The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West
The Conservative Aesthetic offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a late-nineteenth-century circle of writers and artists who connected popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics.
That circle included novelist Owen Wister, illustrator Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. For them, going west was like going back in time, traveling to a Darwinian state of nature where America could select its so-called fittest citizens and fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.
Lexington Books, 2021
What People Are Saying About The Conservative Aesthetic:
“The Conservative Aesthetic demonstrates that the conservative movement owes a profound imaginative debt to western myth and romance. ‘Telling old stories in new ways,’ as Mexal aptly puts it, this capacious, exact, deeply researched, and yet surprisingly accessible narrative history has much to offer scholars and western enthusiasts alike.”
—Cathryn Halverson, author of Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly and Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives
“With great narrative skill, Mexal tells how modern conservatism found its aesthetics shaped by the landscapes and social conditions of the American west. If we want to understand the antidemocratic, racist, and antisocialist tendencies of today’s politics, then an important starting point is the one Mexal illuminates: the west as seen by Roosevelt, Wister, and Remington.”
—William R. Handley, author of Marriage, Violence and the Nation in the American Literary West
“How did the aesthetics of a mythic western ethos shape our understanding of conservatism? Stephen J. Mexal offers a fresh reading of conservatism as an aesthetic movement, one that not only born in the political sphere, but in the cultural realms of literature and art as well.”
—John-Michael Rivera, author of UNDOCUMENTS and The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture
“Mexal locates a foundation of modern conservatism in a group of nineteenth-century writers, artists, and adventurers. Perhaps the most compelling storyline here is the ‘slow migration’ of Emersonian individualism from the political left to an axiom of right-wing identity politics. While the book is designed to speak to academic audiences, Mexal’s lively storytelling will appeal to a much broader readership.”
—Robert Lawrence Gunn, author of Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands