9781847183859-sample

Westerns: Paperback Novels

and Movies from Hollywood

Westerns: Paperback Novels

and Movies from Hollywood

Edited by

Paul Varner

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Westerns: Paperback Novels and Movies from Hollywood, Edited by Paul Varner

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Paul Varner and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-385-9, ISBN (13): 9781847183859

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 By Paul Varner Part I: Movies from Hollywood Chapter One................................................................................................. 6 William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges in the Progressive Era By Richard Hutson Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 26 “Towards the Setting Sun”: Open Endings in Stagecoach and The Pioneers By Tom Paulus Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 44 The Cowboy in the Shadows in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine By Dennis Rothermel Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 71 Dale Evans: Girlie-Girl With a Six-Gun By Wendy Galgan Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 84 Fighting “Reds” On Screen and Off: Reagan as Cowboy turned Cold-War Politician in Cattle Queen of Montana By Brianna R. Burke Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 Death with Dignity: Comitatus in Sam Peckinpah’s “New Western” By Stephen Weathers

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 112 To Avenge or not to Avenge: Violence, Vengeance, and Vigilantism in Clint Eastwood’s Westerns and in Mystic River By Len Engel Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 125 Lone Star: Forget the Alamo By John M. Gourlie Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 136 Sonnet Subtexts and Palatable Stories: Gay Cowboys and the Heterotopian Frontier of Modern-Classic Westerns By Christopher Le Coney and Zoe Trodd Part II: Paperback Westerns and Movies from Hollywood Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 158 Hopalong Cassidy (1910): A Novel That Defined the American Cowboy By Paul Varner Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 170 The Politics of Reconciliation in John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy: Adapting James Warner Bellah’s Short Stories By Brett Westbrook and Kathleen A. Brown Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 191 Time and Space in the Western: Warlock as Novel and Film By Robert Murray Davis Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 199 The Western Goes Dutch: Catholic Cowboys, Civilized Indians, and a Miniaturized West in the Arendsoog Series By Evert Jan van Leeuwen Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 215 The Countercultural Cowboy: Rereading the 1960s novels of Doctorow, Herlihy, and Portis in a Marcusian Framework By David Simmons Index........................................................................................................ 228

INTRODUCTION

PAUL VARNER, ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY

One of the most fascinating developments in academic literary studies over the last two decades, to me at any rate, has been the explosion in serious study of previously neglected literary forms from popular culture. Science fiction, detective stories, little white paperback romances, action movies, and, yes, popular Westerns have all developed a small industry of academic studies and new academic stars publishing their findings in serious scholarly journals and with major scholarly presses. The following collection of essays over popular Westerns simply represents some of the best new scholarship in this direction.

When I first came to the serious study of popular Western fiction nearly twenty years ago, I was surprised at the negative views many critics then had of the popular formula Western, whether paperbacks or movies from Hollywood. Commonly, the entire field of popular Westerns was dismissed as mere escapist literature or film, created solely for entertainment and commercial profit. I was surprised at this common reaction because much of my previous academic work has been in the field of early English dramatic comedy—specifically, the farces of the eighteenth century. For years I had been studying a group of plays that by definition had no character development; that used standard, formulaic plots all based on spectacular intrigues, deceptions, trickery, and coincidences; that merely adopted the form of true comedy while not being true comedy; that relied heavily on stock devices, stereotypical characters; and that celebrated their sheer meaninglessness. The farce writers did not pretend to produce profound studies of human nature or of the human predicament. Despite this professed unoriginality, this professed meaninglessness, the genre of farce had attracted a wide array of critical appreciation. Few critics considered farce beneath consideration as serious literature. In fact, those very negative, anti-literary characteristics of farce were seen as the very means farce uses to provide serious literary

Introduction

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interest. Such attitudes as these were commonplace in the field of dramatic studies. But popular Westerns had not fared so well.

Times have changed, and it has been a joy to observe the move toward serious, scholarly study of Westerns through the years. Of course, social historians have always studied popular novels and movies of all kinds from the standpoint of popular studies, but many recent studies have also shown the value of examining strictly popular literature and film because of what it tells us about the contemporary culture and because of what it reveals about the quality of literature and film of the time. Studies by Richard Etulain, Max Westbrook, James Folsom, Lee Clark Mitchell, Bruce Serafin, C. L. Sonnichsen, Jeni Calder, Madeline Heatherington, Jane Tompkins, Richard Slotkin, Robert Murray Davis, Christine Bold, and others have helped change scholarly attitudes toward what was formerly considered a subliterary genre with minimal literary merit.

This collection of essays relating to popular Westerns from Hollywood and popular Western novels represents some of the best new work on the genre from a wide variety of critical approaches, and they represent well the state of the field today. Several of the essays such as Richard Hutson’s “William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges in the Progressive Era,” David Rothermel’s “The Cowboy in the Shadows in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine,” and Tom Paulus’ “‘Towards the Setting Sun’: Open Endings in Stagecoach and The Pioneers” treat classic Western films closely. John M. Gourlie and Robert Murray Davis consider lesser-known films in “Lone Star: Forget the Alamo” and “Time and Space in the Western: Warlock as Novel and Film.”

New scholarship on popular Western novels also is represented in David Simmons’ “The Countercultural Cowboy: Rereading the 1960s novels of Doctorow, Herlihy, and Portis in a Marcusian Framework,” my own “Hopalong Cassidy (1910): A Novel That Defined the American Cowboy,” and Brett Westbrook’s and Kathleen A. Brown’s “The Politics of Reconciliation in John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy: Adapting James Warner Bellah’s Short Stories.”

Others show the connections of Westerns and their makers with contemporary culture. Brianna Burke relates Ronald Reagan’s Westerns to his policies as President of the United States in “Fighting ‘Reds’ On Screen and Off: Reagan as Cowboy turned Cold-War Politician in Cattle Queen of Montana.” Len Engel shows a continuity between Clint Eastwood’s early Westerns and some of his most recent work in “To Avenge or not to Avenge: Violence, Vengeance, and Vigilantism in Clint Eastwood’s Westerns and in Mystic River.”

