Хайке Пол Мифы, которые сделали Америку Американские исследования | Том 1 Хайке Пол преподает американские исследования в Университете Фридриха Александра в Эрлангене-Нюрнберге. (Германия). В настоящее время ее исследовательские интересы - культурная мобильность. и межкультурность, транснациональные американские исследования, аспекты неявного знания, и современная североамериканская литература. Хайке Пол Мифы, которые сделали Америку Введение в американистику Электронная версия этой книги находится в свободном доступе благодаря поддержке библиотек, работающих с Knowledge Unlatched. KU - совместная инициатива разработан, чтобы сделать высококачественные книги открытым для общественности хорошо. Эта работа находится под лицензией Лицензия Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (BY-NC-ND). что означает, что текст может быть использован в некоммерческих целях при условии заслуга автора. Подробности на сайте http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Библиографическая информация, опубликованная Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Deutsche Nationalbibliothek перечисляет эту публикацию в Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; подробные библиографические данные доступны в Интернете по адресу http://dnb.d-nb.de Все права защищены. Никакая часть этой книги не может быть перепечатана, воспроизведена или использована. в любой форме или любыми электронными, механическими или другими известными в настоящее время средствами или изобретены в дальнейшем, включая ксерокопирование и запись, или в любой информации системы хранения или поиска без письменного разрешения издатель. © 2014 стенограмма Verlag, Билефельд Концепция обложки: Кордула Реккенхаус, Билефельд Иллюстрация на обложке: MisterQM / photocase.com Текстовый редактор: Себастьян Шнайдер Наборщик: Стивен Кетцинг Дополнительная помощь: Клаус Лёш Отпечатано CPI - Clausen & Bosse, Leck Печать-ISBN 978-3-8376-1485-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-1485-9 Мне всегда казалось редкой привилегией быть американцем, настоящим Американец, традиция которого формировалась едва ли шестьдесят лет. Мы нужно только осознать своих родителей, вспомнить наших бабушек и дедушек и познать самих себя и наша история завершена. Старые люди в новом мире, новые люди, созданные из старого, то есть историю, которую я хочу рассказать, потому что это то, что есть на самом деле и что я действительно знаю. ГЕРТРУД ШТЕЙН, ИЗГОТОВЛЕНИЕ АМЕРИКАНЦЕВ (1926) Возможно, когда с течением времени американская свобода превратилась в фикцию прошлое, - поскольку это до некоторой степени выдумка настоящего, - поэты мира будет вдохновлен американской мифологией. ГЕНРИ ДЭВИД ТОРО, «ХОДЬБА» (1862) Если не нравится, поезжайте в Россию, - возразили остальные. ШПИЛЬКИ ТЕРКЕЛ, АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ МЕЧТЫ: ПОТЕРЯННЫЙ И НАЙДЕННЫЙ (1980) Содержание Благодарности | 9 Введение | 11 Вопросы для изучения | 32 Библиография | 33 Глава I Христофор Колумб и миф об «открытии» | 43 год Вопросы для изучения | 79 Библиография | 80 Глава II. Покахонтас и миф о трансатлантической любви | 89 Вопросы для изучения | 127 Библиография | 128 Глава III. Паломники и пуритане и миф об обетованной земле | 137 Вопросы для изучения | 187 Библиография | 188 Глава IV. Независимость Америки и миф об отцах-основателях | 197 Вопросы для изучения | 243 Библиография | 244 Глава V Из многих - единое? Миф о плавильном котле | 257 Вопросы для изучения | 299 Библиография | 300 Глава VI. Аграризм, экспансионизм и миф об американском Западе | 311 Вопросы для изучения | 353 Библиография | 355 Глава VII. Выразительный индивидуализм и миф о самодельном человеке | 367 Вопросы для изучения | 408 Библиография | 410 В качестве заключения Еще двадцать пять вопросов для изучения | 421 Процитированные работы | 426 Индекс | 427 Благодарности То, что начиналось как проект моего творческого отпуска в зимнем семестре 2009/10 г., превратилось в пятилетнее (рекламное) предприятие. Несмотря на все задержки и продленные сроки, Карин Вернер, Йоханна Тенсинг и Дженнифер Нидик в расшифровке стенограммы остались терпеливый и обнадеживающий. На протяжении многих лет мне очень помогали исследования, и я очень многим обязан особая благодарность Тане Ахо, Жасмин Драгашниг, Джудит Лакампер, Кристине Освальду и Катрин Шмидт за помощь. Для отдельных глав (на раз в форме бесед и семинаров) я получил высокую оценку критических отзывы, а также положительные отзывы от Элизабет Бронфен, Седрика Эсси, Герберт Сироис, Вернер Соллорс, Флориан Тачнер, Харальд Цапф и Майке Цвингенбергер. Александра Гансер и Катарина Герунд прочитали и оставили комментарии на большие части рукописи, и в конечном итоге они первыми «Попробуйте» в классе американских исследований в Эрлангене. Их тестовые прогоны помогли исключить запутанные отрывки, а также изучить вопросы участников семинара не хотели отвечать. Ведь это книга для студентов американских исследования. Большое спасибо также участникам моих семинаров по повышению квалификации учителей. по американской мифологии в Мюнхене и Нюрнберге. Себастьян Шнайдер был замечательно внимательным читателем и превосходным текстом. редактор, который сделал этот проект своим главным приоритетом, когда другие вещи были актуальны. Его острый взгляд на необязательные слова (или даже полпредложения), на библиографические несоответствия, и для стилистических улучшений сделали это много лучше книга. Стивен Кетцинг оказал неоценимую помощь в вопросах исследования. и справлялся со сложными запросами всех видов; прежде всего, он произвел окончательная рукопись с кропотливым старанием - как всегда, я должен добавить. Я много в долгу перед вами обоими. Наконец, Клаус Лёш взял на себя бремя постоянного запрос в качестве местного эксперта и пришел к выводу, что знал ли он когда-нибудь меня "без книги"; он настойчиво ставил под сомнение политику каждой главы 10 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ помогая мне сформировать аргумент. Окончательный результат во многом обязан его критическому комментарии и полезные предложения, не в последнюю очередь его название. Были приложены все усилия, чтобы связаться с правообладателями иллюстраций. Если что-то было непреднамеренно упущено, необходимые меры будет производиться при первой возможности. Эрланген, май 2014 г. Хайке Пол Введение 1. ВВЕДЕНИЕ Эта книга предлагает введение в американские исследования, исследуя «мифы. которые сделали Америку », т. е. популярными и сильными нарративами американо-американских национальных начала, которые оказались якорями и ключевыми ссылками в дискурсы «американскости», прошлого и настоящего. Даже если Америка явно « континент, а не страна »(Гомес-Пенья,« Граница Нового Света »750) в этом исследовании Я буду следовать условию использования означающего «Америка / n» для обозначения Соединенные Штаты и относитесь только к американо-американским мифам. В следующих главах анализируется основные мифы, на которых построены американские нации были основаны и до сих пор определяют современные дискуссии оАмериканско-американская идентичность. Эти мифы включают миф о Колумбе и «Открытие» Америки, миф о Покахонтас, миф о Земле Обетованной, миф об отцах-основателях, миф о плавильном котле, миф о Американский Запад и миф о человеке, который добился своего. Каждый из этих основополагающих мифы позволяют нам получить доступ к американской культуре (ам) под определенным углом; каждый из они обеспечивают и содержат конкретное повествование значимых и фундаментальных Начала и развитие «нового мира» в истории Соединенных Штатов Америка, а также знаковые визуальные образы и ритуальные культурные практики, сопровождающие и усилить их воздействие и эффект. Тем не менее, эти мифы не являются фиксацией в американском национальном культурном воображении: объяснение их долголетия а выносливость заключается в их адаптивности, гибкости и значительном повествовании. изменения во времени и в широком социальном и культурном спектре. Мое обсуждение этих мифов проследит их сложную историю и многоголосие. присвоения, а также различные семиотические / семантические изменения и дискурсивные сдвиги, которые являются частью этих историй. Материал каждой главы состоит из разнообразные представления и использования мифов в различных функциональных области американского общества с течением времени. В первой части каждой главы я опишу актуальность конкретного мифа, реконструировать его формирование в его конкретном 12 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ исторический момент и контекст, и показать, как его «создание» неразрывно связано к проекту американо-американского национального строительства и к (дискурсивному) создание и утверждение последовательного и единого американо-американского национального идентичность: Соединенные Штаты как «воображаемое сообщество» (см. Андерсон) построены и подтверждается посредством этого репертуара основополагающей мифологии, что влечет за собой создание «пригодного для использования прошлого» (см. Commager, Search; Brooks, «On Создание ») и« изобретение »« традиции »(см. Хобсбаум и Рейнджер) для новая американская нация с национальной генеалогией прошлого и настоящего герои. Эта «воображаемая общинная мифология» (Кэмпбелл и Кин, американская Cultural Studies 22) предоставляет национальные рассказы об индивидуальном и коллективном героизм и превосходство (когда речь идет об исторических личностях и группах, таких как Колумб, Покахонтас, паломники и пуритане, а также отцы-основатели) а также рассказы о коллективной принадлежности и прогрессе (когда к абстрактным понятиям, таким как плавильный котел, Запад и самодельный человек). Взятые вместе, они составляют мощный набор представлений о себе, который Американская коллективность требовала и временами заимствовала у ранних, преднациональных утопическое воображение Америки и что оно превратилось в мощную способы говорить о себе как о «сознательно сконструированной утопии нового мира» (Остендорф, «Почему?» 340). Вместо того, чтобы быть продуктом серии более или менее случайные исторические события и события, США фигурируют в этих мифах как предопределенная сущность и (пока) незавершенный утопический проект, т.