mother’s or a father’s side.[5] And, true: the last British cabinet still having a majority of aristocrats was surprisingly late, Gladstone’s of 1892. Thirty years later in Bonar Law’s there were still equal numbers of aristocrats and commoners. Thatcher’s of 1979 still contained nearly a quarter from the “landed establishment,” though some quite recently recruited to it. But even in that class-haunted nation it is by now a good while since real aristocrats mattered. Harold Macmillan’s cabinet of 1957, it was said, had more “old Estonians” (émigré politicians) than old Etonians.[6]
Centuries earlier the English and then the Scottish aristocrats had stopped their Homeric bloodletting and had turned to farming, court masques, and the gaming table. The proportion of violent deaths for males over age fifteen in English ducal families—“the king’s brothers,” so the very top of the social order—is an astonishing one half for the cohort born 1330-1479, dying courageously in the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. It falls to about a fifth for those born under the Tudors and Stuarts, then to about one in twenty for those born under the Hanoverians, fighting in the ethically-restrained wars of the 18th century. The mortality rate from war comes back, startlingly, to its medieval levels for sons of dukes of an age to serve in World Wars I and II. So compelling is the faith in an aristocratic Courage; and so ethically unrestrained is modern war. [7]
Most of us in modern democracies therefore have forgotten what an “aristocracy” literally is. American university students believe “upper class” is merely a fancy word for “rich.” European and especially British students have less difficulty understanding caste-like classes. The young Americans begin to understand if they are urged to think of European “class” as equivalent to American “color.”
Most Americans therefore think of the Kennedys as “aristocrats,” though the older one’s are only two or three generations from proletarian origins—Senator Edward’s grandfather Kennedy grew up poor—and none are professional soldiers. It’s a metaphor. Professors and artists since the late 19th century have preened themselves as a “new aristocracy,” though of merit (they modestly say) rather than of birth, as though there were such a thing. Such a category mistake among democrats would have puzzled a Renaissance duke with a 900-year old name.
When in the 16th century the new Dutch Republic threw off Spanish and other dukes and kings, its aristocracy lost the mechanisms of refreshment by new ennoblements. The aristocratic rump, now an entirely closed class, remained somewhat influential in the affairs of the Republic, though continuing to shrink. But no one in the Netherlands mistook the nouveau-riche merchant class, the regents, with a training in accounting and classical languages, for literal aristocrats, with a training in violence and leadership.
Income had nothing to do with it, and still doesn’t. There persists in places like Holland and Sweden, now five or so centuries after the sanguinary deeds that elevated it, an aristocracy consisting of a few folk living in modernized castles behind hedges. Though democrats now, they still possess the self-confidence of hereditary rulers, often taking up military careers. My friend the economist Axel Leijonhvufvud (literally, “lion head”) comes from such a family, ranking high in the Swedish aristocracy, a descendent of Norse kings. It causes an American peasant of Norwegian descent like me to swoon.
We all need to be Courageous in life. But even our physical courage cannot be merely aristocratic virtù, if we wish to stay out of jail. It cannot be Homeric or even old Roman, certainly not olde-tyme as filtered through the stories from Homer to Hollywood. “How much longer,” asked John Stuart Mill in 1869, “is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another?”[8] It is my main concern here. We ordinary, unarmed citizens in the West, as against our fellows who volunteer to fight as imitation aristocrats at Srebrenica or the Somme or the local crime-or-fire scene, are urban and democratic and liberated and pacified and bourgeois and even female now. Perhaps we should acknowledge the fact.
* * * *
That is, the word and ideology of Courage has been corrupted. Bourgeois men have adopted instead the mythical histories of knights and cowboys as their definition of masculinity. Stories help construct identities and, as William Reddy argues, even emotions.[9] We, and especially the men among us, keep turning, turning over in our minds aristocratic stories of virtue in the line of the Iliad. You would think that bourgeois men of Europe or Japan or America were actual Kings of Ithaca, or of Engelond varray, parfit, gentil knights.
Take the professions of arms c. 1800 in England. England was to be sure “une nation de boutiquiers,” in Napoleon’s well-worn phrase (well-worn even before Napoleon: I quoted Adam Smith’s use of it in 1776). Yet Napoleon was the son of a businessman and bureaucrat, and himself a genius of Prudence. He was affecting to scorn the other bourgeois nation that at last defeated him. The British Navy in the age of Lord Nelson, if one looks merely at the origins of the officers, was ordinarily in fact non-aristocratic, Nelson himself the son of a parson, Captain William “Bounty” Bligh the son of a customs officer. The equally eminent Dutch navy of the previous century had been equally egalitarian, drawing its admiraals, its Tromps and van Dorps, from sons of common sailors and of aristocrats, both.