Paul Varner

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Unusual subjects for Western studies appear in Wendy Galgan’s “Dale Evans: Girlie-Girl With a Six-Gun,” a surprising new assessment, and Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s “The Western Goes Dutch: Catholic Cowboys, Civilized Indians, and a Miniaturized West in the Arendsoog Series.” Zoe Trodd and Christopher Le Coney provide detailed new research into the pervasive homoeroticism of movie Westerns in “Sonnet Subtexts and Palatable Stories: Gay Cowboys and the Heterotopian Frontier of Modern-Classic Westerns.” Those of us who lived through the 1960s remember the extreme audience reactions to the Westerns of that period, and Stephen Weathers writes an engaging personal essay on the initial appearance of The Wild Bunch in “Death with Dignity: Comitatus in Sam Peckinpah’s ‘New Western’.”

It is my hope that this collection will contribute to the ongoing vitality of scholarship in Westerns and popular culture and that these essays will illuminate and inspire as well.

PART I:

MOVIES FROM HOLLYWOOD

CHAPTER ONE

WILLIAM S. HART’S HELL’S HINGES IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

RICHARD HUTSON, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

For good reason, film and cultural historians have tended to think of

William S. Hart’s first major screen success, Hell’s Hinges (1916), as a Western. For historians of the genre, George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, the film “remains one of the classic Westerns.”1 Scott Simmon finds it the purest example of a unique group of Westerns, a “harsh strand of the Western, echoing angry-God fundamentalism and Old Testament fury,”2 but such a classification raises a number of questions. John G. Cawelti, emphasizing the formulaic nature of popular genres, notes that, for various reasons, there is “the development of different types of westerns for different audiences.” Filmmakers discovered that “they must manipulate the western formula so that it responds to the interests, values, and assumptions” of a mass audience.3 What kind of genre can be so various? Is not the purity of genre lost, or, at this early stage of filmmaking, not yet achieved? What more or less gets lost in these accounts of a genre as distinctive as the Western is the cultural/historical context that would constitute the background of the filmmakers and the audience. Context is everything, even though we know that what there is in a context that is especially or exactly pertinent to a filmmaker can be difficult to locate.

For instance, if one removes Hell’s Hinges from the category of the Western, forgets for a moment the later development of the genre, which had not really been formed yet, and places it in its historical context of pre-World War I United States, Hart’s film takes on a number of resonances that might otherwise be overlooked. To see the film in the context of what filmmakers and writers were doing in this period could suddenly turn the film into an interesting mystery. It is easy to claim that it is a melodrama, primarily a melodrama, but such a claim is not so earth

William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges in the Progressive Era

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shattering, since John Cawelti had said as much. If we were to see it in relationship to other films of the era such as, for instance, George Loane Tucker’s Traffic in Souls, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat, Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration, and, of course, films of D. W. Griffith, as well as examples of what Tom Gunning has named the “cinema of attractions,”4 the sense of Hell’s Hinges as melodrama becomes intensely clear (or problematical) on the screen. We know that Hart liked narratives with a heavy Old Testament gravitas, in this instance, however, invoking the Cross with the interruptive montage of a woman at the foot of a cross, a scene intended to suggest the meaning of Faith Henley’s act of Christian resoluteness and courage. And we know that Hart himself tended to play a character known as the good badman, a figure who appears, in various guises, in many of Hart’s films, whatever the genre. It has become easy for us to simply expect this figure to be obvious without asking why the character portrayed by Hart or by “Bronco Billy” Anderson and others in the pre-World War I era tends to be that of a man of a highly questionable past who becomes converted to domesticity and apparently good middle-class values, to non-violence and love, or to vengeance, perhaps, or to Christianity, whereby he might even echo a version of a Progressive era reformer, albeit in a Wild Western style. In fact, a few months before the release of Hell’s Hinges, a movie reviewer suggested that Hart was risking losing his audience in “a predictable role that was becoming a bore,” referring to what the reviewer noted was the repetition of the “’western badman reformed through the sweet and humanizing influence of a pure-minded girl.’5

John Cawelti noted that “like [Owen] Wister, [Zane] Grey and [William S.] Hart portray the West as a distinctive moral and symbolic landscape with strong implications of regeneration or redemption for those protagonists who can respond to its challenge by recovering basic human and American values.”6 Whereas such a description is certainly correct, it still leaves something to be said about a film like Hell’s Hinges. It’s true that our hero Blaze undergoes a change of heart, a conversion, a change of loyalties. There is a telling scene of him reading the Bible in one hand with a cigarette in the other hand and a bottle of whiskey alongside. He has been a respected leader of the saloon society, and he flabbergasts his fellow saloon men when he appears to hesitate in carrying out his intention to run the newly arrived Christian minister out of town as he catches a glimpse of the Reverend Robert Henley’s sister, Faith. The initial and immediate mutual glance between the resolute, pure and upright woman and the leader of the saloon crowd turns Blaze toward her and the church group and away from the saloon group. There is the Christian or church

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group within the town, but it is weak and liable to defeat, and certainly unable to redeem the town from its Wild West ways. According to an intertitle, this group consists of “a scant handful of respectable people, a drop of water in a sea of rum.” In this film, the West is first and foremost presented as almost completely given over to the values of the saloon society, in its “almost undiluted evil,”7 a raucous and highly undomesticated environment of prostitutes and liquor and men, overseen by Silk Miller who, according to an intertitle, mingles “the oily craftiness of a Mexican with the deadly treachery of a rattlesnake.”8 And this dominant group from the saloon is militant against any effect that the Christian group might have upon the town with the arrival of a minister to lead them. The saloon people are adamant in the view that “neither law nor religion shall ever come to Hell’s Hinges.” Did Hart, with his claim that he knew the West, or his screenwriter, C. Gardner Sullivan, think that the actual, real West was as corrupt and lawless as the town of Hell’s Hinges? However one might describe the town, from the perspective of Progressive era reformers whose major successes were municipal reform, it looks like a town in need of a strong reform effort. In the melodramatic excess of its representation, it might even look like a town that could not be reformed and would be better off demolished. The seeds sown by the church group have fallen on barren moral soil, despite the arrival of a minister to lead and help the good people develop into a viable force.

