In a sense, I'm a strange person to recommend Carl Oglesby. He always had a strong libertarian streak, while I've come to despise those who would mix liberalism with libertarianism. (In his Reason interview, here, he admits to sleeping with Bernardine. He may have known Hillary intimately as well).
But his Yankee-Cowboy theory holds a continuing interest which transcends such concerns.
After Watergate, Oglesby outlined that theory in his The Yankee and Cowboy War, a book which had a profound impact on my own outlook -- so profound that I forced myself to shake off its influence. Losing my copy of the work worked to my benefit: Not having it to hand forced me look at the landscape through other binoculars.
Y&CW is a mid-70s conspiracy book, or rather a meta-conspiracy book, one so broad and original in its vision that even those unbitten by the paranoia bug may read it with profit. Robert Altman's film about Nixon, Secret Honor, directly references the Yankee-Cowboy theory. The same theory runs like a subterranean river throughout Oliver Stone's JFK and (especially) Nixon.
The quickest way to understand the theory is to recount a (perhaps apocryphal) quote attributed to Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt: "When ah go East, they treat me jus' lahk a stablehand!" Hunt thus funded the John Birch society, ostensibly an anti-Communist organization. The JBS really served to advance paranoia about those snooty bastards back east.
The Yankees are old money, the Atlantic, New England, New York, the industrialized north, Wall Street, finance capital. The Cowboys are new money, the Pacific, the west and the south, the frontier, industrial capitalism. (Well, they were industrial capitalism; now they're Wal-Mart.) The Yankees look to Europe, especially to England -- think of Joseph Kennedy's posting as an ambassador; think of his son John's first book. The Cowboys fancy Asia -- think of Douglas MacCarthur, the ultimate Cowboy hero and one-time ruler of Japan, enraptured by that which he conquered.
Oglesby, in 1976:
The Yankee mind, of global scope, is at home in the great world, used to regarding it as a whole thing integrated in the far-flung activities of Western exploration, conquest, and commerce. The Yankee believes that the basis of a good world order is the health of America's alliances across the North Atlantic, the relations with the Western Democracies from which our tradition mainly flows. He believes the United States continues the culture of Europe and relates to the Atlantic as to a lake whose other shore must be secured as a matter of domestic priority. Europe is the key world theater, and it is self-evident to the Yankee mind that the fate of the United States is inevitably linked up with Europe's in a career of white cultural destiny transcending national boundaries: that a community of a unified world civilization exists, that there is such a thing as "the West," "One World."During the cold war, the Yankees spoke of Communism's containment, while the Cowboys demanded rollback. To the Yankee, the business of America is business. To the Cowboy, the bidness of America is war. Yes, the Cowboy loves capitalism -- loves it so much that he itches to kill for it. The Yankee prefers to buy off or subvert any potential enemies.
The Cowboy mind has no room for the assumption that American and European culture are continuous. The Cowboy is moved instead by the discontinuity of the New World from the Old and substitutes for the Yankee's Atlantic-oriented culture a new system of culture (Big Sky, Giant) oriented to an expanding wilderness Frontier and based on an advanced Pacific strategy."
Although the American intelligence apparat has long held both Yankee and Cowboy factions, the old-school easterners ran the CIA the for many years. It was said of the OSS (the CIA's forerunner) that the initials stood for "Oh, So Social." Military intelligence is the natural home of Cowboy spookery.
CIA counter-intelligence officer James Jesus Angleton (son of a military man and a lovely Mexican senorita) can be considered a Cowboy who slipped into Yankee territory while secretly harboring a lifelong resentment of the socialites surrounding him. He loved Elvis; they loved opera. He never told them that his middle name was pronounced Hey-Zeus. They would have looked down on him.
Yankee religion is -- in its Protestant manifestation -- contemplative and austere. A Cowboy's religion consists of hyper-emotional caterwauling about how much he loves Jayzuss Crass. Think of Col. Joshua Chamberlain (theology professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine) versus Stonewall Jackson (nut).
Culturally, the Yankee outlook is Emily Post and Judith Martin. The Cowboy outlook is y'all go fuck yourselves and have a nice day.
For the past few generations, Yankees have felt comfortable around Jews. To Cowboys, Jews remain the Eternal Other. Yes, many Cowboys espouse a rabid Isra-olatry, thanks to the influence of Hal Lindsey and his brother apocalypticians. Yet they also trade in conspiracy theories about "international bankers" and Evil Hollywood Brainwashers -- i.e., you-know-who.
And that brings us to the topic of conspiracies, real and imagined.
To make a long story very short, Oglesby's 1976 book argues that JFK -- snooty Easterner, soft on the Russkies -- was killed by a Cowboy-led conspiracy. In something like retaliation, Yankee CIA head Richard Helms engineered the ouster of Richard Nixon, a graduate of Whittier College who actually dared to think that he could run the country.
Even if you think Oswald diddit, even if you disagree with the above analysis of Watergate, you may appreciate -- as a matter of metaphor -- the difference in style. When the Yankees consider you a nuisance, they simply want you to leave the scene. If you leave with dignity, fine; just leave. It's a matter of business, not bloodlust. By contrast, when a Cowboy wants rid of you, he wants to see your brains splattered across the pavement in Dallas. And then he'll kill your brother, and eventually your kid, and he'll finance the publication of books which trash your name forever while he does a barbaric victory dance in honor of his tribal war-god Jayzuss.
The Yankee-Cowboy theory can be expanded trans-nationally. The Republican-Monarchist conflict which marked the French Third Republic was really their version of the Yankee and Cowboy war. The Nazi Braunes Haus was in Munich; for years, Berlin was enemy territory, and the Prussians considered Adolf a dangerous rube. You can think of other examples.
In any large society, there will always be a division between City Mice and Country Mice. Invariably, a secret war will arise between the wealthiest Country Mice and the wealthiest City Mice. That war drives the internal history of MouseLand.
Traditionally, America maintained unity by placing representatives of the Yankee and Cowboy factions on each presidential ticket. The classic example: 1960. Yankee JFK ran with Cowboy LBJ, while Cowboy Nixon ran with Yankee Henry Cabot Lodge.
That system began to break down in 1980. On the surface, it looked like Cowboy Reagan had teamed up with Yankee Bush. But even though Poppy Bush sprang from a family of eastern finance capitalists, he had made his personal fortune in Texas. In the Awl Bidness.
Perhaps sensing that the day of the Yankee was drawing to a close, GHWB became the classic examplar of a Yankee in a Cowboy hat, chewing pork rinds and pretending to love Jayzuss. "I've been born again," he mumbled on camera in 1988, biting his lower lip so hard you could see a thin trickle of blood.
His son Dubya completed the transition. He did not mumble his "born again" status: He shouted it. A true Yankee would have preferred to buy off or subvert any potential adversaries in Iraq and Iran: War is often bad for business, and covert ops are cleaner. But Cowboys harbor a lust to see things go boom. Besides, W had to prove that he was the toughest gunslinger in Tombstone.
Cowboys also have a hard-on for Asia. Has China ever had a better friend than the Bush family?
Like Poppy, Bill Clinton fuzzed the traditional categories. Was he Yankee or Cowboy? By birth, the latter. By education and association, the former. Clinton was a student of Carroll Quigley, viewed by Cowboy paranoids as the insider who revealed the great Yankee scheme to install a one-world guv-a-mint. Bill Clinton thus became the object of many a Cowboy conspiracy theory. One of the leading theorists was Ann Coulter -- whose Connecticut background offers further indication that the Yankee-Cowboy split has now transcended geography.
We saw no great cultural split in the McCain/Palin ticket. Both Cowboys. McCain, however, has some Yankee tendencies.
