John Ford, philosopher
In his reply to my post on David Brooks’s New York Times column today, Jake writes:
In those John Ford movies where a Western town organized itself, they would point out that there was no U.S. government employee handing out spools of red tape, telling them they how to do it; it was individuals freely choosing come together harmoniously.
This is not uniformly true. In the 1962 John Ford classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, civic order and community arrive in the form of a young lawyer from the East named Ransom Stoddard (and played by Jimmy Stewart). Stoddard despises the way rugged individualism has left the town lawless and violent, and the children uneducated. He works for the newspaper, opens a school, and helps organize the towns people.
The fundamental political conflict has to do with whether the territory in which the town is located should seek statehood. On the one side are the small farmers and entrepreneurs who have much to gain from statehood and, on the other, are the ranchers and big landowners who wish the land to remain part of the “open range.” The landowners hire Liberty Valence (an outlaw) to terrorize the townspeople in order to dissuade them from advocating for statehood. Stoddard is elected to represent the town at the territorial convention and, from there, is elected a delegate to Washington (he later becomes a senator representing the state).
In this case, community did not come about as the organic result of unfettered individualism. It was, in fact, government agents, studious bureaucrats, and the rule of law that were the only hope to curtail the rugged individualism and unbounded liberty (“Liberty Valence” is not a coincidental name for the outlaw) that were tearing apart the bonds of community and civic order.
Jake might be right about the Republican theory of community, but he’s not correct about John Ford Westerns.
-Sam
Related posts:
- How the West was lost
- Untramelled Liberty = Community?
- Community first?
- Democrats not public philosophizing, say critics
- NYT following The Public Philosopher
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