I’m assuming everyone knows the story but a brief synopsis might be in order. A congregation in the West has called for a minister, and Robert Henley, newly ordained as a Protestant minister, is urged to take the position in the belief that the Eastern big city life is too difficult for him to handle, he being a momma’s boy who seems to be more interested in the young women in his audience than in the gospel. His sermon is “God is love,” as he ardently gestures to the appreciative and engrossed young women of the congregation. As an elder informs him of a position opening in the West, Robert, dreaming of fawning senoritas, decides to accept the call. As it turns out, the frontier West is also too hard for him to handle, as he easily becomes discouraged and seduced by the forces of the saloon society of Hell’s Hinges. His sister Faith accompanies him to the West, and she is made of firmer moral stuff, able to stand up to the raucous saloon crowd that has interfered with the first service of the reverend Henley. But Blaze Tracy, a natural born leader of the saloon crowd, is also seduced by the courageous and resolute sister of Robert, Faith Henley. Apparently, Blaze has never met a heroic and virtuous woman before, and the encounter generates an immediate conversion, at least a partial conversion. With the arrival of a minister for the Christian group,


9

the good people undertake to build a church. But Silk Miller’s chief seductress, Dolly, at the direction of Miller, turns her wiles on Robert, with complete success, since from the beginning we see that he is vulnerable to the attentions of young women. With the example of the new minister drunk and dissolute, the saloon crowd rushes to burn down the church; the church group engages in armed battle but loses, and they straggle out of town. Blaze enters the scene, shoots Silk and a couple of other men in Silk’s bar, burns down the saloon, and sets off a conflagration that encompasses the whole town. Robert has been shot and killed in the melee; Blaze and Faith bury his body on a hillside and move out into the wilderness alone.

The division of the town’s citizens into the two groups of saloon and “respectable” people is a quasi-melodramatic binary that will continue to be important for the Western as a genre. And with the major characters of Robert Henley and Blaze Tracy, and also the women, Faith Henley and Dolly, the film narrative strives for legibility with the device of presenting the two women and the two men as contrasting versions of each other. Robert, in his ministerial role and popularity as a preacher to women, is identified with the tradition of the feminized American spiritual or intellectual institutions, such as the ministry. His institutional and cultural role is to lead the church people, reinforce their Christian moral values, but his vulnerability to women results in his failure to carry out the conventional task of a pastor. Blaze is the unredeemed man when we first see him, a masculine authority within the saloon group, entrusted by the leader, Silk Miller, to defeat the power that the new minister might be supposed to bring. The role of the two women, unconscious and conscious, is to seduce the presumed leaders of the two groups. Faith turns Blaze toward the Bible and toward the church group with her seductive power of courage and integrity, with the genuineness of her faith. Dolly seduces the Reverend Henley into drunkenness and a presumed illicit sexuality that brings about his ruin and the ruin of the church group as well as the town of Hell’s Hinges.

We might note that, in the character of Robert, there is a suspicion that he is merely play-acting in his sermonizing, as if he has usurped the pulpit to impress young women or as if the development of the feminization of religion in the U.S. has resulted in Christianity as theater rather than substance. In this case, to play-act means that Robert is not genuine in his ministerial mission. He does not know himself, does not know the truth of his own character. And he does not know it because his mother has supported him in this false character (perhaps because a father is absent). In such a society, becoming a minister means taking on one of the leading

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forms of social authority. The minister gets to be the moral arbiter and cynosure of the society. There are the deacons or elders of the church who see that Robert is not yet ready to withstand the temptations of the modern city, and they feel a strong obligation to guide him. Why would they think that the wild West would be the proper place for him? Maybe these deacons have read Theodore Roosevelt or S. Weir Mitchell and think that the West will toughen Robert up sufficiently with a touch of the manly strenuous life. They also, it turns out, have an idealistic view of the West as a place where “people live simply and close to God.” But, in fact, according to an intertitle, Hell’s Hinges is a “gun-fighting, man-killing devil’s den of iniquity.” The Eastern men of the cloth clearly have no realistic sense of what a Western town is like.

Does Faith Henley decide to go with her brother because she does not trust her brother to be able to take care of himself, or is she afraid that he will not be forceful in presenting his Christian message? If Robert, the “momma’s boy,” is so weak, then the undue influence of women would seem to be dangerous to manhood and to Christianity. Faith’s independence is both asserted and denied in the fact that she volunteers to go west, but to accompany her brother in order to “help him get established.” In effect, she can be strong and assertive only by being a martyr to her faith, as if she has fused the Christian mission and her concern for her brother. And so Blaze is converted to Christianity by Faith, but his loyalty is always primarily to the good woman rather than to any kind of religious doctrine. Blaze Tracy’s upbringing seems to be somewhat similar to that of Zane Grey’s Lassiter when Lassiter says to the Mormon community leader, Tull, “’Where I was raised a woman’s word was law. I ain’t quite outgrowed that yet.’”9 An authentic male must obey this law, which is generated from a good woman’s thoughts and actions. But if Blaze is vulnerable to Faith, why should we fault Robert for being vulnerable to women, to Dolly? Clearly, the film is asking for its characters to make basic distinctions and asking its audience to understand the distinctions. All men seem vulnerable to women, perhaps because all men have mothers. And mothers can dote on sons, as daughters might also dote on brothers, taking on attributes of the mother. In the beginning, Faith acts as the proxy mother for Robert, but steps in when Robert falters as he begins to preach to his new congregation. On the whole, in the nuances of the depiction of Faith, we can uncover something of a “collision of modern values with persistent Victorian codes of womanhood.”10 She shows signs of independence and resolve, having improvised the notion of going west voluntarily, suggesting that she is a figure of the New Woman cultural phenomenon.11 But she is also clearly


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subservient to her brother and to the Christian mission, and, in the end, in need of the chivalric Blaze to rescue her from despair and defeat.

