Journalist, historian, classics scholar, Garry Wills is the quintessential Renaissance man. In his book on the 1988 presidential race, Under God, for instance, Wills's digressions took him on explorations of the roots of black spirituals, a revisionist reading of the Scopes trial, and a history of the Nazarenes in America--to name but a few of the subjects he touches on in that book. His long, fact-filled articles on any number of topics appear shockingly often in the New York Review of Books. And yet, while his books and articles cover an amazing diversity of subject matter, there is a unifying theme. Wills is profoundly curious about the American experiment and wants to understand it as thoroughly as possible. In his latest offering, John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity, Wills examines Wayne the icon, a potent figure in our national mythology.

Why is John Wayne, nearly two decades after his death, still the most popular movie star in Hollywood history?

John Wayne taps into our deepest myths, the myth of the frontier, of American exceptionalism, of manifest destiny.

The frontier is our defining myth: you go out into open spaces and you're free, you're an individual, you forge your own fate, make your own soul and community; but you're also part of a western surge of the whole nation. Many of the early advocates of the West called it a uniting experience. It was what would bring the North and the South together. (Of course, it actually divided them--the fight was over what territories would be slave and what would be free.)

What does this say about our national character?

It says that underneath it all we still believe that America has a special destiny, that the frontier opens up special kinds of purity, and that we access God through nature. I quote Herman Melville saying that the idea was to have an American Adam, straight out of God's hand and the native earth, with no forebears, no ancestry. Jefferson wanted to get us severed from Europe as soon as possible so that we would all start afresh with a clean slate and a pure chance.  It's deep stuff for Americans.

You cite the critic Eric Bentley who thought that Wayne helped start the Vietnam War. But then you also say that Wayne embodied Melville's "American Adam." Is Wayne the most dangerous man as Bentley thought, or is he Melville's American Adam?

He's both; he's one because of the other. The myth itself is ambivalent, inspiring, and dangerous. The myth makes us aspire to a fresh start, with clean hands. On the other hand, it makes us think that we've got these virtues when perhaps we don't.

As a Catholic, I would say that the myth denies original sin. You don't start fresh from the earth. We have to be redeemed by Jesus, not by the frontier and western canyons. In Graham Greene's novel on Vietnam, The Quiet American, he said that we took over from the French colonial people, and if anybody could have handled Indochina, it should have been the French. They had a long experience in the culture and the language, and they had a religious tie to the Catholics there. The naïve American in Greene's novel says, "Ah, but we come with clean hands." We Americans are not like the French; they came with dirty hands from the old colonial past, but we are not like that. We don't have any selfish colonial interests.

That's the dangerous side of the myth: that we think we can be pure and clean and outside the contaminating trends of history and that we can come in unpolluted, untainted.

Is there anything about John Wayne, the person, that we can benefit from today? Could America use an infusion of some of what Wayne represented?

Sure, not the person, but the image. There is in all of John Ford's films with Wayne a sense of identity, of family. The odd thing is that Wayne's character is often without a family himself. He's always either lost his wife, or his sweetheart, as in Red River, but he's a defender of the family. That's again very much the frontier figure. The frontier figure is out there in the wilderness, but the white community advancing into the wilderness depends on him. He's peripheral and central at the same time. He goes off and blazes the trail, but he keeps in contact with the people who have to follow the trail. Always he's the outsider defending those inside. In The Searchers he's sealed out at the end. It's wonderfully symbolic that in Stagecoach he's the prisoner manacled inside the stage and then, when the attack comes, he's the one who climbs up on top. He's the outsider defending those inside, swinging around in all directions to fire at the attackers. Over and over that's the situation with Wayne.

There's a lot of what George Washington was to Americans that is conveyed in some of the Wayne movies. Washington was this big, physical presence. He conveyed a sense of unstoppability--you didn't get in his way. People thought that no matter how bleak things looked in the Revolution, if Washington was leading them they'd get there.

Now Wayne the man was not particularly admirable. He evaded the draft; his families all fell apart; he was not an interesting person when he was not making movies because nothing much interested him.