е. со специфической телеологией. В то же время эти мифы не просто «складываются» последовательной и последовательной национальной мифологии, свободной от противоречий ни в ни в диахронической, ни в синхронической перспективе, поскольку основополагающий национальный дискурс всегда был отмечен борьбой за гегемонию (например, между Север и Юг или Запад и Восток) в соответствии с установленными режимами представительства всегда оспариваются. Во второй части каждой главы я проработаю множество реконфигураций. и реинтерпретации, которые соответствующие мифы претерпели из субнациональные перспективы. Часто различные группы иммигрантов и / или меньшинств как а также отдельные писатели и художники оспаривали авторитет (до) доминирующего версии и интерпретации этих мифов, предписывающие «единый национальный монокультура »(Пиз,« Исключительность »111) и тем самым поставил под сомнение кажущееся однородность и последовательность национальной идентичности США. Субнациональные перспективы на эти мифы бросили вызов и вмешались в национальный режим репрезентации, указывая на голоса, которые были заглушены, отвергнуты и исключены из американской фундаментальной мифологии из-за актов эпистемологии насилие. Тем не менее, призывы субнациональных ревизионистов к более инклюзивному и демократическому артикуляция этих мифов часто не затрагивает их культовый статус; в этом смысле, ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 13 маргинализированные группы (коренные американцы, женщины, афроамериканцы, иммигранты группы и рабочий класс, и это лишь некоторые из них) следовали стратегии присвоение и наделение полномочиями, а не радикальное увольнение с целью сформулировать свой опыт и заявить об их американскости. В третьей и последней части каждой главы я буду указывать на более свежие (часто современные) критика и комментарии исследуемых мифов, которые временами более радикально ревизионисты и полностью развенчивают миф. В во многих случаях более ранние национальные и субнациональные версии мифа предполагают транснациональное или постнациональное измерение в свете новых постколониальных интерпретаций и критика империи, выходящая за рамки национального контекста США и США исключительность как интерпретационные рамки. Тем не менее, миф не обязательно становится устарел, став более противоречивым и оспариваемым, поскольку и формы поминовения, которые отдают предпочтение национальной перспективе стороны, и академический, возможно, несколько элитарный ревизионизм, сформулированный из субнациональные и транснациональные точки зрения друг на друга часто сосуществуют бок о бок (см. Шуман, Шварц и Д’Арси, «Элитные ревизионисты»). Возникающее напряжение, который можно охарактеризовать как своего рода когнитивный диссонанс, вызывает «Внутренне разделенная культурная символика» (Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb 41) или «Балканизация символического поля» (Вейн, Дид греки 56), которая позволяет уравновешивание различных и порой явно противоречащих друг другу способов создания мира в рамках того же дискурса. При оценке роли и актуальности основополагающих американо-американских мифов в эпоху глобализации, мы также можем различить новые формы массовой коммодификации и крупномасштабный культурный экспорт американских мифических повествований по всему миру; приведет ли это к возрождению мифического материала и его часто утопическая привлекательность или опустошение культурной специфики в процесс распространения, перевода и национализации (или и того, и другого) еще предстоит видно, но обработка «мифов, которые сделали Америку» в любом случае продолжается и незаконченный.Хотя я придерживаюсь приблизительной, несколько схематичной хронологии каждого из главы, чисто линейное повествование часто не дотягивает до сложных адаптаций и интерпретации каждого мифа, поскольку разные версии и повествования конкурируют друг с другом за господство и гегемонию. Чтобы выявить предвзятость доминирующие версии мифов и политические и экономические интересы тех, кто продвигать их, обсуждение национальных, субнациональных и транснациональных измерение каждого мифа определяется рамками идеологической критики в рамках какое противодействие американскому консенсусу представляется сомнительным основополагающей идеологии США. Установленная доминирующая идеологическая парадигма, подвергается критике, подтверждению или опровержению американской исключительности: 14 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Все мифы возникают в рамках этой единственной доминирующей парадигмы в истории и практики американских исследований, потому что дисциплина долгое время были организованы вокруг него либо путем утверждения, либо критики. 2. АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЭКСКЕПЦИОНАЛИЗМ - НЕКОТОРЫЕ ОПРЕДЕЛЕНИЯ Когда французский аристократ Алексис де Токвиль отметил в своей основополагающей работе Демократия в Америке (1835/1840), часть стипендии американских исследований avant la lettre, в котором записано его путешествие по Соединенным Штатам в 1831/32 году, «Положение американцев было совершенно исключительным» («Демократия», т. 2, 36; курсив), он не имел в виду, что американцы были исключительными или особенными как людей или культуры, но ссылались на уникальность американской политической системы. Американская демократия для него резко контрастировала с ситуацией в его родной Франции, которая на протяжении последних десятилетий характеризовалась жестокими революции и контрреволюции и восстановление монархического правления. Токвиль видел демократическую систему, которую он изучал в Соединенных Штатах, как С Божьей волей и думал, что это только вопрос времени, когда он распространится в другие страны; он чувствовал, что в США эта система пустила корни в «исключительных» способов только постольку, поскольку это было возможно в отсутствие феодальных структуры и аристократическая оппозиция. Приведенный выше отрывок часто воспринимается как основополагающий научный справочник. к американской исключительности, однако американская исключительность вскоре была деконтекстуализирована из этого конкретного случая и используется для описания генезиса Американская нация в гораздо более всеобъемлющих и широких терминах; политический ученый Байрон Э. Шафер, например, категорически заявляет, что «американская исключительность […] - это представление о том, что Соединенные Штаты были созданы иначе, развиты по-разному, и поэтому его следует понимать по-другому - по сути, само по себе термины и в своем собственном контексте »(Предисловие v). В отличие от того, что мы можем спросите, а какими конкретно? И что означает эта разница? Часто, фраза «исключительность» использовалась весьма неопределенным образом для утверждения Американское превосходство над неамериканцами и законная американская гегемония за пределами США; он также передает понятия уникальности и предопределенности. Американская исключительность - это идеология, которую мы находим во всем история в различных формах и дискурсах саморепрезентации. Он обновляется актуальность и даже нормативность с формированием американистики как дисциплина в первой половине 20-го века, и становится планом и руководящий принцип для многих научных публикаций по США. Пока ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 15Стипендия американистики анализирует американскую исключительность, в то же время появляются новые исключительные нарративы. Хотя идеология американской исключительности - это нечеткий конгломерат самых разных ингредиентов, можно выделить три типа, которые повторяются снова и снова в политической, художественной, и популярные дискурсы, прошлые и настоящие: религиозная исключительность, политическая исключительность и экономическая исключительность. Что касается религиозного измерения американской исключительности, Дебора Мэдсен напоминает нам, что концепция американской исключительности «часто используется описать развитие американской культурной идентичности от пуритан истоки в настоящее »(American Exceptionalism 2). Пуританская риторика Землю обетованную можно рассматривать как источник американской исключительности. Согласно Мадсену, «мифологию нации-искупителя» можно «объяснить со ссылкой на пуританские проповеди семнадцатого века, поэзию и проза »(там же 16). Это в изображении Джона Уинтропа города на холме в История Плимутской колонии Уильяма Брэдфорда, а также в пуританских журналах что мы находим веру первого поколения поселенцев Новой Англии в их особая судьба, выраженная «избранным Богом народом» (см. главу 3). Эта вера был на удивление настойчив в ходе американо-американской истории и были изменены на светские и полусекулярные варианты. Политическое измерение американской исключительности приближается к тому, что Токвиль, возможно, имел в виду, когда использовал прилагательное «исключительный» в ссылка на создание и развитие американо-американской нации. Чай сочинения, например, Бенджамина Франклина, Томаса Джефферсона и Томаса Пэйн отражает исключительный дискурс, окружающий политическое основание американская республика. Когда Пейн заявляет, что «[мы] в наших силах начать мир заново »(Common Sense 45), он создает творение мифология американской нации, подтвержденная многочисленными авторами, например, Сеймур Мартин Липсет, который называет США «первым новым нация »(ср. его книгу с таким же названием). Ссылки на учредительные документы и исходные данные (о которых будет рассказано в главе 4 данного исследования) подтверждают общие смысл секуляризованной доктрины американо-американского предопределения. Особый (и для культурных аутсайдеров часто довольно властный) тип американского патриотизма Алексис де Токвиль, который уже считал несколько раздражающим, необходимо быть помещенным в контекст самооценки, основанной на понятии исключительности американского демократического республиканизма. Экономическое измерение американской исключительности часто связано с представления о новом виде индивидуализма, который соответствует, но в то же время также выходит за рамки политического и оценивает эгоизм как законный и необходимы для благополучия политического тела. Американский индивидуализм - это 16 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ часто рассматривается как предпосылка для индивидуального успеха, что в основном понимается в экономическом плане. Понятие социальной мобильности воплощено в культурном деятеле самодельного человека - от лохмотьев к богатству, «от слуги до звания мастер »(Crèvecoeur, Letters 60) - прототипом иллюстрирует перспективы экономической успех в Америке как прямое следствие условий свободы и равенство, которое в данном контексте понимается как равенство возможностей. Чай миф о самодельном человеке и идея выразительного индивидуализма (быть рассматриваются более подробно в главе 7 этой книги) являются частью утопического повествования обещает лучшую жизнь всем, кто приезжает в США, и поэтому также очень во многом иммигрантский миф. В рамках типологии настоящего исследования этот миф определены как секуляризованная версия религиозно и политически информированных мифические рассказы об американской исключительности. В более широком смысле он (вместе с другие мифы) является частью гражданского религиозного видения американской мечты, который фигурирует как своего рода «зонтичный миф», охватывающий все остальные (ср. Флак, «Культура»). Сгруппированные вокруг этих трех направлений идеологии американской исключительности борцов за религиозность, патриотизм и индивидуализм, мы считаем мифическими рассказы об исторических личностях (Колумб и Покахонтас) и моделях ( плавильный котел, Запад), с которым они взаимосвязаны. Тем не менее, можно было даже в более широком смысле заявляют, что исключительность - это «форма интерпретации со своими собственными язык и логика »(Madsen, American Exceptionalism 2). Американская исключительность таким образом, речь идет не только о том, что изображено (исторические личности, происшествия,взаимодействия и достижения), но также и о том, как изображаются американские дела и emplotted - то есть о семиотике и политике представления. «Язык и логика» американской исключительности - это способы повествования. обрамление, иконическая визуализация и ритуальное исполнение. Часто в этих режимах был идентифицирован как артикулирующий американскую гражданскую религию; концепция гражданской религии (который впервые использовал французский философ Жан-Жак Руссо, ср. Общественный договор 249-50) предполагает не просто утилитарное отношение к религии, но тот, который выборочно заимствует религиозные традиции разных конфессий с целью создания «мощных символов национальной солидарности» (Белла, «Гражданская религия» 239). Американская