Despite his spiritual and moral lapses, Robert has conscience enough to feel that he has to hide his trips to Dolly from his sister and from the townspeople. Just what is this sister-brother relationship? When Robert is confronted by the rowdy saloon society, which breaks up what one of Silk’s bartenders calls a “religious uproar,” he folds into complete helplessness. And Faith steps to the fore and begins singing “Rock of Ages.” She subdues the saloon men and women, especially one of the prostitutes, better than her brother, but only momentarily, as one of the cowboys suggests that he is going to dance with her, force her to dance, that is, in the interrupted church service. She is protected from the indignities of such rowdiness by the strong manliness of Blaze, who steps up, draws his two six guns and forces the group to retreat.

Hart’s character in a number of films as the bad man who is capable of being reformed resonated deeply within Progressive era culture. Bronco Billy Anderson had performed this character at least a couple of years before Hart entered film and incorporated “Christian themes of moral uplift, self-sacrifice, and redemption” and “often evoked the ideals of evangelical Protestantism.”12 The character acknowledges that a man, the “natural man,” can live a life outside of strict moral rectitude, but is always and hopefully vulnerable to a reform impulse. As Blaze Tracy is presented to us, he is much more a man’s man than someone vulnerable to the wiles of women. He is admired by other men, and there is no indication in the narrative that he is appealing to other women, except to Faith, who must see something deeper, more spiritual, in him than the leader of a saloon society of lawless and immoral men.

If Blaze becomes committed to Faith (in his analogy, she is the strong “rope” to the values of Christianity whereas her brother is an unreliable rope, one that quickly breaks), he seems not to be committed to anything but her, as if he cannot quite move to the level of spiritual abstraction that would be necessary to see her merely as the rope or connection to spirituality. Thus, his ability to take apocalyptic revenge on Silk and the saloon society as well as the whole town is perhaps more plausible for his inability to think spiritually. His commitment extends only to the rope, the physical being of Faith as a spiritual figure. At the other end of Faith as a rope is, presumably, God. At the other end of Dolly as the rope is Silk and the orgy of the saloon life. If Blaze’s analogy of the rope is adequate, why is it that Faith as the rope can save Blaze and not Robert? Robert moves away from the rope of Faith, moves toward Dolly as his rope, although, as the congregation’s institutionally sanctioned minister, he is supposed to be

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the rope, a role he obviously cannot sustain. He is himself in great need of a rope for his own salvation since his rope has been his mother, and it has led him into disaster.

Cawelti notes that both Zane Grey and Hart, in their narratives, “place much greater stress on sexual and religious motifs” than on political and social issues, as in Wister’s The Virginian. Grey’s and Hart’s “leading men and woman typically combine hints of dazzling erotic intensity and prowess with an actual chastity, purity, and gentility that would hardly bring blushes to the cheek of a Victorian maiden.”13 But, sexual and religious motifs always carry a certain appropriateness and weight for expressing political views. For conservative thinkers and popular audiences, especially, sexual issues can easily dominate their critique of the world in general, perhaps because sexual behavior may seem easier to correct and control than an actual political or social system. What would it take to get the reverend Robert Henley to overcome his vulnerability to pretty young women? Blaze never indicates that his immediate attraction to Faith is sexual. As the intertitles make clear, his attraction to her is spiritual. He sees her honesty, her integrity, her genuine hospitable welcoming to him as a stranger. He sees a purity and moral strength that touch something within himself. Perhaps Cawelti is dubious about such a motive when he claims that for Grey and Hart, “sex and religion are strangely intermixed. Sexual passion is treated as a semimystical moral and religious experience.”14 Such an interpretation derives from our post-Freudian perspective, which is almost inevitably, and perhaps rightly, projected onto a William S. Hart romance. However, what the film emphasizes is the contrast between Robert Henley and Blaze Tracy, the vulnerability of Robert to an erotic sense of the world against the non-erotic view of Blaze. Robert is the over-feminized male whose basic Christian message is “God is love,” thereby expressing his own weakness to the possibilities of seduction by designing women who actually, as well as in his own fantasy life, take the initiative in exploiting his seducibility. But Blaze is presented as a counter example of a male, the good-bad man capable of being converted spiritually. His action blends justice and vengeance, a fusion common to many of John Ford’s Westerns. It could be argued, thus, that the film insists upon the spectator being able to see a fundamental distinction between an erotic seduction and a religious or moral seduction.

Early reviewers of Hart’s Westerns mentioned the stories of Bret Harte, who must be an influence on the scenario writer, although in its message it is very anti-Bret Harte, it would seem, in the sense that Hart’s film is not at all tolerant of the gamblers, drinkers and prostitutes who may


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fall victim to periodic moral uprisings in California mining towns. For William S. Hart, the battle of Christianity can be defeated by the entrenched bad forces, and there can be no such thing as a general communal impulse to moral purity, as in Bret Harte, that will cast some characters out of town into a deadly mountain wilderness. In this instance, William S. Hart’s cynicism meets Bret Harte’s kind of cynicism. The two outcasts of Hell’s Hinges move into self-exile after Blaze has destroyed the town.

Hell’s Hinges works with a lucid, heavy-handed sense of the melodramatic stakes, moral lucidity or legibility highlighted by melodrama. We might think of melodrama as nineteenth-century popular drama for a Victorian audience, a highly moralistic narrative appropriate to a Protestant nation. But Ben Singer has illustrated the pertinence of the terms and issues for an early modern audience of film viewers. According to Singer, “Melodrama manifested the powerful new populist consciousness. Melodrama was a cultural expression of the populist ideology of liberal democracy, even if the bourgeois champions of that ideology did not have populist aesthetic sensibilities.”15 Deriving from a popular sense of the moral struggles in the French Revolution and joining the American Protestant moralistic culture of the nineteenth-century and expanding into American dime novels and popular stage plays, the American melodramatic tradition interpreted the European venal aristocrat trying to seduce the innocent young middle class woman as an evil banker or head of a powerful corporation. It was also easy to transform this demonized villain into an ethnic minority character such as an Indian or Mexican. In Hell’s Hinges, there are a number of quite original twists on this scenario. In the clichés of melodrama, a heroic male comes to the defense of the virginal white woman. In Hell’s Hinges, it is the white minister who becomes the victim of the evil exotic vamp, and it is the white woman, the sister, who is steadfast in her faith, willing to stand up against the unruly mob of men who want to break up the religious service. Both Faith, courageous Christian, and Dolly, saloon vamp, are presented in this narrative as having great power over men; both work their influence in the transformation of the two men; Blaze turns toward the Bible and protecting the Christian community; Robert sinks into the oblivion and total passivity of drink and is even pushed into the leadership of the saloon gang to burn down his church.

