COME DOWN FROM YOUR HIGH HORSE

"The Rough Rider"  Theodore Roosevelt by Phimister Proctor

The story goes that a small child was taken by his babysitter to visit this statue every day and it was very much beloved by the child.  His tender would say, "Do you want to go the park and see Teddy?" It was years and years before the kid realized that Teddy was not the name of the horse.

Below are the URL’s of posts I find enlightening, at least in little rays, when trying to think about the Charlottesville mess.  They are from educated, Manhattan-located, liberal-skewed (well, at least not white supremicist), successful people.  Maddow, of course, has the stigma of being female, highly educated, Jewish, and wealthy.  Etc.  You can’t find much contempt directed at Steve Benen, her male blog writer, but Maddow is a contempt-magnet.  YouTube has posts about “wipe that smirk off her face.”  I reckon I, too, often have a smirk on my face, but not about Maddow.  If you don’t know why, go read something else.  This won’t reassure you.

And I won’t stoop to interpreting Trump’s grimaces.

www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show  8-15-17

This is a highly relevant history of the USA and the KKK.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/what-trump-struggles-understand-about-confederate-statues

Mainly, they aren't about the confederacy.

www.slate.com/authors.matthew_dessem.html  How Did We Treat Monuments to White Supremacists When They Weren’t Our White Supremacists? 

Here’s where I’m coming from: north central east slope of the Rockies, practically in Canada and historically on the Blackfeet reservation.  In the Sixties I was married to Bob Scriver whose business was bronze statues of men on horses, sometimes monumental ones.  The history and emotional connections of men on horses go back to the high plateau Eurasian “mongol hordes” who swept down on Europe.  (Just like today's Jimgiwee raiders in Africa.)  It continued with the difference in status between cavalry and infantry.  I was a bit surprised that the police did not use horses for crowd control in Charlottesville, but trained horses and riders are expensive.  However, Manhattan and Portland both use them.  As did white overseers controlling black cotton pickers and chain gangs.  Kings (Also QE II) and Napoleons ride horses.

The history and emotions of big bronze statues go back through the periods of alternating war and peace: in war the bronze formed cannons, in peace the cannons were melted down and cast into monuments.  Then came war again and the monuments were once more used for cannon bronze.   It's a little like swords and plowshares.  These days for raids we use computer-controlled predator drones of many metals and rare substances, and when we create monuments we are likely to use lasers to cut names into stones.

Probably the torch-bearers and beat-down warriors (who may have thought they were in a production of “Game of Thrones”) did not know that the cast of characters would soon list them by name, onscreen as we watched.  Face recognition programs were in operation at vid feeds of the scene so people were being named and doxed even as they looked for their next victim.  This works both ways: Trump’s people want the names and url’s of every dissident on the internet.  Plus control of the internet (“regulation”).

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjjnpz/the-ethics-of-doxing-nazis-on-social-media?utm_source=vicetwitterus

Cultural anthropologists spend a lot of time thinking about the agriculture revolution that seems to have been triggered by the withdrawal of the glaciers ten thousand years ago, and then we all got caught up in industrialization and the anthropocene.  Pastoralization (not pasteurization) has been skipped over: first the influence of herding animals on foot and then the dynamics of herding animals from horseback, which meant moving large numbers of big animals over long distances, which has been memorialized again and again in Westerns.

Not a fake photoshopped cover.

It’s amusing to think about the heroic statue of John Wayne as “Rooster Cogburn” done by Harry Jackson, a friend of Bob’s.  The monumental version was commissioned by a bank and emplaced in front of what became Larry Flynt's Hustler headquarters.  No one tore it down or demonstrated around it, but when Hustler moved away, there was a search for a place to relocate it, which ran into difficulties.  The new culture of California did not appreciate violent movies.  Not even the Autry Museum of the American West.  Art is at the mercy of culture.

The herding of cattle across the continent — and the range wars between pastoralists on foot like sheepherders (who sometimes used horses) and cowboys, a split culture in which wealthy owners controlled the lost and the losers who did the work -- was ended by the railroad.  Cattle herding was not owned by cowboys, but by wealthy people in league with the government — the same government that had allowed them free use of the national grasslands plus occasional forays onto Native American land. Mounted cavalry were used to march on foot Native Americans to reservations. Horses by that time were a symbol of power and wealth among the tribes, as powerful as guns.

Bob Scriver’s work was based on his consciousness of the monuments  being emplaced after WWI.  Born in 1914, he was a dedicated reader of the newspapers that celebrated each new dedication and absorbed the world view that went with it.  These were Beaux Arts sculptures, based on the fine bronze casting of French artisans after marble monuments went out of fashion.  Phimister Proctor was one of those sculptors and Eddie Big Beaver posed for both Proctor and Scriver.  Malvina Hoffman was another Beaux Arts sculptor beloved to Bob and we met her.  She tempered the triumphalist tone of some Western art aficionadoes, who often were white supremacists.  Of course, for those who believe that the historical American tribes are supreme, the dynamics were very confusing to a white boy on the rez, esp. since Bob's music career idolized black jazz musicians.  Which is why I’ve thought about it so much.

