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O'Boyle discusses the vision of the frontier in early Western films from the Walt Disney Co, including "Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier," "Davy Crockett and the River Pirates," and "Tonka."

My cousin Jerry and I were both twelve years old in 1958, probably the cultural equivalent of nine or ten today. We were also best friends, inseparable in play and in agreement on all things-except one. My personal hero was Colonel William Barret Travis of the Alamo (who was, not coincidentally, a distant ancestor on my mother's side). Jerry's was Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer, hero (so Jerry stoutly claimed) of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The minefield of toy soldiers strewn across our respective bedroom floors left little doubt as to our sympathies. Mine was a Marx Davy Crockett Alamo playset, complete with fort, cannon, buff-colored plastic Texans, and dark-blue plastic Mexican soldiers. Unfortunately, the good folks at the Louis Marx toy company did not share my cousin's enthusiasm for Custer, so he had to improvise his personal Little Bighorn from legions of generic toy cowboys, cavalrymen, and Indians in a rainbow of primary colors. He even conscripted one of my beige Alamo figures to play the role of the buckskin-clad Custer. Hanging over his bed was his proudest possession: a reproduction lithograph of Custer's Last Fight, a cartoon-heroic depiction of the battle that once graced taprooms across the country, courtesy of the AnheuserBusch brewery.

When word came out that the Walt Disney Company was making a movie about Custer's Last Stand, it was all Jerry talked about for weeks. He stayed over at my house the night before the premier, and could not sleep in his excitement. While I did not share his enthusiasm, we were still inseparable, so noon on a brisk December day in 1958 found us first in line at the Tower Theater for the opening matinee of Disney's Tonka.

Ninety minutes later, Jerry ran out of the theater in tears.

In Disney's Tonka, Custer was portrayed as a dangerous megalomaniac, distrusted by his men as a bigoted, glory seeker, deaf to any opinion but his own. At Disney's Little Bighorn, the Sioux were the good guys. No wonder my cousin retreated in tears and confusion. His trusted American icon had just come violently into conflict with another-Walt Disney. My cousin's dilemma was an early indicator of the profound cultural impact of the Disney vision of the United States. Through the genre of the movie and television western, Disney became the primary transmitter of traditional American values for the first cadre of the single most powerful demographic unit in our nation's history-the baby boom generation.

Discovering the Audience

Those [Disney] experiences shaped those of us who were at Woodstock. I can't imagine the Vietnam War protests in some ways without all of us having sat around watching The Walt Disney Show. -Karal Ann Marling2

The modern Crockett craze, appearing in 1955, is now considered to be one of the great popular culture events of that decade. It was catapulted into existence by two of America's most formidable media forces: Walt Disney and television, and ignited by a new consumer audience: the baby boom generation. -Margaret J. King3

My cousin and I had no way of knowing it at the time, but we were part of the cutting edge of a phenomenon. We were two of the seventy-six million children born between the end of World War II and 1961, who grew up with a set of cultural assumptions about American society and our place in it that was dramatically different from previous generations. Our parents were the War Generation, the "The Good War," to use Studs Terkel's term, and a grateful government rewarded its veterans not with a deferred (until 1945) cash bonus as promised to World War I vets but with the GI Bill of Rights (Serviceman's Readjustment Act). It turned out to be the deal of a lifetime. Two of the bill's provisions, 4 percent home loans with no cash down and money for college education, transformed the social structure and the face of the United States.

Over two million returning veterans crowded the campuses of colleges and universities that had been on the brink of closing for lack of enrollment only a few years before, and they did not go alone. Before the baby boom came the marriage boom as Americans made up for their war-deferred youth with a vengeance. While demographers insisted that postwar birth rates traditionally returned to normal after the first wave of "welcome home" babies, the security of home ownership at an age unknown to their Depression-era parents' generation, along with the promise of upward mobility in a bullish economy, created a dynamic that defied tradition. By 1954 births topped 4 million a year, a rate that would continue for the next decade.

