The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West by Stephen J. Mexal (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West by Stephen J. Mexal Matthew Evertson Stephen J. Mexal, The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. 364 pp. Hardcover, $120; e-book, $45. This wide-ranging exploration of the influence of the frontier West on American conservatism begins with a question of cowboy hats. Why did Ronald Reagan wear one? George W. Bush? Beyond the Stetsons, how did such symbols of the West come to underpin modern conservatism, particularly in its aesthetic appeal, the stories, symbols, values, and “habits of mind” that Mexal argues would later form the core of what he calls “practical conservatism.” Politicians still exploit these “romantic and accessible” aesthetics because they tend to “pluck conservatism free of its modern entanglements with racism, classism and authoritarianism” (vii). The introductory chapter, “The Old Iron Days,” lays out this study in five parts, from the development of the myths and images of “winning the west” (as Theodore Roosevelt wrote it) to where it concludes, with Roosevelt in the White House and the rest of the main players in the study ensconced in high-profile positions of the eastern establishment, secured in some ways by their “fitness” demonstrated in their western adventures. Mexal outlines how modern conservatism builds upon these “aesthetics,” particularly in the belief that western expansion had built an interior “skill set” that the country would need going forward, after the closing of the frontier, and those images and myths so strongly associated with [End Page 169] the “old iron days” became useful in the modern age for embodying conservative ideals. Evolution had selected the most tenacious and self-reliant men to “settle” the frontier, but as the country came into its own manifest destiny, Mexal argues, these rugged individuals with their exploits and myths gave way to a conservative promise fulfilling the “old Jeffersonian dream of an America led by a naturally selected aristocracy” (3). Such aesthetics focused on: . . . belief in the absolute power of the individual; an orientation towards maintaining the historical status quo; a sense that society should be ordered by the laws of nature; a feeling that certain rules apply to some groups more than others; an innate suspicion of collectivism; a faith that inequality is not just acceptable but natural; and a belief in a hierarchical society. Those ideas came to life with vivid clarity when these men told stories about the hazards of the American west. (7) Which men? Roosevelt, of course, and Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Buffalo Bill Cody, and others whose influences are not always as apparent as those colorful western legends (Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, Charles Darwin and his evolutionary cohort of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Herbert Spencer, and, near the end of the study, Frederic Jackson Turner and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). The “aesthetic” that these men developed (for they were all men) is bound by their western-ness, whiteness, class, masculinity, education (college, often), love of travel, and their desire to “regenerate” from loss by heading West. The book explores these lives in the context of historical events that prove useful for constructing the potent imagery and ideas of a certain brand of conservative thought, charting American progress through the “temporal” lens of selective western history that evolved out of the struggles to resettle this “contested space” with a kind of landed gentry elected by their social status, if not ballots. Mexal then cautions that his exploration leans less upon literary or historical analysis, or political theory, than events and narratives from the period illustrating an evolving idea of a uniquely American brand of conservatism shaped by romantic frontier myths. For example, a series of short chapters in the first half of the book takes up Roosevelt’s western garb, Remington’s scientific depictions of [End Page 170] a horse in gallop, Wister’s engagement with case law at Harvard, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s depiction of the wild West as a Darwinian struggle staging freedom coming from the West, not to it. The last part of the book explores the range wars at the end of the frontier, the 1893 Columbian...