Melodrama is a “’cluster concept’ involving different combinations of some constitutive elements such as strong pathos, heightened emotionality, and moral polarization.” There can be many different historical combinations of these elements. For Singer, echoing the studies of

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Sigfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, melodrama “grew out of the perceptual dynamics of urban modernity.” The context is the new sensationalism of popular amusements in the urban contexts. Of course, the feature that we all tend to remember is that “classical melodrama filled a psychological need by offering moral certainty through utterly unambiguous designations of virtue and villainy.”16 It is as if the female innocent victim served as a stand-in for the loss of a post-sacred world that is one of the features of modernity. What a thesis like Singer’s allows us to see is that, whereas Hart’s Westerns belong to the mode of melodrama, they also consistently complicate the terms and characters within the high moral drama. All we need to acknowledge, in the depiction of Faith Henley, for instance, is that she is the strong, resolute figure of the virtuous woman, stronger than her brother, as if she felt growing up with him that she could take up and overcome the moral slack of her brother, for the sake of her brother and for a commitment to integrity.

In speaking of the melodramas of the era, Kay Sloan claims that they “reveal a broad spectrum of fears and fantasies. Taken together, they weave a story of the period’s shifting moral codes.”17 There is a large body of film in this period that “obligingly cast ‘demon rum’ as the villain.” And in the white slave films, the resolution at the end has to restore “traditional morality” and reinvest in the family. For Sloan, “that process was implicitly religious,” or explicitly religious, as in the case of Hart. Melodrama’s stated purpose is to “teach a great moral lesson.” We should note that a highly repressive Victorian moralism of traditional values and gender roles still pervaded many groups before the entrance of the U. S. in World War I, an experience that really did change the moral sense of the nation, leading to the “roaring” twenties. But Hell’s Hinges carries the religious discourse or allegory farther, perhaps, than most films of the Progressive era.

Melodrama of this kind hearkens back to the nineteenth-century religious imagination, although, in Hell’s Hinges, the crowds of people, filmed as waves of movement, and the corrupt municipalities (without law or religion) might well refer to the present concerns of reformers. One has to consider both the contemporary reference and the tradition of melodrama in the U.S. to appreciate what this film is trying to do. It captures the conservatism of the period as well as the peculiar spirit of reform of the Progressive era. Perhaps that is the nature of the Progressive era— religious moralism in the guise of reform urges in the name of practicality and efficiency.

It might be claimed that the power of women in the film echoes an anxiety about the liberation of New Woman in this era. As Singer noted,


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“probably the most interesting facet of serial melodramas was their unusual emphasis on active, courageous, assertive female protagonists.” And the “New Woman epitomized the profound cultural discontinuity of modern society; traditional ideologies of gender, . . . . became objects of cultural reflexivity, open to doubt and revision.”18 Faith has echoes of this New Woman idea in her strength, but her ordeal also reduces her to the passive and disabled subject who has to be guided by Blaze in the end. She may be stronger than her brother and fixated upon her brother, even after his death, but she can falter in the end, making way for the reformed stronger male hero to rescue her. Likewise, Dolly, the evil seductress of Robert, who takes her orders from Silk, is effective in her wiles until she is literally manhandled by Blaze in his outrage at what she has done to Robert for the effect his moral fall has in undermining the strength of Faith. Neither of these women, good or bad, seems interested in domesticity. Both women appear to be highly mobile, and we cannot quite imagine them as desiring or ending up as the center of households, although we could surmise that Faith, now defeated and minus her brother, could eventually be the moral anchor of a domestic household when she recovers from the trauma of her brother’s fall and death.

As Ann Douglas claims in her study of the feminization of religion and culture in the late nineteenth-century, “the nineteenth-century minister moved in a world of women,” and took “custodianship over essentially feminine concerns.” In this view, “religion was increasingly associated with feminine influence and disassociated from masculine activity.” “Ministers often exalted the maternal impulse because it had been a key force in their own lives. As a minister claimed in his autobiography, “’God made mothers before he made ministers.’”19 The film’s intertitle which criticizes Robert’s mother for making him a “momma’s boy” acknowledges the feminization of clergymen in the middle and late nineteenth-century. By going to the frontier West, Robert and Faith appear not to know that the population is basically men, men starved for women rather than for spirituality. Clearly, Robert does not know how to preach to men, especially men of the frontier West. In the fact that Faith steps in for the failure of her brother, it is important that she does not try to preach words to the rowdy men. Instead she sings “Rock of Ages,” a less authoritative expression, the montage presenting the rock and a cross that can withstand the beating of the heavy waves. And her singing works only momentarily in quelling the disturbance of the mob.

When Silk Miller comes to Robert and asks him to preach to his saloon girls, he does not ask Robert to preach to the saloon men. Silk appears to be observant enough to surmise that Robert’s preaching to his prostitutes

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will not convert his women to virtue but, instead, is likely to work the other way, to bring down Robert into the pit of vice and oblivion. And he is right. Robert is unable to resist the wiles and wishes of Dolly, as he falls into an alcoholic trance, to the total embarrassment of Faith and the church group who find him drunk in a back room of Silk’s saloon.