William McNeill observes that navies possess an analogy in merchantmen that armies do not. There is no civilian analogue to an army. The British Navy therefore required habits of mind natural to commercial ventures, such as double care in provisioning a ship before setting sail, or never missing a tide, or manning the pumps with energy in a crisis.[10] Work, work, work. No laying about merely waiting for the wild charge. Like engineers in the Royal Navy under steam, below-decks with the black gang monitoring pressure gauges, an 18th-century British naval officer had to know quite a lot and do all sorts of jobs and was therefore permitted to be less than genteel—a non-aristocratic Scot, for example. Being Jack Aubrey is not just a matter of aristocratic Courage.
Indeed, as Jack is always saying, it is a matter, too, of bourgeois profit from prizes. Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) reminisces about the sloop Asp: “I knew that we should either go to the bottom together, or that she would be the making of me.” And then his frigate: “those were pleasant days when I had the Laconia! How fast I made money in her!”[11]
But England expected its sailors, whether of bourgeois origin or not, to do their duty, which was defined peasant-wise for the men and aristocratically for the officers. Not bourgeois-ly. Admiral Lord Nelson died at Trafalgar because he chose, as was his nouveau-noble duty, to stand on the quarter deck in full view of French snipers, with medals flashing in the smoke. Those are the traditions of brave men at sea, as a post-aristocratic Lord Jim ruefully apprehended. Jane Austen’s ideal potential husband, acknowledged to be in want of a wife, is a naval officer, honorable off-stage doubtless in a very gallant way, though never so lofty as an actual aristocrat. Two of Jane’s much-beloved brothers ended as admirals; another was for a time in the army. Even bourgeois Carthage would literally crucify admirals and generals who came home empty handed. The Dutch behavior at Srebrenica would have earned British admirals in the nation of shopkeepers courts martial and speedy executions—“to encourage the others,” as Voltaire described the execution in 1757 of a British admiral for not doing his utmost.
The Army of the Duke of Wellington was even more rigidly tied to aristocratic myth, and unlike the Navy was sociologically speaking an aristocratic preserve. The echt-aristocratic officers at Waterloo were expected to sit nobly on their horses and face decapitating cannon fire while their peasant or proletarian soldiers were permitted—no, ordered—to lie down.
John Keegan points out that by the time of the Napoleonic Wars the Army officers, unlike their Homeric or medieval models, were not supposed to engage directly in slaughter. The sailors still did, with cutlasses issued in a crisis indifferently to seamen and admirals. An English captain at Waterloo, doubtless a crack shot of deer and grouse, spotted a French common soldier climbing into the farmyard he was under orders to defend, and “instantly desired Sergeant Graham, whose musket [the captain] was holding, . . . to drop the wood [that the sergeant himself was carrying], take [back] his [musket from the very captain] . . . and shoot the intruder.” Yet the captain would gladly have dueled to the death man-to-man with a French fellow officer. “The only feats of arms worth the name were those conducted between men of gentle birth, either one on one or in nearly (ideally exactly) matched numbers,” like cricket teams.[12]
The point is that bourgeois men still take their models from aristocratic warriors, or cricket teams. By 1914 the British and other European armies had became very different, making the Great War possible. By then the officers, though aristocratic in imagination, were bourgeois in origin. Thorstein Veblen had this point right: that aristocratic values survived in the imaginations of the bourgeoisie.
In her profound study of the rise and fall of the American western Jane Tompkins quotes the inventor of the acceptably middle-class version of the genre, Owen Wister, writing in 1895, seven years before The Virginian: “In personal daring and in skill as to the horse, the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon of different environments.” Tompkins notes: “Wister’s identification of the cowpuncher with the Anglo-Saxon knight-at-arms is a way for an upper-class composer-turned-short-story-writer with doubts about his independence to claim a robust masculinity.”[13] The predominately Norman knighthood of England would have been amused by Wister’s concept; and King Arthur was if anything a Celt, not a Saxon.