In 1945, the United States was the only Allied country with a massive, intact industrial base, ready to retool from war materiel to consumer goods. The GI Bill provided seed money for the emerging, modern middle classa numerically dominant working population with a host of advantages formerly reserved solely for the elite: general education, knowledge of other options and the freedom to pursue them, leisure time, discretionary income, and geographic and class (cultural) mobility. As if to complement this social mobility, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 (the Interstate and Defense Highway Act), authorizing construction of a 42,500-mile system of interstate highways.4 This mobility, abetted by a flourishing auto industry and affordable gasoline, enabled the bulk of the population to live for the first time at some distance from their jobs. That, in turn, set the stage for entrepreneurs such as builder Abraham Levitt to purchase cheap land in the rural outback of Long Island, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania's Bucks Country and put to peacetime use prefabrication construction techniques developed for the Navy. The areas' affordable, mass-produced homes, complete with major appliances, were set on winding streets and centered on village greens with shops, schools, churches, a playground, and a community swimming pool. By 1951, Levittowns housed more than 17,000 families and set the style for the emerging suburbs.

The conditions that created the baby boom also reformulated the concept of childhood. The contrast between the idealized childhood associated with the name Disney and founder Walt Disney's actual Missouri childhood is revealing. Numerous Disney biographers have documented Disney's early years in terms redolent of child abuse: hard labor on the family farm at the age of five under conditions so grueling that they drove his two oldest brothers to leave home, a strict disciplinarian father, and the notorious paper route delivering both morning and evening editions before and after school-essentially an exhausting full-time job. Disney himself recalled how "...the papers had to be stuck between the storm doors. You couldn't just toss them on the porch. And in the winters there'd be as much as three feet of snow. I was a little guy and I'd be up to my nose in the snow. I still have nightmares about it" (qtd. in Schickel 55). Yet Disney's upbringing was typical for his time and place, one in which children were contributors to the family economic unit. The childrearing philosophy of the era echoed the time-honored "scientific" philosophy of notables such as Granville Stanley Hall, John B. Watson, and the popular Dr. L. Emmett Holt, who denounced "coddling" of babies, particularly by playing, or even demonstrating affection (Jones 55). While such attitudes had been softening for decades, it took the relative affluence of the postwar era to finally release children from the obligations of contributing financially to the family and to free parents to follow their instincts. Thus, the first millionaire created by the baby boom was not Walt Disney, but a 43-year-old Connecticut pediatrician named Benjamin McLane Spock who authored the best-selling new title ever published in the United States, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Our contemporary assumptions of childhood-school, play, and the paper route reserved for personal spending money-are recent, another by-product of postwar affluence, and one that prompted philosopher and educator John Dewey to remark that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the child.5

This unprecedented combination of events and conditions positioned Walt Disney culturally as the most prominent and influential definer of values for the most demographically powerful generation in U.S. history. By the mid-1950s, the rapidly changing social dynamic and the massive numbers of boomers crowding into the school systems were overwhelming the traditional mechanisms of the socialization process. As Landon Jones notes, "Every society seeks to transmit its culture to the younger generation through parents and teachersand now there were not enough teachers to go around" (58). But the baby boomers had already discovered a new transmitter of culture-television.

The equalizing new medium of television enabled a continent-wide, ethnically diverse population to share a common set of values, memories, and cultural benchmarks.6 In 1945, the year of my birth, only 5,000 American households owned television sets. By 1948 there were over a million, and the numbers grew at a phenomenal rate: 8 million by 1950, and 17 million in 1952. The burgeoning numbers of the new child audience subtly but rapidly shifted the dynamic of television programming. In 1952, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett was a continuation of a popular radio show centered on the challenges of parents relating to their children; by 1957, comparable shows such as Leave It to Beaver routinely focused on the corollary: the problems of children relating to their parents.

By 1958, when my cousin and I watched Tonka's Custer ride to his well-deserved end, there were 42 million televisions in America's living rooms (Communications)-and each weekday, three out of four television sets in use between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. were tuned to Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club (Jackson 59), one of two Disney-produced shows that cemented his cultural grip on the emerging new audience. Broadcast by ABC as part of a deal to raise money for his new Disneyland theme park, the show was a mix of live performance, vintage cartoons, and specially produced serials and "edutational" segments such as "Curiosity with Jiminy Cricket,"7 and "Inside Report on Washington," hosted by child performer Dirk Metzger. Unlike previous children's shows such as Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Ding Dong, School, Pinky Lee, and the later Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rogers ' Neighborhood, which featured adults entertaining children, The Mickey Mouse Club starred childrenthe Mouseketeers. The production can be viewed as uneven and even primitive by today's standards, but Disney was firm on one point: "We're not going to talk down to the kids. Let's aim for the twelve year old. The younger ones will watch, because they'll want to see what their older brothers and sisters are looking at. And if the show is good enough, the teenagers will watch too, and their parents" (Thomas 290). It was a formula few children could resist.