гражданская религия представляет собой институциональную коллекцию священные или квазисвященные верования об американской нации, отличные от деноминационных религий, но разделяет с ними веру в существование трансцендентного бытие (Бог); он основан на идее, что американская нация подчиняется к законам Бога и что Соединенные Штаты будут руководствоваться и защищаться Богом. Символично, что эта гражданская религия выражена в учредительных документах Америки. и конкретизируется такими фразами, как «Мы ​​верим в Бога» (там же, 228). Чай Американская исключительная логика, концептуализированная как американская гражданская религия ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 17 Роберта Белла и других ранее также называли американским символом веры: «Америка - единственная нация в мире, основанная на вероучении. Это кредо изложены с догматической и даже теологической ясностью в Декларации Независимость »(Честертон,« Что я видел »7). Гуннар Мюрдал говорит о «Американское кредо» как «социальный этос» и «политическое кредо», которое действует как «цемент» в структуре нации и отождествляется с «американской своеобразная разновидность национализма »(Американская дилемма 1, 5). И Гилберт К. Честертон и Гуннар Мюрдал, культурные аутсайдеры (из Англии и Швеции, соответственно), для кого США были объектом научного интереса, разработаны влиятельные интерпретации идеалов американского патриотизма, а также его недостатки. В то время как мы можем ясно видеть символические языки политики и религии. объединяясь в понятии гражданской религии и американского вероисповедания, экономические аспект также играет важную роль как подлинное «обещание американского жизнь »(см. одноименное исследование Кроли), что влечет за собой обещание экономической самосовершенствование и выгода, как, в свою очередь, пресловутое «евангелие богатства» (ср. Карнеги, «Богатство») связывает экономический успех с общественными обязанностями в рамки национальной солидарности и принадлежности. В его доминирующем и повторяющемся темы, а также в его общей риторической структуре, американская исключительность информирует и структурирует американские самопрезентации. Это было важно в формирование внутренней согласованности, а также часто используется в качестве идеологического инструмента проецировать американскую гегемонию за пределы США. Таким образом, американские мифы играют решающую роль роль в символизации и утверждении нации США; это их культурный работают, так сказать, чтобы сделать дискурсивные конструкции нации правдоподобными и самоочевидно, чтобы создать внутреннюю солидарность и приверженность национальному государству и свою политику, и представлять США посторонним. Миф в целом, как действует на уровне (часто молчаливого) веры, а не рациональности, может рассматриваться как главное дискурсивная форма идеологии; мифы, обсуждаемые в этой книге, могут быть предполагается, что более конкретно укрепляет основные принципы американской исключительности также и, возможно, даже в основном ниже уровня осведомленности, когда они вызываются. Американские исследования и американская исключительность были связаны ненадежно. пути с самого начала. При возникновении и закреплении Американские исследования как дисциплина начала эпохи «холодной войны», Американская исключительность была мощной гегемонистской конструкцией, которая получила распространение в форме «академического дискурса, политической доктрины и регулирующего идеала возложена ответственность за определение, поддержку и развитие национального идентичность »(Пиз,« Исключительность »109). Для практиков американистики: это означало, что 18 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ[h] историки и политические теоретики [а также ученые из других дисциплин, HP] обратились к прошлое в поисках исторических подтверждений уникальной миссии нации и судьба. Изучение прошлого стало для ученых, исповедующих исключительные взгляды, личный поиск, в ходе которого они поймут значение своего «американского» идентичности, раскрывая особое значение национальных институтов. (Там же 110) Таким образом, исторически американские исследования частично участвовали в установлении и поддержание дискурсов, которые пытались оправдать имперскую политику США в «Холодная война» - и дальше. 3. СТИПЕНДИЯ ПО АМЕРИКАНСКИМ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯМ - ОБЗОР Американская исключительность и американские мифы можно исследовать более подробно. в отношении их национальных, субнациональных и транснациональных контекстов и рамок ссылки, что соответствует трем основным этапам в истории дисциплина американистики и сопутствующие трансформации ее исследований практики и образ мышления. Принимая во внимание, что различные ранние отдельные работы из вышеупомянутого Алексиса де Токвиля Демократия в Америке - трехтомник Вернона Паррингтона. Течения в американской мысли (1927-30) обсуждались в качестве первых статей. стипендии американистики, дисциплина действительно занимала только институциональные формировались и развивались более формализованным образом с конца 1930-х годов. В период его зарождения, с конца 1930-х до 1950-х годов, ученые так называемого Школа мифов и символов искала и выявляла мифы и символы которые якобы свидетельствовали о специфике или даже уникальности США, и, таким образом, стремился подтвердить исключительность Америки. Имя этого слабо связанного школа мысли происходит из подзаголовка основополагающего исследования Генри Нэша Смита Целинная земля: Американский Запад как символ и миф (1950); Смит, первый ученый, получивший докторскую степень в области американистики (в 1940 г. Гарвардский университет), определил свой подход следующим образом: Я использую слова [«миф» и «символ»] для обозначения больших или меньших единиц одного вида. вещи, а именно интеллектуальной конструкции, которая объединяет понятие и эмоцию в образ. Мифы и символы, с которыми я имею дело, обладают еще одной характеристикой коллективности. представления, а не работа единого ума. Я не хочу поднять вопрос, точно ли такие продукты воображения отражают эмпирический факт. Они существуют в другом плане. Но, как я пытался показать, иногда они оказывают решающее влияние по практическим делам. (Целинная земля vii) ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 19 Смит рассматривает Девственную Землю как один из выдающихся символов, заключенных в мифические рассказы о встречах европейцев с Северной Америкой, такие как пограничный миф и аграрный миф, с готовностью признавая эти мифы (и соответствующие символы) могут рассматриваться как вымысел и, следовательно, могут содержать некоторые степень принятия желаемого за действительное или даже ложь. Наряду со Смитом, другие влиятельные Исследователи мифов и символов, такие как Р.В.Б. Льюис и Перри Миллер аналогичным образом исследовали природа американского опыта и его исторические герои. Льюис предлагает образ «американского Адама» для характеристики прототипа «поселенца нового мира» как фигура происхождения и эмблема «нового истоки мира: В американском мифе жизнь и история только начинались. […] Новые привычки возникшие на новой американской сцене, были подсказаны образом радикально нового личность, герой нового приключения: личность, освобожденная от истории, счастливо лишенный предков, нетронутый и незапятнанный обычными семейными и расовыми наследствами; индивидуум, стоящий в одиночестве, самостоятельный и самодвижущийся […]. Это не было удивительно, в поколение, читающее Библию, что нового героя […] легче всего идентифицировать с Адамом перед падением. (Американский Адам 4)Американский генеалогический рассказ Перри Миллера также пропитан религиозными дискурс; он отправляет пуритан «в пустыню» (ср. его книгу с таким же названием), волевой поиски утопического сообщества в центре ранний американский опыт и поэтому также находится в центре американских исследований. Таким образом, пуританское богословие 17 века оказало долгосрочное влияние на культурное воображение нации. Миллер делится с Сакваном Берковичем, еще одним выдающийся исследователь пуританизма, считавший, что «пуританские истоки американского я »(см. одноименную книгу Берковича) руководили формированием национальное государство США благодаря «способности к самотворению, которую пуританская теология атрибуты верующих »(Madsen, American Exceptionalism 13). В целом, вызывающая воспоминания американская примитивная сцена создается первой группой. ученых-американистов, представляющих себе «американского Адама» в «Деве Приземлиться на «поручение в пустыне» (ср. Пиз, «Новые американисты»). Раннюю фазу этой новой области исследований часто называют «американской Изучает движение »(ср. Маркс,« Мысли »), указывая на критическую позицию по отношению к традиционные дисциплинарные конфигурации, которые доминировали на английских факультетах многих американских университетов, что, казалось, подразумевало политическая повестка дня. Поскольку США чувствовали все большее давление, чтобы объяснить (и рекламировать) к миру за его пределами, исследователи Мифа и Символа Школа не только определила, но и создала мощные образы национального воображения. Это 20 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ не случайно, что программы и проекты американских исследований получили финансирование после окончания Второй мировой войны и на протяжении 1950-х годов, и стало вполне корпоративное предприятие (ср. Wise, «Paradigm Dramas» 181). По следам «Холодная война», «Америка» представлялась в американских исследованиях в некоторой степени эссенциалистские термины как в значительной степени единую и однородную сущность. Все мифы и ученые-символисты, вероятно, согласились бы, что есть что-то вроде «Американский разум», который можно изучить в интеллектуальной истории Соединенных Штатов. Штаты (там же 179). Кроме того, исключительность, заявленная для объекта исследование, то есть США, также было заявлено как новая дисциплина американистики. которые стремились исследовать США «в целом», а не в отдельных дисциплинарных карманы. Когда Генри Нэш Смит спросил: «Могут ли американские исследования развить метод? » (ср. свое эссе с тем же названием), он ответил на свой вопрос о том, что что он увидел «стипендию» «американской культуры прошлого и настоящего» (там же, 207) осуществляется не столько в рамках определенной методологии или теоретический подход, но в форме междисциплинарного предприятия, сосредоточенного на общий предмет, то есть Америка. С самого начала многие ученые предполагали Американские исследования как «арена для дисциплинарных встреч и плацдарм для свежие актуальные занятия »(Байлис,« Социальные науки »203). Стипендия по мифам и символам ссылался на американские исследования как на новый идеал научных и дисциплинарных согласованности, но подчеркивая единство и уникальность американского общества, он часто не хватало аналитического расстояния от исследуемого объекта и тщательная проверка (см. Claviez, Grenzfälle 209). Со времен исследователей мифов и символов не полностью отражали их собственную позицию, свои идеологические предпосылки в определенной степени предопределили их выводы, а их научный усилия в основном привели к утверждению (а не к точному определению или критика) тех американских мифов, символов и изображений, на которых воображение американских исследований так сильно полагалось. В середине 1960-х годов стипендия первых американских исследований по мифам и символам когорте бросили вызов многие