Biden is definitely Yankee.
What about Obama? He was born in Hawaii, which is as far West (and as Asian) as America gets. And he affects a southern preacher accent when the mood strikes. But many would nevertheless classify him as a Yankee. That factor may help to explain why the mainstream media fell so deliriously in love with him.
Or perhaps America's great classification system no longer works in an age of globalization and closed frontiers. Is the Yankee and Cowboy war over? Do we need new categories?
(I want to thank the commenters who responded to this post. A couple of them inspired some of the riffing seen here.)
20 comments:
Interesting that Oglesby seems to suspect government involvement in the WU.
From the Reason article linked:
"But I was naive. The government had its own reasons for wanting to destroy SDS. We were messing up their plans, and they didn’t like us. So they did what they thought they needed to do to tear us up. That’s one of the reasons the Weathermen formed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government had something to do with the Weathermen. [Johnson adviser] McGeorge Bundy said that the best thing they had going for them was the “violent doves.” It was to the government’s advantage if SDS undertook violent tactics: It turned the public against us, and it opened up the gates on police action."
Ellie:
The Weatherman started in 1969 - Police action was well underway by 1968
myiq2xu~
Yes, that seems to be what Oglesby is saying in that passage.
He implies that turning the SDS to violence (creating WU) may have been the work of the gov't.
In other words, I take it that he does mean infiltration prior to WU.
While I can certainly see such infiltration & manipulation (we already know of three undercover infiltrators),I still don't swallow that Dohrn & Ayers were/are CIA. If so, it sure is a shitty way to make a living: pretending for nearly 40 years to be murderous sociopaths, while killing people and spewing bullshit ideology along the way.
Beats working at Burger King...
excellent post. also good is Joan Mellen's well researched biography of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, Farewell to Justice. she basically makes the case that the Kennedy assassination was a palace coup by rogue elements of the CIA. Bush II and Rove appear to have thrown the election to Obama, the anti-Hillary opportunist, to secure the power of the corporations and corporatists who are really calling the shots.
The political analyst Poblano (an Obama backer) had an excellent track record of correctly predicting outcomes during this past election. He built a multiple regression model (using demographic factors and past voting patterns) for predicting primary outcomes that outperformed actual polling. And interestingly, one significant determinant of voting patterns during the Democratic primary season, all else equal, was the percentage of WASP ethnic heritage for a location (the WASPs tended to strongly favor Obama).
On the infiltrator point. When Paul Soglin became mayor of Madison, he opened up all the political infiltrator/informer files (held by the Madison Police Department) and had them filed in the public library. Someone later compiled and published the best parts under the pseudonym Steel Erection (alas, I lost my copy of the book years ago).
There have been several Left activist groups that I've been involved with where I was pretty sure certain individuals were plants. I still remember having to argue against a proposal by one such person to stuff bananas in all the ATM machines (to jam them), thereby simultaneously protesting capitalist hegemony and U.S. intervention in Central America (I swear I'm not making this up).
Well, you do make a point, Joseph.
Burger King just doesn't get you a lovely old stone house in a fine neighborhood, publishing contracts for numerous books including a memoir smirking about your criminality, millions of bucks to spread around amongst your kook pals and yourself as grants, a position as a renowned university professor, speaking engagements, visits to exotic lands like Cuba (Sept. 2008), meeting world leaders like Chavez where you can cheer the revolution, mutual-admiration society reunions with your socialist, communist, Maoist and anarchist buddies (Nov. 2007), having your neighborhood kept safe by NOI security, attendance at a private reception at Norwestern University to honor pillars of society the likes of Jeremiah Wright (two days ago), and being named Chicago Citizen of the Year, and earrings to match your star-studded t-shirts.