The episodic nature of weekly television offered Disney the opportunity to revive an art form previously believed extinct-the serial. The Mickey Mouse Club introduced two western serials, The Adventures of Spin and Marty, starring child actors Tim Considine and David Stollery, supported by veteran western stars Harry Carey Jr., and Roy Barcroft; and Corky and White Shadow, featuring Mouseketeer Darlene Gillespie backed up by Buddy Ebsen and character actor Lloyd Corrigan.8 Of the two, it was The Adventures of Spin and Marty, the first "buddy movie" for the boomer generation, that caught the imagination of the first-wave boomers. Running for three seasons, the series serves as an example of Disney's gift for recasting classic folk tales for contemporary audiences. Spin and Marty retold the American frontier myth of the west as character builder-the place that would "make a man out of you." A century earlier, the myth was personified in Theodore Roosevelt, a selfdescribed soft, Eastern-educated mama's boy, who made the journey westward to the Dakotas to find himself. He returned as Teddy Roosevelt, self-affirmed individual, Rough Rider, straight shooter, pugilist, outdoorsman, and big-game hunter. In Disney's retelling, Master Martin Markham, a soft, Eastern-educated mama's boy, is sent west to the Triple-R Ranch, a cowboy-style summer camp in California. His experiences mature him into Marty Markham, a self-affirmed individual: a horse-loving, squaredealing, conflict-resolving, team player, and an appreciator, rather than a tamer, of nature. The evolution of Martin into Marty echoed Walter Elias Disney's own westward journey and evolution into Walt Disney (the series was filmed on his own ranch), and the values he promoted are still agreed on as models to be emulated by individuals across our diverse cultural and political spectrum.

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If The Mickey Mouse Club dominated the children's hour, it was the prime-time, family-oriented Disneyland program that proved children's clout. The hour-long weekly series premiered on ABC-TV on 27 October 1954, when the leading edge of the baby boom were nine years old.9 Conceived in large part as a public-relations venture for Disney's films and theme park, Disneyland introduced cinematic standards to television programming, filming in Technicolor, which even Disney's closest advisors thought extreme since the episodes were to be broadcast in black and white. The show quickly made it into the top 10 of the Nielson ratings, and when, on the evening of Wednesday, 13 December 1954, a little-known, 29year-old actor named Fess Parker appeared on living room television screens as Davy Crockett, Indian fighter, the show attracted 40 million viewers.

Although two-thirds of the Crockett saga took place east of the Mississippi, the driving themes and evocations were immediately recognizable to a young audience already familiar with the western genre. The "Disney effect" was immediate and dramatic. As director Steven Spielberg recalled, "I was in third grade at the time. Suddenly the next day, everybody in my class but me was Davy Crockett. And because I didn't have my coonskin cap and my powder horn, or Old Betsy, my rifle, and the chaps, I was deemed the Mexican leader, Santa Anna. And they chased me home from school until I got my parents to buy me a coonskin cap" (Jones 50).

Overnight, the baby boomers had flexed their developing muscles and shifted the foundations of the marketing world. No one had anticipated that children were a consumer power,10 not even Disney, who recalled later, "We had no idea what was going to happen to Crockett. Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo. It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero" (qtd. in Maltin 142). Parker quickly recorded "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," a ditty originally knocked off by studio composers to fill air time when it was discovered that the series ran a few minutes short; it rocketed to number one on the Hit Parade for 13 weeks (Jones 50)." More than 10 million coonskin caps were sold, boosting the wholesale price of raccoon skins from twenty-six cents a dozen to eight dollars. It was the first boomer fad, a seven-month, $300-million buying spree. Disney's insistence on theatrical production values and Technicolor paid off handsomely. Even though the television series had already been seen free by 90 million people, the feature film release in June 1955 reaped a theatrical profit of almost $2.5 million.12

