by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Not only did some of its final words inspire the name of this column, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance marks the end of an era, at least for this year’s iteration of this column. I’ve spent a good amount of the first half of the year looking at John Ford, John Wayne, and Jimmy Stewart, and this is the last time any of them will make an appearance as we head out of the golden age of westerns and into spaghetti, revisionist, and neo-westerns. But if these three icons are to ride off into the sunset, they could do a lot worse than The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which encapsulates Ford’s view of the west, history, and America’s founding. 

I am writing this the day after the Supreme Court took away the right to privacy and bodily autonomy of all Americans, especially those able to get pregnant. This coming after the horrific mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. And the insurrection on January 6 of last year. And all of the vile things that have happened in this country in just the last few years. Watching earlier this week (on Paramount’s new pristine UHD Blu-Ray release), I was struck by the clarity of John Ford’s vision of America and what the film has to say about democracy and violence. 

“Well, take some advice, pilgrim. You put that thing up, you'll have to defend it with a gun... and you ain't exactly the type.” –Tom Doniphon (John Wayne)

The film is about the relationships between three men. The first we meet is Ransom “Ranse” Stoddard (Stewart), a US. Senator heading to a small frontier town to attend the funeral of rancher Tom Doniphon (Wayne). Reporters ask the senator why he is attending Doniphon’s funeral, and the main events of the story occur within this flashback. In it, Stoddard is attacked, robbed, and beaten by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his gang. Doniphon rescues him, and is tended to by Tom’s girlfriend Hallie (Vera Miles). Afterward, the debate begins between Ranse and Tom about how to deal with Liberty Valance. Ranse, the newly arrived lawyer, believes that Valance should be brought to justice through legal means. Tom argues that men like Valance only understand violence and should be dealt with through force. Ranse and Valance come into conflict again when the outlaw is hired by local cattle barons to intimidate anyone supporting statehood at the territorial convention. 

The conflict does turn to force. Valance and his men escalate things on behalf of the wealthy cattlemen by vandalizing the newspaper office and challenging Ranse to a duel. Ranse goes to face Valance. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Tom intervenes, firing the shot that kills Valance and saves Ranse’s life. This allows Ranse to represent the unnamed territory at the convention, winning statehood over the wishes of the rich elite and sending Ranse on track to becoming governor, senator, and potentially vice president. Only Tom and Ranse know the truth, and the reason for Ranse telling the story on the eve of Tom’s funeral is to reveal the truth. The journalists present instead reject the truth, leading to the famous line “this is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

John Ford is maybe the best example of director as historian, and it’s easy to see Ford’s influence on Spielberg’s latest run of films set in America’s past (Bridge of Spies, The Post, West Side Story) and even Almodovar’s latest.Throughout Ford’s westerns, he chronicled the choices made by men (I would argue the influence of women is felt throughout, but resigned to some sense of ‘accuracy’) that shaped the west and the country at large. But The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance stages these choices in their most intimate venue. Away from the soaring rock formations of Monument Valley, the action here is set almost entirely in the fictional town of Shinbone in an unnamed future U.S. state, and shot in monochrome. While Ford was a master of shooting in color, the black and white photography here–besides obscuring the fact that Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are too old for the flashbacks–only adds to the legendary feeling of the story. It creates a remove in the viewer, and emphasizes all three men as archetypes. 

