But has America's Western star lost its luster? A recent BBC World Service poll contacted over 26,000 people in 25 countries and found the image of the US deteriorating. Only 29 percent of those surveyed felt the US currently has a positive influence on world affairs. It would seem that the image of the lone cowboy no longer plays well overseas.

The romance of the American West is largely a Hollywood reconstruction of what was originally an attempt to write serious history. In a series of essays begun in 1893, the American academic Frederick Jackson Turner suggested that US history—and American values—could be explained by the presence, for over 300 years, of a western frontier. Turner argued that American democracy—never completely realized in America—more closely approached its ideal as this frontier expanded.

To Turner, the frontier was the crucible in which social injustices and inequalities were broken down. He held that the availability of free land in the West—at least through most of the 19th century—bred opportunity, freedom, and democracy for the rest of the country. In his view, new social conditions evolved as older institutions were subjected to the transforming influence of free land.

A century out, the shortcomings in Turner's thesis seem obvious. Considerable amounts of America's western land ended up in the hands of large cattle, timber, and mining companies—not in the hands of settlers. And the land wasn't free; it was stolen from the Native Americans who had been living on it for thousands of years. But the legacy of 100 years of Hollywood Westerns does not fade easily. American symbols of the West—from blue jeans to TV Westerns—still contribute to America's image overseas as well as to Americans' view of themselves.

The frontier myth was also slow to die. After the close of America's western frontier, Turner saw powerful factions still lobbying for territorial expansion outside the country's North American boundaries. He noted in particular the Hearst-media-inspired Spanish-American War (1898) and the subsequent acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines by the US, as well as the American annexation of Hawaii.

Olins sees a silver lining even here, however. "The way that people are paid and the way in which there is no safety net for poor people, or very little, all that is traditional to a country where independence of spirit and independence of behavior is prized more than collegiate," he says, while adding, "There are other aspects of it that are very attractive. If there is an opportunity to fail, there is an opportunity to steal. There is also an opportunity to do incredible things." And that would seem to make a pretty good ending to this story, even by Hollywood standards.

But perhaps there's an even better one. Turner fully expected that Americans would seek new frontiers in the pursuit of knowledge after the Western frontier had disappeared. And since frontier conditions would no longer be able to produce social equality, he thought American democracy would increasingly be given shape by other social and economic forces—with occasional government intervention.

Certainly America's immense technological prowess—from the time of Henry Ford to the present—bears witness to equality of opportunity even in the absence of a Western frontier. Noted Olins, "Wherever you look, whether it's Google or Yahoo or IBM or Microsoft or Apple, it's American. But it could be led by a Chinese or by an Indian. Or in the case of Andy Grove at Intel, it could be led by a Hungarian."

Thomas Cromwell believes America's message to the world should emphasize exploration of these kinds of knowledge-based, non-territorial frontiers. "I do think that pioneering is a critical element of American psychology, starting with the movement West and continuing on to space and other non-geographical horizons, including science, technology, and business." He added, "The challenge for marketers of Brand America is to get the world to join America in its big-picture quest to improve the world for everyone, to keep expanding the frontiers of knowledge and science, to keep expanding the opportunities and quality of life."

Now that's a Hollywood ending.

    

[2-Apr-2007]