How the West Was Changed

How was it the portrayal of Anglo-Celts in the movies changed around 1950? Here's a fascinating answer:

Before the Second World War, American Westerns presented what later came to be seen as a "naive" view of what might be called white borderer culture and conflicts. The "good" of the Scots-Irish based and European immigrant and settler population was not just an underlying assumption but a central and explicit thesis in the Westerns, most of which were made by “poverty row” studios and distributed to rural and small-town theaters—and seen by the grandchildren of the very people portrayed.

As James Webb wrote in Born Fighting, the Scots-Irish are "family-oriented, take morality seriously, go to church, join the US military, support America’s wars, and listen to country music." In other words, we're the heart and body of America. But around 1950, Hollywood decided it didn't like those qualities and started presenting us differently. One notable example:

Why, for example, was a cultural split added to The Magnificent Seven (John Sturgis, 1960), the Hollywood remake of Shichinin no samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)? In the original, the townspeople are simply poor and oppressed; they share a cultural background with the samurai they hire to protect them as well as with the people who are expected to see the film. In the remake the townspeople are alien—to their protectors and to most of their intended audience. Why? Why make it a Mexican town in need of protection by Americans?

Simple, says the author -- the Hollywood elite, angered by Middle America's rallying around Joe McCarthy -- had declared war on the white middle class:

... small-town Americans had fallen out of favor by 1960, out of favor with the “New York and Hollywood elite” (whose negative attitude continues today, with some calling the rest of the country the “flyover”). Filmmakers could no longer see a way of making the white townsfolk seem worthy of protection without being accused of a naïve and, eventually, racist viewpoint.

Then came other portrayals of Anglo-Celts as evil, such as "Easy Rider," "To Kill a Mockingbird," and "Monster Ball." Today, even immigrants from India notice that Southern accents are reserved for the bad guys in American movies. That's how the Left Coast views us.