Richard Hofstadter, summarizing a good deal of research, claims that the ministry in the late nineteenth century lost much of its cultural authority. In the transformations of American society and culture, he notes that the clergy “were hard hit in their capacity as moral and intellectual leaders by the considerable secularization that took place in American society and intellectual life in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.” They especially lost the “support of the working class on a large and ominous scale.”20 The question is whether or not a two gun Westerner who undergoes conversion to a quasi-Christian chivalrous civilized goodness can overcome the decline of the authority of Protestantism in the U.S. Melodrama in theater and film offered echoes of this previous pastoral authority, as Americans still believed in the fundamental drama of good and evil. And, as Hofstadter further notes, when the Protestant clergy began to identify with ordinary people who felt that they were losing in the culture of industrial capitalism, they joined in the new reform movements. “Progressivism can be considered from this standpoint as a phase in the history of the Protestant conscience, a latter-day Protestant revival.”21

The melodramatic effect in Hell’s Hinges is heightened to excess by the fact that the town seems to be dominated by an unrealistic group of men committed to nothing but drink, prostitutes and violence. Despite the historically known lawlessness of Western towns in the late nineteenth-century, there is, I think, no record of a town as bad as Hell’s Hinges (not until the recent HBO’s town of Deadwood). Hart, retelling his own experience in the West, experience that he felt gave him a special authority for being involved in stories about the West, claimed that the country of the West was “unbroken.”22 But this characterization does not seem to preclude the idea that the citizens are inherently redeemable. Melodrama, even as complex as this film, emphasizes utter clarity, and the moral terms have to be exaggerated, it seems, for a popular audience that cannot be depended upon to have extensive education outside of ordinary life experience.

From the beginning of the film, with the scenes of Robert Henley giving a sermon in a “Slum” area of a large city, along with the interpretative intertitles, we can surmise that this highly melodramatic, moral vision of Christianity is an attack on a presumed feminized


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Christianity. As a newly ordained minister, Robert is doubly, excessively, feminized, as a minister with a congregation made up primarily of women, and as a man spoiled by his mother who is sitting as a rapt auditor in the congregation. Such a feminized male is unable to practice the kind of courage, self-control and self-confidence in the faith needed for the modern civilized world. He is, in such a weakened state, especially vulnerable to women. But Robert’s feminization is blamed on his mother, who has committed a “great injustice to her son and to the church.” And in the town of Hell’s Hinges, when the raucous saloon group interrupts the morning service, Robert’s sister Faith has to take over for the defeated Robert. But she would no doubt have been defeated by the violence of the saloon group if Blaze had not interfered. In this view, traditional American Protestant Christianity needs a resolute male defender, even if women have the more direct line to the sources of authentic spirituality and power.

In the discourse of the Progressive era, where else could one find an authentic instance of a true manly man but in the wild West? The elders who suggest that Robert needs a non-urban setting for his ministry apparently have not had access to frontier journalists whose comments on the West would have given them hints that the real West is not so simple or close to God as they suppose.23 We can see that Hart and his screenwriter are interested in a sense of realism that entails a discrepancy between a myth of the West as a version of the urban pastoral and an actual West with its raucous and lawless frontier towns.

Besides the problem of masculinity, the two major moral concerns for Hart’s film as also for his era are prohibition and prostitution, and these were basically women’s issues at the time, which in Hell’s Hinges have to be taken away from the feminized man and taken up by the masculine man, the one who can act against the crowd of the saloon group that supports both alcohol and prostitution. Even as women are presented as the origin and upholders of spiritual power, it is the non-feminized man who becomes the champion of true womanhood. This complex idea of straightening out gender identity and roles must account, in part, for the popularity of Hart in the early twentieth century.

It is a woman at the foot of the cross in the insertion of the montage image, representing the view that it is the woman who is close to God. No doubt Robert is suffering because of his failure to control the invading saloon group. But genuine suffering is represented by Faith standing up to the crowd, taking over the role of religious leader from her abject brother. And the montage insertion is designed to indicate that her courage is an expression of piety at the foot of the cross. What all of these images and

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ideas suggest is that Blaze need not be accused of feminization even though his conversion is to the woman as the “rope” to spirituality. The man does not become feminized just because the woman is the true intermediary. Blaze can be loyal to Faith and to his own raucous, frontier masculinity at one and the same time. If Christianity is a call to the feminine and Faith answers the call when her feminized brother cannot, Blaze is exempt from feminization even as he is seduced into the church group by the presence of Faith. His conversion allows him room to move back into Old Testament vengeance, justice with violence bypassing Robert’s message about God and love. Susan Curtis’s account of the reinterpretation of Christ and God at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century by a number of Protestant ministers committed to a social gospel type of Christianity indicates that the ministers were struggling against their fathers and also against the feminization of Christianity that Ann Douglas identified as a transformation toward a more liberal, undoctrinaire Protestantism. In the retrospective view of a group of Protestant ministers, the Victorian image of God was that he was tough patriarch and of Christ was that he was polite. At the same time that they wanted to soften a “vengeful Jehovah,” they also began “’to appreciate the manhood of Jesus.’”24 They recreated images of Christ and God according to their desire to masculinize Christianity for the industrial, urban and strife-torn era. A melodramatic Western such as Hell’s Hinges is the perfect cultural artifact for this new (and old) sense of the uses of religious allegory.

For Hart and Zane Grey, the religious theme in the wild West entails the notion of getting back to foundations for thinking and being, back to the primitive terms from which a proper civilization can be built. Something has seriously gone awry in Placer Center, aka Hell’s Hinges. Individual initiative and power have subsided into crowds and groups, controlled by an alien to basic Anglo-American values of domestic life. It is perhaps not the case that Hell’s Hinges simply mirrors unpleasant developments in American culture and society since the end of the Civil War, but there had been phenomenal transformations, sometimes even referred to as a “revolution.” As Peter Conn has observed, a culture experiencing such great changes is likely to generate a strong counter-revolutionary movement also. For instance, against the organizational tendencies of the era, pervading all forms of life at the time, and “as a direct reaction against these tendencies, the myth of individualism was never more tenaciously embraced than in these years. ‘Collective man’ was not compatible with the requirements of the American imagination. . . . What seemed, from one perspective, to suffocate individualism became,


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from a different vantage point, a cause to reaffirm the idea of the individual.”25 The very idea of conversion super-emphasizes the notion of individual agency. And whereas the popular culture of journalism emphasized the leading businessmen as the great individuals, for another popular culture, there was always the cowboy, the Westerner, the loner, with his readiness to draw his six-guns.

