Santa Fe Trail

Last night at 6pm when I was surfing through my Verizon TV “favorites”, I noticed that the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) network was airing “Santa Fe Trail”, a 1940 movie that was described in the following terms: “Romantic rivals get caught in the battle to stop abolitionist John Brown.” What the fuck? The battle to stop John Brown? This I had to see.

Although the film is a reactionary and racist piece of trash, I urge my readers to watch it online through Youtube since it is an essential cultural artifact of the New Deal. The writer/director team consisted of Robert Buckner and Michael Curtiz, the same people who brought you “Mission to Moscow”.

Despite the title, the movie has nothing to do with wagon trains or fighting off Indians. It is, as stated in the TCM blurb, an account of the military campaign against John Brown led by J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart that climaxed with the raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown’s capture and eventual hanging. The opening caption says it all:

1854 – The United States Military Academy – West Point. When the gray cradle of the American army was only a small garrison with few cadets, but under a brilliant Commandant, named Robert E. Lee it was already building for the defense of a newly won nation in a new world.

Civil war buffs probably do not need to be reminded of who Robert E. Lee was, but Jeb Stuart’s role in fighting for the slavocracy was nearly as critical. He commanded the Northern Virginia confederate troops and took part in the Battle of Gettysburg. The wiki on Stuart cites historian Jeffery Wert:

Stuart had been the Confederacy’s knight-errant, the bold and dashing cavalier, attired in a resplendent uniform, plumed hat, and cape. Amid a slaughterhouse, he had embodied chivalry, clinging to the pageantry of a long-gone warrior. He crafted the image carefully, and the image befitted him. He saw himself as the Southern people envisaged him. They needed a knight; he needed to be that knight.

Stuart, who is played by Errol Flynn, is the hero and Brown (Raymond Massey) is the villain. His villainy is made quite explicit: it was he and he alone that precipitated a tragic war between North and South. In one scene, Stuart—who has been captured by Brown’s followers—argues that the South was changing and that peace was possible. Against Stuart’s reasonableness, Brown and his fighters are the living embodiment of dead-end fanaticism.

The rival referred to in the blurb is none other than General George M. Custer, who is played appropriately enough by Ronald Reagan, who deserved the same fate as the character he played: an arrow through the heart. They both love the same woman, ‘Kit Carson’ Holliday, who is played by Olivia De Havilland. Her character warns at one point that the clash between the North and the South was unnecessary. It made sense for De Havilland to be cast in this role, given the part she played as a Southern belle in “Gone with the Wind”.

Blacks are portrayed in the film in the same way as they are portrayed in “Gone with the Wind”, as bamboozled victims of Northern do-gooders. John Brown is depicted as a manipulative fanatic who cares little about their fate, once he has freed them from their owners. At one point, a male ex-slave tells Stuart that all he wants is to go back to Texas and live a normal life once again. That, of course, can only mean a return to slavery.

Lewrockwell.com, a reactionary and racist website that publishes Counterpunch fave Paul Craig Roberts, published an adulatory review that sided with the film’s political perspective and that coincides with contemporary “revisionism”:

A very telling scene occurs when Brown announces to a group of escaped slaves in his keeping that he is leaving them to continue his work elsewhere. He tells the slaves that they are now free. But the slaves are skeptical and one asks Brown: “Does just saying so make us free? How are we going to live? Get food and shelter?” This is one of the practical considerations that ivory tower abolitionists failed to address. In typical abolitionist fashion, Brown tells the slaves to find other people to help them and dismisses their concern with: “From now on you must fend for yourselves as other free men do.”

When you mull over the arguments regarding how to end slavery presented in Santa Fe Trail, you are left with the disturbing realization that the War Between the States should have been avoided. Throughout the South there was a growing awareness that the institution of slavery could not be sustained much longer. Emancipation could have been accomplished peacefully as it was where it existed everywhere else in the west.

The interesting question, of course, is why the creative team behind “Mission to Moscow” would make such a racist film. You can find an entirely reasonable explanation in the history class notes posted on the Internet by Laura Poisson from Northern Virginia Community College, the same part of the country that Jeb Stuart hailed from:

Pals Custer and Stuart were the good guys in the film—the heroes. They were always shown as perfectly dressed and well-mannered gentlemen and officers, constantly with a smile on their faces. They didn’t mix politics and soldiering; they took their orders and followed through. Their eventual representation of different sides in the Civil War was to show audiences that putting differences aside and working together enables good to prevail over evil.

Why tell the story this way….and why now?

Most Americans in December 1940 weren’t ready to jump into WWII with two feet, but England was getting heavily bombed and people were starting to worry about Hitler. [See below for more detailed history.]

Santa Fe Trail was the first of many Westerns with Civil War characters or plots designed to build “American nationalism.” These movies endeavored to unite Americans of all “regional, ethnic or political” persuasions in order to prepare them for the possibility of entering WWII. The movies defined America’s enemy and showed that the nation needed to stay together in order to “save Democracy.” The U.S. could and did defeat John Brown; they could defeat Hitler if necessary.

Bruce Chadwick, Ph.D. The Reel Civil War, Mythmaking in American Film. NY: Vintage Books 2002

In other words, the political purpose of “Mission to Moscow” and “Santa Fe Trail” were not that far apart: to convey and justify to the American people through the medium of pop culture the overriding foreign policy goals of imperialism.