The Oklahoma Kid

My work on Daisy Lampkin has preempted a previous project, a cultural history of American empire. But I stir the pot on that project occasionally. Here is a fun little rumination on US culture, empire, and the myth of the frontier that derives from it. 

Hollywood Westerns, one of the great wellsprings of American culture, are a particularly rich source of imperial—in this case, frontier—mythology. Take, for example, the 1939 Warner Bros. film, The Oklahoma Kid. That film starred Warner Bros.’ most bankable star, James Cagney, in the titular role as “Jim Kincaid.” Kincaid’s rival, the sinister “Whip McCord,” featured an up-and-coming Humphrey Bogart, still a few years shy of shaking the black-hat roles in which the studio had typecast him. Miscasting two quintessentially New York actors in a potboiling genre piece makes the picture a literal incarnation of Hollywood’s studio system.
 
The plot is set against the backdrop of the Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s, the land grab in which those who rushed the claims timeline to grab a piece of land before it was allowed came to be called “Sooners.” The land grab will soon bring Kincaid and McCord into conflict. Cagney's Kincaid—The Oklahoma Kid—as events make clear is an outlaw. Within the frontier logic of the film, however, he is a much different kind of outlaw than McCord.

Unlike many Westerns, there is an initial establishing shot in Washington, DC, showing President Grover Cleveland grudgingly signing the bill that will evict Native Americans from their last substantial reservation in the West. Some money is exchanged for the land, but then the plot moves sharply past this scene as the main thrust of the movie unfolds: the staking of claims by settlers as they rush to build a new civilization.
 
The scene with Cleveland is important for two reasons. First, it establishes the historical verisimilitude of the movie by rooting the plot in actual events. More important, however, is how it casts Native Americans. Though in actual history the Oklahoma land rush was primarily about displacing Indians from treaty-bound reservation lands, in the plot of the movie Indians will play no role. Instead, like nearly all Hollywood movies, the plot centers on what will become a personal conflict between Kincaid and McCord. It is not a movie about US foreign policy, about US Indian removal, or even about conflict with Indians. But if verisimilitude is going to be maintained, Indians have to be accounted for. This accounting is not trivial.
 
As Frederick Turner and others argued, the myth of the frontier was not simply a story about the march of civilization, but a more fine-grained narrative: that the march of civilization was a virtuous undertaking precisely because it fought savagery and won. Within imperial culture and frontier mythology, the Native American is required to be there, witness to his own dislocation, symbolically playing his part in the myth of the frontier. Indians are required to both be there and not be there, viz, to be present for the express purpose of being displaced by civilization. This is a central trope in much imperial mythology: the requiring of the Indians to bear witness to their own eradication (see, e.g., Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions). The scene takes dispossession for granted, even making it seem inevitable. Being so relegated, the Indian presence marks the destiny of the settlers, a destiny made manifest by asserting the presence of, but allowing absolutely no juridical space for, any Indian counter claim. They must simply bear the weight of history, they are not allowed to address it. That one scene establishes the mythological role of the Indian, defuses the actual historical conflict between white settler and Native American, and displaces it to the personal conflict between Bogart and Cagney.
 
The drama of settlement, in Hollywood genre fashion, is dramatized by the romantic hopes and dreams of young settlers not yet married. Settling land and establishing towns is juxtaposed with marriage, making the one tantamount to the other. Early in the movie, Kincaid is given a chance to register for a piece of the action. But Cagney’s Oklahoma Kid is a classic American archetype, the reluctant vigilante anti-hero, outsider and loner. He is a gunslinger and petty criminal, not a farmer or merchant. But his criminal ways are no real threat to the march of civilization. He is simply disinterested in marriage, in settlement, and in the community of hungry land grabbers in which he is surrounded.
 
In one early scene, Kincaid is invited to join the land rush, but expressly demurs, preferring his independence. Donald Crisp’s Judge Hardwick, ostensibly the film’s establishment figure, chides Kincaid: “Those people are going out there to build a new empire,” which the Judge immediately defines as the carving of civilization out of the wilderness, and asks what kind of American The Kid is. Surely any right kind of American wants to pursue this civilizational destiny? But The Kid refuses, preferring his criminological ways. He gives a little speech, notable in its political implications:

The Oklahoma Kid: I don’t take to this itch for plowing up new empires. That’s all.
Judge Hardwick: But, why not?
The Oklahoma Kid: I’ll tell you why not. Now, look. In the first place, the white people steal the land from the Indians, right?
Judge Hardwick: They get paid for it, don’t they?
The Oklahoma Kid: Paid for? Yeah. A measly dollar and 44 cents an acre, price agreed at the point of a gun. Then the immigrants sweat and strain and break their hearts carving out a civilization. Fine. Great! Then, when they get it all pretty and prosperous, along come the grafters and land-grabbers and politicians and with one hand skim off the cream and with the other scoop up the gravy.