In 1957, after losing the time slot to ABC and Disneyland for two seasons, NBC countered by copying Disney's big-screen style with Wagon Train, the most expensive western series on television. ABC produced Cheyenne, Maverick, and Wyatt Earp, which forced Disney to develop westerns as well. Disney appeared at a studio meeting with ABC executives dressed in his Frontierland western garb, complete with six-guns. He twirled the revolvers and laid them down on the table, saying, "OK, you want Westerns-you're gonna get Westerns!" But, he explained, they would be his kind of westerns (Thomas 303).

Although Disney entered the field reluctantly, the western proved an ideal vehicle to carry core values to American children hungry for role models. The western genre was already well established and ideally suited for the fundamental childhood socialization process-imaginative group play. Hopalong Cassidy had blazed the trail-by 1950, kids were toting $40 million worth of Hoppy merchandise-and before long children had a passel of western heroes to chose from. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers led the posse, but pint-sized buckaroos could also choose from a diversity of western styles: female (Annie Oakley), Mexican (The Cisco Kid), masked avenger (The Lone Ranger), modern aviator (Sky King), middle-class professional (Frontier Doctor), and even canine (The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin). Children who had never heard of Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History nevertheless instinctively recognized and reveled in the escape from authority figures, the joy of exploration, and the individual freedom offered by the American frontier myth.13

Yet, while the frontier looms large as a cultural touchstone of American identity, the western itself has limited scope. As British journalist Katharine Whitehorn observed, "I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot, but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one." Cultural historian Russell Nye points out that the western is, above all, about a place and a time:

As a matter of fact, the Western is fairly well restricted to the area west of Missouri and east of the Rockies, from West Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico to the Canadian border. Its time limits are approximately 1865 to 1890, that is, the cowboy and trail town era, beginning with the early cattle drives and ending with the completion of the railroad network in the Plains states. (300-01)

Disney the innovator had little interest in covering old ground. Disney's way meant reinterpreting the western form as a value-driven story in a frontier setting. His television and film "westerns" covered the Plains states (Westward Ho, the Wagons, 1956 and Tonka, 1958), west Texas (Texas John Slaughter [TV], 1958 and Old Yeller, 1957), and the southwest (The Littlest Outlaw, 1955; The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca [TV], 1958; Ten Who Dared, 1960), but also the early postcolonial frontier of Tennessee, the Florida Trace, and the Ohio Valley (Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter [TV], 1954 and The Light in the Forest, 1958) as well as the Pacific frontier of Spanish California in the made-fortelevision Zorro (1957). These early Disney westerns were produced over a scant five years (1955-60). They had a cultural significance far beyond their aesthetic merits (which veer wildly from excellent to abysmal) precisely because they focused on driving themes-values-rather than locale and were positioned before an audience hungry to act them out, again and again, in backyards and playgrounds across the nation. Although the Walt Disney Studios still continues to produce the occasional western (Savage Sam, 1963; The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, 1967; The Castaway Cowboy, 1974; and The Apple Dumpling Gang, 1975), the first-wave baby boomers had (literally) played out the mythic potential of the genre by the early 1960s. But while the television and filmic evocations evolved from sheriff and pioneer to private eye and space explorer, the themes behind the stories did not.'4 It is often difficult to isolate the extent of audience appeal of the thematic core of Disney animation or theme parks because there is nothing to compare them to. They are "invented" forms, so distinct from the competition that they essentially stand alone. However the same values and themes permeate all Disney projectsand there is no shortage of contemporary westerns for comparison.

Shaping the Storyteller

The American story created the American people, but part of its magic was that it created a story about women and men who would in time choose their own story's outcome. -Benjamin Barber (267)

The difference between Disney's characterization of Custer in Tonka and the more traditional Hollywood incarnation of the Boy General-swashbuckling Errol Flynn as the last man standing in the epic They Died With Their Boots On (Warner Brothers-First International Pictures, 1942)-is the difference between Walt Disney the man and Hollywood the institution. Despite the fact that his studio has won more Academy Awards than any other, Walt Disney was the perennial outsider in the film industry. He was an artist/storyteller from America's heartland in an industry dominated by businessmen emigres from New York City. No one was more aware of this than the man himself: "Look, we live out here in the cornfield. All these years we've been turning out corny entertainment. I don't consider myself a big producer like Louis B. Mayer or Darryl F. Zanuck; I'm not in their class" (Thomas 294). Unlike those other studio heads, Walt Disney personally involved himself in the development of every project that bore his name. The result was, and remains, something that no other studio can claim-a body of work with a unified theme.

