Gene Autry's *Rovin' Tumbleweeds* and the New Deal

Autry’s Rovin’ Tumbleweeds (1939) places New Deal programs at the forefront, this time in relation to flooding like that combated in The River, a documentary promoting TVA projects to thwart flooding on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The River makes it clear that our overuse of the land has caused erosion and loss of top soils that have contributed to the river’s flooding. Pare Lorenz wrote and directed The River in 1937 as a tool for the policies of the Roosevelt administration and the U. S. Farm Security Administration, policies that might be seen as both as socialist and as appropriate for eradicating some of the problems caused by the Great Depression. The film also promotes "the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as the solution to problems of flooding, agricultural depletion, and electrification" (Bordwell and Thompson 58).

Lorentz's The River claims that the best way to solve the problems humans have caused by their degradation of nature is to implement a technological project driven by culture and mankind: The TVA’s construction of enormous dams like the Norris Dam, started in 1933 and finished on March 4, 1936, at the head of the Tennessee River. As the film's narrator argues, "The old river can be controlled. We had the power to take the Valley apart. We have the power to put it together again." According to The River, the TVA’s dams “will transform the old Tennessee into a link of fresh water pools locked and dammed, regulated and controlled.” 

Autry’s Rovin’ Tumbleweeds concentrates on flooding as a problem without discussing its cause. The film instead focuses on its solution—a flood control bill facilitating programs like those promoted in The River but which the local congressman (Fuller) chooses not to support. Like Man of the Frontier, Rovin’ Tumbleweeds opens with a message about the power of water. The first part of the message reads, “Water—Man’s Greatest Friend,” and then we hear a thunder clap and see thrashing storms, and the rest of the message appears: “but unleashed, man’s greatest foe.” A newspaper headline shows us the repercussions of the storm when it claims, “Green River Bursts Banks.”

The force of water has been established, but Autry gives us the cause in an interview with a radio reporter, “We wouldn’t have had this storm—I just wanna tell ya—we wouldn’t have suffered this loss of life and property if that cheap politician Congressman Fuller had put through that flood control bill.” Autry blames politicians for the flooding without referencing a war against nature in Rovin’ Tumbleweeds, unlike the radio interviewer, who proclaims, “It looks like nature has called a truce,” when the storm ends.  Autry, on the other hand, has a philosophy that lines up with that portrayed in The River: To save working farmers and ranchers and their land, the government should intervene.

The film’s connection to New Deal programs rings through the community-minded film. After halting flooding, for example, Autry sings a song about flooding rivers with an image of New Deal proletariats in the background. Headlines that spring up throughout the film carry a similar message. When ranchers washed out by the flooding migrate to Rand County in search of work, headlines read: “Community Minded, Promised Land.” And Congressman Fuller serves as a representative of the corporation keeping them out (The Randville Development Corporation), offering Autry and his fellow workers a tangible entity to fight against, even going to jail to fight for their right to work.

Autry facilitates the fight between working people and greedy corporations and politicians first by singing on the radio and donating his earnings to the people, but his efforts are unsuccessful. Headlines read, “One man relief agency on behalf of all the migratory workers—unfortunately Gene’s generous contributions have proved pitifully inadequate in the face of the ever increasing hordes pouring into Rand County.” When Autry and Congressman Fuller meet at a railway station, however, Autry chooses to be “the man in office who’ll do something” to stop the flooding—a long-term environmental solution that will help ranchers reclaim their lands. The conflict is heightened then, since viewers discover that Halloway and Fuller are a team determined to buy up the land along the Green River before the flood control goes through. Autry’s efforts for the workers pay off—he saves the radio station and saves a camp of migrants from a sheriff who wants to burn them down, so he wins the Congressional election in a landslide.

After a series of failures in Washington D. C., Autry seems on the brink of getting the flood control bill through. But the film takes an odd turn at the end when another storm erupts and the Green River floods again. Gene convinces the Rand County migrants to help him sandbag the banks of the river, and Halloway has a change of heart, joining in with the migrants. On the radio, an announcer says, “With courage and cooperation” they “work side by side” and the flood control is passed. Halloway even gives his money to labor in an act that seems to draw on New Deal socialist inclinations. Environmental degradation is thwarted by community efforts that cross class lines here. The film argues effectively for measures like dams and levies, just as do New Deal films like The River.