In this instance, Blaze Tracy, a lone individual against the crowds of men and women in the saloon society, takes over the role of the purifier of the frontier town, in effect, burning it to the ground as the citizens flee the inferno. And the question is how such a narrative of the weak minister and resolute converted bad guy would play for a film audience in 1916. Clearly, a basic Protestant ideology was very much intact with the attempts to reform various institutions in the culture of early modernism. For film audiences, in 1916 and continuing throughout the twentieth century, the lone vigilante cleaning up a town with violence and moral fervor has continued to be a crowd pleaser. But whereas the Progressive reformers tended to be quite modest in their views and goals, presenting a tone of a mild and judicious movement, Hell’s Hinges is much more radical, or rather, exaggerated, as was felt appropriate for a popular, mainly working class and immigrant film audience of the era.

The saloon group seems to have greater social solidarity than the Christian group. Yet, why does the saloon society feel so threatened by the arrival of the parson? Why does Silk offer Dolly anything she wants if she can ruin the parson? Why is the West seen as in need of apocalyptic violence for its cleansing? How did the West come to represent all of the negative values that many commentators on the era thought belonged to the new era of industrial, urban capitalism? If there is a paranoid intensity of the saloon society against the petticoat brigade, it must have something to do with the prohibition movement, a crusade that was thought to be able to transform society in a number of ways. The opponents of prohibition are afraid that the privilege of drinking will be outlawed, as in fact it eventually was. The aggressive militancy of the saloon contingent seems to have taken the initiative from the classic militancy of the evangelical Christian church. However, the church contingent is mainly concerned to protect itself, not to engage in a push to convert the saloon people.

The film was produced during a strong campaign for prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Blaze is capable of handling his liquor, whereas Robert is not. But once Robert has tried alcohol, he becomes immediately addicted. Or his first drink has a lasting effect on him, making him crazy for more liquor whereby he loses his dignity and self-control completely. Even Dolly gets drunk, and so does Silk, both prominent figures of the

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saloon contingent whom we might think would be able to handle their liquor. And the men of the saloon apparently are drunk enough to get them to do the unthinkable, burn down the church. Such is the power of alcohol. Liquor generates mass craziness. To be crazed by alcohol is perfectly natural for men who also act in crowds, who get their courage, such as it is, in crowds. But Blaze is able to hold his liquor, just as he is also able to maintain control of himself even as he has become enamored of Faith.

Likewise, as we see in Zane Grey, this is a period that is shocked by what was called the “white slave trade” in women. The nation was shocked to read an official governmental report on the women drawn into prostitution.26 As Grey depicts the Mormons, they are in effect white slavers, capturing women as sex slaves. Mormon polygamy was seen by the outside world as enabling males to force women into sex slavery.27

Paul Boyer’s Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 offers a comprehensive account of the cultural issues on reform that are central for an understanding of the political/cultural background for a film like Hell’s Hinges. The Progressive Era was a highly moralized attack on the new urban world of industrial capitalism, and urban reality was believed to be corrupted by alcohol and prostitution, the two evils ensconced in the town of Hell’s Hinges. As Boyer points out, the problems were considered widespread throughout the nation. As Hart could have known, certain towns in the West were notorious for the openness with which prostitution was rampant, the center of focus along with the saloon. Boyer notes that as early as 1896, in New York State, a law was passed that “outlawed Sunday liquor sales except when the beverage was served with a meal in a hotel.” As a consequence, many a saloon became a “hotel” with a restaurant, which quickly became a cover for “the haunts of prostitutes and their customers.” This describes what is going on in Silk Miller’s saloon as we see when Dolly invites Reverend Henley to her birthday dinner. Thus, as Boyer notes, “terms like ‘the saloon’ and ‘the brothel’ became, at times, simply code words for the larger menace of urban social change.”28

The interjection of the picture of a single woman kneeling at the foot of the cross indicates that the film is designed to seduce the audience into believing that a righteous individual can emulate the worshipper who remains loyal to the suffering on the cross, in the midst of a storm-tossed sea. The fact that Blaze does not feel obligated to emulate Faith in her behavior dismisses, in effect, such a sermonic message. If Faith mimics the integrity of a lone worshipping individual, Blaze takes the role of the avenger, as if the roles were to be divided up between women and men. If


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there is a sermonic message, it is that pure loyalty to the suffering and sacrifice for one’s faith is not really going to work in the world without the supplement of the avenger willing to use violence against the mass of moral offenders in their utter corruption.

Or, better yet, Blaze’s violence is fairly gentle. It just has an apocalyptic effect in the destruction of the town. No one in the saloon has any doubts about Blaze’s willingness to shoot anyone who does not retreat and cower before his double drawn six shooters. They know Blaze from his life in the saloon culture. He is one of their own, after all, and he holds onto the features of his life as the leader of the saloon culture, even as he has been converted by the good woman. The conversion story is, for Blaze, not quite complete, as there is the holdover and synthesis of pre-conversion and conversion Blaze. And it does not seem to occur to him to move, in the end, into the society of the disbanded church society.

As with Zane Grey’s Lassiter and Jane, Hart’s Blaze and Faith move, at the end, alone into the wilderness. Hart’s The Narrow Trail (1917) makes fairly explicit what this move signifies. In this later film, both of the characters have lived a checkered life and they reform each other, in effect, into a purity that entails their moving from their former paths as outlaw and prostitute into “the cool of the clean-living mountains,” according to an intertitle. It was not merely President Theodore Roosevelt’s commitment to the preservation of the unspoiled environment that gave new significance to the wilderness and environmental issues. By this time, religious groups such as the Methodist Chautauqua camp meeting retreats into unspoiled nature emphasized the religious significance of the wilderness. As Blaze mentions to Faith, previously in his life he has ridden on the “wrong trail,” and now, with Faith, he feels that he is on the right trail toward redemption. And now, with the destruction of the church and its community as well as the town of Hell’s Hinges, Blaze leads Faith into what some Protestant groups thought was a space “closer to God, with a promise of rejuvenation in the bosom of God’s nature.” The Chautauqua camp meetings in the wild “altered spiritual consciousness by removing [participants] from the familiar patterns of home and placing them in an otherworldly religious landscape—a terra spiritualis.”29 The emphasis here could be construed either as doctrinally Christian or as a purely secular belief in the purifying powers of nature alone.