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Disney did not invent the theme that, for lack of a better term, could be called "Americaness." Instead, he both was shaped by and reflected it. Disney's formula for choosing material was simple: "Styles may change on the surface, but at the bottom the big audience taste doesn't change. They like sympathetic characters and lifelike action. And that's what I like, too, whether it's cartoons, live action, or all those creatures at Disneyland" (qtd. in Miller 34). Raised in the culture of middle America, Disney only made films he liked, and, as in the high arts tradition, the big themes, with their perennial appeal, carried the work.

"Americaness" is born of many styles and many histories. Historian Steven Watts credits the modernist and populist movements that flourished in Disney's youth with shaping Disney's values. While there is much to this, neither modernism nor populism developed in a cultural vacuum. The values and assumptions that drove both movements were in place far earlier. Modernism's goal was to recombine elements of human experience that had been separated by the Victorianshuman and animal, reason and emotion, intellect and instinct-to reconstruct the totality of human nature. Populism's ideal was a life close to nature, a distrust of urban industrial society and the "money power," esteem for village life, and the glorification of the common man. They were among those values that forged the nation. Disney's contribution was to animate those values-bring them to life-by adding to their weight and currency as all artists do, by re-casting them to make them speak to the cultural agenda of the moment.

History as Myth

As more than thirty-three million people visited these attractions (Disneyland and Walt Disney World) in 1987, one might fairly say that Walt Disney has taught people more history, in a more memorable way, than they ever learned in school, to say nothing of history museums. -Michael Wallace (34)

The difference between "real" and "false" history is deeply problematic. History of any sort is an imaginative discourse built out of some subset of available information, shaped by one or more available literary tropes, and presented as a gambit motivated by conditions contemporaneous to its invention. There is thus no essentialist history to be "killed." Disney's histories are no more guilty of this capital crime than those of Gore Vidal, Carl Sandberg, or, for that matter, Henry Steele Commager and William Appleman Williams. What is important is to attend to the ideological metathemes that motivate a particular history. -Stephen M. Fjellman (411 )

Disney as a storyteller recognized that history is myth-not in the popular meaning of fanciful legends, but myth as defined by E. H. Carr in What Is History?-the act of giving meaning to the past. The creation of myth is the act of making "cosmos" from chaos, from the million unrelated details of life as it is lived through time by the thousands of nations or millions of individuals. It is the willful act of creating meaning in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about who we are, how we got to be that way, and what we hold to be true and worthy. Those values-or archetypes, to use a less-loaded termcomprise the American vision. They are Fjellman's ideological "metathemes" that motivate our history. It was those values that pervaded and shaped Disney the man; Disney the storyteller coded them into twentiethcentury media. They met with acceptance not because they were ideas new to Americans, but quite conversely, because we the public recognized in the Disney oeuvre our own stories, re-forged and freshly fashioned for our generation.

One such story is our suspicion of authority, an integral part of the American cultural matrix. The history and legend surrounding the very founding of our country (by rebels, prisoners, slaves, dissenters, and dissidents) urge us to be so. The reason can be found in the popular vision of who we are, as expressed in the words of immigrant poet Emma Lazarus engraved on the base of our premier national icon, the Statue of Liberty:

. . . Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

A prime mover of the American mythos is the vision of ourselves as descendants of the oppressed and exploited-by government, state religion, the military, financial interests, bureaucracy, and authority in general. Walt Disney's father lost the family farm in a bank foreclosure. Is it any wonder that the secret mastermind behind the evil land-grabbers in The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca is the president of the local bank? Is it really so odd that a generation raised on Disney's films views all businessmen as variations on his stock comic character, the scheming Alonzo P. Hawk, president of the Auld Lang Syne Finance Company? Disney's cultural mindset was consistent throughout his films. Although they may have been light, even frothy, entertainment, their messages were pure Americana: bankers were deceitful and avaricious, government officials incompetent and officious, politicians self-important and untrustworthy, and the military downright dangerous. Film critic Leonard Maltin noted that the Disney themes were present not only in his westerns, but in all his productions, even such lightweight comedies such as The Gnome-Mobile ( 1967). As Maltin observed, ". . . the film embodies many of the key elements of the Disney philosophy (as expressed in his films): children are smarter than most adults; man constantly destroys the beauty of nature; big business is cold and cruel" (251).

