The close identification of Western themes with expansionism, in the twentieth century, did not completely extinguish the pastoral image of the West, often invoked by anti-imperialists against the glorification of conquest and hyper-masculinity. The legacy of Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo, and Huck Finn lived on in American politics, in attenuated form, in the environmentalist movement's fixation on the preservation of wilderness (as opposed to a sensible balance, say, between industry and agriculture, or a more flexible technology); in the romantic cult of "third world" peoples, including the American Indian, as a counterweight to industrial technology; in young radicals' identification with Holden Caulfield, James Dean, Bob Dylan, and other self-conceived fugitives from adult repression, modern Huckleberry Finns; and in the continuing belief that women, children, and "people of color" (an old, condescending, and discredited expression oddly revived by the left in recent years) remain uncompromised by the exercise of power and therefore pure in heart. That images derived (however distantly) from a common source can be claimed by anti-expansionists and expansionists alike underscores the ambiguity that was always inherent in the westward movement, alternately conceived as the wave of the future and as a journey into the past.

As a source of fresh images, however, the Western theme had already exhausted itself by the time of World War I, as is indicated by its formulaic repetition. The nostalgic imagination had to seize on other images, notably that of the elm-shaded small town. Mark Twain once said, during a visit to India, "All the me in me is in a little Missouri village half-way around the world." Like so many of Twain's sayings, this was ambiguous. Did it mean that he'd left his heart in Hannibal, or that Hannibal was the prelude to the rest of his life, the hiding place of his power as a man and writer, the "background"—as Sherwood Anderson later wrote on the last page of Winesburg, Ohio, where his protagonist, Chicago

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