критики, которые начали сомневаться в однозначности природа и политические последствия якобы раскрытых американских мифов и классифицируется предыдущим поколением ученых. По следам социальные протестные движения 1960-х и 1970-х годов, в том числе за гражданские права движение, женское движение и антивоенное движение, многие критики предложили альтернативные генеалогии Америки и формирование американской идентичности которые бросали вызов американской истории в более критическом свете и оспаривали «невиновность» об американце Адаме, возделывающем свой «сад» в «пустыне». версия американского начала, которое давало привилегии определенным группам маргинализируя или полностью игнорируя других, больше не воспринималось как ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 21 годпредставитель американского опыта. А что насчет американской «Евы»? Золото, в более широком смысле, как насчет опыта женщин и небелых людей в Соединенные Штаты, прошлое и настоящее? А как насчет удаления коренных американцев из Роль «дикой природы» и рабства в возделывании «сада»? Представители так называемой школы критических мифов и символов, второй важной группы в история американских исследований, рассмотрела такие аспекты, как насилие, расизм, сексизм, и геноцид как основа американской культуры. В то время как символы и мифы, созданные на первом этапе американских исследований, часто не полностью опровергнутые, теперь они интерпретировались по-другому и рассматривались во многих более критический свет. Эта переориентация привела к менее лестным оценкам создание Америки, чем рассказы, произведенные Мифом и Символом Школа, которая теперь выглядела как идеализированное и романтизированное описание эволюции белой патриархальной Америки. Возьмем, к примеру, книгу Генри Нэша Смита выдающийся символ Целинной земли: Аннет Колодны в "Песни о земле" переосмысливает гендерный символизм этого изображения как метафору изнасилования и патриархального эксплуатации, и Ричард Слоткин, другой главный герой Школа критических мифов и символов, в более общем плане, объясняет насилие (скорее чем невинность) как основополагающий американский опыт (см. главу 6). В то время как школа критических мифов и символов также занималась специфика и особенность США это не касалось с утверждением превосходства американской культуры и общества, но с критика идеологии американской исключительности; его критическая переоценка Основополагающие тексты и мифы США привели к трансформации американских исследований. и практика, поскольку он рассматривал национальный проект с субнациональной точки зрения и таким образом выявили, что понятие однородной нации и единственная «американская» история была продуктом повествования гегемонистского мастера, который исключили перспективы и истории других внутренних. Этот ревизионизм совпал с артикуляцией «негативной» исключительности США и развитием новых областей в рамках и наряду с американскими исследованиями, такими как исследования черных, женские исследования, исследования популярной культуры, индейские исследования, этнические исследования, исследования труда, и это лишь некоторые из них. Эти новые поля адресованы и рассмотрел культурные и социальные иерархии (т. е. асимметричные властные отношения между мужчины и женщины, белые и небелые, а также экономически привилегированные и экономически обездоленные американцы), которые были глубоко вписаны в Мифы и символы. Эта контргегемонистская стипендия повысила ценность особенно универсальный американский опыт, обращаясь к вопросам идентичность ниже уровня нации. В процессе деконструкции иерархий, различия между высокой культурой и низкой (или популярной) культурой также имеют были поставлены под сомнение, а изучение массовой культуры стало центром 22 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ часть стипендии по исследованию Америки (см. Cawelti, Adventure; Tompkins, Sensational Конструкции). Подчеркивая неоднородность американского общества и сосредотачиваясь на асимметрии власти в сфере репрезентации, критический миф и символ Школа направлена ​​на более инклюзивное повествование и представление об Америке и признание его мультикультурного наследия, привилегия неоднородности американского общества над любым одномерным взглядом на Америку "в целом" как на объект исследования; американские исследования этого второго этапа, таким образом, были плюралистическими. а не целостные в перспективе и разрушили общепринятые представления о «Американскость» на протяжении нескольких десятилетий. Поскольку эта новая когорта американских ученых-исследователей (среди них Лесли Фидлер, Алан Трахтенберг, а также вышеупомянутые Аннет Колодны и Ричард Слоткин) стали более заметными, такие ученые, как Генри Нэш Смит, чувствовали себя обязанными пересмотреть свой миф и Рассказы о символах: Я предложил использовать термины «миф» и «символ» для обозначения «больших или меньших единиц то же самое […] ». Я мог бы избежать недопонимания того, кем я был о том, ввел ли я здесь термин «идеология», добавив, что интеллектуальный рассматриваемые конструкции не могут быть четко классифицированы, но их следует продумать как занимающие должности в спектре, простирающемся от мифа с одной стороны, характеризуемых преобладанием образа и эмоций, на другом конце - идеологии, характеризующейся акцент на концепциях, на абстрактных идеях. («Символ» 22) Институционализация этих новых перспектив произошла в новой формулировке университетских программ и с так называемыми каноническими дебатами 1980-х годов. Эти часто ожесточенные дебаты (также называемые «культурными войнами») иногда приводили к драматическое противостояние между теми, кто боролся за сохранение якобы универсального «Западный каноник» (см. Одноименную книгу Блума) и те, ктонаправленных на диверсификацию нарративов Америки путем замены универсалистских Главный нарратив США (grand récit) с множеством «малых» нарративов (small рассказы) и предложили канонизировать тексты (особенно женщинами и представителями меньшинств) это пока не было каноническим. Такие работы, как Реконструкция Поля Лаутера Американская литература (1983), Сенсационные проекты Джейн Томпкинс (1986), Генри Свободные каноны Луи Гейтса (1992) и А. Лавонн Браун Руофф и Джерри «Новое определение американской истории литературы» У. Уорда (1990) - образцовые публикации. о «новом» каноне, который включает ранее исключенных или маргинализированных голоса, которые выражают конкретную, субнациональную (или подчиненную) точку зрения вместо того, чтобы требовать быть представителем нации в целом. В то время как «слабые» версии мультикультурализма просто выступайте за добавление "новых" текстов в школьную программу и колледж ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 23 списки чтения, "сильные" версии призывают к более серьезным изменениям, касающимся культурных наследие и канон: «Мультикультурный» - это не категория американского письма - это определение всего американского письма. письмо. […] Понятие «мейнстрим» культуры и культур «меньшинств» является узким Посмотреть. Новое определение мейнстрима - это тема, сообщение и миссия [нашего проект]. " (Стрэдс, Трублад и Вонг, «Введение» xi-xii) Поскольку национальный консенсус вокруг идеи «Америки» был переформулирован в более инклюзивных терминах или ставится под сомнение как принудительная концепция сама по себе, субнациональные и многокультурные подходы с 1960-х по 1980-е годы были усиленный; однако новые ограничения и ограничения области американского исследования стали очевидными в процессе. В то время как критический миф и символ Школа успешно создала чувствительность к внутриамериканским различиям и динамика власти и направленное внимание ученых на мультикультурное измерение американского национального генезиса и культурного производства, это не подвергало тщательному сомнению рамки нации как основная концептуальная категория стипендии и, таким образом, оставались привязанными к логике национальной исключительности (ср. Талли, «Постамериканская литература»). Только на третьем этапе стипендии по американским исследованиям с 1990-х годов. в настоящее после смены парадигмы или «поворота», осуществленного представителями так называемые новые американисты, которые начали преследовать транснациональную перспективу в большей части своей работы. Основополагающие культуры Эми Каплан и Дональда Пиза империализма Соединенных Штатов (1993) четко обозначил переход от субнационального к транснациональной перспективе, поскольку очерки в этом томе помещают США в более широком контексте постколониальной теории и постколониальных исследований. США как империя стала объектом многих научных усилий, которые больше не США как «замкнутая нация» (Бендеры, Nation 3) и наблюдают континентальную экспансию в результате имперской, а не внутренней политики. Таким образом, Новый Американисты 1980-х и 1990-х годов (Эми Каплан, Дональд Пиз, Джон Карлос Роу, Робин Вигман и др.) Фундаментально изучили и поставил под сомнение парадигму американской исключительности и ее основополагающую роль для дисциплины американистики, опираясь на работы «ученых чья концепция нации и гражданства поставила под сомнение доминирующую американскую мифы, а не их канонизация »(Rowe et al.,« Introduction »3). Новый Программа американистов в области американистики направлена ​​на «преобразование традиционно националистические интересы этой области, чтобы решить несколько способов, которыми "Америка" означает в новых глобальных […] обстоятельствах »(там же 3). Рассматривая США как « мультикультурная нация в глобализированном мире »(Бендер, Нация 6) также требует 24 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ «Глобализация американских исследований», как Брайан Т. Эдвардс и Дилип Парамешвар. Гаонкар предлагает в своем сборнике эссе с таким же названием; национализм здесь воспринимать как ограниченность, а исключительность - как устаревшую область воображаемого, провоцирующего вопросы, могут ли американские исследования существовать после американской исключительности » вообще (Пиз, «Американские исследования» 47), и действительно ли «все американские стипендия для изучения [является] [...] пропагандой »(Кастроново и Гиллман,« Введение » 1). По словам Пиза, область американских исследований должна быть «обоснованной. в компаративистской модели исключительности имперского государства »(« Американская Исследования »80) и, как заявляет Шринивас Аравамудан, необходимо продолжить тщательное изучение. о «отношениях между государством и дисциплиной» («государства-изгои» 17). Поворот к реляционной структуре анализа в духе Джейн Десмонд и «космополитизм» и «критический интернационализм» Вирджинии Домингес который работает с «компаративизмом, не ориентированным на США» («Изменение положения» 286)кажется таким же важным, как «участие в постколониальных исследованиях» (Rowe et al., «Введение» 7) и использование новой методологии историзма, которая также внесла свой вклад в реконфигурацию поля (см. Michaels and Pease, American Эпоха Возрождения). Междисциплинарность области американских исследований (или «критического Исследования США ''), таким образом, подкрепляется работой новых американистов по новая теоретическая база. В том же духе обращение Шелли Фишер-Фишкин к исследованию Америки Ассоциация, проведенная 12 ноября 2004 г. (см. «Перекресток»), посвящена впечатляющий диапазон транснациональной научной деятельности самостоятельно и другие, включая трансатлантические, транстихоокеанские