The Weekly Screed (#921)

Only the white guys live forever

By David Benjamin

“We here have little chance for glory or advancement. While some of our brother officers are leading their well-publicized campaigns against the great Indian nations — the Sioux and the Cheyenne — we are asked to ward off the gnat stings and flea bites of a few cowardly 'digger Indians’.”

          — Henry Fonda, as Lt. Col. Owen Thursday, in Fort Apache

MADISON, Wis. — While contriving last weekend to escape news of the latest American carnage in El Paso and Dayton, I fled to the movie channel, TCM, and stumbled right into a powerful, frustrating exegesis of our nation’s bleak, dark and muddled history of institutional race hatred. 

The film is Fort Apache, directed by the magisterial John Ford. It stars Henry Fonda as the genocidal Colonel Thursday and John Wayne as his soft-hearted antagonist, Captain Yorke. The story takes place in the midst of the U.S. Army’s 50-year war against the tribes of the Apache Nation on the Mexican border.

Although the movie was filmed in 1948, during a benighted period of race relations in America, director Ford prosecutes an admirably evenhanded case against the U.S. government’s campaign to crush Indian resistance in the West and exterminate the stubborn Apaches by captivity, deprivation and mortal attrition.

The white-skinned advocate for chief Cochise and the Apaches is Capt. Yorke (Wayne), who articulates passionately the hardships and betrayals imposed on the natives by the Army and the malignant U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Yorke is a veteran of many Apache campaigns and a signatory to the treaties that have granted the native peoples safety and sustenance on government reservations. He speaks Apache. With the aid of Sgt. Beaufort (Pedro Armendariz), Capt. Yorke communicates in Spanish with Cochise, Geronimo and the other Apaches.

 

Col. Thursday speaks only English and seethes with contempt for any other tongue. His unsubtle xenophobia foreshadows, rather symmetrically, the present state of racist American leadership. From his first utterances, Col. Thursday champions the Aryan crusade of ridding the land — from sea to shining sea — of the verminous savages who infest a continent ordained by God to belong to white men and Shirley Temple.

  

The tension between Thursday and Yorke is a strong narrative vehicle, deftly managed by John Ford and, of course, filmed against a breathtaking background. I’ve always admired Ford’s mastery of black-and-white cinematography, handled in Fort Apache by William H. Clothier and Archie Stout. When Ford’s camera soars above Arizona’s Monument Valley, the foreground washed and the clouds limned in vivid, vibrant contrast to a sky almost black with overexposure, the result is riveting. Now and then, I hit the “pause” button just to stare at Ford’s achingly crisp tableaux of the jagged desert he loved.

John Ford’s tendency toward tolerance and justice, embodied in the character of Capt. Yorke, seems to be the heart of the story. Ford even used real Indians (instead of Anthony Quinn and Jeff Chandler) to play most of the Apaches.

 

But the monomaniacal Col. Thursday is in command. In his hunger to subjugate the Apaches, he scorns a treaty with Cochise (Miguel Inclan) as an irrelevant pact negotiated with subhumans. Capt. Yorke, who gave his solemn word to Cochise, is helpless to mediate against a war that Thursday wants. Nor is Yorke allowed to caution Thursday on the recklessness of charging blind into a box canyon where a thousand armed Apaches hold the high ground.

Of course, Thursday charges anyway. All but a few of the white guys, led by a raving bigot who can’t believe Indians can shoot straight, die.

As Yorke perishes with his boots on, the message of the film still seems radically enlightened. Ford appears to suggest that the U.S. government should have shown more respect for America’s native people, that the genocide of these people was a national disgrace and a slaughter that killed thousands — millions — needlessly and horribly, on both sides. The message seems to be that the military campaign to expunge the Apache, the Sioux, the Cheyenne and all the other native tribes from the face of this continent is American history’s greatest, deepest shame.

But no, wait.

Racism, even as heinous as this, turns out in the end to be, well, just one of those crazy things.

 

I noticed, for example, that one of the troop’s recruits, played by the inimitable Hank Worden, proudly announces that he fought for the South in the Civil War, under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. This casual reference is barely noticeable, but it serves as a name-dropping wink of absolution for the vast bloodletting visited upon the nation by the Confederate states’ addiction to human bondage. Nathan Bedford Forrest is a uniquely significant figure in America’s racist past. He was perpetrator of the Civil War’s worst massacre, at Fort Pillow, of unarmed Union soldiers, women and children. He went on, in civilian life, to become a founding father of the Ku Klux Klan.

 

In one of the last scenes, a reporter praises, as a great hero, Col. Thursday — who hated Apaches and led his troops into an idiotic charge that left them all dead or dying. The reporter laments the fact Thursday’s regiment of obedient corpses will be soon forgotten.

This is where John Wayne, John Ford and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent could have said, “Wait a minute!” Capt. Yorke could have reiterated his brotherhood with  Cochise and his beleaguered people. He could have, accurately, described Col. Thursday as a raving bigot driven into a catastrophic military plunge by his lust for genocide. Capt. Yorke could have explained that he himself was spared from the slaughter of his comrades because he courageously defied the blood thirst of his hate-driven commander. He might even have admitted that the members of his troop died in an evil cause, their lives wasted by leaders whose policies for a century were marked by deceit, greed, unspeakable cruelty and mass murder.

 

But no. Before the credits roll, Hollywood, in typical fashion, pulls its punch. Instead of sticking to the truth and being true to his character, John Wayne — his iconic visage framed by the reflection of Ford’s heavenly desert skies — blathers through a hackneyed litany of martial clichés.

He says, “They aren't forgotten because they haven’t died. They’re living — right out there… The faces may change, the names, but they’re there. They’re the regiment, the regular army, now and fifty years from now. They're better men than they used to be. Thursday did that. He made it a command to be proud of.”

After a lifetime advocating for fairness to the Apaches, Capt. York opts to piss it away. He makes the distinction that the people who count, the dead who will live on, are not the millions of Indians killed by troops who were “just following orders.” The white guys live on, says Yorke, and the regiment — whose mission is to establish an American apartheid over every square inch of the land and permanently push the surviving handful of natives into second-class citizenship inside dusty concentration camps — are the only warriors worthy of honor.

After all, the movie’s stars are white. They get all the good lines (in English), and hog the close-ups. Shirley marries John Agar and, in the end, the beautiful tragedy belongs to the victors.

The Injuns? Just extras.