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The abiding American archetypes, those that powered 1950s Disney plot lines, continue to drive contemporary, 1990s thinking, just as they have constructed American collective thinking from the eighteenth century. The inevitable process of debate and definition has built our ideological metathemes from the past to their present shared meanings, meanings on which their future will depend. Once implanted, the notion that "All men are created equal" only waits for the concepts of "all," "men," and "equal" to be debated, elucidated, enlarged upon, and redefined generation after generation. When Disney's Davy Crockett matter-of-factly informed three landgrabbing racists that "Indians have rights. They're just folks like anybody else," the phrase, just folks like anybody else is the driving metathemerights derive from that basic fact of humanity. By standing beside his Indian neighbor, Crockett is not granting the Cherokee rights-they are not his to give. He and his companion George E. Russel are merely respecting the American concept of fair play by leveling the playing field.

A close examination of Disney's historical film output shows a consistent pattern of antiracist, antiwar, anti-authoritarian messages-messages often at odds with the prevailing popular mood of the time. His productions, from major-budget releases to the fluffiest of comedies, are case studies in paradigmatic American values. Disney's protagonists were instantly recognizable as American heroes: individualistic everymen and everywomen, answerable only to their own personal codes, self-effacing and soft-spoken, slow to anger, and reluctant to fight except in the defense of others.

Unlike most filmmakers of his era, Disney never made a film that glorifled war. This was reflected even in the midst of Davy Crockett's Alamo when Hans Conried, as the reformed gambler Thimblerig, pauses in the midst of a cannonade to declaim, "They say that war is the most exalted experience a man can endure. To me it is the most miserable and untheatrical method of suicide."'5 Disney missed few opportunities to reflect on the American metatheme that the only trustworthy army is a citizen army. The Disney view of a professional military is a further reflection on our historical one-to be tolerated, but never trusted.

It is no wonder the belligerent, selfaggrandizing Custer did not make Disney's cut for the hero's role. As a midwesterner, Walt Disney reflected our deep-seated American suspicion of authority. In Disney films the professional military are either pompous buffoons like Davy Crockett's Major Tobias Norton, dangerous tyrants like Zorro's Commandante Monastario, or both, as with Tonka's Custer. To Disney, the only praiseworthy army was one of citizen soldiers, who were voluntarily and reluctantly roused in the defense of their own community, a description that not only fit the Alamo defenders in Davy Crockett at the Alamo and the minutemen in Johnny Tremain, but Tonka's Sioux tribesmen.

Defining the Hero

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy-common clay, if you like--eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead.

And then there are the others-the noble ones, the heroes. -Jean Anouilh'6

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. -Raymond Chandler"

Disney's western heroes were not predestined as in Anouilh's European mold. In Disney's American pantheon, the common clay so sneeringly disparaged in the above quotation by Anouilh's protagonist was the essential material for molding a hero, a theme echoed by other recognized American originals from hard-boiled mystery author Chandler to singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who stated simply, "I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.'s

Disney's western protagonists, as in his other works, were, by definition, always drawn from the ranks of the common man. They came from slightly off-center; not predestined heroes but ordinary people face to face with extraordinary events. Instead of the solitary, mythic Daniel Boone, Disney chose to tell the story of Davy Crockett, a genuine but lesser-known and more populist figure. Rather than the already legendary Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Texas John Slaughter and Elfego Baca carried the story of men who tamed the wild west. Like the reluctant Crockett, who resists becoming the village justice of the peace until injustice to his Cherokee neighbor drives him to accept the job, Slaughter had no ambition to be a Texas Ranger. He was literally just passing through, looking for a place to settle, when his friend and partner was murdered by cattle rustlers. He enlisted in the Rangers not for revenge, but to defend the security and future of the entire community.

