Volume 28, Number 10 · June 11, 1981
Spaghetti West
By C. Vann Woodward
Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century
by Ray Allen Billington
Norton, 364 pp., $18.95
Europe's myopic view of America over the centuries might be diagnosed as double vision except that the competing images—those of evil, the others of good—rarely coexisted. In European eyes, America has always been one thing or the other and usually one of the antipodal extremes: paradise or purgatory, pastoral tranquility or blazing violence, idyllic utopia or diabolical anti-utopia, land of promise or land of savagery. The 'savages' were either noble or ignoble, and the white interlopers were likewise one or the other extreme. Either/or—depending on the purposes, preoccupations, and biases of the particular European, or upon the place he lived, the period in which he wrote, the readers he wrote for, the politics he professed, or the philosophy he espoused—depending on many other conditions as well, but least of all upon conditions in America.
Review, 3121 words
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