Cowboys

Few figures have had as powerful and persistent an impact on representations of American masculinity as the cowboy. Popularized and romanticized during the late nineteenth century in dime novels, frontier melodramas, and Wild West shows, the cowboy became an enduring icon in the twentieth century through the influence of fiction, film, television, and advertising. In such figures as the title character of Owen Wister's best-selling 1902 novel The Virginian, the silent film star William S. Hart, the actor John Wayne, and the Marlboro Man, the cowboy has embodied the image of a rugged and authentic “all-American” masculinity. Throughout its history, the cowboy icon has reflected concerns over the social and economic status of Anglo-American men and the emasculating effects of urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization.

In contrast to his longevity as a cultural icon, the cowboy's appearance on the historical stage was fleeting. Actual cowboys rode the trail for less than a generation following the Civil War—from 1865 until the late 1880s. They were the product of the open-range cattle industry, which required the services of hired hands to round up and drive Texas cattle to [Page 115]northern railheads for transport to markets in the East. Early accounts, influenced by middle-class Victorian associations of manhood with propriety and gentility, presented cowboys as antisocial and often criminal figures prone to drunken assaults on defenseless communities on the western frontier. But Wister and his friends, including the artist Frederic Remington and the future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, worried that overcivilization and growing immigration threatened manly vigor and Anglo-Saxon cultural and physical dominance. As a result, they recast the cowboy as an exemplar of the natural integrity and racial superiority of the Anglo-American male.

A sketch by nineteenth-century artist Frederic Remington. Amid the urbanization and industrialization of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cowboy became symbolic of a vision of masculinity that emphasized autonomy, mobility, adventure, and strenuous living in rugged, natural, outdoor environments. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

Despite the cowboy's historical status as a poorly paid laborer within a massive business enterprise, the image of the cowboy astride his horse represented the fantasy of masculine autonomy and mobility—a life free from urban-industrial concerns, domestic constraints, emotional attachments, and the feminizing influences of civilization. Roosevelt, in particular, celebrated the cowboy's reinvigorating primitive pursuits as a model of the “strenuous life”—a life of outdoor physical adventure that would cure men of the softness and nervous exhaustion brought on by modern commercial society.

The cowboy has always been a paradoxical figure, at once modern and archaic. He has embodied concerns over the fate of a traditional producer-based model of masculinity in a modern consumer society, while at the same time the cowboy image itself was created as a mass commodity and has endured due to its success as marketable entertainment. In the twentieth century, alongside such icons of rugged authenticity as Hart and Wayne, such cowboy stars of film, radio, and television as Tom Mix, the Lone Ranger, and Hopalong Cassidy have—like their nineteenth-century Wild West show brethren—eschewed manly reserve in favor of flashy costumes, daredevil stunts, and commercial product endorsements. By the latter half of the twentieth century, parodies and critiques of the image of the cowboy as a tough, laconic loner became more frequent, particularly as authoritative white masculinity came under pressure from the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, the cowboy image endures, in music, fashion, and, not least of all, in political rhetoric, where politicians from Henry Kissinger to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush have invoked the cowboy image to legitimize the moral authority of violent action in the name of the American nation.

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