Wister like his friend and fellow enthusiast for heroism Teddy Roosevelt knew the West as scenery, but could not have known the samurai warriors of his imagination, because they did not exist. His model was not “reality” but the elaborate fictions developed in the workingman’s dime novel. Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men appeared first in December 1869 as a magazine serial. The author of the Deadwood Dick series, Edward Wheeler, who described his occupation on his letterhead as “Sensational Novelist,” lived in Philadelphia and never ventured much further west than that.[14] Wheeler wrote 33 dime novels from 1877 until his death in 1884, and after his death 97 more novels appeared under his name, petering out finally in 1897. The author of Shane (1949) admitted that when he wrote the novel he “had never been west of Toledo, Ohio.”[15]
The cowboys inspiring the myth early and late did actually make the Long Drive in Texas and Kansas and the Indian Territory briefly in the 1870s and early 1880s before the southern rail lines were extended west, and later herded doggies in the draws as employees of the cattle barons of Wyoming and Montana. There were only some 35,000 of them. The number is uncertain, but anyway it was a very small share of the 17,000, 000 or so Americans working for a wage at the time. The Western cattle industry was some small fraction of 2 percent of national income in 1880. After all, beef was not a very large share of the nation’s expenditure—ask yourself how much even you in your early 21st-century prosperity spend out of your annual income on the farmer’s share of the proceeds from beef. Only a small part of the beef had seen the Wild West. Corn-fed cattle from Iowa pens, not grass-fed from Montana open ranges, dominated the industry from 1900 at the latest. The workers who took care of the grass-fed cattle were buried in the occupational category at the bottom of the proletariat, farm hands. They were proletarians, not aristocrats. They were commonly teenagers, not men. Upwards of a quarter were people of color.
The bourgeois real-estate men who governed the cow towns kept their boys under strict control, by taking their guns away. Gun control is not a recent idea. The actual gunfight at OK Corral, October 26, 1881, for instance, was about Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers, as the law in Tombstone, trying to take away the pistols the McLaurys and Clantons were illegally displaying in town.
A classic study of the extent of violence in the cow towns of Kansas discovered that all the murders 1870-1885 came to a mere one-and-a-half per town per trading season, and few of these the outcome of Shane-type duels. [16] It’s hard to duel with pistols to the death when the city fathers have disarmed you. Less than a third of gunshot victims in the non-Hollywood cow towns returned fire. Many were not armed, as for instance the Caldwell wife shot dead in 1884 by her drunken husband. The fictionally terrifying Bat Masterson, for example, killed no one while resident in Dodge City. The cowboy, like the samurai and the knight and the Homeric hero, is a belated fiction.
“Fiction” does not mean “an utterly pointless fantasy without the slightest reference to the actual world,” at least not in the minds of the male audiences for such tales of courage. As Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe observe in The Arthurian Handbook, “Medieval storytellers . . . . and their audiences viewed Arthur’s kingdom rather as people now regard the Wild West. . . . Like the Wild West, [Arthur’s Britain] was a realm of the imagination, but its creators would have denied that they were simply inventing out of nothing.”[17]
The assertion that a fiction is about something that once actually happened is important to the men who read it, as to the men who read Tom Clancy novels about spies and use them to interpret the day’s headlines, or to make their next business deal. In his introduction to an edition of The Ox-Bow Incident (1941) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, the literary man Clifton Fadiman declared that “we should remember that the background out of which the Western came was once a reality, that there was a Wild West, that gunplay was a habit.”[18]
Not really. The blood spilling out of the dime novels, carried into the mature western novels and then into the western movies, most profusely in the spaghetti westerns at the very end of the genre, was a literary and economic device, not a sociological statistic. The boys and men of the 1870s, and the 1970s, had to be enticed to turn the page, and to buy the next novel in the series, or to go to the movie. “A hundred dead in two chapters,” The Atlantic Monthly sneered in 1879.[19]
On the last page of his first Deadwood Dick novel, set in contemporary (1877) South Dakota, Wheeler—remember, he lived in Philadelphia—adds “a few words to end this o’er true romance of life in the Black Hills.” He reports on the after-plot life of the characters, such as Calamity Jane, Dick’s sometime fiancée and fight mate, who “is still in the Hills.” “And grim and uncommunicative [note this: no talk], there roams through the country of gold a youth in black, at the head of a bold lawless gang of roadriders, who, from his unequaled daring, has won and rightly deserves the name—Deadwood Dick, Prince of the Road.”[20]
As Robin Hood was to feudal lords, so Deadwood Dick and Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde and other outlaw heroes were to American capitalism. Or they were at least in song and in story. In sociological fact James and his gang were the sons of rich Missouri slaveholders, continuing after the war the guerrilla resistance to Union and abolition they had learned before and during it. The historian James McPherson notes that “the unromantic truth is that Jesse spent much of his ill-gotten gains on fine horseflesh and gambling,” not paying off the mortgage of poor farmers or engaging in other proto-socialist gestures.[21]
It’s unclear what Wheeler meant by claiming his roadrider story was “o’er” true. But despite the reportorial rhetoric, it wasn’t. The men and boys reading the dime novels did not want pure fantasy, science fiction, say, because they wanted to imagine themselves into the fictions, and so the fictions denied their fictionality. The black cowboy, Nate Love, later claimed to be the “real” Deadwood Dick, but this is an instance among many, from James Fenimore Cooper to the urban cowboys of suburban Dallas, of life imitating art.