The confusion is aggravated today, now that the practice of pacifying the remnants of the pre-existing and culturally unique people that was done by controlling their food and supplying their liquor, is not enough.  Today NA’s don’t feel conquered and are claiming their lives back.  At the same time the white folks not enrolled in the tribal corporation and therefore not able to receive the government-backed shares, are plenty angry.  But they are not traitors, like the real estate moguls of international megacities who no longer recognize the regulations of nations.

"An Honest Try" by Bob Scriver

Bob’s largest monuments are based on rodeo, a quintessential horse-based demonstration of manliness that is uniquely Western, an arena war in which the opponents really ARE animals.  His statue of a bull rider is in front of the Kansas Board of Trade.  It’s not as well-known as the Wall Street bull, which was revealed as a male power force when a defiant little bronze girl was placed in its path.  Bulls are symbols of economic power and they are white men’s symbols.  I haven’t heard of any statue of a bull being pulled down.  Just those of rival powerful male humans.

In the end all wars and power structures are economic.  In this small town the markers of male success are big shiny cars kept very clean plus neat, recently painted houses with green lawns kept a certain height, and skill at golf in summer/bowling in winter.  Veterans’ clubs are no longer significant.  The really wealthy have wives who keep horses. Some collect Scriver bronzes.

Brutal younger men will say frankly that anyone who doesn’t have a powerful car that can go fast should not be allowed to use the Interstate because they just get in the way.  And they enjoy the defiance of Confederate flags.  Some of the more significantly wealthy got their start with an insurance award for an auto accident that was judged not their fault.  They do not believe they will age and die and therefore have contempt for those who do.  They either don’t care to join the military or couldn’t pass the entrance exams.  In college towns where the dorms are integrated, they rape — even if they have to drug the women . . . or men.  This “script” is reiterated over and over in vivid media narratives.  It is based on folly and frustration.

All this stuff is terrific material for fiction, but much harder to explore as complex history or as a source of prediction for the future.  Although it becomes easier and easier to predict Trump’s future and the fate of his circle of oligarchs.  There will not be monuments.  Maybe a tiki torch.

A LIFE TRAJECTORY

Note the expression on my mother's face.

In 1961 I came to the Blackfeet Reservation to teach high school English and fell in love with Bob Scriver.  In 1966 we married, in 1973 he divorced me (at my request), in 1999 he died, and in 2006 the book I wrote about him was published:  “Bronze Inside and Out” by the University of Calgary Press.  By 2010 the book had been pirated and was for sale in one place for $3 and another for $166.

This is not an orderly nor predictable world.  Nor are any of its life trajectories.  

I did a lot of research on Bob’s genealogy, which was made easy by one of his relatives, head of Clan MacFie in Canada, who accumulates and documents everything he can find.  In 1879 Bob’s father, Thaddeus, was born on a dairy farm in Clarenceville, Quebec, so premature that his mother’s wedding ring could be put over his little fist.  She was a little bird of a woman, much beloved.  She had lost several babies.  Thad was the last.  The gap meant that the older boys grew up and found their way in easier times.  The oldest did very well indeed since he bought land on the site that became Minneapolis.  The second worked for the first at a pleasant salary.

Thad roamed the West through the turn of the 19^th century into the 20^th -- tried newspapers, made contacts in Seattle and Minneapolis, and finally settled in Browning, MT, in 1901, founded the Browning Mercantile Store in 1907, and there he was when he died in 1971.

Wessie and Thad "on television"

By 1911 he had become prosperous enough to start a family.  He was 34 and his new wife, Ellison Westgarth Macfie from the next farm over, was 23, b.1887.  They had not spent any length of time together in the previous decade.  He, quite small but tough, chose her because she was big, healthy, and popular and would have healthy children.  She had two sons, the oldest to be the heir, English style, and the other to be a spare and his mother’s comfort.  After the first she was so miserable that she threatened to go back across the continent to Quebec.  After the second she saw the impossibility of that and had a circle of friends.  She was entirely shut out of the Merc so devoted herself to the second son.

This is the background of Bob’s life, which I see as explanatory.  Born in 1914 at the beginning of WWI.  Dependence on a vigorous mother, a need to invent a career that will satisfy her, and a strong drive to show his value in the world, but never to leave.  He was no good at being married, though he was terrific in bed.  Somehow, that seems to have always been public knowledge. 

So his jobs began with music, which his parents thought of as brass bands, taught music so he could stay in Browning, played Big Band and jazz in small dance bands through WWII which took him to Edmonton, blew up as a teacher because he was so strict and passionate about it which also meant the music program he drove was stellar.  He was far too anti-authoritarian to tolerate school administrators.