According to Richard Koszarski, any kind of genre film from about 1915 to the middle twenties used the formula of melodrama. “Melodrama continued to represent the dominant stylistic mode in Hollywood all through the silent period,” and this dominance “can be seen in the high

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percentage of genre films produced in this period. These films utilized recurrent situations, locales, and characters and were perfectly suited to an age that saw most of its dramatic conflicts in highly conventionalized terms,” and the “most popular of silent genres was unquestionably the Western.”30 Hell’s Hinges could not be expected to make its appeal with a drama that would be more “realistic” than the audience expectations for melodrama. Jean Louis Leutrat, in his study of Westerns of the 1920s, claims that the genre did not become pure, or strictly identifiable, as a Western until it broke away from the earlier modes of dramatic presentation such as melodrama, burlesque, comedy, etc., in 1929 with Victor Fleming’s version of The Virginian (1929).31 But popular film genres in the United States have perhaps never achieved anything like the imagined purity of genre.

Eileen Bowser suggests that films identified as Westerns became especially popular by being filmed in the West with Western landscapes. In the early period of filmmaking, every evening’s film program had to include a Western. And “[’t]he demand is all for Wild West drama.’”32 As film production companies moved west, producers “found fast action, rugged landscape, and authenticity” in Westerns that generated audience enthusiasm throughout the United States and Europe. Bowser also notes that, once the companies moved west, the films classified as Westerns offered action that could belong to the recent past or to the actual present. The time of the action in Hell’s Hinges could be the present day, 1916, for all that any viewer cared.

As almost all film historians claim, Hart brought a new visual realism to the screen in his Westerns. Of course, Hart sees that there are possibilities for a moral struggle between two militant forces, and in the character of Blaze Tracy there is the possibility of a moral reformation, even if it might be incomplete. As Cawelti rightly noted, the vaunted “realism” of Hart’s dramas derived from the visual trappings of the film—the setting in the actual West, cowboy clothing, six guns, ten gallon hat, horses, dust—and not from the dramas which were always highly melodramatic. It’s not as if Hart and his producers did not know what they were doing by this split between setting and moral drama. Their use of melodrama, common for all genre films of the era, as Richard Koszarski notes,33 posits a moral truth behind the surface reality of the world, so that, for us, Hart’s realism, as expressed in melodrama, is twofold—the realist setting of the Western town and the realism of a moral Manichaeism that lies both on the surface and behind, the heritage of nearly three centuries of the cultural dominance of Protestantism in America. This is an imagination that Hart’s audience in 1916 readily


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understood. There is, however, for the earlier culture, no split, but simply realism, the synthesis of the real and the truth.34

And so, a narrative such as Hell’s Hinges gathers many strands from its cultural moment and performs its own synthesis of these many themes from the discourse of the early twentieth-century America. One could argue, as has Forrest Robinson,35 that the synthesis is really a way of having everything both ways—for gender representations (the New Woman who represents the authority of a feminized Protestant Christianity in the U.S.; the manly man who is also seduced by the virginal woman, but who takes on his chivalrous role with apocalyptic violence. No matter how subdued he is by the woman, he is always capable of extraordinary violence when he needs it), for the connections between the sacred and the secular. There is the institutional minister brought to destruction by a woman in the “traffic in souls.” What the narrative posits on the one hand it can also take away with the other, or vice versa. But it seems that Hart and his prolific screenwriter hit on a deeply resonant synthesis of ideas floating around in 1916, a synthesis that historians have to take seriously when struggling to define what the Progressive era really was or what it was supposed to have been just recently.

Notes 1 The Western, From Silents to the Seventies. New York: Penguin Books, 1973, 83. 2 The Invention of the Western Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 128. 3 Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976, 230, 231. 4 “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde,” in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative. London: BFI, 1990, 56-62. 5 Ronald L. Davis, William S. Hart, Projecting the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003, 83. 6 Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 233. 7 A production blurb for the film, as quoted by Diane Kaiser Koszarski, The Complete Films of William S. Hart, A Pictorial Record. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1980, 39. 8 I have used the fine DVD version of the film in the collection Treasures of the American Film Archive with Program Notes by Scott Simmon and Notes on the Music by Martin Marks. San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, (2000).

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9 Riders of the Purple Sage, Introduction and Notes by William R. Handley. New York: Random House, Modern Library, 2002, 10. 10 Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 96. 11 On the concept of the New Woman in the Progressive era, a short summary of an extensive bibliography is in Lois Rudnick, “The New Woman,” in 1915:The Cultural Moment, edited by Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991, 69-81. 12 Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006, 109. Abel acknowledges that he is taking these ideas from Andrew Brodie Smith, “The Making of Broncho Billy,” in Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2003, 133-56. 13 Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 235. 14 Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 236. 15 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 132. 16 Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 7-11. 17 Sloan, The Loud Silents, 78-84. 18 Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 13,14. 19 The Feminization of American Culture. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, 97, 89, 99. 20 The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F. D. R. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959, 150. Hofstadter draws mainly on the work of Henry May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America, New York: Harper and Row,1949. 21 The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F. D. R., 152. 22 My Life East and West, edited by Martin Ridge. Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1994, Chapter II: “The Unbroken West.” 23 See Clifford P. Westermeier, Trailing the Cowboy, Caldwell, Idaho, The Caxton Printers, Ltd. 1955, 189-229. 24 Susan Curtis, “The Son of Man and God the Father: The Social Gospel and Victorian Masculinity,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, Ed. by Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1990, 73. 25 The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 13. 26 Sloan, The Loud Silents, 82. 27 See Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, Chapter 6: “White Slaves in Purple Sage,” 121-149. 28 Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978, 210. Especially valuable is Chapter 13, “Battling the Saloon and the Brothel,” 191ff.

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