The Davy Crockett Gun Craze by Sarah Nilsen
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“Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead”: The Davy Crockett Gun Craze by Sarah Nilsen In April 2005, sixty thousand members of the National Rifle Association gathered in Houston, Texas for their 134th Annual Meeting. The keynote speaker for the event was embattled U.S. House Majority Leader, Representative Tom De Lay. After his speech, De Lay was joined on stage by Lee Hamel dressed as Davy Crockett in full buckskin attire and a coonskin hat. Hamel presented De Lay with a handcrafted flintlock rifle that he had made for the event with his mentor, Cecil Brooks. The presentation of the reproduction rifle to De Lay is part of a long NRA tradition that began in 1955 when Walt Disney‟s Davy Crockett series first appeared on television. When Charlton Heston received his handcrafted flintlock rifle in 1989, he uttered his famous words, “From my cold dead hands.” President Ronald Reagan and Vice President Dick Cheney also joined the list of those who received facsimile Davy Crockett flintlock rifles from a man dressed in Crockett buckskin attire. This tradition is part of the NRA‟s efforts to represent the gun as a key instrument in the founding of the United States. It secured this ideological representation in part by appropriating the mythology of early American heroes like Davy Crockett. Davy Crockett became emblematic of the gun mythology of early American life. This mythology was synergized by the NRA and popularized through children‟s television to promote a conception of the role of the gun in American cultural history consistent with its political agenda. Through children‟s television, Davy Crockett became an iconic figure for the promotion of the American gun craze. The NRA‟s reliance on the media to support its political agenda is not remarkable considering its strategic goal to speak for a national, majority audience. What is significant is the NRA‟s continued dependence in its ceremonies and histories on a Disney hero that had been manufactured for a children‟s audience. This article considers the way in which a television show produced by the Walt Disney Corporation, the purveyor of wholesome children‟s entertainment in the 1950s, became incorporated within the NRA‟s vision of a historical past centered on the gun. The linkage of the NRA with Walt Disney signaled a radical change not only in the cultural production of the studio, but also the public perception of the relationship between childhood and gunplay. At a time when the public discourse was focused on the correlation between media consumption and juvenile delinquency, The Davy Crockett series was able to successfully align child‟s play and violent gunplay through the narrativization of the life of an American frontier hero. The unprecedented popularity of the miniseries, broadcast first on television and then repackaged for theatrical release, helped make the proliferation of toy guns in the hands of children appear not only acceptable but politically and historically correct because it was manufactured by the Disney studio. The National Rifle Association of America Headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, houses the National Firearms Museum which provides a dioramic chronology of the history of the gun in America. Key historical events and decades are recreated to highlight both the centrality of the gun within the formation of the United States and the social significance of the gun in the creation of American national identity. The NRA‟s narrativization of this history frequently relies on mass media sources to support its historical claims. The exhibit chosen to illustrate the 1950s is a recreation of a typical youngster's bedroom decorated with western-style wallpaper, furnishings, and a sampling of western-theme toys and games based on popular television shows. Consistent with the Red Feather Journal 73 museum‟s intent, the gun is central to this nostalgic reconstruction of childhood in the 1950s. A large variety of toy pistols in holsters hang from a coat rack and a gun cabinet with three rifles stands next to the bed. Over the bed is a rack of steer horns, off of which hangs a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. According to the NRA‟s reconstruction of the past for their members, the 1950s represented a period in which the immense popularity of the television western was instrumental in making the gun into an essential part of American childhood. The Davy Crockett hat--and, by extension, the cultural image of Davy Crockett-- offers a starting point for making sense of the ideological effects of the NRA display. This diorama represents the social significance of children‟s television in the galvanization of the gun culture in the United States during this period. Drawing on the NRA‟s image of a 1950s boy's bedroom, I will unravel some of the various cultural forces at work in the construction of this gun culture, focusing on the role of a children's television program produced by Walt Disney. The Davy Crockett television series provides some valuable insight into the way that television, in representing the gun in American history, blinded the American public to the way that it was normalizing the gun as part of youth culture. In the effects of this television series, we understand what media theorist Daniel Dayan means when he says “ideology is hidden in our very eyes” (Dayan 123). The Davy Crockett series displays ideology at work through the contradiction that animates it. By examining the seeming contradiction between the desire to ameliorate a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency on the one hand, while promoting the conjunction of youth and guns on the other, I intend to cast some light on the way that children's television programming, and in particular Disney, was able to motivate a particular conception of guns in American culture, while effectively diffusing broader social concerns and criticisms over gunplay. The tremendous fan base attached to the Davy Crockett television series suggests an element of identification and enjoyment that was unparalleled in children‟s entertainment. In 1955, the American family was swept up by a craze the likes of which had never been seen before. As Life magazine reported, there was "an army of Americans which had a sudden and shattering impact on the nation's home life"("U.S. Again Is Subdued by Davy" 17). The article's central subject was a "pleased 3 year-old, who sees himself as the King of the Wild Frontier. He is a Davy Crockett fan and is a brother in arms of almost every American of both sexes from the age of 2 to 12." ("U.S. Again Is Subdued by Davy" 17). The television program, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, was originally designed by the Walt Disney studio in 1954 as a three-part television series and as the first installment in a larger series about American folk heroes to be shown on Disneyland, the weekly Disney television series aired Wednesday evenings on ABC: "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter" appeared on December 15, 1954, "Davy Crockett Goes to Congress" on January 26, 1955, and "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" on Feb. 23, 1955. In June 1955, Disney refashioned the Crockett series for release as a feature length film to add fuel to the craze. The Crockett craze was "by far the best selling myth in America" (King 145). Over 3,000 Crockett items filled the stores and lead to $100 million in sales. In some department stores, Crockett accounted for as much as 10% of sales. "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," a song which had been written as filler for the already completed shows, sold 18 million copies, was recorded by over 20 different singers in sixteen different versions (including the "Davy Crockett Mambo"), and was the number one song of 1955. Retailers sold 14 million Crockett books, and a Red Feather Journal 74 comic strip appeared in syndication in 200 newspapers. Sylvia Porter, a syndicated financial columnist, recognizing the social significance of the Crockett craze, explained, "The youngsters always have had a vital influence over the family's spending habits--but now even the pre-reading ones are developing definite buying habits. We're creating a nation of spenders from infancy. It tells as much about us in 1955 as the original tall tales about Davy Crockett told us about American in 1835" (Sann 29). Coupled with the spending frenzy of the series was the promulgation of American family values and ideals. Under the title "Davy Crockett Says," Disney distributed newspaper columns featuring a picture of Fess Parker, the actor who played Crockett in the series, as Davy, and homilies regarding honesty, trust, justice, duty and frugality (Derr 27-28). In all of these cultural venues, Disney‟s Davy Crockett became a constant presence. At every turn this figure of Davy Crockett appeared, and the gun was always at the center of his image and his message. A children‟s television program centered on gunplay would appear anathema to the company credited with creating one Hollywood‟s most famous anti-hunting and anti- gun films, Bambi (1942). In Disney‟s adaptation and alteration of Felix Salten‟s novel, the focus of the narrative becomes the wild baby animals in their natural environment whose pacifism and innocence is put under siege by the destructive forces of “Man” and his gun. The film became a national symbol for the inhumanity of the hunters whose gun shots destroyed the peaceful harmony of the natural world. But the Walt Disney studio responsible for the Davy Crockett television series had been radically transformed by two events. First, the traumatic strike at the studio in 1941, lead directly to Disney‟s personal involvement in the HUAC hearings, and his appointment as first vice president for the notorious anti-Communist organization, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.