Obama's first full-time job was with Business International. Curiously, one blog links Business International with SDS.
http://volokh.com/posts/1225663950.shtml
Wikepedia, on the other hand, includes this qualification regarding Business International:
"The company was persistently and erroneously identified as a front operation for the Central Intelligence Agency. Part of the company lore was that the unusual role of researching politics and economics from abroad during the 1950s and 1960s “proved” that the company was a CIA front, but no firm evidence ever surfaced."
I'm sure you're aware that an online forum posted some of the chapters from Oglesby's book.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7291
They discuss how to characterize the Bush family. A poster opines:
"Bush 41 and Bush 43 are PSEUDO-COWBOYS. Yankee roots. Skull and Bones." I don't know if I agree. Both view the US separate from Europe. Dubbya's Iraq War can also be seen as expansionism.
Obama mouths "one world" sentiments. His actions bear watching, and later classification.
Did you read the article in the Washington Post about Hillary, Oglesby, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, and her raising Ayers connection to Obama? Politicians all!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/18/AR2008051802101.html?sid=ST2008051802293
There is of course a lot of truth in the thesis. And of course the Yankees love the English (and Scottish) elites.
But the 'Atlantic', i.e. US-UK, relationship was forged on war, and still is. Central to this was the nuclear research done by cooperating physicists at elite institutions in the UK and the US.
I am currently toying with the idea that the takeover of British nuclear research was crucial to the US takeover of the UK.
Compare the Soviet-Chinese relationship in the 1950s. When the KGB took over cutting-edge mathematics and physics in China, the Chinese leadership decided enough was enough. By 1964 they had their own N-weapons.
The UK was allowed its own N-weapons without undermining the relation with the 'protecting' (Yankee) power. But many required the turning of a US key before release. Nowadays, all do. Meanwhile, UK forces are fighting wars on US orders, which wouldn't have happened in the 1950s and 1960s. Also look at the ludicrous policy of not joining the eurozone, which must surely be on US orders. (Remember De Gaulle). I had to laugh at the Brit state propaganda, when half of the main high-street banks nearly went bust, declaring that Gordon Brown was off to the continent to tell Johnny Foreigner what was what.
b
citizen k:
"They discuss how to characterize the Bush family. A poster opines:
"Bush 41 and Bush 43 are PSEUDO-COWBOYS. Yankee roots. Skull and Bones." I don't know if I agree."
The Bush family is one reason why I felt I had to look for scenarios outside the Y&CW thesis. The Bushes resist analysis. When I spoke with Oglesby, the Bush I presidency was a recent memory, and he (Oglesby) seemed downright confused as to how to categorize the guy.
The Reason interview offers this:
"He’s tried to adopt the Cowboy look. He is a Yankee, went to all the Yankee schools, had Yankee money in his blood. He goes to Texas, buys himself a pair of cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, and tries to speak with a bit of a drawl. He’s a phony. He’s a bad actor. He’s no more a cowboy than you or I—probably a good deal less. But his handlers grasped that there is a basic collision between the neo-Union and the neo-Confederacy. The Civil War is not over; its issues continue to echo. Bush II emerges from that process. He is a Cowboy, as I use that term, and represents the movement of the Confederacy from the East to the West."
"He is a Yankee..."
"He’s no more a cowboy than you or I..."
"Bush II emerges from that process. He is a Cowboy..."
What more can we say?
b:
I did not mean to imply that the Yankees are pacifists. You're right to say that the Anglo alliance was born of militarism. But Yankees are about business.
That was Oglesby's argument: Vietnam was doomed when the Yankee faction turned against the war, because the war was hurting business. Much the same can be said of Iraq. We'll know for certain whether Obama is a Yankee or a Cowboy depending on how he handles Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
A Cowboy will fight to the death. A Yankee sees no sense in that, because you can't do business when you're dead.
Bill Ayers was born into a life of privilege and wealth. There would never have been the prospect of Burger King on his horizon.