The ideal of community has long been an integral part of the American mythos. The western form itself is built around the necessary resolution of the inherent tension between the dominant individualism that drives American culture and the communal needs of society. A core paradigm of the American hero, from Chandler's dark knights to Disney's good neighbors, is that while they are answerable only to a personal code, they act only in defense of the community. Disney's Elfego Baca was also a community builder. Played with an endearing youthful cockiness by actor Robert Loggia, Baca's fame begins when he volunteers to arrest a drunken Anglo cowboy who is shooting up the primarily Mexican American town for fun. He does so using guile, not gunfire. But 80 of the cowboy's friends ride into town to put the upstart deputy in his place; Baca takes shelter in an adobe shack and holds off the lynch mob in a three-day siege. The cowboys fire 4,000 rounds into his refuge and even attempt to blast him out with dynamite, but Baca survives to become a sheriff, then an attorney dedicated to defending the powerless and the oppressed.

As with Davy Crockett, these embodiments of the American paradigm of fair play for all struck an instant note of recognition, acceptance, and emulation among their youthful audience. Like Spielberg with Crockett, I missed the first installment of Texas John Slaughter, but I knew something important had happened when the front brims of every cowboy hat in my neighborhood were simultaneously turned up (previously a hallmark of the comic sidekick), and my playmates twisted their toy gunbelts around to adopt Slaughter's crossdraw. Similarly, in 1959, when the words Hispanic, Latino, and Mexicanos had yet to supplant the ethnic slur wetback, we re-enacted Baca's siege over and over. It never occurred to us that there was anything odd about imitating a Mexican American hero whose rise to fame began by shooting it out with a mob of white cowboys. We understood the code of the west as interpreted by Disney. We knew who the good guy was-which is why, after a brief period of denial, my cousin's preoccupation with Custer soon dissipated in favor of baseball cards and the Civil War. Disney did not preach; he showed. Disney's heroes had impact on America's pre-teen audience because they embodied what we already believed it meant to grow up in America: to develop, live by, and be judged by a personal code of honor. Or, in the words of Davy Crockett, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead." Disney's heroic, true-life adventures celebrated fair play, the supremacy of the individual over government, belonging, community, connection with nature, self-redemption, self-sacrifice, and the belief that ordinary people could do extraordinary things-in other words, all the qualities Americans admire most about themselves, which are often the same ones foreign observers cite as admirable about us.

Living with the Legacy

So don't fault me for doubting that Disney, which used Davy Crockett to help convince a nation that Native Americans had no right to be here, suddenly intends to do right by blacks. Courtland Milloy on Disney's America (D1)

Sure we gotta grow, but not at the expense of the things this country was founded to protect.... Expansion ain't no excuse for persecuting a whole part of our people just because their skins are red and they're uneducated to our ways. -Fess Parker as Davy Crockett in Davy Crockett Goes to Congress (1955)

If Disney's cultural effect is frequently underappreciated or misread today it is perhaps because memory is such an imperfect vehicle. The stylization inherent in the medium itself imparts a timeless quality to much of Disney's feature-length animation, but his live-action adventures age poorly. The evolution of acting styles, the fading of Disney stars, and the heightened expectations of the 1990s audience in terms of production values all combine to date the films as quaint artifacts. Films such as Tonka and television miniseries such as The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca and Tales of Texas John Slaughter are only now appearing on the Disney Channel and in video stores after a hiatus of more than a quartercentury. Those not shaped by the Disney version tend to assign them to a universal file folder marked "westerns" in our cultural memory banks, along with thousands of hours of B-picture shoot-'em-ups produced by other studios more interested in stylization than substance-thus the gap between Courtland Milloy's racist image of Disney's Crockett cited above and the very different reality of the series' portrayal of the character as a champion of Native American rights. Milloy has obviously never seen the original Davy Crockett series but is basing his assumptions about Crockett's character on general principles of 1950s B-picture Hollywood, where "the only good Indian was a dead one."

