Seeking a well executed heritage

Editor’s note: Dr. Daniel Maher is the assistant professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. Opinions, commentary and other essays posted in this space are wholly the view of the author(s). They may not represent the opinion of the owners of Talk Business & Politics or the administration of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.
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Given that the month of May is declared Western Heritage Month in Fort Smith, it is an apt time to attempt to understand what exactly that means.

By “western heritage,” are we referring to the violent acquisition of large tracts of land previously guaranteed by treaty to North American Indians? Or, could it be remembering the role played by the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in dismantling the sovereignty of Indian Nations in Indian Territory? Maybe it is designed to provoke thoughts of donating to the cause of the U.S. Marshals Museum that “broke ground” 19 months ago with actual construction yet to begin?Maybe it has something to do with gender roles and how men and women are conscripted into given positions in Fort Smith?

I suggest that all of the above have something to do with this month of May celebration.

Considering the recent revelations of the skewed nature of the Fort Smith City employee demographics toward white males, I will focus on how Fort Smith’s “western heritage” is manifest in these numbers.  In press coverage of the diversity study session it was emphasized that whites make up 86.4% of all city employees, but downplayed, if not overlooked, was the fact that 81% of all employees are men. The article notes that “whites were the only group overrepresented.

Are men not a group? This overrepresentation of men employed by the city is a far more startling demographic disparity – a deficit of 32 percentage points – than those based in race and ethnicity. I argue that the seeds of this disparity are rooted in a heritage that embraces “brave men” and “loose women” as tourist icons.

If Mattie Ross, heroine and according to Charles Portis the genuine embodiment of “true grit,” were here today she might exclaim: “There is some mix-up here. I am Mattie Ross of near Dardanelle, Arkansas. My family has property and I don’t know why I am being treated like this.”

The particular brand of “western heritage” that Fort Smith lays claim to is located squarely in the late nineteenth century. It is well documented by scholars such as Gail Bederman in “Manliness and Civilization,” and Michael Kimmel in “Manhood in America,” that this moment in time that Fort Smithians are invited to retreat to during Western Heritage Month, was a bastion of white male privilege. The stories told for tourists at the official Fort Smith Visitor Center, a former bordello, reinforce this highly gendered ideology. One can hear quips such as “It’s a business doing pleasure with you” and “Miss Laura’s girls had it pretty good,” juxtaposed to stories of otherwise respectable men visiting prostitutes with impunity.

Visitors to Fort Smith’s frontier tourist sites, including “Miss Laura’s,” the Fort Smith Museum of History, the Fort Smith National Historic Site, the Bass Reeves monument, and the Clayton House, often experience “authentic” moments of connecting with the past. These feelings of authenticity represent a visceral connection to the past. We feel as if time has been suspended and we are transported to a past era. Heritage sites function as mediums in this séance with the past, guiding individuals to powerful moments that reinforce deeply held convictions in the present by projecting them, the ideas and the person, into an earlier period.

Significantly, different audiences receive differing convictions in these heritage séances. Some visitors report feeling that they “live in the wrong time” that the past was a “better, cleaner, fresher time,” but can you imagine an African American or a woman who enjoys the right to vote saying that about the 1870s?

The specific details of the heritage we claim does not include historical context. Heritage is the use of history for present day purposes. Many historical elements are erased or omitted in that process. This could be something as basic as conflating events that happened in two different time frames into one.

For example, Judge Parker had been dead for seven years by the time Laura Zeigler opened up the Riverfront Commercial Hotel in 1903. Yes, there was prostitution in Fort Smith during Parker’s era, as well as Zeigler’s, but what gets lost in the heavy emphasis of locating prostitution narratives in the late nineteenth century is the wide extent of the practice during other periods of time in the city’s history. The heyday of prostitution in Fort Smith may have only begun in the 1940’s. Into the 50’s and 60’s hotels such as the Como, Palace, Saint Charles, Ozark, and Rex Rooms, were widely known to be operating as brothels and were frequented by Fort Smith’s “respectable men” for paid sex.

Beginning in 1941, soldiers from Camp Chaffee flocked to Garrison Avenue to do what virtually always occurs near military camps full of a disproportionate number of men – buy sex. Historian C. Calvin Smith noted that a near-epidemic of syphilis broke out at that time: “In Fort Smith, the growth in reported cases was so alarming that Circuit Judge Sam Woods called for a grand jury investigation.”

Even more disturbing, Smith documents that of these so-called “Victory Girls,” “there were more girls in the 14-year-old bracket than any other.”  Focusing on our “western heritage” conceals these historical facts and quiets these contradictions in our value system.

An alternative séance with the past derives a far different revelation. The late nineteenth century magnified a white male privilege in Fort Smith that has continued on up to the present moment as evidenced by the disproportionate number of whites and males now employed by the city of Fort Smith.

Moreover, it is no small irony that Western Heritage Month frames frontier settlers of the past in nostalgic, heroic terms while contemporary immigrants to the United States, and to Fort Smith are often framed in problematic, negative terms. Claims of heritage function to privilege one particular group over others in the past as well as the present. Such myopic vision blinds us to the larger context of contemporary migrants on the new global frontier, who are in essence the new pioneers, whether they be Syrian refugees, or Hmong, or Vietnamese, or El Salvadoran, or Mexican, etc.

Acknowledging the diverse heritage of the United States in all time periods, is perhaps a step toward reducing the ideology that drives the disparity of whites and males in the city employment demographics.

When the demographics of those employed by the city of Fort Smith mirror those who live in the city, then that will indeed be a well-executed heritage worthy of celebration.