Politics: Has Anything Changed?

       

While I was in college, I was asked to create this blog and for this particular post I was to read Catherine Albanese’s article called “Savage, Sinner, and Saved: Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings and the Wild Frontier,” discussing the mores of the early nineteenth century by examining Crockett Almanac and other sources.  What struck me about the article was the reference to Davy Crockett’s political campaigns.

 Apparently thus almanac told highly fictionalized stories about the frontiersman turned politician. The almanac encouraged violence, depicting the fictionalized Crockett killing animals with his bare hands and fighting people of all races and ethnicities, including Whites, Blacks, Mexicans and of course Indians. Albanese cites the use of alcohol as a form of manliness including quoting how Davy Crockett as a boy supposedly drank a pint of whiskey with breakfast and a quart at lunch. Albanese further says that often these stories would end with a political message like people wanting to make Crockett president after displaying a great feat of strength. Albanese brings a point that these stories were not historical in nature. Crockett had been dead for up to twenty years by the time that many of these stories were written. Albanese indicates that these stories were moral tales. A form of propaganda to show the rest of America the best way to go out west. That the only way was through strength.  That it did not matter whether that strength be physical or political, it encouraged the idea superiority among whites as Americans. The idea of might makes right is still in use today.

We do not have to look very far to see the modern version of exaggerated strength and violence through satire just think of the last Chuck Norris joke you have heard. Or even the last Action movie you watched.  Americans still associate strength and violence with manliness and power. One can here the desire for political strength in any politician’s speech, although the feat of strength may have changed but Americans still expect presidents George W. Bush to save the world from terrorists after 9/11.  The belief that Barak Obama should save America from financial ruin, health care worries, political party back biting etc.  And of course most recently Donald Trump’s rhetoric that America must me be made great again! As if America has fallen and needs a new Davy Crockett to battle the world for her sake. 

There are two main differences between the Crockett almanacs and today’s media. One, the media outlets are greater instead of a publication in the form of a magazine or newspaper it is now on television news agencies, movies and the internet spreading a message wider than any nineteenth century publication could. The second is the audience is wider, such sentiment is not just directed at whites anymore, and such messages are carried to all races and ethnicities. The term American has a far greater inclusion than in the nineteenth century.  This being said, the message really hasn’t changed in two hundred years.

Bush, George W. Decision Points. New York: Crown Publishers. 2010.

 Catherine Albanese, “Savage, Sinner, and Saved: Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings and the Wild Frontier,” American Quarterly 33:5 (1981): 482-501. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712799

 Scherer, Michael. “How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular.” Time Magazine, September 2, 2010. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2015779,00.html