And the political beliefs currently espoused by Ayers and Dohrn aren't "cover jobs". E.g. You can look at Ayers' writings on his website. The thinking is often deeply flawed, paternalistic, self-serving, self-righteous, etc. - but it's not a simplistic caricature. They actually believe what they're preaching (and their adult children espouse similar belief systems).
People ask me why I love Joe Cannon—this is why. (Other) Best. Post. Ever.
Joseph - have you read Fredy Perlman on the worm and the octopus? ('Against His-Story, Against Leviathan').
I once tried to develop a Marxist take on this kind of stuff in terms of the law of value and the law of command, terms I later found had also been used by Toni Negri (whose recent work has been crap). But I soon realised that value remains value; one can't put another category up alongside it and give it equal weight. The Cowboys are about business too.
If the Yankees always put business first, and the Cowboys don't, then this might mean the Cowboys are stupid in the objective terms of what is best for them as capitalist exploiters. I'm not wholly sure I'd go along with that, though. If this were the whole story, the Cowboys would have vanished ages ago. Part of this goes to the role of memes and attitudes in ruling class culture. One could say the same about monarchy in Britain.
What I came up with, instead of the two-sided value/command thing (cf. Yankee/Cowboy) (in fact, I wrote a book on it) was the role of non-currency-based forms of money - a thesis I developed specifically in relation to the USSR but which has applications, changed according to circumstances, in the UK or anywhere.
Attitudes, ways of self-reproduction, cultures among the ruling class - they either serve a function in the reproduction of capital or the kernel falls away and they become mere shells.
b
PS New York City isn't run by Yankees; it's the capital of Israel. The role of Jewish culture in part of the ruling class in the US has got to be put up there with Yankeeism and Cowboyism if the conceptualisation's going to go anywhere. Isn't it something like half of the US-based billionaires are Jewish?
I'm not sure about the view that 'the civil war isn't over'. More likely, it ended in the 1960s, what with the revolution in communications. The idea reminds me of the 'red states' versus 'blue states' stuff that all the new-grown psephology and demographics 'experts' spouted after the Repugs stole the last two elections. (It's also reminiscent of the 'North-South divide' stuff that similar types came out with in the UK, after the unexpected Conservative election victory in 1992, although this was quickly forgotten about).
2) I think I'm right in saying the Cowboys don't play much part in running the elite academic institutions of the US. These are important, in any advanced country, in the continuity of the elite over a period of time; and in how its brainy members bring about change and deal with it. A locally-based part of the ruling class needs such institutions in order to function in a proper class way over time, and also in order to compete with rivals.
See Bourdieu, in this connection, on the state nobility in France, and on the difference in roles between the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (administrative) and the Ecole Normale Superieure (cultural).
In Britain the most prestigious place is Trinity College, Cambridge - a fact that is undeniably so for anyone who gets up close and take a proper look, but which isn't widely known, even in Britain. (Over 30 Nobel prizes, at a college with about 1000 undergraduates!)
The most prestigious university is Cambridge University. Interestingly, many more well-heeled Americans attend Oxford or the London School of Economics. The UK-based part of the ruling class clearly prefer the Yankees to the Cowboys, and the Yankees are involved at Cambridge both at the university in physics and in the wider area in biotechnology. There aren't many Cowboys at UK universities at all. While the Cambridge Anglo snobs look down their noses even at Yankees, I doubt they're able to talk to each other about anything important without the CIA finding out, and they know which side their bread's buttered. (They aren't stupid!)
So arguably the main role of Anglo upper-class snobbery in the 'special relationship' is merely as a cultural signifier that used to be valued numero uno by the Yankees before it was demoted to second place when the latter gave an even greater preference to Isrolatry... Just a thought!
Joseph, I must apologize - I thought I'd read the Reason interview - just finished it. That interview along with the comments gave me goosebumps. I'd already been reluctant to post about all of this.
