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The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson's century-old dream of a "natural aristocracy." Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.
List of contents
Introduction: The Old Iron Days
Part I: Gentlemen of the West (1880-1884)
Chapter 1: Roosevelt in the Badlands
Chapter 2: Wister Goes West
Chapter 3: Frederic Remington's Vanishing West
Chapter 4: A Self-Made Man
Chapter 5: Remington and the Art of Scientific Representation
Chapter 6: Wister's Legal Education
Chapter 7: "Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Selling of the West
Part II: The Early History of Conservatism (1689-1880)
Chapter 8: The Nature of Freedom
Chapter 9: Emerson's Great Man Theory of History
Chapter 10: Darwin Comes to America
Chapter 11: The Redeemers, the Socialists, and Conservatism After the Civil War
Part III: Selling a Darwinian West (1884-1890)
Chapter 12: Equal to All Occasions
Chapter 13: Cody and the Queen
Chapter 14: The Cowboy of Dakota
Chapter 15: Remington's Great White West
Chapter 16: Natural Inequality and the Course of Progress
Chapter 17: The Ghost Dance
Part IV: In Search of a Practical History (1890-1895)
Chapter 18: The Johnson County War
Chapter 19: The World's Columbian Exposition
Chapter 20: The Boone and Crockett Club
Chapter 21: Environmental Conservation and Political Conservatism
Chapter 22: The Science of Western History
Chapter 23: A Practical Conservatism
Chapter 24: The Evolution of a Cowboy
Chapter 25: The Bronco Busters
Chapter 26: Progress, Populism, and the Lure of War
Part V: Cuba and the New West (1896-1902)
Chapter 27: The Rush of War
Chapter 28: The Cowboy Regiment Abroad
Chapter 29: Rewriting a Legacy
Chapter 30: The Virginian and the White House
Epilogue: The Cowboy President
About the author
By Stephen J. Mexal
Summary
The Conservative Aesthetic explores a circle of western writers and artists that rose up around Theodore Roosevelt in the late nineteenth century. It makes the case that their unique alloy of popular Darwinism and western mythmaking represent an aesthetic component of American conservatism that has long been overlooked.