But this was never the Disney version of Native America, not with Crockett, or The Light in the Forest (1958), or Tonka (1958), two other films featuring Native American storylines. Nor were they the only object lessons to showcase the Disney sense of fair play. Film critic Leonard Maltin frequently cites this seeming contradiction between the popular conception of Disney and the actuality. Referring to Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, Maltin observes, "It is also interesting to note that a film made under the aegis of Walt Disney shows Davy Crockett being 'used' by the President of the United States! Those who find nothing but pabulum in Disney's product ought to look again" (Maltin 124).

Indeed, when the story called for what Disney termed "hard facts," the storyteller pulled few punches.'9 Two of the most traumatic cinematic moments of the baby boom generation came from the Disney studios: the death of Bambi's mother and Tommy Kirk having to shoot his own dog in Old Yeller. Production staffers called for a lesstragic ending to Old Yeller, but Disney stood firm, arguing, "This is a Texas farm in 1869 and the dog has rabies; there's no way he can be saved.... The kids will cry, but it's important for them to know that life isn't all happy endings" (qtd. in Thomas 312). Disney's western heroes were expected to face "hard facts"; their measure was not honors or titles, but deeds. Their values are reflective of Thomas Paine's definition of integrity as constancy to an internal code of honor: "It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe." It is a definition handed down from generation to generation of Americans through our popular culture media and one still shared today by our television-raised generation. As Landon Jones points out in his "biography" of the baby-boom generation, Great Expectations, "The kids did not accuse their elders of false values but rather not living up to the ones they taught. They actually believed those homilies about fairness and justice Jim Anderson was preaching on Father Knows Best. If killing is wrong, they said, it is just as wrong in Vietnam as in Dallas" (Jones 113). 20

Since Disney films were primarily simple stories for pre-teens, the time inevitably comes when we outgrow Disney. Fortunately, as Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage, has noted, we "outgrow our outgrowing" (22). As adults, it is possible to look back with a sense of wonder at Disney's cultural assumptions from the 1950s because they seem more the stuff of the 1990s.

Disney's classic Old Yeller begins with former Crockett star Parker leaving his Texas ranch for a cattle drive to raise some much-needed cash. In the first five minutes we learn that all the local men are making the trip, leaving the job of maintaining and defending the ranch to the wives and children. Actress Dorothy McGuire's strong portrayal of the frontier wife and mother is based on the casual assumption that she could handle anything that came along, which proves true. It was also natural and believable to a pre-teen, baby boom audience. At the time I was being raised without a father by a mother who made it all happen on a full-time salary of $52.50 a week, less deductions. Young working widows with children were not uncommon in my post-World War II neighborhood.

It is arguable that many similar 1990s values took root from the seeds of Disney's embedded anti-authoritarian, antiracist, egalitarian, antiwar, and ecologically minded messages.21 If Disney's view of history still resonates, it may well be because it is firmly set in shared American fundamental cultural assumptions of the expectation of fairness; the dominance of the individual ethic; class mobility; and an "improvable" society. Disney western heroes work in the 1990s as well as they did in the 1950s because they are consistently American characters: personal in style, reasonable as models of behavior, and universal in appeal.

More than any other television or filmic storyteller, Disney gave shape and expression to the heroes of a rising generation by evoking the deep patterns of American metathemes set against the backdrop of that uniquely American period-the westward expansion. Even today, as the 40- and 50-something baby boomers continue to set the standards for heroism, depictions of Native Americans, and our relationship with nature, the original Disney vision of the west casts a long shadow across the cultural landscape. It is not unreasonable to assume that such a vision was readily absorbed by the young audience precisely because it came from a source whose communications, based on generations of experience, could be trusted. As Marty Sklar, president of Walt Disney Imagineering, noted about the popularity of Disney's EPCOT Center theme park, "Industry has lost credibility with the public, the government has lost credibility, but people still have faith in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck" (qtd. in Wallace 158).

For 12 years, as host of his own television program, Disney repeatedly and consistently promoted his classic American viewpoint from the most intimate and confidence-inspiring pulpit imaginable-our own living rooms. For many Americans in a time of massive social change, Disney was the only "family member" telling them consistent stories about who they were and what was expected of them. Any attempt to determine the extent of Disney's influence on our vision of ourselves as Americans must include one salient fact: it was not the Disney Company that named him "Uncle Walt." We did that ourselves.