и американские исследования в полушарии стипендия, а также пограничные исследования. Характеристика этого нового транснационального критическое внимание уделяется публикациям, таким как Radway et al. Исследования: Антология, которая включает в свой первый раздел статьи о «нации» как а также «империя» и «диаспора». Также есть новый поворот к неанглийским языкам и многоязычие (см. Sollors, Multilingual America; Shell and Sollors, Multilingual Anthology), поскольку проведение транснациональных американских исследований невозможно. и практикуется с источниками только на английском языке. Подход транснациональных американских исследований диахроничен и восходит к как 15 век, а также синхронный; через призму транснациональной перспективы, Появляются американские начала (как и любые другие национальные начинания) как более случайный и случайный, более хаотичный и «беспорядочный» (см. Schueller и Ваттса), чем предполагают исторические и мифические рассказы, утверждающие их целеустремленность, последовательность и телос. Транснациональность известных культурных, политические, социальные и литературные явления в прошлом часто принижались на поля; транснациональные американские исследования перемещают его в центр, анализируя- ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 25 рассматривая США со сравнительной точки зрения как «нацию среди наций» (см. Бендер книга с таким же названием). Подводя итог: каждая из следующих глав посвящена трем этапам Стипендия по американистике с точки зрения национальных, субнациональных и транснациональных подходы и перспективы, которые они создали; на первом этапе так называемая Школа мифов и символов, ориентированная на национальные темы и символы; в второй этап, так называемая школа критических мифов и символов, субнациональные перспективы и группы, которые игнорировались на первом этапе; и на третьем этапе так называемые новые американисты ставили под сомнение нацию как рамки на основе постнационального или транснационального и, возможно, постэксклюзивного повестку дня и сформулировал критику американской империи. Однако я не утверждаю, что каждая часть американских исследований ученость и критику можно отнести к этим трем точкам зрения и это точный хронологический порядок. Конечно, есть много совпадений, так же, как есть другие рамки, которые можно использовать для описания и хронологизации Стипендия по американским исследованиям. Также необходимо признать, что существует тесная связь между субнациональным и транснациональным подходами. Стипендия Лизы Лоу по истории азиатской Америки относится к «международному внутри страны »(см. ее статью с таким же названием) и символизирует попытки изучить субнациональное и транснациональное во взаимосвязи, поскольку они но две стороны одной медали: в то время как субнациональный подход ограничивает этнические группы иммигрантов внутри национального дискурсивного поля, транснациональное делает это применительно к глобальным; аналогично, диаспорные культуры можно рассматривать как часть как в субнациональной, так и в транснациональной сферах. Тем не менее, национальная мифология все еще подтверждается во многих текущих видениях США перед лицом предполагаемой фрагментации традиционных коллективов, и некоторые версии транснациональных усилий все еще не удается построить Вселенную, в центре которой находится США. 4. АМЕРИКАНСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ: МИФ КРИТИКА - КРИТИЧЕСКАЯ ИДЕОЛОГИЯ - КУЛЬТУРНЫЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Есть ряд описаний американских исследований, которые служат для определения поле. Междисциплинарность обычно является общим знаменателем: американские исследования. - это совместная междисциплинарная академическая попытка получить систематические знания об американских общества и культуры, чтобы понять историческое и современное значение и значение США. (Флак и Клавьез, «Введение» ix) 26 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУВ то время как различные академические дисциплины, такие как литературная критика, социология, политическая наука, история, экономика, история искусства, география, медиа и др. участвовать в Американские исследования, это дисциплина культурологии, которая позволяет нам соединять например, политология - литература, история искусства - социология, история - экономика и география, и интегрировать эти различные дисциплинарные перспективы в рамки американских исследований. Культурология всегда действовала как дисциплина, которая в области американистики привносит разные подходы в диалог, который устраняет дисциплинарные пробелы. Далее все эти (под) дисциплины американских исследований будет иметь отношение к моему описанию основных мифов США, поскольку мифы не относятся к одному конкретному сектору американского общества, а часть более широкой «биографии» нации (Андерсон, «Воображаемые сообщества» 204), отвечают на «потребность в повествовании об« идентичности »» (там же 205) и составляют «Национальная символика», которую несут «традиционные иконы, ее метафоры, ее героев, его ритуалов и повествований », чтобы« предоставить алфавит для коллективное сознание или национальная субъективность »(Berlant, Anatomy 20). Миф критика поэтому актуальна для анализа политической культуры, социологических описаний, историографические отчеты, художественные тексты, картографические практики картография и нейминг, а также национальная визуальная и памятная культура, и может касаться как семиотических, так и дискурсивных измерений мифов, то есть с формами (пере) изложения, а также с их идеологическими функция (ср. Холл, Представление). Мифокритика в литературных и культурологи, историки, социологи, антропологи, политологи, и Т. Д. придавал мифам совершенно разные роли, значения и функции; я буду поэтому кратко обрисуйте некоторые из этих вкладов в теорию мифов, чтобы прийти к рабочее определение мифа для настоящего тома. Одно известное направление мифологической критики установило критическую точку зрения о мифах, противопоставляя их «истине» («логосу») или «научной мысли»; миф здесь рассматривается как ложный, вымышленный, анахроничный, «примитивный» или «патологический» (Claviez, Grenzfälle 14). Исторически мифы часто рассматривались быть домодернистскими конструкциями и интерпретациями мира, чьи силы пошли на убыль с наступлением эпохи Просвещения. С этой точки зрения миф в современности отрицательно фигурирует как инструмент пропаганды, политического демагогия и манипуляции (анализ Хоркхаймера и Адорно, ср. Dialektik 44). В повседневном использовании слова «миф», которое приравнивает миф к ложь, принятие желаемого за действительное или выдумка, это значение все еще присутствует. Клевета на природу и культурную деятельность мифов, как указано выше контрастирует с теориями мифов таких критиков, как Эрнст Кассирер и Ганс Блюменберг, которые вместо этого указали на функцию мифа как на способ осмысления мира. Кассирер не считает мифы нормативно анти- или иррациональными. ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 27 но вместо этого считает, что миф обеспечивает «свой собственный вид реальности» и рациональность (Философия 4). В то время как миф, кажется, «создает совершенно фантастический мир на с одной стороны »(Кассирер, Язык 45), это« символическое выражение »и «Работа» или «искусное выражение» с другой стороны (там же 46, 48). Мифы - это «объективации» (там же, 47) социального опыта и вносят значимый вклад в интерсубъективное понимание культуры или общества. Кассирер описывает миф обращается к его внутренней логике, формальным структурам и социокультурным функция, а не ее предмет. Философия Ганс Блюменберг в работе над мифом более подробно остановился на функции мифа как фундаментальной деятельности человека по «Преодолейте архаическую изменчивость мира» (Уоллес, Введение переводчика x) и защищать людей от «абсолютизма реальности» (Blumenberg, Work 3) путем создания коллективной идентичности и солидарности. Для Блюменберга наша потребность в мифы не растворяются с просветительским мышлением или позитивистской рациональностью а скорее фигурирует как вневременная константа в нашем отношении к миру в целом (см. там же 113).В то время как это спорно, обсуждали ли современные мифы, такие как те, в эту книгу на самом деле можно рассматривать как основной способ создания мира, они явно часть дискурсивной формации и составляют семиотическую систему, которая включает интерсубъективный аспект. Это интерсубъективное измерение, по моему аргумент, работает, чтобы утвердить нацию как воображаемое сообщество и расширяет всем тем, кого запросили в качестве членов. Социальная функция мифа как популярного система убеждений должна отвечать на аффективное желание онтологической (повторной) уверенности и действует в гражданских религиозных формах, которые создают внутри группы (т. е. "нации") полусознательная, но глубоко эмоциональная связь (ср. Белла, «Гражданская религия»), которая можно пережить и сформулировать как своего рода «общественное чувство» (Стюарт, «Обычные Влияет на 2). «Структуры чувств» (см. Эссе Уильямса о том же title), лежащие в основе этих «общественных чувств» и «обычных аффектов», находятся на пересечении индивидуального опыта и коллективно понятного объяснения. «Мифологии» Ролана Барта более критически обращаются к роли мифа в повседневная жизнь. Барт концептуализирует миф как «систему коммуникации». (Мифологии 109) и как «метаязык» (там же 115), который функционирует на основа и как язык. Для Барта критика мифов эквивалентна идеологии. критика, задача которой состоит в том, чтобы постоянно деградировать и деконструировать то, что кажется самоочевидным, естественным и объективным: «[M] yth состоит из потери историческое качество вещей; в нем вещи теряют память, которой они когда-то были сделано »(там же 142). В этом смысле миф может использоваться для различных целей: «Миф ничего не скрывает: его функция - искажать, а не заставлять исчезать» (там же, 121). Определение мифа как средства обеспечения согласованности перекликается с определение идеологии как 28 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ система культурных допущений или дискурсивная конкатенация, связность убеждения или ценности, которые поддерживают или противостоят социальному порядку или иным образом обеспечивают связная структура мысли, которая скрывает или заглушает противоречивые элементы в социальных или экономические образования. (Вольфрис, Ключевые слова 101) Сакван Беркович указал, что ученые часто конструируют ложные оппозиция между «критикой мифа и идеологическим анализом», которая утверждает, что задача мифокритики - «оценить» его [миф, HP] изнутри, объяснить его «По сути» в его собственном «органическом» смысле »(Rites 358), тогда как, напротив, идеология «является [] подозрительным по своей природе», «проводником предписанных культурой директив. для мысли и поведения », анализ которой« рационально раскрывает зловещие последствия его вымыслов: »« [критиковать идеологию - значит видеть сквозь нее, раскрывает свои исторические функции, обязательно с внешней стороны, и обычно со стороны враждебная перспектива »(там же). Этот «двойной стандарт» (там же) затмевает идеологические измерение / присвоение мифа и мифических текстов; именно этот дуал качество мифа - как осмысленное представление о себе и как идеологический вклад - что я буду участвовать в этом исследовании. В области политологии Кристофер Флад и Херфрид Мюнклер также выступили против