ON AMERICAN MYTHS PART 1

“IN NEED OF A NEW MYTH” is the title of Professor Eric Foner’s review of Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, published in London Review of Books, July 4, 2024.

I hasten to stress Slotkin’s definition of the word “myth.” Foner writes, “He is neither asking Americans to embrace demonstrable falsehoods as a way of restoring a lost sense of national unity nor demanding that unifying narratives embody only verifiable facts about the country’s past. ‘As I use the term,’ he writes, ‘myths are the stories—true, untrue, half-true— that … provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action.’ ” 

In a sense, these myths are the cohesive tales of American culture. 

Foner continues, “Such common beliefs are more important in the US than elsewhere, since compared with other nations the country lacks traditional underpinnings of patriotic nationalism such as a shared ethnocultural identity, a long-established history and a powerful and threatening neighbour…. In A Great Disorder, Slotkin explores the emergence and evolution of the ‘foundational’ myths that have helped define American culture.”

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, by Richard Slotkin, Belknap Press, 2024. Slotkin is Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Here, in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, are tidbits gleaned from Professor Foner’s LRB review of Professor Slotkin’s book.

Our Myths. Slotkin identifies several of our unifying themes, “myths,” if you like: The Myth of the Frontier; the  Myth of the Founding; three that arise from the Civil War, the Myth of Liberation, the Myth of White Reunion, and the Myth of the Lost Cause; the Myth of the Good War; and the Myth of the Movement.

“The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, while not the bloodiest shootout in the Wild West, became an enduring symbol of the struggle for law and order in the American frontier.” Image and caption from The Independent Southern Utah.

 Frontier. This theme evolved from the earliest pioneers, along with the shoot-’em-up culture that ensues to this day. It wasn’t only fun and games, however. As an example Foner says, “Slotkin makes the interesting point that the eastern press reported on Custer’s Last Stand by invoking the ready-made paradigm of a battle for the defence of civilisation, leaving virtually unmentioned the corporate economic interests that had drawn the army into the Black Hills where Custer met his death—railroad development and the discovery of gold on land guaranteed in perpetuity to Indigenous peoples.”

The Founding. The Myth of the Founders, Foner describes, is “the belief that the American nation was created by a unique generation of statesmen, who produced a governing structure that enabled the US to balance liberty and order while mostly avoiding the ideological conflicts experienced by European nations.”

The Declaration of Independence, by John Turnbull, 1818. Image from Britannica.

That this governing structure has lasted some 250 years speaks well for its legitimacy, though not without quirks. Foner cites, “Another expression of this revised Myth of the Founding could be found in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, which, Slotkin points out, claimed to be an exercise in what today is called judicial ‘originalism.’ Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s infamous pronouncement in Dred Scott that Black persons had ‘no rights which the white man is bound to respect’ purported to reflect the founders’ racial views at the time the Constitution was written.”

An horrific “Originalist” interpretation indeed.

Tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll continue with others of Professor Slotkin’s myths and Professor Foner’s analyses of them. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024