Kincaid seems opposed to Manifest Destiny itself, and for political reasons.
 
The plot will soon enough have our anti-hero reveal his true self, however, and he becomes what in fronter mythology is even a truer kind of American than Judge Hardwick imagines: the violence-wielding vigilante, the most necessary of the frontier characters.
 
Whip McCord and his gang are known for any number of petty robberies and assaults, but their real crime as far as the plot is concerned is that McCord has staked out a claim for himself earlier than the rules allowed, grabbing gambling and saloon concessions before anyone else has a fair chance. McCord becomes a wealthy man, but his inherent vice and inequity turn the civilization that rises up around him into a squalor of urban depravity. Kincaid remains thus far unmoved. But hoping to clean up the town, Kincaid’s father and brother—paragons of virtue both—lead a reform movement to oust McCord’s nefarious influence. Through a series of plot maneuvers McCord frames The Kid’s father, John Kincaid, for murder. McCord’s conspiracy intends to use the justice system—the very instrument of civilization that settlement was intended to bestow—to advance his own villainous ends.
 
John Kincaid [spoilers follow] will soon be murdered by a lynch mob whipped up by McCord. Enraged, The Kid goes on a killing spree, reminiscent of Wyatt Earp’s famous Vendetta Ride. The Kid’s natural killer instincts reveal themselves as he guns down three vicious outlaws in revenge for his father’s killing. The writers are careful to depict each encounter as a duel, The Kid being drawn on by the gang members and hence morally and legally within his rights to bring his superior gun skills to bear and kill them in turn. The sequence is meant to play out like a miniaturized version of the Vendetta Ride, but to the modern viewer it may also echo the video game trope of the quest that delivers mini-bosses until the hero’s encounter with the Final Boss.
 
There is a side of our anti-hero who remains uncorrupted by bloodlust, however, and The Kid determines to bring in a fourth outlaw to stand trial, with the intention of testifying against McCord for the whole sordid business and bringing the true bad guy to justice. Delivering the baddie to the law whom The Kid had picked up clinging to life in the desert, Kincaid is asked if the baddie is dead or alive. “A little bit of each,” The Kid replies, in a line reading only Cagney could deliver, totally justifying his improbable casting. Before The Kid’s plans come to fruition, however, the cowardly McCord [spoiler] is gunned down himself by The Kid and his brother, Ned.
 
By deploying his outlaw skills to right McCord’s wrongs, The Kid is operating from within a long and heralded formula in American culture: the righteous vigilante determined to save civilization from an evil it is otherwise powerless to stop. “Regeneration through violence,” the esteemed historian Richard Slotkin calls this theme. By bending himself to those institutions at the end, like all anti-heroes, The Kid answers the judge’s earlier question: What kind of American is he? He is, in fact, the most essential kind according to our frontier mythology: the vigilante who evades, deranges, or even breaks the law in pursuit of a higher cause and a higher justice, but whose violence is always eventually contained and containable by civilization. After dispatching the baddies, The Kid is married off and settled on a plot of land of his own, symbolically bringing him back into the fold, the empire successfully absorbing his violence, which nevertheless remains a latent force to be tapped again in the future if needed.
 
What I find interesting about this film is its depiction of the villainy with which McCord is charged. His infraction is not that he stole land from Indians. His infraction is that he bent the rules of the imperial game to suit himself, essentially, that he stole land from the white stealers. There is no place in which to stand in condemnation of the imperial project itself, as Kincaid himself shows. He had at the outset been opposed to the whole sordid mess, but eventually succumbs to the ineluctable logic of empire, a married settler himself. All the characters are engaged in the same project, McCord as much as Hardwick, albeit some with a stronger sense of morality and rectitude compared to McCord. The movie seems to be saying not that empire is bad, but that there is a proper and an improper way to do empire. But of an alternative to empire, the movie, like so much of American culture, has nothing to offer.
 
Further reading:
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(University of Chicago Press, 2017).
 
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Picador, 2020).
 
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1973).
 
—David J. Snyder