более раннего нормативного подхода, который подозрительно относился к мифам и в одностороннем порядке как инструменты политического воспитания, не отрицая того, что политические мифы выполняют идеологическую функцию. Потоп исследует мифотворчество в политические дискурсы в современных обществах XIX и XX веков на пересечение политики, (сакральной) мифологии и идеологии (см. «Политический миф»). Херфрид Мюнклер считал изучение политических мифов неотъемлемой частью дискурсивно сконструированные современные национальные идентичности, которые нельзя сбрасывать со счетов небрежно как неуместное или анахроничное. Собираем воедино большую часть более раннего мифа критика (ср. Буркерт, Структура; Барт, Мифологии; Кассирер, Язык; ср. также Berlant, Anatomy), Мюнклер выделяет три аспекта мифов: 1) (повторяющийся) ритуал как древнейшее проявление мифического мышления, 2) повествовательная форма миф как своего рода повествование; 3) визуальное и иконическое измерение представление мифа (ср. Die Deutschen). Опять же, это гражданская религия, а не чисто религиозный аспект, который выдвигается на первый план и исследуется в отношении национально-культурное воображаемое. Все эти измерения - ритуальная итерация мифов в культурных практиках, их различных повествовательных паттернов и их визуальных качество и иконичность - будут рассмотрены в каждой главе настоящего исследования. Тем не менее, различные способы, которыми мы сталкиваемся с мифами в политике, искусстве, литературе, мемориальная культура и др. не исчерпайте силу и сложность мифа и даже не объясняйте полностью его значение. Мы знаем миф только через наши поработать над его работой, предлагает Блюменберг, и мы никогда не сможем понять миф ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 29полностью через рациональные или другие формы объяснения, поскольку он превышает полную семиотическую доступ. Фактически, «его функция может быть« единственным познаваемым аспектом », который он обладает для нас »(Уоллес, Введение переводчика xviii), тогда как для сообщество его верующих, для которых его онтологический статус очевиден, он представляет «святая истина» (Потоп, Политический миф 32). Критическая идеология ограничена динамичный и в то же время скромный характер мифа и тем, что его идеологическое ядро ​​сводится к коллективно разделяемому неявному знанию или тому, что можно также назвать «политическим бессознательным» (см. книгу Джеймсона того же title) или «государственной фантазии» (ср. Пиз, New American Exceptionalism 1-39). Похожий Зигмунду Фрейду, который находит мифические модели в бессознательном (ср. Die Traumdeutung), Славой Жижек определяет «неизвестное, известное» (ср. «Что Рамсфельд») как часть нашего внутреннего идеологического репертуара, который эффективно работает именно потому, что это то, «что нельзя назвать» (Пиз, New American Исключительность 17). Именно это скрытое качество мифа иммунизирует его от критика снова и снова и объясняет ее долговечность и ее способность притворяться несмотря на очевидные противоречия. Историческое «создание» американских национальных мифов опровергает предположение, что мифы теряют свою силу и авторитет интерпретации и устаревают с развитие современных демократических обществ; как раз наоборот: это с формирование США как нации и республики в конце 18 века в контекст просвещенного мышления и философии естественных прав, которые современные национальные мифы возникают или «создаются» во имя исключительности Американский национализм: В истории американского национализма нет ничего более впечатляющего, чем скорость и щедрость, с которой американцы обеспечили себя полезным прошлым: история, легенды, символы, картины, скульптура, памятники, святыни, праздники, баллады, патриотические песни, герои и - с трудом - злодеи. (Коммандер, Поиск 13) Кажется, что антропологические и психосоциальные аспекты мифов центральное значение для национального дискурса, который присваивает универсальность как «Американская универсальность» (Claviez, Grenzfälle 16). Эволюция этого «американского универсальность »реконструирована Ричардом Слоткиным, применившим Юнгианские архетипы в национальном контексте, чтобы критически идентифицировать Американские архетипические паттерны и то, как они были закодированы Американские мифы. Для Слоткина «[] миф - это повествование, которое сосредоточено в единый театрализованный опыт всей истории народа на своей земле »автора «Сокращение многовекового опыта до созвездия убедительных метафор» 30 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ (Регенерация 269; 8). В контексте исследований памяти Ян Ассманн описал миф, чем-то похожий на Ролана Барта, как «горячее» воспоминание основная функция - утверждать настоящее как предопределенное и самоочевидное. (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 78); Я использую слово «фундаментальный» примерно так же. Некоторые из мифов, о которых я говорю, увековечивают славное прошлое (Колумб, Покахонтас, пилигримов и пуритан, отцов-основателей) и связывают миф с культурная память и ее различные архивы, в то время как другие (плавильный котел, Запад и самодельный человек) - это мифы о (географической, культурной и социальной) мобильности. которые увековечивают события и события прошлого, но также предполагают будущее Америки. Тем не менее, в модели Ассманна миф не обязательно всегда основополагающий, но может иметь и вторую функцию, а именно привлекать внимание на разрыв между памятным мифическим прошлым и обжитым настоящим - этот эффект «контрпредставительства» может вызвать социальные и политические изменения, и подстрекают к революционным действиям.В контексте американской культуры Сакван Беркович определил Американская иеремиада, мотивационная проповедь в пуританской традиции, как широко распространенная риторическая структура, которая постоянно признает такой дефицит и откладывает устранение разрыва между «фундаментальным» и «презентистским» измерениями мифа, не отказываясь от обещаний Америки и ее утопических качеств. Даже если американская иеремияда утверждает, что люди упали со своего (изначального) библейских, духовных или нравственных стандартов, он предлагает и дает второй шанс вернуться или полностью реализовать идеальную общественную жизнь со всеми ее преимуществами для индивидуум и сообщество (ср. Беркович, американская Джеремиада). Американец Иеремиаду можно снова и снова считать вымышленной риторикой подтверждает идеологическое содержание американской мифологии, сглаживая социальные политическое недовольство и маскировка социальных и политических недостатков. Такие недостатки более подробно рассматриваются Дональдом Пизом в своем отчете. США после окончания «холодной войны» и 11 сентября, где он определяет именно такой «разрыв» между национальной системой верований и представлением опыты. По словам Пиза, это «государственная фантастическая работа» - государственная фантастика. являясь «доминирующей структурой желания, из которой граждане США представляли свои национальная идентичность »(New American Exceptionalism 1), что ликвидирует разрыв между (старый) миф (эпохи «холодной войны») и (новая после 11 сентября) реальность как новая ситуация превосходит толковательные возможности старого мифа: Обычно мифы включают события в узнаваемые национальные повествования. Но травматические события вызывают чрезвычайное положение, которое становится первым моментом. в другом символическом порядке и происходят в масштабе, превосходящем понимание Имеются представления из национальной мифологии. Прежде чем национальный миф сможет рассказать ВВЕДЕНИЕ | 31 год события такого масштаба, государственная фантазия, обеспечивающая горизонт ориентировочных ожиданий их значение должно быть уже стало символически действенным. (там же 5) «Государственная фантазия» во время кризиса затем способствует адаптации старых мифов. к новой ситуации таким образом, чтобы не поколебать социальный и политический порядок « побуждение граждан к желанию того национального порядка, который у них уже есть »(там же 4). В этом логика, американская исключительность повторяется и оживает как государственная фантазия (или состояние фантазии; ср. там же 20); при изучении того, что Пиз называет «новым Американская исключительность », - фактически диагностирует изменение маршрута и окончательный« возврат » национальной мифологии »после 11 сентября, в котором« целинная земля »становится «Граунд-ноль» (там же 153). Исследование американских мифов в исторической перспективе, значит, он никоим образом не устарел и не констатирует очевидное; даже когда мы пришли с тех пор, как зародилась школа мифов и символов, запутанности Между историческим мифом и современной идеологией сложны, как они когда-либо были. Подводя итог наиболее значимым аспектам обсуждения мифа во введении: Во-первых, дискурсивное, а не нормативное определение мифа сообщает современному критика мифов, а также анализ в следующих главах. Второй, критика мифов должна учитывать взаимосвязь между мифом и идеология. В-третьих, сила мифов проистекает из, казалось бы, парадоксальной структура, которая предполагает долговечность и преемственность, а также разнообразие и гибкость. В-четвертых, миф проявляется в повествованиях, иконах и ритуалах. В-пятых, молчаливый измерение мифа является частью его способности выполнять и регулировать «политические без сознания. " В следующих главах обсуждается основополагающая мифология США. в этих рамках. 32 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ 5. ВОПРОСЫ ДЛЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ 1. Каковы различные аспекты американской исключительности, изложенные в текст и с какими мифами они наиболее четко соотносятся? 2. Дайте определение американской гражданской религии и назовите несколько примеров гражданская религия как проявление исключительности. 3. Каковы взгляды и планы разных поколений / когорты ученых-американистов? 4. Обсудите определения американских исследований с точки зрения их ориентации на междисциплинарность.5. Обобщите своими словами различные аспекты критики мифов. 6. Как связаны друг с другом разные американские мифы? 7. Обсудите взаимосвязь между мифом и идеологией, как указано в тексте. 8. Изучите контекст этого часто цитируемого изречения: «[В] начале все мир был Америкой »(Джон Локк, Второй трактат о правительстве 29). 9. Изучите контекст заявления тогдашнего государственного секретаря Мадлен Олбрайт. что «[мы] незаменимый народ» (The Today Show, 19 февраля 1998). Обсудите его утверждения и последствия с точки зрения идеологии исключительности. 10. Можете ли вы представить себе мифы других современных нации и соотносить, сравнивать и / или противопоставлять их американским? 