These days, reality is slowly undermining the political power of the mythological American Cowboy image. In the years after World War II, that image helped to sell the idea that a government that regulated business, provided a basic safety net for its poor citizens, promoted infrastructure, and protected the civil rights of Black and Brown Americans and women, was cruising perilously close to communism. The cowboy image suggested that a true American was an individualistic man who worked hard to provide for, and to protect, his homebound wife and children, with a gun if necessary, and wanted only for the government to leave him and his business alone.
The cowboy image dominated television in the years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision: First, with shows like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Rawhide showing cowboys imposing order on their surroundings, and then, by 1974, with Little House on the Prairie showing a world in which “Pa” Ingalls—played by the same actor who had played Little Joe from Bonanza—was a doting father who provided paternal care and wholesome guidance to his wife and daughters. That image was, if you think about it, all Hollywood fantasy. It was never based on reality, but we were indoctrinated/subliminally-convinced to think it was real.
In truth, the federal government provided more aid to the American West than it did to any other region of the country, so the whole cowboy concept was a myth from start to finish.
Success in the American West depended as much on access to capital as it did in the American East. Western entrepreneurs struggled constantly against rich men monopolizing resources and political power, just as their counterparts did in the East. The wages, dangers, and upward mobility of cowboys, miners, and other western wage workers paralleled those of urban workers everywhere in the country, in the same period. Western women provided the kinship ties that facilitated trade in the region, and they—including the Ingalls girls, on whose income Pa’s family depended—worked outside the home for wages.
Even the free-ranging cowboy gun culture was a myth. UCLA law professor Adam Winkler explained that “guns were widespread on the frontier, but so was gun regulation. Wild West lawmen took gun control seriously, and frequently arrested people who violated their town’s gun control laws.” Political scientist Pierre Atlas has noted that the famous frontier town Dodge City, Kansas, prohibited guns altogether. We have definitely gone downhill since then!
Modern-day Americans were able to embrace the cowboy myth so long as the laws of the land addressed conditions in the real world. But as extremist lawmakers and judges have removed those guardrails by legislating around ideology rather than reality, they have ushered in conditions that are badly hurting all Americans.
This moment in our history feels chaotic in part because the gulf between reality and image can no longer be hidden with divisive rhetoric. Ordinary Americans are reasserting their right to laws that protect equality, community, and opportunity and, in the process, relegating the cowboy myth to the history of Hollywood.
The myth of the cowboy, together with evangelical fanaticism, have also produced some dangerous recent trends. A study published recently in the pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Pediatrics) shows that the idea of returning women to roles as wives and mothers by banning abortion has, in Texas, driven infant death rates 12.9% higher. The rest of the country saw an increase of 1.8%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies increased almost 23% in Texas while they decreased for the rest of the nation. This forcefully shows that the abortion ban is forcing women to carry to term fetuses that could not survive.
When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state.
Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF), and recently, Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) announced he would file an amendment to the 2025 defense appropriations bill stripping it of funding for IVF for the armed forces, saying “the practice of IVF is morally wrong.”
Trump advisors behind Project 2025 want to enforce the 1873 Comstock Law to ban medical abortion and contraception nationally. The Biden-Harris campaign recently released a tape in which Jeff Durbin, a Trump ally who is pastor of the Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the founder and head of End Abortion Now, says that abortion is murder and those who practice it deserve execution: “You forfeit your right to live.” You have got to be kidding….but, unfortunately, they mean it, and it’s part of Trump’s plans.
Republicans in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas are determined to reestablish patriarchy (cowboy image again), and have now taken on the cause of eliminating no-fault divorce. Eric Berger of The Guardian explains that right-wing opponents of no-fault divorce note that women, especially educated, self-supporting women, file for divorce more often than men and that no-fault divorce means men can’t fight it. They claim divorce hurts families and, by extension, society. Berger points out that it was then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, who signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Other states followed, with New York last in 2010. Berger also notes that in states that approved no-fault divorce, domestic violence rates dropped about 30%, the number of women killed by an intimate partner fell by 10%, and women’s deaths by suicide dropped by 8–16%. It’s hard to imagine American voters are going to embrace an end to no-fault divorce, but that’s what Trump supporters are planning.
Constructing a society around the myth of free individual gun possession has also met reality. Guns have now outpaced car accidents and drug overdoses to become the number one cause of death for American children and adolescents.
Finally, on the economy, and the Trump plans for addressing it, on June 11, David Lynch reported in the Washington Post that U.S. economic growth has been so strong this year that it is helping to stabilize the global economy, while Hans Nichols of Axios reported today that 16 Nobel prize–winning economists have warned that Trump’s economic plans will spike inflation and hurt the global economy. “While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies,” the economists wrote, “we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump.”
Restoring reality to the center of our political debates would protect the rights stolen from us by ideologues in government, left and right, but mainly right. Curiously, it would also do a better job than the cowboy myth of reflecting real people and communities in the historic American West.
I took most of this blog from an excellent article by Heather Cox-Richardson and I am grateful for her insights. Let’s hope more people wake up to these realities and the attempts, which are only too real, of the radical right to return us to the dark ages of religious fanaticism and, maybe, even the Inquisition.
This shows you didn’t grow up here. The cowboy theme started in the 20’s and by the 30 it was ell established in the movies then after WW2 we saw Tom Mix, Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers and the lone Ranger were well established before Bonanza was even thought of. This country has a long history of cow boys.