He was not a reflective, self-examining man. He was a workaholic, he was a professional, he was disciplined on the set--there early, sober, lines learned, cooperative with directors, supportive of actors, and curious about cameras. But off the set he really didn't know what to do with himself. He drank too much and played a lot of cards.

Wayne's friend Dobe Carey said he was always amazed at the lack of interests in the man. For instance, he had no interest in sports, either following or playing. He didn't get any exercise when he wasn't making movies. That's one reason he kind of fell apart; he was drinking too much. He didn't play golf, as a lot of his friends did.

His politics were spasmodic and un-ideological. He would endorse Reagan because he liked him, but when Reagan opposed the Panama Canal treaties, Wayne endorsed Carter. Not because he had any sophisticated ideological analysis, but because he had gone down and become friends with Torrijos when he wanted to make movies in Panama. That's how nonideological he was.

But the Wayne I'm interested in is the mythic Wayne. I only mention the private one occasionally to point out what matters. It's not what Wayne said about Vietnam that matters, it's what he was on the screen that matters.

Why did you pick Wayne as your archetype of America? Are there other people you could have picked?

He's the only person with this kind of resonance. The way the book came about is that I wrote books on Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan. When you do that, then agents, editors, and publishers come to you and say, "You do presidents, so why don't you do Carter, or Ford, or Bush, or Clinton?" But none of them have what the three I did had. There's something larger about Nixon and Reagan and Kennedy. They're the repository of so much emotional investment by people: resentment, devotion, and curiosity. Nixon continues to fascinate people; Bush doesn't fascinate anybody. They were, for me, ways of studying America; they embodied so much of their followers' and even their opponents' hopes and fears.

So I was looking around for another figure who could do that, whether a president or not. I didn't find one in the electoral sphere, but then there's Wayne. He did it more at the level of values than political policies. So when Reagan or Nixon or Gingrich want to defend their policies, they refer to Wayne's values. He's a political resource for these guys. People who run for office can appeal to his mythic sense of patriotism, duty, law, order, manliness, self-control, and self-discipline.

You say that Wayne was the unwitting heir to the long tradition of anti-intellectualism created precisely by American intellectuals. What do you mean by that?

The transcendentalists and the Jeffersonians thought that it was important that you get away from civilization and sophistication and the associations of high culture to have this fresh start that the frontier promised. So when Jefferson says, "State a moral case to a professor and a plowman and the plowman will answer as well, or better, because he's relying on his native intelligence," he's not getting the answers given him by tradition.

Running all through this, as I suggested earlier, is a deep denial of original sin. We don't have original sin, we have acquired sin. The acquired sin is culture; man in himself is good, but he's been corrupted by the overlay of too many associations of inauthentic experience, borrowed reality, having someone else tell you what's true rather than finding it for yourself. If you could just scrape away culture, then you would be left with your own, native, original good self. You can then simply trust your instincts.

So flee to the frontier.

Yes, get away from cities and libraries and universities. Emerson said that while he was living in a city and working at a university! So there's a real theological heresy in saying that if you just get back to nature, nature is good and it will guide you in a perfect way.

It sounds like your next book should be on the missing link of original sin in American history.

I'm beginning to feel that way too. I'm reading a lot of Saint Augustine these days. He's my principal hero and favorite author.

You say that there is no more defining note to our history than the total absence of a sacred city in our myths. We never had a central cultic place, no temple and no holy center to our society. What do you mean?

I should have said that the message is that not only should you get away from universities and libraries and cities, but you should get away from official cult places. Because if it's a traditional religion, you're getting second-hand stuff. You're getting priests telling you what to think, whereas the way to experience God is to go out into nature.

So our real religious art is the Hudson Valley painters. I reviewed Robert Hughes's BBC series on the history of American art for the Times Literary Supplement. Hughes knows that religion is important to American culture, and so early on he shows things like Quaker meeting houses and Shaker furniture. It should have tipped him off that the early Puritans were anti-icons, so you have to get this plain chair or meeting house, instead of gorgeous gilded reliquaries or cathedrals. But that's not where they thought religion was, in man-made stuff. They thought it was out there in the canyons. So I said he should have treated the Hudson Valley school, and people like Ansel Adams, as America's religious art. He was looking in the wrong place, and he didn't find much. That's why I think we never had a sacred place, because everybody is his own moving cathedral.

