(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Friday 26. September, John McCain and Barack Obama meet for a duel in the sunset over the Mississippi.
There is perhaps little reminiscent of The Wild West when the presidential candidates discuss foreign and security policy in the first of a total of three debates during this year's election campaign. But even though six-year-olds and Stetson hats have long been replaced with neat suits and oral ammunition when powerful men settle in, understanding what is at stake with the history lessons in two new books.
Former NRK correspondent in the US and Latin America Joar Hoel Larsen has written Dead or Alive. Cowboys in American history from Davy Crocket to George W. Bush, while historian Hans Olav Lahlum publishes the Presidents. From George Washington to George W. Bush.
A global sheriff?
The authors end up near each other, as the titles suggest. But the roads there are markedly different. Both books use individuals as a starting point to understand the long lines that have led to the polarized political situation in today's United States. Still, the presidents and cowboys represent two different versions of history.
When Thomas Jefferson completed "The Louisianna Purchase" in 1803, thus doubling the US area, and when James K. Polk repeated the business and re-doubled the country's reach by means of a clarification of the northern border and a war against Mexico in 1846-48, arose a huge area to be civilized by the white man. At the same time, this ideology was called "Manifest destiny," and it justified the God-given right of the settlers to expel the Indians. Thus, the hard-headed cowboys became the vanguard of civilization, and according to Hoel Larsen, America's self-proclaimed global sheriff role is an extension of this tradition.
Admittedly, Theodor Roosevelt sat on the horseback for a few years, and was a cattle owner and sheriff's assistant in the 1880s. He also formed a voluntary regiment of friends from the West, called "The Rough Riders," who fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898. But in Lahlum's variant, the scattered "Native American wars" in this phase of US history are at an altitude interesting side sports to the events in Washington and the protracted conflict between the northern and southern states, culminating in a bloody civil war of 1861-65.
Symbols in the saloon
Lahlum has made mini-portraits of all American presidents so far, and supplements it with some historical considerations. They are about assessing the presidents 'relative efforts, commenting on whether each one is over- or underestimated, and about following the tensions between isolationism and internationalism or idealism and realism, as well as the development of American democracy and the United States' relations with the outside world.
In a solid publication that confines itself to adjusting the image of a couple of presidents, and which also includes some pages about the two candidates who are fighting to be the 44th in a row, some analytical estimates are gradually formed related to which characteristics required to become president, and to remain a successful one. One also gets an impression of the societal tensions between plantation owners and industrialists, as well as the development of the American party system. But by and large, this is traditional and safe history writing.
For Lahlum, the period between Abraham Lincoln, the president who won the Civil War, and Woodrow Wilson, the president who brought the United States into the First World War, is relatively uninteresting, a tale populated by mediocrities such as Chester Arthur, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley and some far greater figures Ulysses S. Grant and mentioned Theodore Roosevelt.
Hoel Larsen sees it differently. For him, these decades at the end of the 1800th century are the golden age of the cowboy, where right and wrong are sauced together in the saloons, while people like Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp rob banks and trains or try to stop those who do. He shows how the settler mentality and the border structure's social structure have influenced the development of the American nation state, and also points out the impact that western mythology would later have on American politics.
Thus, a difference in the philosophy of history is also noticeable. For Hoel Larsen, the battle of the Alamo in the war against Mexico, the defeat of General Custer at the Little Big Horn and the bombing of the ship Maine in the war against Spain are of great symbolic political significance. The same goes for Dime novels about the lives of western heroes and legendary moments of death, as well as John Wayne, western actor and conservative posterboy with white supremacy sympathies.
Theodor Roosevelt ran for mayor in New York in 1886 under the banner "The cowboy from the Dakotas", but it is only later that the political cowboy legends have proved to have great impact. In the 1950s, John Wayne made the western film a front line in the Cold War, while Dwight Eisenhower clapped his hands. Lyndon B. Johnson often wore boots and Stetson, while Ronald Reagan brought Hollywood's cowboy cliché to the White House. It is these traditions that incumbent President George W. Bush is trying to live up to, and which he explicitly referred to at a press conference a few days after the terrorist attacks in September 2001, when he spoke of Osama bin Laden being "Wanted, dead or alive". .
Lincoln Vs. Roosevelt
There are several examples of history also playing a role in the ongoing battle over who will succeed Bush. Lahlum recalls, for example, that Obama launched his candidacy on historic grounds in Springfield, Illinois. Nearly 150 years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had delivered his famous speech about the United States as a "divided home" in the same place. Obama reiterated his mantra of uniting the nation, and at the same time linked it to the Civil War hero's message, which seems particularly strong as Obama seems to be the one to finally transcend the US racism trauma. McCain, for his part, is often referred to as a "maverick", ie an independent politician with courage, integrity and his own opinions. According to Hoel Larsen, the word originates from the 1850s, when the lawyer Samuel A. Maverick sold a bullock cattle to a neighbor. Maverick had been lax with his herd and lethargic with the marking. The neighbor, on the other hand, was so ambitious in his attempt to collect the Maverick cattle that he created a new concept: a "maverick", ie a herd member going astray.
Whether it's Abraham Lincoln fan Obama or Theodor Roosevelt supporter McCain who lefler most convincingly with the past in 2008, we will hardly know before November 4. But that history lives on in American politics seems obvious.
So far, Obama has a narrow lead in the polls. But as the first duel is being prepared in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, nothing has been decided.
While the senator who may be the first African-American president has God-given speeches and regularly impresses when speaking alone to a large audience, greater questions are asked about his abilities as a debater. About McCain, on the other hand, it has been said that arguing with him is like dancing with a cactus.