Liberty Valance represents the bad actor, the person who does not recognize law and order because he benefits from lawlessness. Supporting him are the cattle barons, who want to keep the territory in the transitional phase between being settled by whites and full statehood. Rance Stoddard is the avatar of the future, of law and order (the idealized kind). Tom is the man in the middle. The realist. He understands how the world works and that often violence and bloodshed is needed to move the world forward. The American Revolution was not a bloodless escape from the crown. Tom thinks Rance doesn’t understand this, and acts as a sort of guardian angel to help him run or fight. But when push comes to shove, Rance squares off with Valance with a gun. He is willing to die to defend his principles.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance deals with a lot of themes Ford previously explored in My Darling Clementine, but here they exist on a more elemental level. Shades of Antigone surface here, as Tom could be seen to represent a kind of natural law that exists above the law that Rance wants to enforce. But that’s the core of the issue. How are laws enforced? Ultimately through the use of force. Murder somone? Don’t pay your taxes? The state will send armed individuals to your house to carry out “justice.” The status quo of Shinbone, like Tombstone in Clementine, is one of lawlessness, in this case because the marshall is well-known to be ineffective. The only people who are able to protect their own self-interest are those who hire men like Liberty Valance to carry out their will upon the rest of the population and men like Tom who are willing to fight force with force. But it takes both Tom and Rance to fully supplant the Hobbesian world of Shinbone and enter into America.

Flash forward to 2022, and it seems like the only people who are able to protect their own self-interest are those same rich elites. But instead of cultivating anarchy, they have subverted the laws and our democracy itself into serving them. There are very few Ranse Stoddards, with many more of our elected officials acting like Liberty Valance, unregulated money lining their pockets and buying their votes. Rule by the rich is de facto minority rule, which runs counter to America’s democratic nature. The Founding Fathers didn’t grant corporations the legal status of personhood. Of course, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance doesn’t show anyone other than white men active in the halls of power, but that also makes it easy to notice the lack of progress we’ve made in the last century. 

After the events of this week, it feels like we may need to defend our rights with actions closer to that of Tom Doniphon than Ranse Stoddard. John Wayne’s portrayal of Tom as an agrarian individualist who nonetheless wants his fellow citizens to be protected may seem to link up with the actor’s real-life conservative ideology, but the character’s kindness and sense of duty aligns more to what conservatives say than what they do. Where we are today is out of alignment with the ideals of the country’s founding–an important distinction here–the ideals of its founding, though not its actual circumstances. In her excellent single-volume history of the nation, These Truths, historian Jill Lepore writes that America is “the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.” 

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is about how our founding myths like The Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, George Washington and the cherry tree, and others are more important for what they say about us than whether or not they are factually true. But when legend becomes fact, they can enshrine inequalities as truth as well. The history of America, a country founded on bloodshed and displacement of indigenious peoples, isn’t a clean one. Knowing the real stories is more important than ever, because often the true versions of those stories help explain the present and the lines drawn around sex, race, and religion. The right understands this. When they say ‘America was founded as a Chrisitian country,’ they are lying. America trumpeted itself as a secular state throughout the 18th century, but evangelical Christrians will continue to profess their mythology until it is accepted as truth. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to give ourselves a sense of narrative, and America has lost its way. The rise of conspiracy theories, fringe “alt-truthers” like QAnon and others proliferate in part because the truth of America feels uncertain. Lepore also touches on this in These Truths: “the United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.” 

There is an opportunity to rekindle those ideas. In my mind, the story of America is that of progress, a continual effort to expand who is included in the lofty ideals on which the country was founded. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are flawed documents. Of course they are, they were written by deeply flawed men. Men like Tom Doniphon and Ranse Stoddard. They were limited by their own biases and limited worldview. Instead of running from history in shame, we must own the oppression of the past but offer a way forward. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the few leading voices to consciously do this:

Figures like Lincoln and FDR, also deeply flawed men, offer a framework for action and also speak to the narrative of America as a progressive country. It’s time to take that back.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is John Ford exploring the use of force and “peace” is paved with blood, even if that blood is spilled in the name of justice. Engaging with this movie was a reminder that America is an ongoing project. History is not over, it’s the backstory we choose to tell, and we can emphasize the parts that are more important today. A 60 year old movie is also a flawed lens, but Ford’s command of emotion and mood deepens a relatively simple story to the point of where I could use it to teach an entire civics course. As entertaining as it is thought-provoking, I hope to revisit it at a less maddening moment when this era feels like an aberration. See you in the streets, protesting and working for local progressive candidates.