It's eerie to see his opinions on WU: "They weren’t nihilists. They were true believers. They had a passion for ridding the world, or the United States anyway, of a peculiarly odious form of cryptofascism, or militarism at least. They always were clear that they were fighting the militarizing of the United States and American foreign policy. They weren’t just into violence for violence’s sake. They were doing the best they could in their limited imagining of the situation to fight the people who were making things bad for Americans and Vietnamese and others around the world." This too was my opinion. They were true believers.
But later, he says: "The government had its own reasons for wanting to destroy SDS. We were messing up their plans, and they didn’t like us. So they did what they thought they needed to do to tear us up. That’s one of the reasons the Weathermen formed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government had something to do with the Weathermen. [Johnson adviser] McGeorge Bundy said that the best thing they had going for them was the “violent doves.” It was to the government’s advantage if SDS undertook violent tactics: It turned the public against us, and it opened up the gates on police action." This sounds contradictory of what he said before. But it echoes a feeling I had that we were always under scrutiny by someone. My phone was tapped and I was a real baby in all of this, not worth the time.
Some of the comments deal with the Maoist infiltration. Again, I agree. Perhaps that was just CIA? It had the effect of all of not trusting anyone anymore.
Come to think of it, I have that same feeling of not understanding the pieces when I try to think through the Obama phenomenon. Oglesby considers him a good guy ("Both are good people. But she’s my guy."). I think he's just a politician, but invented by whom? With such ease he sailed to #1.
You wonder if the classifications still work. In the Reason interview, Oglesby says: "I still believe in the basic split between the Yankees and the Cowboys. The South, as it continually promised, is rising again. That’s a lot of what Bush is about."
Won't you contact him again, Joe? It would be fascinating to have something current through which to filter the next four years.
"...and eventually your kid..."
Oo...so you believe JFK Jr's death wasn't an accident?
And Obama has ridiculed rural people, and their fear of globalization, so it's clear where he stands. His fake Southern preacher accent makes me sick.
"Oo...so you believe JFK Jr's death wasn't an accident?"
That's not what I said. I know that the accusation has been made, and that alone is enough for the purposes of metaphor.
You DID notice the presence of the M word in that paragraph...?
Nixon was no cowboy, IMO. He was HIRED to be a Congressman by blue blood old East monied Prescott Bush, and he was boosted to VP on a short resume, enhanced by the information fed him to 'reveal' the Hiss Pumpkin Papers (so-called, actually microfiche) in the HUAC hearings. All through his career, Nixon was closely associated with David Rockefeller, the archetypical Yankee I'd imagine, including taking the key Rockefeller staffer(s) Kissinger and Haig and the rest.
Later, Nixon returned the favor to Grandpa Bush, providing all the short resume entries for GHW Bush (significant posts, all of which were very brief, and during which Bush accomplished nothing that anyone can say).
Yes, Nixon was part or a creature of the China Lobby (which you're associating with the Cowboys). However, his pursuit of detente, fairly liberal social policy platform, and other matters, were along Yankee lines of thinking. And his second bid for the presidency in '68 was on the ashes of the 'Cowboy' candidacy of Goldwater, with the imprimatur of the Rockefellers, and on an anti-war secret peace plan.
Now, it's true that as Nixon's Chairman of the Republican Party, Bush got way in bed with 'the Texans,' as Nixon described them right before the 18-1/2 minute gap, Bob Mossbacher and Co., for gigantic amounts of slush funds. Since it was Texas, it goes without saying that it was the new oil moneyed people, whom Carl calls the Cowboys.
XIslander
" I know that the accusation has been made, and that alone is enough for the purposes of metaphor."
I got it, and I loved the metaphor. I was just teasing.
There are conspiracy theories about all sorts of politicians who've died in plane crashes....or should I call it an overarching conspiracy? I haven't followed it closely enough to know if the "use" of plane crashes is cowboy or yankee.
What do beatniks have to do with it? Was Burger King even around during the Beat Generation?
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