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МАЙКЛ ДОРРИС, «ОШИБОЧНЫЕ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ»Мифология «нового мира» начинается с дискурса открытий и с мощными европейскими проекциями, которые видят новый вид рая, утопия где-то по ту сторону Атлантики, которая облегчает недовольство "старых мир », и это сулило безграничные земные богатства. В традиционном европейском версии, этот дискурс не столько о «хозяевах», которых часть Native Американский писатель и поэт Майкл Доррис считает, что сцену встречи, поскольку она касается их "посетителей", то есть тех европейцев, которые приезжают и «открыть». Хотя эта первичная сцена предшествует формированию США как национальное государство за несколько сотен лет, оно превратилось в одно из своих основных основополагающие мифы и, при всей своей исторической отдаленности, глубоко сформировали национальное воображаемое. История Христофора Колумба (1451-1506) и его прибытие в Америку занимает центральное место в американской фундаментальной мифология, которая этапирует «открытие» и последующее урегулирование и колонизация «нового мира» пророческими способами как неизбежный шаг вперед в ходе человеческого прогресса, что в конечном итоге приведет к основанию США и экспансии США и Америки на запад, его «явная судьба». может спросить, почему, когда и «как итальянский исследователь стал американским 44 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ герой »(ср. Бушман, Америка), или, чтобы еще больше раскрыть парадокс: почему Колумб, кто никогда не ступал на землю, которая позже станет Соединенными Штатами и кто никогда при жизни не знал, что в 1492 году он не высадился в Азии, считался одним из основоположников американо-американской нации. Фактически, он может быть самой важной и самой известной фигурой в контексте «Открытие» «нового мира», хотя его место в истории уже давно время оспаривается. Я покажу, как миф об «открытиях» прочно связан с фигура Колумба и как идеологические инвестиции определяют использование этого историческая фигура была помещена в: Колумб «не что иное, как собрание множество маскировок, собранных вокруг набора исторических фактов »(Ставанс, Imagining xvii) с изображением, колеблющимся между «главным злодеем современной эпохи. за геноцид и загрязнение незапятнанного земного рая »и« кто-то достойны святости »(Шрив,« Христофор Колумб »703). В этой главе будут описаны четыре этапа создания и демонтажа Американский миф об «открытии» и Христофоре Колумбе; это будет историзировать миф и его модификации и указывают на его различные функции. Моя генеалогия начинается с исторического момента первоначальной «славы» Колумба в конце 15-го века. век и его отголоски в контексте испанского колониализма; во-вторых, я обратится к открытию и укреплению мифа о Колумбе на Севере Америка в революционный период во второй половине 18 века и посмотрите на процессы перевода (также в смысле translatio imperii) участвует; в-третьих, я прослежу миф до конца 19 и начала 20 веков. указать на его участие в дискурсах иммигрантов, которые сделали Колумба этнический герой, последовавший за ирландской, еврейской и итальянской "волнами" иммиграции в Соединенные Штаты; в-четвертых, я кратко остановлюсь на недавнем ревизионизме в Native Американская стипендия в контексте переломного 1992 года (который отметили пятисотлетие «открытия») как свидетельство нового взгляда на Колумба (человек, а также миф). Конечно, нельзя сказать, что эти четыре фазы начинаются или заканчиваются через год или еще один; вместо этого они указывают на тенденции, тенденции и меняющиеся точки зрения. На протяжении всей американо-американской истории и на протяжении сотен лет Колумб служил национальным символом - День Колумба сегодня по-прежнему является национальным праздником, несмотря на упорные возражения против его идеализации и прославления. Однако его профиль исчезла из пятидолларовой купюры в 1923 г. (последняя американо-американская купюра на которого он был изображен); и тогда как американские учащиеся начальной школы все еще узнают о героизме Колумба недвусмысленно, город Беркли с 1992 года вместо празднования Дня коренных народов отмечает Колумб (ср. Мартин, «Литература» 16): значение Колумба и наследие КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 45 его «открытия», таким образом, оспаривались и постоянно обсуждаются заново. 2. ПЕРВОЕ ПИСЬМО «НОВОГО МИРА»Давайте не совершим ошибки, теперь, когда мы собираемся сопровождать Колумба. о своем великом приключении, предполагая, как это обычно делается, что, хотя он не знал об этом, он «действительно» пересек Атлантику в поисках Америки и что берега, к которым он прибыл, «на самом деле» принадлежали американскому континенту. ЭДМУНДО О’ГОРМАН, ИЗОБРЕТЕНИЕ АМЕРИКИ При рассмотрении исторических свидетельств о путешествиях Колумба и о его высадка в Северной и Южной Америке 12 октября 1492 г., в первую очередь, к месту назначения Колумба. собственные сочинения, которые мы переворачиваем, поскольку его обычно называют «первым Европеец, чтобы написать новый мир »(Лёвенберг, American History 31). Чай оригинальный манускрипт журнала Колумба был утерян, поэтому ученые полагаются на краткое изложение его Diario, составленное Бартоломе де лас Касас (отрывок в Антологии американской литературы Хита; ср. Лаутер и др.). Тем не менее, Коламбус так называемая первая буква обычно считается более достоверной документ; он якобы написал первую версию под впечатлением грозящее кораблекрушение по возвращении из первого рейса (еще трое должны были следовать), чтобы оставить для потомков запись того, что он видел и нашел, покрыли воском, запечатали и бросили в море. Он сделал вторую версию этого быть помещенным на борт его корабля «Нинья»; оба эти письма также были потеряны. Однако почти кораблекрушение, похоже, заставило Колумба осознать важность оставить запись своих исследований, чтобы задокументировать "новый мир" как а также его роль в "открытии" и утверждении этого. Таким образом, он написал свое письмо для третий раз - на этот раз в более трезвом настроении и в более расчетливом стиле мы может предположить - адресовав его Луису де Сантанхелю, казначею испанской Корона и, как следствие, сами испанские монархи, которые спонсировали своего предприятия и кого он, очевидно, хотел впечатлить тем, что он нашел в чтобы узаконить и расширить свое предприятие (см. Wallisch, Kolumbus 6). Нам следует поэтому не совершайте ошибку, наивно глядя на это письмо как на просто достоверное отображение путешествий и встреч Колумба; это означало бы недооценку его риторические навыки в создании сцены, полностью предназначенной для передачи важность и предчувствие исторического момента, т.е. описать его как и таким образом сделайте это историческим моментом, хотя на самом деле он был довольно невежественным 46 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ о том, где он был и что собирался начать. Прежде всего, Columbus’s Letter полагается на сознательное самовосприятие при тщательном построении своей роли как исследователь и покоритель новых миров. Рисунок 1: Колумб вступает во владение Теодор де Бри, Открытие Америки, 12 мая 1492 (1590). Начнем с того, что в своем письме Колумб описывает Америку языком удивление и трепет, вызывающие в воображении библейские образы Эдемского сада. «Эспаньола это чудо, - пишет он, - […] у него прекрасные, большие реки »,« горы и вершины […] прекраснейшие »,« деревья бесконечного разнообразия, такие высокие, что они кажется, касается неба […], покрытого цветами, некоторые плодами »,« мед, много видов птиц и великое множество фруктов ». земля «богата и плодородна» ("Письмо"). Колумб нашел, судя по его письму, земной рай, место красоты и изобилия, которое он описывает в превосходной степени за превосходной. Его изумление не совсем искреннее и искреннее, но обрамленный, на втором этапе, языком прибыли и выгоды. Обилие «Новый мир» сулит испанской короне экономическую прибыль: не только Испанцы смогут обосноваться в этом раю, «сажая» и «пасти» и КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 47 «Строить города и деревни», но и чтобы заработать состояние, извлекая из этого ресурсов, которыми он владеет: испанские монархи найдут «столько золота, сколько они желание », а также« специи, хлопок, сколько их Высочества прикажут быть отправленным »(там же). Колумб пытается произвести впечатление на испанскую корону, чтобы выполнить свое первоначальное обещание вернуть капитал хотя бы на словах и обеспечить дальнейшая финансовая поддержка его следующих экспедиций через Атлантику, инвестиции для монархов, - кажется, он предлагает - с разнообразными и непомернымивозвращается. Таким образом, Колумб рекламирует свое «открытие» как успех по всем стандартам. Тем не менее, этот рай, который описывает Колумб, не «пустой»: он населен коренное население, которое каким-то образом, кажется, стоит между ним и богатого он жаждет. Туземцы фигурируют как жители островов, которых он считает расположен к востоку от Индии. Однако эти «индейцы» не изображаются как обладатели место, где они обитают. В самом начале своего письма Колумб описывает как он овладевает «новым миром», заставляя коренное население под испанским колониальным правлением: «Я обнаружил множество островов, населенных бесчисленное количество людей; и всем, чем я овладел для Их Высочества провозглашение и демонстрация Королевского штандарта без возражений »(там же). Стивен Гринблатт обратил наше внимание на театральность мероприятия. описанный в письме Колумба, постановка, которая может показаться странно неуместной, почти абсурдно и буквально несколько "неуместно", когда мы помните, что обстоятельства встречи туземцев с Колумб "разительно отличался" от всего, что было раньше (Marvelous Имущество 55). Кто среди адресов выступления Колумба присутствует на месте происшествия могли понять, не говоря уже о озвучивании оппозиция провозглашению Колумба? Как могло коренное население выступил против его претензии, когда им было непонятно, что его напыщенный жест подразумевается или что означал его ритуальный язык? Колумб якобы играет обман с ними - с простой формальностью он претендует на землю, а их запас читать как навсегда лишение права на территорию (см. там же 60). Колумб строит его предметная позиция как расширение и выражение испанского королевская власть, которую он просто принимает в ряде речевых актов: «За Колумба овладение - это, в основном, выполнение набора языковых действий: декларирование, свидетельствование, запись »(там же 56-57). Он одержим именованием. Прежний к более подробным описаниям островов Колумб детализирует новые имена, которые он имеет дан им не потому, что они были безымянными - он даже регистрирует их "индийские" имена иногда - но потому что он игнорирует и отбрасывает их предыдущие имена в благосклонно относится к новым, испанским, и делает их переименование частью процесса своего «Открытие» и завоевание (ср. Продажа, Покорение рая; Тодоров, Завоевание Америка 38). Кроме того, его выбор имени призван льстить монархам. 