By this time he was on his second wife who helped him leave teaching to build a taxidermy studio that grew into a natural history museum, and then helped him develop the taxidermy into a tourist figurine business and finally into a high class bronze sculptor career.  When he built his foundry, I was part of that.  When he became a major success, I was part of that.  But I always think in terms of genius and art.  He just wanted to make money and be respected.

Success is a bitch.  After Bob's death a local old woman, a prosperous ranch wife, announced to me, “He wasn’t that famous.”  She meant that he wasn’t famous enough to balance the scales for all the shortfalls she knew about.  She knew NOTHING about art.  In fact, nothing that didn't happen not in Montana.  Another of her type, years after his death, wanted to know “how good he really was in bed.”

Just about the time Bob was hitting his peak in the late 1970’s, the secondary feeders on cowboy art -- the wheeler-dealers -- were shifting sales from galleries to auctions which meant a drop in class and wild unpredictability in prices.  Just about the same time the sympathetic base Bob had had among Native Americans his age and a little older -- mostly his parent’s generation -- were dying (Indians die younger than whites) and the younger tribal people were in the throes of political rebellion, symbolized by AIM at one end of the spectrum and national indigenous organizations at the other.  He began to become paranoid.  His common-law alcoholic wife fanned the flames and so did local defensive whites and the racist FBI.

There were major achievements like the monument in Fort Benton, culminating in a parade in 1976.  Much photographed, the big monument was not as well-loved as his small portrait of a dog.  There were some other big pieces, some of them huge rodeo figures cast in fiberglass.  

His world was local.  He’d always been a loner except for a female sidekick, a classic Western pattern.  Now his real life was centered on his ranch and his constant yearning to be a painter.  Painting is SO much easier than sculpture.  By this time he was having heart attacks and trouble breathing.  He had long periods of being bed ridden, which his wife addressed by berating him.  

"To See Eternity"  Bob's portrait of his dying daughter.

He fell out with almost every big institution, finding them obtuse and often corrupt.  (I think they really were and are.)  His daughter had died and his son died.  It turned out that his first wife, the pretty blonde who had been his student, was carrying a genetic vulnerability for colon cancer.  It went rolling on down the generations.

This was a family with very little bonding among them, a conviction they were always on the edge of poverty, and a dedication to preserving appearances and preventing change.  The nuclear family was so small that Bob was outside of it in spite of visiting his aged parents nightly.  By the time the Browning Merc burned down in 1991, it had not changed since its founding.  His pop had a bad stroke, was bedridden and speechless at home for a couple of years before he died in 1971.  His mom had several cheerful years after that, though Bob refused to move back to live with her.  One afternoon while tacking down a new carpet in the bathroom, she died of a heart attack.

How could fame have prevented any of this?  Bob’s will gave $10,000 to each grandchild which is a threshold for legal inheritance to keep them from challenging the will.  His idea was to concentrate his estate into one entity that would be self-sustaining, a projection of himself.  His wife immediately converted everything into cash, much if not most of which was skimmed by the lawyer (rumor has it that the amount was eight or nine million dollars).  There was a brief tug of war over who got the “stuff” and it ended at the Montana Historical Society.  

"No More Buffalo"  The model was Eddie Big Beaver.

At one point, in the first Blackfeet oil boom, Bob and some of the tribal leaders had projected a series of twelve life-sized bronzes to be placed along a path at the Museum of the Plains Indian.  It didn’t happen.  Instead local Blackfeet by the turn into the 21^st century had been on relocation to cities where they were taught to weld.  When they came home, they turned to welding sculpture.  Those pieces are now everywhere.

Bob is buried in Cut Bank, “Whitetown”, though he had asked to be put to rest beside his beloved horse on his beloved ranch where grizzlies visited.  He’s not beside his mother but in a double plot, head-to-head in the next row.  The stone shows his name and the fourth wife’s name, but she’s not there.  She was cremated and thrown into the sea near Vancouver, B.C., which is where she went and built a house in the few years she lived past Bob.

Does any of that matter?  The Victorian Era thoughts of self-righteous middle-class Montanan is that Charlie Russell is the ultimate template for every artist.  (One has to look away from certain parts of Charlie.)  Bob was nothing like him and neither was his work, though those who can only see subject matter always accused him of copying.  He made a sculpture called “The Mighty and the Many,” wolves pulling down a moose that has broken through ice.  The more “famous” he was, the more he was the moose.

No fame and no fortune will prevent death.  Paranoia has no effect on enemies or changes of fortune.  Chance lays out the terrain of our times and each of us chooses our path.  With luck there are some fabulous encounters and with diligence there are excellent creations.  This is a romantic premise and will not appeal to that old ranch wife who thought the goal was Status, defined as name recognition and good sales.  Of course, even she was curious about  Charlie's sex life, which included a lot of whores.  She thought that was an entitlement of creative genius.  Actually, her model for success was a prime herd bull, worth a lot of money.