John Wayne

Why was Wayne the Number One Movie Star, even as late as 1995? He embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person—arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer but cleansing the world of things that ‘need killing,' loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the Center in himself. . . .

John Wayne is the most obvious recent embodiment of that American Adam—untrammeled, unspoiled, free to roam, breathing a larger air than the cramped men behind desks, the pygmy clerks and technicians. He is the avatar hero in that genre that best combines all these mythic ideas about American exceptionalism—contact with nature, distrust of government, dignity achieved by performance, skepticism toward the claims of experts. . . In Westerns, the Easterner is . . . comically encumbered with useless knowledge, ignorant of the basics, too crippled with theory to act. In him, the instincts that lead to Wayne's easy responses have been blunted, have atrophied in the stale air of commerce or technology, in the conditioning to life on a smaller scale than the open range.

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National unity for the great Cold War effort was a theme of growing insistence by 1949. Internal differences must be sacrificed for the sake of putting up a united front as the 'leader of the free world.' . . . Social criticism in movies, what little of it there had been (dealing with American racism), was branded as red propaganda by the investigators and blacklisters. Ford's movie puts a benign and fatherly face on this search for national union. [Wayne and his partner in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon] embody the fusion of different elements in American society—North and South, old and young, experience and energy, Father of His Country and rebellion restored to loyalty. . . .Wayne's fatherly yet vigorous air of authority makes him indispensable, first in peace as in war.

^{Source: Wills, Garry. John Wayne's America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. 180-181, 302, 311.}