Some dueling did go on, exceptionally rarely, in the streets of Dodge City. The medieval knights did joust from time to time, though not much, or they would have killed themselves off Monty-Python style. The samurai did refuse on their honor to perform executions in anger, usually. And even in commercial Florence in the 16th century Cellini the sculptor, no aristocrat, had to the credit of his virtù numerous victims in duels and other affrays. Yet it is not a true history of olden times to portray lethal dueling as how Real Men spent their days, a habit.
Do the math. If a population of male aristocrats engaged in lethal duels on N occasions over some period, by the end, of course, only (1/2)N would survive. I said “lethal” duels, one-on-one. If such duels happened weekly, for example, as one might infer from watching Gunsmoke on TV, then an aristocracy of 10,000 courageous cowboys would be reduced by the end of a ten-week TV season to merely 10 (very) quick-draw sharpshooters still standing.
You get the point. Fights literally to the death, above once every 18 years or so, it turns out, would overwhelm even pre-industrial birthrates of 4 percent of the existing population in a year. And since people die for other reasons, too, a much less frequent rate of heroic killing—once, say, over an entire career of noble sword-fighting or gunslinging—would destroy the social class that indulged in it. This is why challenges male-on-male in the mammalian world are ceremonial rather than lethal. If bucks actually killed each other each spring at the rates their faux-aggressions seem to promise there would be no species of deer surviving. The same argument in reverse was Darwin’s crucial insight, derived from the economist Malthus, that in a world of scarcity a proliferating class needs to be cut down, somehow; and so it must compete to the death.
Class suicide in fact does seem to characterize gang members in Philadelphia nowadays, who take their models from the television art, and was nearly so of the English dukedom during the Wars of the Roses. The Bishop of Carlisle prophesies accurately in 1399, “the blood of England shall manure the ground / . . . . and this land be called/ The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.”[22] But the mathematics shows that death-defying courage can only in romantic theory be the virtue primarily called upon in any society, except in the emergency services or in a literal military camp, and then only at the rare, looming crisis.
Such a fiction does of course a cultural job. Especially it fueled in an age of democracy the occasional explosions of mass armies, 1861-1865, 1914-1918, 1939-45. In peacetime it gave the over-civilized man of the late Roman Empire or of Enlightened Europe before the Revolution or of late 19th-century America a way out at least in imagination from under the skirts of women and the domination of priests—and an escape from under an urban, unheroic, international market which took his manhood in a moment’s beastly roaring on the floor of the Bourse.
Like the highwaymen or the Rob Roys of earlier British romance, “Deadwood Dick and [the fictionalized] Jesse James,” writes Bill Brown (agreeing with Michael Denning), “contested the dominant ideology, the encroachment of advanced capitalism. . . . The James brothers achieved iconic status as a force that could interrupt the success of capitalists (the banks) and the institutions of modernization (the train)”—though the hero of the later bourgeois version of the Western initiated by Wister’s The Virginian breaks a strike and protects the owner’s capital, in the style of John Wayne in Red River.[23]
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Quoted in Everitt, Cicero, 2001, p. 46. The translation is that of Fagles, 1990, 6: 247 (p. 202), whose “my boy” is not literally in the Greek (VI: 208), but does seem to capture the tone of the passage.
[2] Hanson, Western Way of War, 1989, p. 41.
[3] Page, Chronicles of Vikings, 1995, p. 25.
[4] Byock, Viking Age, 2001, pp. 149-158.
[5] Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 34.
[6] Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 1990, Appendix B, p. 711; and discussion pp. 206-222.
[7] Hollingsworth, “A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families,” 1957, Table 3.
[8] Mill, Subjection of Women, 1869, p. 43.
[9] Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 2001.
[10] McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 1982, p. 104f.
[11] Austen, Persuasion, 1818, pp. 73, 74.
[12] Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976 (1978), pp. 190, 322, italics supplied.
[13] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, pp. 145, 146.
[14] Bill Brown, Reading the West, 1997, p. 269.
[15] Schaefer, “Interview,” in Schaefer, Shane, ed. J. C. Work, p. 278.
[16] Dykstra, Cattle Towns, 1968, pp. 146, 148, 143.
[17] Lacy and Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 3-4.
[18] Fadiman, “Introduction,” 1942, p. vii.
[19] Quoted in Brown, “Reading the West,” 1997, in Brown, Reading, p. 2.
[20] Wheeler, Deadwood Dick, 1877, pp. 357-58.
[21] McPherson, “Confederate Guerrilla,” 2003. p. 21.
[22] Shakespeare, Rich. II 4.1, lines 128, 134-35
[23] Brown, “Reading the West,,” in Brown, Reading, pp. 35, 38, 40.