Gene Autry's *Man of the Frontier* and the Power of Water

 Two powerful Gene Autry films, Man of the Frontier (1936) and Rovin’ Tumbleweeds (1939) illustrate the environmental impact of controlling water and water rights. In Man of the Frontier, Autry presents us with a clear solution to drought—the lack of water, and in Rovin’ Tumbleweeds provides us with viable solutions to flooding—another consequence of failure to control water usage. Both of these films provide environmentalist readings of water use in the West, blatantly asserting wise use policies that hark back to New Deal programs and the documentaries that promoted them (see The River (1937) and The Plow that Broke the Plains (1934), for example. Autry’s 1936 film, Man of the Frontier, highlights the dustbowl issues foregrounded in The Plow that Broke the Plains within the parameters of an action-packed Western narrative. Man of the Frontier opens with a voiceover warning that introduces the environmental concerns of the film:

Drought: The grim enemy that devastated once prosperous farm and ranch lands. Men have learned that bitter lesson of unpreparedness. Throughout stricken areas today, they are rallying forces to fight back with their only weapon—water.

Water is introduced as a weapon to combat drought, and then the camera pans to images of a dam and the water it holds back, along with a sign reading, “Red River Land and Irrigation Company.” A company formed by area ranchers have pooled their resources to build a dam and canal to irrigate their land. When gate five is blown up, a rancher exclaims, they will “not stop at murder to stop us from finishing the canal,” and the conflict of the film has been established:  Steve Conway (Boothe Howard) and the town banker, Hartley Moore (Frank LaRue) are scheming to thwart the ranchers, so that he can take over the water rights for the reservoir and canal and make a profit from the thirsty ranchers. Gene Autry and his sidekick, Frog (Smiley Burnette) intervene and save the dam and canal, but more importantly, they save the rancher’s drought-ridden land.

           

Autry enters the film as a rancher who volunteers to protect the canal and dam after the previous ditch-rider is killed when gate number five is dynamited. While damage to the gate is repaired, the water is shut off and a whole season’s crops might be lost. Autry’s ditch riding might save the land and the crops and cattle it sustains. The film intertwines mining with cattle ranching and sheep ranching to explain the presence of dynamite, so it comes as no surprise when the banker’s thugs set up gate number nine for another dynamite blast. The plan is to kill Autry when the dynamite goes off, but Autry notices the dynamite and blasts the fuse off with his gun. When he comes back to town, the banker’s hoods go back to retrieve any dynamite left at the site—evidence of their foul play—but Autry and Frog rope one of the men and knock the other into the water. They take them back to town, but the men are set free, since there’s no evidence to convict them.

At this point, Autry does not know who’s behind the dynamite explosions, but he stands behind George Baxter (Sam Flint), who heads the dam project, and his daughter, Mary (Frances Grant). After a series of altercations, including one that ends with Autry dragging the banker’s men back across a desert, Autry saves the dam and canal for the ranchers and the Red River Land and Irrigation Company by retrieving a stolen payroll from Moore and Conway’s henchmen. They celebrate with a song—Red River Valley—but the film’s parting words highlight its environmental message regarding water as weapon: water, held back by a dam and maneuvered through a canal, will “transform the Red River Valley into one of the richest of farm lands.”

As with New Deal documentaries like The Plough that Broke the Plains, drought and the parched infertile farm and ranch land it causes are environmental problems that can be solved with engineering miracles like dams and irrigation canals. These “miracles” were, according to Frederick Turner, a product of the New West, a west he said required “expensive irrigation works, cooperative activity, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer, and vast paternal enterprises of federal reclamation” (quoted in Hundley 6). As Wells A. Hutchins explains, “Water, as well as land, is property. And just as privileges of land use are rights of property, so privileges of water use are recognized as property rights entitled to protection under the due process clause of the federal constitution” (867). Water rights, according to Hutchins, can be categorized in two ways: “The riparian doctrine, based upon ownership of land bordering a natural stream. Such a situation of the land entitles the owner to use water of the stream on his riparian land” (867).  And “The appropriation doctrine [which] sanctions the taking of water from a stream for use on or in connection with land, which need not border the stream….Time of beginning the diversion and beneficial use of water gives priority of right” (867).

Autry’s Man of the Frontier draws on New Deal issues like these, but in conjunction with water right issues from the nineteenth century when the Homestead Act and the Desert Land Acts provided opportunities for individuals to stake a claim on lands that provided the only access to water in the region. According to Donald Worster, this “increase in federal authority over western water in collusion with corporate water aggrandizement has produced a tragedy of unparalleled proportions” (quoted in Hundley 15). Bankers and corporate ranchers in the film take advantage of this access, attempting to monopolize water rights for financial gain, no matter whom or what they needed to blow up to control vital resources.

