“In these anxious days,” wrote Aaron Latham in the original Esquire article that inspired the movie Urban Cowboy, “some Americans have turned for salvation to God, others have turned to fad prophets.” But more and more people, Latham noted, were turning to the cowboy for guidance.

When Latham’s article was published in 1978, only about a quarter of the U.S. population reported that they could trust their government “at least most of the time.” Radically shaken by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, barreled under stagflation at home, and facing the threat of nuclear holocaust abroad, the public, unable to put their faith in their nation’s institutions, were increasingly putting it in one of its most durable myths.

Is it any surprise then that when Urban Cowboy premiered two years later, the movie ushered in a cowboy boot craze so frenzied that, at its height, farmers and ranchers reportedly struggled to get their hands on the footwear. It took the rise of Lycra-blend aerobics gear to finally tip the scales of ’80s fashion.

For over a century and a half now, the cowboy boot has continued to rise up in the nation’s culture like a Rorschach test, reflecting back to us ideas of what it means to be American. But though the cowboy boot is often used to suggest one version of Americanness, that of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, its history should remind us that the boots were made for everyone.

The iconic cowhide work boot was not destined to be affixed in the American popular imagination this way, just like the term “cowboy” itself was not originally associated with the ideas it now summons. A Revolutionary War-era holdover, cowboys first referred to British Tories using guerilla tactics against the rebel colonists. The boots that would become synonymous with them emerged as the term evolved a century later, as cowboys, of many and multiple races and ethnicities, began driving livestock on the cattle trails from Texas to Kansas railheads for transport to markets in the East. Some of the earliest working cowboys were Black, as Katie Nodjimbadem has noted in Smithsonian magazine. The reason there became so many Black cowboys (historians estimate that in Texas they made up as many as one in four) was because the job was one of the few dignified professions open to them after the Civil War.

Inspiration for the cowboy boot itself was global: It derived from the short-heeled square-toed English Wellington boot worn by cavalry and artillery drivers during the American Civil War, the German Hessian knee-high boot, and the Vaquero riding boot worn in Mexican ranchero culture. As the footwear evolved beyond its initial utilitarian function, it increasingly incorporated Native American designs, such as fringed buckskin.

This shared heritage is what led the design historian Sonya Abrego to characterize the cowboy boot as a reflection of “the material index of the diversity of the American West,” in her 2022 book Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture.

But it’s the parallel story around the cowboy boot, spun out of traveling Wild West vaudeville shows and Westerns, that’s proven more enduring.

Wild West shows were already mythologizing the cowboys and their boots by the time the railroad made its way to Texas, sunsetting the era of the widespread cattle drive that the footwear was created for. These productions increasingly linked them to the nation’s vanishing frontier (which was officially “closed” by the Bureau of the Census in 1890), and to a whitewashed narrative of America’s genocidal manifest destiny. The most popular, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, which began in 1883, ran for three decades in the U.S. and overseas, its story of the West often understood by its audiences to be fact not fiction. Native actors were cast as heels, while romanticized cowboys, increasingly portrayed by white actors on the stage, were held up as symbols of rugged individualism.

Mail-order catalogs of the day began to sell this narrative to consumers as the boots shifted beyond their solely utilitarian purpose (as early as the 1890s, ad copy began calling attention to not just their functionality but their “unique, showy appearance”). Hollywood did much of the rest.

With the rise of the Westerns, the footwear underwent a movie makeover in the ’40s and ’50s, emerging out of it with even more colors and artistry and a newly signature pointed toe. The revamped boot was popularized by Western stars like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the “King of Cowboys” and “Queen of the West,” who portrayed one idea of the cowboy. Viewers who saw their exploits on screen created a mass demand for the boots to emulate it. (The trend even inaugurated a new concept, the “sidewalk cattleman”—a name for people who wore cowboy boots but did not own cattle.)

Cowboy boot booms have come and gone since. Each time the cowboy boot returns in vogue, one can see their artisanry and craft, which continues to be reimagined and reinvented by successive waves of fashion. (Already in the 1950s, country stars were popularizing the rhinestone cowboy boot, now part and parcel of the Nashville bachelorette circuit.) But it can be hard to see the boot, and its style evolution, in a neutral way because it remains so saddled with the heavy load of representing the contested values of a nation.

That tangled history of the cowboy boot is why I’m still trying to figure out what I want to say with my own pair shelved in my closet.

