If you’re running for president as a Republican, chances are good that you are wearing cowboy boots,’ noted Ryan Teague Beckwith in a photo essay published by Time magazine in 2015. Beckwith’s assertion came with receipts: photographs showing cowboy-booted Republicans from nearly every corner of the nation, from Sarah Palin of Alaska, to Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, to Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, to Rick Perry and Ted Cruz of Texas. Wearing cowboy boots, it seems, signals Republican fealty to an ostensibly traditional, more conservative United States.
The cowboy boot fetish, suggested Beckwith, began with Ronald Reagan, the hobby rancher, cowboy actor, and US president from 1981-89. Reagan, however, was a latecomer. The prototype for the cowboy conservative was Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona, who won the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1964. Goldwater joined West and South against the moderate, ‘Eastern establishment’, Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, creating what the California governor Pat Brown called ‘the stench of fascism’. In her recent book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) – currently, Amazon’s top seller in the political history category – the historian Heather Cox Richardson expands and modifies Brown’s observation, arguing that Goldwater’s ‘Movement Conservatism’ – meaning vehement opposition to civil rights bills, communism, labour unions and social spending – solidified a neo-Confederate alliance between West and South that permanently transformed the Republican Party.
In Richardson’s telling, the Reagan/Goldwater cowboy persona evolved out of literary myths manufactured in the late 19th century specifically to counter Reconstruction era racial reforms, myths that 20th-century reactionaries used in their battle against civil rights. The anti-civil rights, anti-government alliance between South and West that began in the late 19th century, she argues, continued with early 20th-century opposition to anti-lynching bills before spawning Movement Conservatism in the 1960s.
What I’d like to offer here is a counter-history. To the degree that progressives formed successful constituencies in the 20th century – in economic, gender, racial and even foreign policy matters – the West was key. What I’ll further argue is that the Western ‘cowboy myth’ often lent support to progressive politics. Contrary to what many modern progressives imagine, the conservative monopoly on the cowboy myth is as much a commentary on the Democratic Party’s drift toward a ‘professional middle-class’ constituency as it is a commentary on Republican reaction.