These two figures represent what Worster calls the “emergence and collusion of two groups that constitute the ‘power elite’—agribusiness and government officials, especially those in the Bureau of Reclamation” (quoted in Hundley 15).  The conflicts in the film, then, are a product of both a contemporary and old West context. Water as a weapon to combat drought and bring back fecundity to the land, however, makes The Man of the Frontier a blatant environmental Western. The film adds weight to Worster’s claim that “A by-product of this collusion [between agribuisness and government] has been human social costs in evasions of reclamation law and exploitation of field workers, as well as massive environmental despoliation resulting from dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and economic (especially agricultural) development made possible through modern technology” (quoted in Hundley 15).

The Sea of Grass (1947) and Myths of the Free Range

In Elia Kazan's The Sea of Grass, Jim Brewton, Spencer Tracy’s character, argues that cattle grazing serves the land better than homestead farming, an argument John H. Lenihan takes at face value when he claims that Brewton “expresses genuine affection for the rich grasslands, which he correctly believes would be ruined by the homesteader’s plow” (100). Lenihan compares the The Sea of Grass to New Deal documentaries with both a conservationist and communal message. In stark contrast, we assert that The Sea of Grass constructs Brewton as a “frontier empire-builder” rather than an agent for community building, so the film, and Lenihan’s reading of it, begs questions. The connection between Pare Lorentz, a major director of New Deal documentaries, and Kazan, the director of The Sea of Grass, however, seems to have influenced Kazan’s attempt at an environmental message, an attempt that we believe falls flat in relation to Brewton’s unlimited drive to conquer the plains and maintain his claim to the range.

Instead of taking Brewton’s claims and the film’s narrative structure at face value, we suggest it invites an ecocritical reading that demystifies the dichotomies on which it rests—that between cattle ranchers and homesteaders in the 1880s Southwest. The film asserts that free-range ranching maintains the plains in their original state, just as did the buffalo and the Indian, and demonstrates that homestead farming destroys the plain, turning it into a dustbowl on screen like that invoked in Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936). What is missing from the film are the repercussions of unfettered grazing environmental historian Mont H. Saunderson warns about in 1949. Although Brewton sees a clear ecological dichotomy between free-range ranching and homesteading, with free-range ranching benefiting grasslands and homesteading destroying them, research even from the film’s period suggests otherwise. Studies from the 1970s forward demonstrate that free-range ranching contributed more to the loss of range ecology than any other farming method.

Brewton sees himself and other ranchers as the rightful “owners” of the range and denigrates the homesteader who does not build an empire with his own hands but on the backs of those who came before him:

Chamberlain, I have sympathy for the early pioneer who risked his life and his family among the Indians, and I hope I have a little charity for the nester who waited until the land was safe and peaceable before he filed a homestead of someone else who fought for it. But when that nester picks land like my big Vega, a thousand feet above the sea which nature intended for grazing land and always will be grazing land, when he wants to plow it up to support his family when there isn’t enough rain for the crops to grow. When he only kills the grass that will grow when his crops starve for water and he ends up killing my beef and becomes a man without respect for himself and a menace to the territory, then I have neither sympathy nor charity…. Boggs is only a sample of what will happen if others try it.

When the film’s protagonist, Jim Brewton, introduces his new wife, Lutie Cameron (Katharine Hepburn), to his large ranch, Brewton reinforces his belief that free-range ranching best serves the land, again establishing himself as the superior pole in the binary between free-range and fenced ranching. He looks at the land and states, “Well, first of all I guess I hear the buffalo” and when Lutie asks him what else he hears, and he explains his arguments for a free-range approach while looking down on the grass,

I can remember the first time I saw her. We’d come a long way. And nobody was telling us about any surprises. We just came over the hill and there she was, sort of lying there all alone. Nobody wanted her then, except the antelope, the buffalo, and the Indians, so we took her, and we set her up right for cow country. We fought for her. Our blood sunk in every mile. Indian blood, too. I’m not so proud of some of that. My brother’s out there. It’s kind of the way God made it and wants it to stay, and I’ve got a hunch that He wants me to keep it that way.

He has defeated both the native range animal—the buffalo—and the region’s indigenous peoples. Yet he sees himself and his cattle as native rather than imported and hence as making no mark on the landscape of which they are a natural part. He also designates himself as the land’s protector with a manifest destiny to “keep it that way.”He does not acknowledge the irony. He has acquired this land only after destroying its original inhabitants. Instead, he asserts that the land is the same for him and his cattle as it was for the buffalo and American Indians before him. The film reinforces Brewton’s assertions about the dangers of homesteading, first by demonstrating that ranchers and homesteaders cannot coexist because their methods contradict one another, and then by illustrating dire consequences of homesteading—destroying the grass and contributing to long-term drought and dustbowl conditions. What it doesn’t do is show the damage free range ranching did to the sea of grass Brewton fights to preserve.