I got them in the late 2000s when friends and I started going line dancing at the college night at Borderline Bar and Grill, a country western bar near my hometown in Ventura County, California. The boots were not just an aesthetic purchase; the heel, which once allowed cowboys to feel secure in stirrups, also allows for twisting, sliding, and stomping on the dance floor.

We loved the big ballads and achy heartbreak numbers the bar featured, dancing until we got tired and then playing the songs again on the car rides home, sweaty from trying to keep up with all the step work we’d put our shoes through.

But as much as I enjoyed going to the bar, I never felt comfortable laying a claim to the boots I wore there. I couldn’t see myself in their story, as modern country music often suggested one idea of who they were for. As I watched the genre continue to go in the direction the cowboy boot went in vaudeville, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to invite that association. More and more when I’d turn on a country radio station, I’d hear pandering songs that felt, at best, like a parody of the genre’s best songwriting traditions, and at worst, like dog whistles about who belonged in those small towns and dirt roads they sang about.

I can’t remember the last time I went to Borderline before a shooter opened fire there, killing 12 people, including himself, during a college night like the ones my friends and I used to go to. That was 2018. My local community fixture was suddenly part of the nation’s horrific, never-ending mass shooting nightmare.

Cowboy boots have been on my mind since, especially as they go through another trend cycle today.

I want to think that there’s a hopeful story in the boots that speaks to the diversity of the American West that the design historian Abrego wrote about. Not to mention the complicated story about life and myth in the U.S. that the boots can uniquely shed light on.

Though I haven’t been wearing my old pair again just yet, I know that I want to. For now, they sit at home, a story of America waiting for me, when I’m ready to put them on.

The post Cowboy Boots Were Made for Everyone appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like struggling musicians or actors, basketball players needed a day job. But Taylor’s day job—selling the athletic shoes that he wore on court—became a lifelong career. Endowed with a love of the game, a showman’s flair, and just the right amount of self-aggrandizement, Taylor would become a veritable Johnny Appleseed for promoting basketball to Americans and around the world. By inventing himself, he helped invent what is now one of the most popular sports across the globe.

Many people know the name Chuck Taylor from the autograph that since 1932 has been stamped on the ankle patch of hundreds of millions of Converse All Star shoes—the classic beloved by everyone from James Dean to Kurt Cobain to Michelle Obama. Larry Bird and Julius Irving wore them on the court. They’re a celebrity staple, unisex and multigenerational, a kind of “hipster” fashion statement. Today, Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars take their place among sports Americana with Louisville Slugger baseball bats and Chicago Schwinn bicycles.

The real Chuck Taylor can sometimes seem like a fabrication, an ad-agency invention like Juan Valdez or Betty Crocker. In fact, Taylor was a standout forward at Columbus (Ind.) High School and captain of his team as a sophomore. He later played semi-pro and “industrial league” basketball in Indianapolis and Detroit. His most famous team was the Akron, Ohio-based Firestone Non-Skids. He proved to be a competent player but he was not the star he had been in high school. He made his name, instead, when in 1922 he took a full-time job selling the recently introduced All Star court shoe for the Converse Rubber Company’s Chicago regional office.

The All Star wasn’t the first shoe of its type—rubber-soled with a canvas top. The A.G. Spalding and Bros. company had previously introduced a similar shoe, and “plimsoles” and “sneakers” had long existed in England. But the Converse All Star, introduced in 1917, improved on earlier designs, particularly with its diamond pattern sole that many believed led to quicker stops and starts on a hardwood court. The trademark on that design was upheld by a court ruling as recently as 2016.

A 1960 basketball game with several pairs of Chuck Taylors on the court. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Taylor was not a good salesman at first. According to a newspaper interview given by his widow, Lucy Taylor Hennessey, in 1979 with the Lansdale (Pa.) Reporter, he was nervous the first time he approached legendary coach Knute Rockne (he of “Win one for the Gipper” fame) at the University of Notre Dame fieldhouse. Rockne allegedly saw the young Taylor pacing outside his door and called him in, and then schooled him in the power of positive thinking and good sales technique.

Taylor’s territory included selling to high schools and colleges, which typically outfitted student athletes at school expense. It wasn’t an obvious sell. Most basketball coaches were just football or baseball coaches with time on their hands in between seasons, and didn’t care much about the finer points of the new game. Taylor, who cared very much, had a brilliant idea to boost sales: Around 1925, he began organizing in-school “clinics” to demonstrate the sport. Grateful coaches appreciated his expertise and welcomed him—and ordered the Converse shoe.

