The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

220 chapter 17Clancy novels about spies and use them to interpret the day’s headlines, orto make their next business deal. In his introduction to an edition of TheOx-Bow Incident (1941) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, the literary manClifton Fadiman declared that “we should remember that the backgroundout of which the Western came was once a reality, that there was a WildWest, that gunplay was a habit.” 18Not really. The blood spilling out of the dime novels, carried into themature western novels and then into the western movies, most profusely inthe spaghetti westerns at the very end of the genre, was a literary and economicdevice, not a sociological statistic. The boys and men of the 1870s,and the 1970s, had to be enticed to turn the page, and to buy the next novelin the series, or to go to the movie. “A hundred dead in two chapters,” theAtlantic Monthly sneered in 1879. 19On the last page of his first Deadwood Dick novel, set in contemporary(1877) South Dakota, Wheeler—remember, he lived in Philadelphia—adds“a few words to end this o’er true romance of life in the Black Hills.” Hereports on the after-plot life of the characters, such as Calamity Jane, Dick’ssometime fiancée and fight mate, who “is still in the Hills.” “And grim anduncommunicative [note this: no talk], there roams through the country ofgold a youth in black, at the head of a bold lawless gang of roadriders, who,from his unequaled daring, has won and rightly deserves the name—DeadwoodDick, Prince of the Road.” 20As Robin Hood was to feudal lords, so Deadwood Dick and Jesse Jamesand Bonnie and Clyde and other outlaw heroes were to American capitalism.Or they were at least in song and in story. In sociological fact James andhis gang were the sons of rich Missouri slaveholders, continuing after thewar the guerrilla resistance to Union and abolition they had learned beforeand during it. The historian James McPherson notes that “the unromantictruth is that Jesse spent much of his ill-gotten gains on fine horseflesh andgambling,” not paying off the mortgage of poor farmers or engaging inother proto-socialist gestures. 21It’s unclear what Wheeler meant by claiming his roadrider story was“o’er” true. But despite the reportorial rhetoric, it wasn’t. The men and boysreading the dime novels did not want pure fantasy, science fiction, so tospeak, because they wanted to imagine themselves into the fictions, and sothe fictions denied their fictionality. The black cowboy, Nate Love, laterclaimed to be the “real” Deadwood Dick, but this is an instance among