Democratic and Republican presidents alike have drawn on our collective cowboy legacy (imaginary?/culture?) as they lead the free world from our Nation’s capital in Washington DC. The Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles is currently hosting a fascinating exhibit on the personal and political use of the cowboy mythology from our nation’s highest political office.The LA Times illuminates:

Highlights include the iconic, such as LBJ’s much-photographed Stetson hat; the sentimental — drawings inspired by the film “High Noon,” which Bill Clinton made as a child; the metaphorical — the intricately carved Saddle of Independence dedicated to 9/11, which was a gift from the Black Hills Stock Show Foundation to George W. Bush; and the curious — Calvin Coolidge’s electric exercise horse (which resembled a mechanical bull). “The rumor is he rode it in the White House in his underwear and a cowboy hat,” says Garron Maloney, the assistant curator for Ranch Life and the New West who organized the show with lead curator B. Byron Price, director of the University of Oklahoma’s Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West, and Jeffrey Richardson, the current Autry-University of Nevada Las Vegas fellow. Maloney says the exhibition, five years in the making, and upcoming book by Price constitute the first scholarly work on the subject.

Photos from the exhibit are available at the Los Angeles Times

Check out the online version of the Cowboys and Presidents exhibit at the Gene Autry Museum.