Do movies today play the same role, and have the same influence on the American psyche, as they did during John Wayne's time?

They're certainly as important, maybe more important. But I think movies were more of a uniting force in his day. They were not as specialized. Now we have movies appealing to youth, movies appealing to older folks, more specialized audiences. In Wayne's time there was more consensus in the society; people of all ages had a better chance of responding to the same movie then than they do now.

That's beginning to change as the baby boomers grow older. About 20 years ago, there was a specific youth culture that came up, which listened to Elvis, the Beatles, rock. Now those young are grown up, but they continue to respond to rock. Tipper Gore still listens to rock when women who were her present age didn't when she was young. So maybe the society will get re-integrated now when what was originally an outside influence becomes domesticated.

I think movies and our culture in general are far more fragmented now. The end of the Cold War is something that has many more aspects than I think we've really studied. America normally has had a uniting mission: manifest destiny in the nineteenth century, a war to make democracy possible, then we had World War II, immediately followed by the Cold War, in which, give or take how you define subversion or containment, there was a large, almost universal consensus that America should oppose communism and stand for the free world. That gave you an overriding mission under which a lot of things could be prioritized. You could say that civil rights are important, but we have to keep the country together and moving along on its main mission. Now that's gone, and I think there is not a mission for the country anymore. People, therefore, don't know how to prioritize things; they don't know what matters, what's most important.

That explains why our movies are fragmented then?

Why the culture is. There's no basic consensus on what one thing we should all be doing. So culturally and politically and economically there's a sense of looking around for a purpose. I think that's why we have been economically very prosperous over the last ten years, yet we've had this amazing dissatisfaction with our lives, this feeling that politics is rotten and government is rotten. Ronald Reagan, after all, taught us that government is only good for one thing: fighting communism. Well, it's not fighting communism anymore, so it's not good for anything.

You find it in universities, you find it in the business world. Now, there are wonderful changes taking place in society; the whole change in the status and dignity of women is a vast and tremendous social change. In the long run that will be seen, I think, as a very benign and important social process we've lived through, but right now it's still very divisive, and people resent it precisely because it is such a big change.

Reflect for a moment on the culture of celebrity. What does it say about the American people that we depend so much on celebrities to find our meaning?

All societies have heroes, and they are often fantasy heroes, escapist heroes: King Arthur or King Alfred in England, or El Cid in Spain, or Joan of Arc in France. These larger-than-life figures reflect back to the people their emotions. People are fascinated by them and want to live vicariously in terms of those heroes. Saints, of course, were always that. The secularization of this means that some people feel themselves larger than life when they're contemplating, say, Jackie Onassis. They don't have to do anything; they just have to be, because they're vessels that get filled up with their own projected fantasies.

So this is not a peculiarly American phenomenon?

No, it isn't. It takes a new commercial form with us. I suppose it's more intrusive in the sense that all of our information-gathering is now more constantly with us. It used to be that if you went into your house you shut out the outside world. Now the outside world is right in there waiting for you on the television set, your radio, e-mail, and electronic communications.

Celebrities almost live with us now.

As does everything else: news, for instance. It's a modern adaptation of an ancient dynamic.

But we all grow by inhabiting other people in some measure. When you see children on a playground, kids are often playing Michael Jordan. It's fascinating to watch, because kids will announce their game as if they're not only Michael Jordan, but they're also the announcer describing Michael Jordan. They are exploring new worlds that way. We continue to do that, and probably it's important to our continuing growth to be young, to be pliable, to be still open. Adults do it when they read novels. They step into an alternate world and get out of their own world. It suggests new possibilities to them, perhaps new emotional reserves they didn't know they had.

So it's important what heroes we choose.

That was the whole point of the call to be saints, it seems to me.

We were supposed to live in the saint world and be sensitized to aspects of reality and God that we had not experienced in our own lives until we had been prodded into it by this alternate experience of living with a saint.

Michael Cromartie directs the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 8

7B4lm7B40087627