Steve Sailer writes:
It’s difficult to get across to young people today just how committed Hollywood was in the mid–20th century to propagandizing that America was less a nation of immigrants, as today’s cliché holds, than a nation of settlers. (Heck, in the 1960s the Italian film industry churned out Westerns.) For example, in Walt Disney’s speech opening Disneyland in 1955, he orated:
Frontierland. It is here that we experience the story of our country’s past. The color, romance, and drama of frontier America as it developed from wilderness trails to roads, riverboats, railroads, and civilization. A tribute to the faith, courage, and ingenuity of our hearty pioneers who blazed the trails and made this progress possible.
At some point between 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and 1972’s The Godfather, however, the American entertainment industry permanently lost interest in cowboys and Indians…
