Arma virosque canit: John Ford, America’s Virgil

Martin M. Winkler (George Mason University)

A small group of fugitives sails across the seas to an unknown land in which they hope to find a new home. They are hospitably received by some of the native inhabitants but have to battle others who remain hostile. Despite all odds the newcomers found a new society which in the course of time will eclipse the original peoples and establish a powerful world-wide empire.

The history outlined above summarizes the foundation legend and subsequent development of both ancient Rome and modern America. Virgil’s Aeneid became the Romans’ national epic of their origin: Romanam condere gentem. The Americans do not have a single mythic-historical work about their beginnings and their course of empire that is analogous to the Aeneid, but they have a comparable body of work in the films of their greatest visual poet, John Ford. In a career spanning almost sixty years, Ford chronicled and mythicized all the major phases of American history from the Revolutionary War (Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939) to Vietnam (Vietnam! Vietnam!, 1967; as executive producer).

This paper concentrates on the most famous among Ford’s films. His Westerns deal with that phase of American history that is most directly comparable to the theme of the Aeneid: the establishment of a new society on a hostile frontier, the victory of an increasingly powerful new race, and the cost of empire. To paraphrase Virgil: tantae molis erat Americanam condere gentem. Specifically, the two major interpretations which scholars have advanced about the meaning of the Aeneid – that Virgil either glorifies and justifies empire or that he criticizes imperial monarchy – will be juxtaposed to Ford’s progressively darkening vision of American history. Key films like Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961) point out and mourn the loss of what frontier America once seemed to promise: a civilized and civilizing empire.