Before long, the clinics became public events, often co-hosted by a local sporting goods store. Taylor would explain the rules, do trick shots, and sometimes compete one-on-five against a local team, daring younger players to block his shots or steal the ball. His most famous trick was called “the invisible pass.” Taylor would thrust the ball toward the face of his opponent, then pass it quickly when the defender instinctively blinked. It was something of a cheat, of course, yet basketball was more of a rough-and-tumble sport in its early days, with far fewer rules and whistle calls than today. And Taylor was genuinely unstoppable against youthful players when he would dribble the ball from one end of the court to the other, weaving between a whole slew of defenders. It’s said that his passes were so forceful and straight that he could pass a ball under a truck underhanded without touching either the floor or the truck’s undercarriage.

Taylor’s theatrics—with a boost from Converse’s financial sponsorship of the Kansas City-based National Association of Basketball Coaches—eventually made the Converse All Star the dominant basketball shoe in America. In time, the company would almost exclusively hire former players or coaches as salesmen, such as Grady Lewis (who was later to replace Taylor as Sales Manager), Canadian basketball player Bob Houbregs, and the important early African American player Earl Lloyd.

Why was Taylor’s autograph added to the shoe in 1932, though? After all, he was just a salesman for the company, and while he had been a pro, he did not prove to be one of the stars of the game as an adult. It was a combination of his marketing skill (those clinics), plus the fact that he’d served for a time in the late 1920s as player/coach of the well-regarded Converse All-Stars (with the hyphen), the company’s own traveling basketball team. The Converse Rubber Co. had gone through a bankruptcy in 1928, and was sold and then sold again in the early 1930s. While it’s not known whose idea it was to put Taylor’s name on the shoe, his “brand” was clearly better than that of Converse at the time.

Plus there was this little thing about the invention of “Chuck Taylor.” He was real, but he often exaggerated his earlier success as a professional, most notoriously claiming to have been a veteran of the most famous basketball team of the 1920s, the New York City-based Original Celtics. Historian Murry Nelson has written the definitive history of the Original Celtics and he found no evidence that Taylor ever played for that team.

Taylor was paid a fixed sum annually for his autograph. It’s not known how much he was paid annually (in one document dating from the early 1950s he received $15,000) but as a traveling salesman he lived on the road almost 365 days a year, staying in the finest hotels and expensing everything. He drove Chevrolets at first, then Lincolns and Cadillacs. Though he clearly was a showman, he proved his basic humanity in other ways. After his older brother, Howard, was blinded in France during World War I, Taylor supported him his entire life, even going so far as to insist in a divorce settlement that his estate must always pay Howard’s expenses off the top before any alimony payments would be made.

Taylor also served his country during World War II as coach of the best “service” team in the military at the time, the Wright Field Air-Tecs, who competed in fundraisers against the best college and pro teams of the day and usually won. He toured South America as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department in the late 1950s.

By the 1960s Taylor, and the canvas athletic shoe itself, were somewhat anachronistic. Mass marketers were replacing the locally owned sporting goods store and national advertising was overtaking the gladhand approach of men like Taylor. European manufacturers such as Adidas and Puma were introducing new leather shoes with lighter-weight soles and other high-tech materials, and in some cases were paying coaches directly to adopt their shoes. (While Converse did subsidize the National Association of Basketball Coaches for years, that money went to the organization, not to individual coaches or players. In the 1970s Converse, too, followed the herd and started paying players and coaches directly to adopt their newer shoes, but that was long after Taylor was gone from the scene.)

The real death knell of the canvas All Star in competitive sports came in 1969, when the most famous basketball coach in America, John Wooden, announced that going forward he would not outfit his players with the shoe. As he told Sports Illustrated and others, he was tired of personally trimming rough seams and loose threads inside the shoe. Converse brought Taylor out of retirement, flying him from his Florida home to meet in person with Wooden in Los Angeles, but to no avail. UCLA went to a new shoe the following year. Though Converse did eventually introduce newer, more modern footwear for competition, it was an uphill battle. Adidas, Reebok, and the upstart Nike (which now owns the Converse brand) all had taken their positions in the marketplace.

Taylor died in June 1969, shortly after he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in a stellar class that included former Boston Celtics coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach, true Original Celtics star Henry “Dutch” Dehnert, controversial University of Kentucky basketball coach Adolf Rupp, and former Oklahoma State coach Hank Iba. Taylor was inducted not as a player or coach, but as a “contributor.” His tagline at the Hall of Fame reads, “Taylor … pursued his goal of building players, coaches, and spectator interest in the game of basketball by conducting clinics and demonstrations throughout the country.”

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