Part 1 Western films frequently contrast the cultures and peoples of the American East and the West. In the opening scenes of John Ford’s Stagecoach we see this contrast immediately. We see Buck in his Western clothes and hat and immediately recognize him as a member of the working class which the vast majority of Westerners were. In contrast to Buck we meet Lucy Mallory in her much higher class clothes. She is not only an officer’s wife, she is a woman from a wealthy family in the East. Look at her hat and contrast it with Buck’s. Buck’s hat has a wide brim to keep the sun out of his eyes because he works outdoors. Lucy’s hat offers her no protection from the sun because as a higher class lady she would not be expected to work and would stay out of the sun as much as possible. They are from different classes, but they are also from different places; East and West. Lucy asks where she can have a cup of tea and Buck tells her she can have coffee at the hotel. Tea or coffee? This is actually a rather important distinction. Today America is a coffee drinking culture for the most part, but some people do drink tea. The history of why we drink coffee instead of tea is fascinating.

Recall that the U.S.A. was originally a group of colonies controlled by England. Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coffee was actually quite popular in England. There were places called “coffee houses” which were actually places where people gathered not just to drink coffee, but also to discuss ideas. Among the topics they discussed were democracy, the rights of man and other things the King did not like his people discussing. The King soon began to suppress the coffee houses in England. But, they could not suppress the ideas people were talking about. In the American colonies people talked about the fact that they were taxed by the King, but had no representation in the British Parliament.

One of the first acts of rebellion against England in the colonies was the Boston Tea Party. Bostonians dressed up as Indians to disguise their identities and attacked British merchant vessels. They dumped the heavily taxed British tea into Boston Harbor. Thereafter, boycotting British Tea became an important symbol of American patriotism. Americans began to switch to drinking coffee imported from South America rather than tea imported from the British colonies in Ceylon and India. We have been a nation of coffee drinkers ever since.

So, why does Lucy want tea when there is only coffee to drink in the West? It is because she is not only an Easterner, but an upper class Easterner. In America, like Japan, upper class people believed that foreign fashions showed how sophisticated and worldly they were. A lady such as Lucy would be interested in the latest clothing fashions from France, music from Italy, philosophy from Germany and of course the British custom of tea drinking. But in the West the people of all classes drank coffee. We will be talking a great deal more about coffee later in the film and throughout the year.

We next meet more ladies, the ladies of the Law and Order League. They are bringing the “civilized” values of the East to this Western town. They have actually gained control of the town and are driving out people they see as undesirable.