1.21 Travels with Martin

Frasier, you're my brother. That entitles you to my bone marrow and one of my kidneys, but THIS is an imposition!

For a painting of such cultural significance, and of such a subject, American Progress is a remarkably small one. Disconcertingly small, even. It should be bigger. After all, its subject, an allegorical woman leading forth pioneers, is all about space. It is a map — a physical, ideological, chronological map — of America. On the right of the canvas, in the East, is the distant skyline of 19th century New York City (the painting was made in 1872). It’s recognisable by the prominent island of Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge, then still under construction, which linked the island to the industrious borough of Brooklyn, where the artist, John Gast, lived and worked. From these eastern urbs, America is unfolding. 

The woman in the centre of the painting, a weightless White giantess in a diaphanous toga, is Columbia, the female personification of America, much like Britannia for the United Kingdom, or Marianne, the allegorical figure of Revolutionary values in France, whom Delacroix famously depicted “leading the people” — a romantic forerunner of Gast’s painting. Those she leads are settler colonists, depicted by wagon train and on horseback sweeping across the prairies, clearing the way for what is clearly regarded as “civilisation”. Before the pioneers of progress is “wilderness”, counterposed against the civilised: the Rocky Mountains, herds of bison, grizzly bears and, of course, Native Americans, the indigenous inhabitants whose lands the pioneers were taking. This wildness is also symbolised by darkness: while New York and the original colonies are bathed in the hopeful golden rays of a rising sun (coming from Europe), the wild west, the frontier, is cloaked in obscurity, the heaving shadow of storm clouds ready to be brushed away. The idea that the fate of America was expansion, from sea to shining sea as the patriotic hymn “America the Beautiful” has it, was a popular one in the late 19th century. Its proponents believed it was a God-given quest for a people with unique and God-given virtues capable of achieving it: White, Christian, and European (at least by descent) people. They called it “Manifest Destiny”.

This belief of North America as a wilderness to be conquered was a uniquely USian take on the old Doctrine of Discovery of the European colonial powers, encoded into US law in the 1823 case of Johnson v. McIntosh. This legal case found that ownership of land came into being on its “discovery” by Europeans, and hence Native Americans had no sovereign claim to the land their ancestors had lived on for centuries. The west was wild, it ruled, and it was there for the taking: finders, keepers. “America the Beautiful” encapsulates this idea of the Christian colonisation of empty land:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

Except, of course, North America was not empty, and “Manifest Destiny”, bringing agriculture and industry to the land, would manifestly require the pioneers to evict from the land its indigenous inhabitants. One consequence was ecological cataclysm, with the near extinction of the vast herds of bison who were integral to the ecosystem. Another consequence, one without which the United States could exist, was the genocide of the Native Americans, an intentional and organised attempt to eliminate the country’s indigenous population. California’s first Governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, would declare “that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert."

American Progress is not just an illustration of the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny, but a justification of it. While the Native Americans flee westwards into the shrinking “wilderness” of which they were regarded as a constituent part, Columbia brings with her the fruits of the civilising mission. Behind the brave pioneers, venturing forth into this darkness, is progress itself, manifested by technology. New railroads bring steam locomotives, farmers enclose the lands and make them fruitful, and the pony express brings literacy and communication. Even Columbia herself has a role: in her right hand she clutches a school book, and in her left a spool of wire unfurls to lay a telegraph line across the land. Soon she will reach the West Coast, California, Oregon (still a teenager when Gast painted his allegory), and Washington, at that point just a lowly territory.

American Progress is iconic because of the story it tells Americans about what America is: it is its relationship to land and space. By using allegory, it tells quite frankly and bluntly what American culture has told itself, in more and less obvious ways, ever since. America is a land where one might discover what one is really made of. By travelling across America, by taking to the open road, you can become yourself and become, even, an American. Some cultural representations of travelling across America, such as the Westerns, perpetuate the myths of manhood and self-discovery within Manifest Destiny; others, like the songs of Woody Guthrie, complicate them, but the idea that by discovering America you discover yourself remains a cornerstone of US culture. Episode 1.21 of Frasier, “Travels with Martin”, plays on the same trope of the open road, setting up a recurrent theme of the series: the class conflict that lies at the heart of the family, a vision of what it means to be an American, and what too it means to be an American man.

Series one of Frasier is built around this conflict of class and masculinity, as the working class cop and the bourgeois therapist have to learn to live within each other’s worlds. “Travels with Martin” serves as a sort of heartwarming coda towards the tail end of the series, when Frasier, who had been planning an overseas vacation to escape his life, realises instead that his father, Martin, should come with him. He gathers a bunch of travel brochures from a travel agent (for our younger readers, this was once how people organised travel before the internet). It feels fittingly American that, unlike Liberty Leading the People (painted as an idealistic entreaty to uphold revolutionary ideals), American Progress was a commercial work produced for tourists. It was commissioned from Gast by George Crofutt, one of the pioneers of guidebooks for travellers and tourists that marketed the West as a destination, and included illustrations of natural wonders, wilderness, and, of course, Native Americans. Even before the frontier was enclosed, it was selling itself as a myth to tourists as the real America.

It’s this America that Martin chooses to visit, based on nostalgia for an experience he admits he never had: travelling across the States in a Winnebago motor home (Winnebago, ironically, takes its name from a Native American Ho-Chunk people who were forced from their land in Winnebago County, Iowa). Drawing towards the end of the first series, the choice raises a problem, and a compromise, that draws the father-son character arc to the conclusion of their initial hostility. Although both realise that the trip will be hellish, both compromise in order to please the other.

