In response to my piece on Westerns, I had more than one reader write that the portrayal of railroads and banks in Westerns as bad guys is really a commentary on corporatism and not on capitalism. Since government was so much involved with banks and railroads in real life, they say, the anti-business sentiment is really anti-government. This would be all well and good if the typical 20th century movie audience was reading Rothbard on a regular basis, but that’s not the case.
I’m sympathetic to this point of view since it’s the one I started with when I began working on this project. The problem with this theory though is that it is not reflected in the films and is nothing more than libertarian wishful thinking.
While those of us who know the facts about corporatism in the 19th century know that the railroad was a massive government operation and that fractional reserve banking was a bad thing, there is scant reason to believe that this is the message the Western wants to send – since its never mentioned at all. Another claim often sported by this evil-businesses-are-secret-code-for-evil-government school of thought is that the conflicts between big ranchers and sodbusters (as in Shane) are really due to government policies regarding water and public lands. Oh really? Where exactly does the film tell us this? It doesn't. In fact in Liberty Valance, the conflict between big ranchers and small ranchers (caused by government according to the theory above) is then solved miraculously by the very same government once statehood and elections are established in the territory. How can we explain that? We can’t because the government and the big ranchers are two very distinct entities in the film and are hardly presented as part of some corporatist conspiracy.
Neither does the theory address the problem of the scumbag merchants prevalent in Mann’s and Ford’s films. Is the federal government secretly making the banker steal the payroll in Stagecoach or making the business leaders in High Noon betray Marshal Kane? I’m not buying it. Very rarely do the movies that feature greedy railroads ever contain anything about the government's historical control of the venture. In fact, in the Jesse James subgenre, Jesse is usually fighting not the government, but the Pinkertons, the private police force of the railroad. There's nothing there with a libertarian, pro-business message. We'd just like to believe it's there. Let’s face it, both the text and subtext say that big businesses can’t be trusted and they’ll steal from you and ruin your life.
Are we really supposed to believe that Americans who loved the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the New Frontier all wanted to see private enterprise stick it to government in their films? Was the New Deal really anti-corporatist and I missed something? Maybe all those American who flocked to Westerns and adored guys like Roosevelt and Kennedy were all secret libertarians?
