The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson's century-old dream of a "natural aristocracy." Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.
Stephen J. Mexal is professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.
Introduction: The Old Iron Days Part I: Gentlemen of the West (1880-1884) Chapter 1: Roosevelt in the Badlands Chapter 2: Wister Goes West Chapter 3: Frederic Remington's Vanishing West Chapter 4: A Self-Made Man Chapter 5: Remington and the Art of Scientific Representation Chapter 6: Wister's Legal Education Chapter 7: "Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Selling of the West Part II: The Early History of Conservatism (1689-1880) Chapter 8: The Nature of Freedom Chapter 9: Emerson's Great Man Theory of History Chapter 10: Darwin Comes to America Chapter 11: The Redeemers, the Socialists, and Conservatism After the Civil War Part III: Selling a Darwinian West (1884-1890) Chapter 12: Equal to All Occasions Chapter 13: Cody and the Queen Chapter 14: The Cowboy of Dakota Chapter 15: Remington's Great White West Chapter 16: Natural Inequality and the Course of Progress Chapter 17: The Ghost Dance Part IV: In Search of a Practical History (1890-1895) Chapter 18: The Johnson County War Chapter 19: The World's Columbian Exposition Chapter 20: The Boone and Crockett Club Chapter 21: Environmental Conservation and Political Conservatism Chapter 22: The Science of Western History Chapter 23: A Practical Conservatism Chapter 24: The Evolution of a Cowboy Chapter 25: The Bronco Busters Chapter 26: Progress, Populism, and the Lure of War Part V: Cuba and the New West (1896-1902) Chapter 27: The Rush of War Chapter 28: The Cowboy Regiment Abroad Chapter 29: Rewriting a Legacy Chapter 30: The Virginian and the White House Epilogue: The Cowboy President
How did the aesthetics of a mythic Western ethos shape our past and modern understanding of conservatism? Mexal's eloquently written work answers this timely question. Breaking from histories of conservatism that locate its emergence after WWII, Mexal offers a fresh reading of conservatism as an aesthetic movement, one that was not only born in the political sphere, but in the cultural realms of literature and art. In doing so, he reads known and unknown literatures and histories in fresh and exciting ways, and, in the end, he gives us a study that will be foundational in Western American culture. -- John-Michael Rivera, recipient of the Western American Literature Book Award and author of UNDOCUMENTS