I think, in its best moments, Frasier draws on a legacy of well-crafted farce that can be traced back to the work of French playwright Georges Feydeau, whose door-slamming, bed-hopping Belle Epoque plays imbued everyday situations with a sort of mania of misunderstanding. Frasier, being a multi camera sitcom, can add new creative opportunities for this sort of farce, and this moment is a perfect example of that. In one room, Frasier begs Niles to come with him, to dilute the intensity of the father-son bonding exercise. In the other, Martin begs Daphne to come along for the same reason. The camera flicks between the two conversations. Each assumes the other is excited; neither realises the other is dreading it. It’s a touching moment, and a clever one for the writers, allowing them to show the development of the relationship — at last, they care about the other’s feelings, and don’t want to disappoint them — without erasing the central tension that is the motor of the show: that they still struggle to be together.

Niles is having none on it. Like Frasier, inside a motor home is the opposite of how he pictures himself. It’s not just a holiday he wouldn’t enjoy: it’s a way of being he cannot understand. “Whenever I see [a Winnebago] on the highway I look into the driver’s eyes hoping to see something that would explain why in God's name he would ever want to do something like this. All I see is a death stare under the brim of a hat made of Miller Lite cans.” For the brothers their class position, and class as a differentiation, something whose signifiers — cultural tastes, holidays, culinary preferences — mark them out as better than others, underpins their lives. Not being poor and tasteless is what makes them who they are. No wonder their relationship with their father is fraught: they struggle to distinguish being good from being wealthy, well-educated, and liberal.

The central tension between class, authenticity and Americanness in Frasier foreshadows Trumpism. It’s cultural difference, a difference in values and what makes a man real, that makes Frasier and Martin’s relationship bound up with anxiety and anger. The two characters display a slight crack in 1990s White America that today is a grand canyon. At its most profound, Frasier is embarrassed of his dad’s unrefined blue collar masculinity, while Martin is ashamed of his son’s snobby, modish social status. Martin regards his offsprings’ tastes and affectations as a betrayal of their manhood and hence their Americanness, while Frasier sees his father’s traditional tastes and values as a form of stupidity, and hence a moral failing. Martin’s core values, once respected and mainstream, are no longer common sense, and it makes him anxious. Frasier, meanwhile, finds the presence of his father’s low tastes and opinions distasteful. His objections are more aesthetic than ethical: it’s not that such things and people exist, it’s that he’d rather he didn’t have to see them. When this episode was first aired early in the first Bill Clinton presidency, these positions were both slight enough and unusual enough to be a great setup for an odd-couple comedy; today they’re so deep and commonplace they were essentially the political positions in the Hillary Clinton - Donald Trump presidential race. In fact, were John Mahoney, the actor who plays Martin, still alive, I think the upcoming reboot would have proved impossible to make. Surely Martin, a conservative ex-cop, would be a Blue Lives Matter Fox News addict, while Frasier would have renounced all family duties to his ailing father on the grounds that, in this house, we believe science is real and love is love and never Bernie? The breach would be uncrossable.

This might be the characters’ own manifest destiny, but back in the heady idealism of Clinton 1.0, an American road trip is all it takes to remind the family that more unites than divides them. It’s no coincidence that Marty decides that the one sight he wants to see on his road trip is that American icon, the “Shrine of Democracy”, Mount Rushmore. The monument, depicting four US presidents, was devised by the historian Doane Robinson to drive tourism to the Black Hills of Dakota. The racial ideology of Manifest Destiny, and of driving out the wilderness, was at the core of his vision. He wrote that the monument would represent "not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of western civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation." It was quite literally the domination of the White man over the American landscape, remaking it in his image, and carved by an avowed White supremacist and supporter of the KKK. Perhaps more significantly, the mountain from which it was carved, the Six Grandfathers, was already a deeply sacred site for many Native Americans. It was stolen from the Sioux Nation and disfigured, not as a result of Johnson v. McIntosh but directly by settlers, in violation of treaties. 

Inevitably, father and sons argue, but soon they decide not to follow a route, and instead to go where the wind blows them. “We are now on the road less travelled!” Frasier exclaims, “From now on there is a new order!  We dance to the rhythm of the road!” Even Martin agrees: “I've got to say, I was pretty anxious, but I'm starting to like this free spirit stuff!” Through adventure, through exploration, the men are finding America, and themselves. Like Alexander the Great, however, who was said to have wept that he had no more worlds to conquer, the American men soon find a limit to discovering what it means to be an American: the border, and its enforcement.

It was ever thus: as American Progress showed, the spirit of White masculinity in America, depicted as an unstoppable force extending civilisation and exterminating wilderness, was being romanticised and packaged as tourism some twenty years before the “closing of the frontier” in 1890. With it, White American men lost their opportunity to prove who and what they really are, and are stuck with a nostalgia for an experience they never had, and can never have. Without that One True Test of US manhood, the conquering of the frontier, they have been left with a terminal anxiety around their status, never truly knowing whether they could match the challenges of their pioneer forefathers. To laugh, as the brothers do, at deer jerky, is somehow offensive, a snub on the men who made the nation, real Americans. Today, the question of what is a real American is still marked by a sense that authenticity, determined by the expansion of Whiteness and the control and ownership of space between the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. The consequences — a simultaneous obsession with both borders and expansion, with expanding theirs and limiting others, with threats and threatening, and of course, with firepower — continues to define the limits of the nation.

Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.