Davy Crockett a Stooge, Professors Claim

Davy Crockett, popular "King of the Wild Frontier," whose ballad, television series, and coonskin caps have made him the new idol of America's children, was actually a vain political stooge in real life, two College professors agreed yesterday.

Perry G. E. Miller and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38, professors of American Literature and History, respectively, both conceded that Davy was a brave "Injun fighter" and "b'ar hunter," as the popular song claims. But as a Congressman, they said, Crockett was a willing stooge used by the Whig Party to counter the popular appeal of the Democrats' Andrew Jackson.

Miller disagreed completely with an article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine which called Crockett a Congressman of "remarkable good sense and such rare moral courage as to make him an authentic spiritual as well as physical American here." "I don't think Davy did anything in Congress but whittle," Miller said.

Commenting on the same article, which was written by Kenneth S. Davis, Schlesinger merely said, "Ken should know better."

The current Crockett cult began last December, when Walt Disney presented the first of three television movies about the old frontiersman.

Now, a Square record salesman said yesterday, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" has even been selling faster than Beethoven's Ninth.

But the King of the Wild Frontier's real story, according to Miller and Schlesinger, is different from the words of the ballad and the Times. Davy, it seems, was an ordinary soldier in Tennessee when the Whig Party, defeated by President Jackson, decided that it, too, needed "someone in a coonskin cap who was a man of the people."

So the Whigs elected Davy to Congress, where they made sure that he supported the United States Bank, and then exhibited him around the country and wrote flattering "autobiographics" for him.