Since childhood I have read editorials and op-ed pieces on both sides of the political spectrum. Like conservative David Brooks of The New York Times once did, I also read William F. Buckley. As a result, I read newspaper pieces that make me a little crazy sometimes.

This morning David Brooks posted “How Trump Will Fail”. I’m glad to read his admission that Trump’s “ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.”

I laughed. Well, of course I did! But then all too soon, Brooks couldn’t help but unwittingly slip into fiction. I appreciate cowboy mythology as much as the next person, but let’s not mistake it for history.

I’m glad Brooks once had a Junior year history text*, but he might want to have another read. He makes this claim: “It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones.”

He’s wrong about that. Wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to start. “Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.”

I don’t disagree with his dismissal of Trump’s intelligence or populism, but I will point out that as a westerner and a reader of history, I can say with certainty that Washington never even imagined the West I know. Abraham Lincoln didn’t live west of the Mississippi River, and McKinley never got near Alaska where it was someone’s stupid idea to rename our tallest peak after him. [It took a century to fix that and return its name to what Alaska’s Senators, both Republicans, call Denali.]

The mythology about the west forging the national character that Brooks cites was born “among the establishment circles” of big eastern cities; not in the west. All the examples in his essay support that: P.T. Barnum, Henry James, Herman Melville—big whoops! These are the western “frontier … wild … uncouth ones” on which our national character was developed in the nineteenth century? Even Andrew Jackson, who might reasonably be counted as wild and uncouth, never crossed the center of our nation. Brooks thinks the West created our national character? Does he know any American history? Apparently, not enough.

[Despite the cowboy Westerns of my childhood, people out west supported and looked after one another because their lives were hard. The fantasy heroic stories about that West written in the nineteenth and twentieth century do not represent direct observation. Those stories about gunfights and so forth were fictions. For example, Jack Warner Schaefer wrote Shane in 1949 based on the little he learned about the West from a pulp magazine serial. He’d attended Oberlin and Columbia and the furthest west he’d traveled at that time was Cleveland.]

That ruthless quality Brooks cites came from eastern industrialists, not the west. The Robber Barons I learned about in my 11th grade Social Studies classes—they are the ones who defined the selfish, ambitious, American character Brooks describes. Blame powerful industrialists like Astor and Flick, Morgan and Vanderbilt for that entitled focus on power over decency. Blame Carnegie. Blame social Darwinism. Blame men who thought they’d been chosen and had earned the right to decide how the world should work because they were rich enough to buy anything. They were not nice people. The very rich might have nice manners, but they’re not usually nice.

I know this from personal experience attending school with them and teaching their children. Common sense should make it clear to anyone that few people gain or maintain fortunes by being what most of us count as good. Every traditional moral and religious system in the world backs me on this.

*Besides, Brooks is Canadian-born and although he did work briefly at Stanford, he seems not to have discovered what the American West was actually like. Heaven knows what distortions he was taught as a child in Toronto! By high school he was attending one of the best public schools in the United States in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia. Like my dad’s (UC Berkeley), his undergraduate degree was in History (U Chicago). But Brooks cites a high school text, and high school textbooks are not the best source of accurate history. I’m sure he must know this. I was raised in the Pacific NW and my dad used to routinely reteach the history I was getting out of textbooks published in Texas. My dad was born in Montana and he’s the reason I know a cowboy always owned a hat but probably not a gun. I know that right after the Civil War there’s a good chance a cowboy was Black. I know he was young, in his early teens to barely into his twenties. Cowboying was a hard life and most of those boys moved on to other work when they could. Or they fell off a horse—someone’s horse, not necessarily their own—and died young. And then there are people like Johanna July (c. 1860-1942) who broke horses and raised cattle and recounted her life to WPA writer Florence Angermiller in the 1930s. [Follow the link —she deserves attention.]