48 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ в Испании: Изабелла, Фернандина, Санта-Мария-де-Консепсьон, Хуана. Идет перевод, именование и классификация - это операции, которые являются частью процесса колонизации (ср. Хартог, Зеркало) и сложные части процесса «другого», то есть превращения коренное население превратилось в «другого» и в объект европейского правления. В Колумбусе описание обитателей «нового мира», есть четкая дихотомия нас (европейцы) vs. их (коренное население) на работе - обе группы изображаются принципиально и непримиримо отличающимися друг от друга. Этот крайняя поляризация - то, что Хартог описывает как «исключенную середину» (там же. 258) - еще один ингредиент в риторике инаковости, порождающий непреодолимое разница, вводит крутой иерархии между «нами» и «ими», и, таким образом, узаконивает асимметричные властные отношения. Таким образом, аборигены описываются как «Дети природы» Колумба, как «необычайно робкие» (на самом деле они «Самые робкие люди в мире»), голые, инстинктивные, доверчивые, щедрые, легковерны и невежественны; и у них нет оружия, кроме «трости» ("Письмо"). Следовательно, Колумб и его люди превосходят во всех отношениях. Они представляют культуру (а не природу) - и, таким образом, совершенствование и прогресс против фон "естественного состояния" туземцев - с точки зрения их одежды, их религии (Христианство) и их технологии; и они яростно демонстрируют свои предполагаемые превосходство: Колумб овладевает островами и туземцами, подразумевая, что он уполномочен делать это по своему желанию. Он конкретизирует культуруприрода разделяют европейцев и коренное население, которое по определению тесно связаны с почвой своей «родной» земли. Во всем письме нет никакого смысла в той встрече, которую вызывает Майкл Доррис в эпиграф к этой главе, никаких встреч на уровне глаз между жителями Америка и их европейские гости: европейцы приземляются и вторгаются; Туземцы бегут, и их приходится брать «силой». В целом последние не изображается как отдельные лица, но как обобщенная группа «индейцев» («бесчисленное множество люди "). В своей оценке герменевтических способностей Колумба Цветан Тодоровдаже утверждает, что Колумб «был более проницательным, когда наблюдал природа, чем когда он пытался понять туземцев. Его герменевтика поведение в одном случае не совсем то же, что и в другом »(Завоевание Америка 17), тем самым ранжируя, по мнению Тодорова, туземцев, людей обитая в «новом мире» ниже уровня неодушевленного мира природы и пейзаж. Заветное предположение о его собственном превосходстве регистрируется на каждом уровень письма Колумба и является частью его «финалистической» точки зрения - «последняя [точка зрения] нет состоит в поиске истины, но в поиске подтверждений известной истины заранее (или, как мы говорим, выдавая желаемое за действительное) »(там же 19). Все это по сути что Колумб предлагает нам рассказ о первом контакте, в котором он пытается убедить нам о его законном завоевании Америки. Эта стратегия определяет местонахождение родного поп- КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 49 Явно на стороне природы, смешанной с дикой природой и растительность - «Колумб говорит о людях, которых видит, только потому, что они тоже, в конце концов, они составляют часть пейзажа »(там же 34). Мы знаем, что Колумб взял с собой в Испанию нескольких выходцев из Америки - точно так же, как он взял с собой растения, животных и золото - и выставил их напоказ при дворе перед Испанский король и королева как животные. Другой определяющий аспект колониальной герменевтики Колумба и его риторика инаковости »- это его религиозность. Письмо открывается и закрывается со ссылками на Бога, и «открытие» празднуется как «славное событие по воле Бога, во время которого весь христианский мир должен возрадоваться »(« Письмо »). Туземцы, конечно, не христиане, и, по мнению Колумба, это еще одно проявление их изначальной состояние природы и их неполноценность. Что они якобы принимают европейцев за боги с небес только добавляют аргумента в пользу того, что им не хватает надлежащего понимания христианской религиозности и сопоставимой концепции Бога. Колумба навыки чтения и перевода жестов и восклицаний аборигенов определенно плохой и симптоматичный для его принятия желаемого за действительное, но его суждения выдвинут с полной уверенностью в себе и без попыток саморефлексии. Фрауке Гевеке обдумывает вопрос, мог ли он освободить более строго от своих европоцентрических категорий и норм, чтобы воспринимать и описывать то, что он на самом деле видел (ср. Wie die neue Welt 12). Четко, в своем письме он заявляет о праве представлять, определять, категоризировать и управлять что Колумб обосновывает свою власть над Америкой. С точки зрения постколониальной критики, мы обнаруживаем, что репрезентативная стратегия Колумба в его письмо делает туземцев немыми и превращает их в объекты гегемонистского дискурса; у них нет голоса в его тексте, и, поскольку они не говорят по-испански, они не может участвовать в его беседе. Что касается известного вопроса Гаятри Спивак, "Может ли младший говорить?" (см. ее статью с таким же названием), в случае На встречу туземцев с Колумбом пришлось бы ответить отрицательно: нет, они не могут. Помимо получения и распространения этого первого письма, которое заложило основу для Репутация Колумба была объектом многих интерпретаций - Колумба стояние в конце 15 - начале 16 веков не осталось незамеченным. В Фактически, борьба за власть между различными группами интересов в недавно завоеванных территории начали в ту минуту, когда Колумб ступил на Америку, распространились после того, как он уехал, чтобы вернуться в Испанию, и продолжал характеризовать судьбу Испанские колонии «нового света». Его последующие путешествия в Америку (1493- 1496; 1498-1500; 1502-1504) не закрепил за ним статус «первооткрывателя» новых миров. Хотя Колумб быстро прославился в свое время и в свое время 50 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ (и оставался объектом всеобщего обожания и памяти), он упал к концу своей жизни из-за благосклонности монархов и даже вскоре заключен в тюрьму по обвинению в бесхозяйственности колонии. Как Киркпатрик Сейл и другие напоминают нам, что «Адмирал» умер в относительной безвестности; Сейл описывает его как несколько дезориентирован и отчужден, и он определенно еще не получил мифический статус, которого он достиг позже (см. «Покорение рая»). Его роль исследователя и его наследие «открытия», кажется, оспаривалось уже во время его жизни, и остались таковыми после его смерти.Иллюстрация 2: Карта путешествий Колумба Филсон Янг, Христофор Колумб и новый мир его открытий (1906). Рядом с письмом Колумба и кратким изложением Колумба Бартоломе де лас Касасом бортовой журнал, это была первая биография Колумба (написанная его сыном Фердинандом) которые достигли более широкого распространения и продвинули образ Колумба как героя и «первооткрыватель» на международном уровне. Повествование под названием "Жизнь адмирала" Христофор Колумб его сыном Фердинандом, был опубликован посмертно в 1571 г. на испанском, итальянском, английском и латинском языках и претерпел множество редакций в следующие десятилетия и столетия (ср. Colón, Life). У Фердинанда были свои планы в содействии безоговорочному оправданию заслуг своего отца. Книжный Фердинанд, как член «династии Колумба в Карибском море» (ср. Книга Троя Флойда с тем же названием), комфортно жил за счет нового отца. КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 51 открытие мира как землевладельца, так и (совершенно беспринципного) рабовладельца, и поэтому был сильно заинтересован в обеспечении своего наследства и юридических титулов предоставлен его отцу, который тем временем был отозван испанскими властями. Корона. Похоже, что многие отрывки в книге изначально были написаны для судебный процесс против испанских судов. Фердинанд утверждает, что Колумб и никто другой до и после него не открыл Америку и это за это он заслужил безоговорочную похвалу; как и многие другие, Фердинанд никогда не задавал вопросов это «открытие» с учетом того, что его отец никогда не знал или полностью осознал, где он был. Текст, похожий на текст Фердинанда, продолжал формироваться образ Колумба как проводника «открытий» и продвигал Петуация идеи «открытия» Америки в целом. Даже когда ужасы испанского колониализма в Америке - такие как жестокие жестокое обращение с коренным населением - стало известно в Испании и Европе в целом репутация Христофора Колумба как «первооткрывателя» не уменьшилась, и, похоже, в конечном итоге не подлежал пересмотру. В его знаменитая история Индии, главный критик испанского колониализма Бартоломе де лас Касас, мягко судит о Колумбе; прежде всего он видит Колумба, которого он сопровождает его в своем втором путешествии, избранном Богом для «исполнения божественный план »(О'Горман, Изобретение 19) и его« открытие »как провидение (ср. Роа-де-ла-Каррера, Истории 138); и даже когда он обвиняет ужасно жестоких отношение к населению со стороны испанцев и признает роль Колумба в установление системы энкомьенд рабского труда, он в значительной степени освобождает Колумб от критики и не винит его напрямую в порабощении и пытки коренного населения в Америке. По словам де ласа Касаса, добрые намерения Колумба превратились в злую практику в руках жадные и безжалостные испанские колонизаторы: «Колумб открыл Америку; другие исследовали и колонизировали его »(Loewenberg, American History 44). От усталости Не только Касас отделяет «открытие» Колумба и его путешествия от что в ходе испанской колонизации Америки, таким образом отличая его от других фигур колонизации, таких как пресловутый Эрнан Кортес или еще более печально известный Франсиско Писарро. Эта стратегия явно помогал сохранять и вновь и вновь утверждать образ Колумба как фигура света и спасения (представляющая возможность обращения «нового уроженцев мира), а не как фигура гибели и разрушения (представляющая геноцид и рабство). В то время как Колумб символизирует новые возможности, новое мир, новое время и повторное открытие рая - это последовательный испанский колонистов, которые якобы разрушили этот рай и извратили Колумба зрение. Его путешествие в «новый мир», таким образом, заключило в себе «краткий момент - 52 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУчудо, за которым последовала длинная серия бедствий и разочарований »(Baym et al. др., «Христофор Колумб» 25). Будь то из соображений личной выгоды (как в случае Фердинанда) или ради критики Испанский колониализм (как в случае с де лас Касасом) многие писатели сохраняли Колумб как героический персонаж, и постоянный поток публикаций столетия обеспечили Колумбу известность и популярность; чай миф о Христофоре Колумбе и его «открытии» «нового мира» был, и прочно на месте. 3. КОЛУМБУС КАК АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ГЕРОЙ Но если историческое прошлое и историческая память действительно необходимы ингредиенты для жизнеспособного национализма, что должны были делать новые Соединенные Штаты в 1776 год, или 1789 год, или, если уж на то пошло, почти любое время до гражданской войны? Как страна, не имеющая собственного прошлого, приобретает его или как она предоставить ему замену? Где такая нация могла найти материал для патриотизм, чувства, гордость, память, коллективность? ГЕНРИ СТИЛ КОММЕДЖЕР, «В ПОИСКАХ УДАЧНОГО ПРОШЛОГО» Христофор Колумб, кажется, был исторической фигурой, наиболее полезной в «Поиск пригодного для использования прошлого» (ср. Commager), который у американцев 18-го века - колониальные подданные британской короны, стремящиеся к независимости - ищите значимые начала. Именно в последние десятилетия XVIII века особый Появляется североамериканский миф о Колумбе, и за очень короткое время пролет прочно закреплен и расшит. В процессе передачи от Источники с испанского на английский, История Уильяма Робертсона 1778 г. Америки очень влиятельна - эта книга «была доступна большему количеству американских колонистов, чем был любой более ранний источник »(Бушмен, Америка 40) и посвятил сотни страниц Колумбу, который, по словам Робертсона, в своих усилиях сочетали «превосходство гения» с «пылким энтузиазмом» (History Vol. II 104). Робертсон следует за де лас Касасом в возвышении Колумба и его признании. с «открытием» нового мира. В целом автор винит испанских колонизаторов. (кроме Колумба) за их жестокие эксцессы в Латинской Америке, но неудивительно, что британская колониальная держава освобождает Северный Америка от любой критики. В контексте американского антиколониального движения, направленного против Британская корона незадолго до, во время и особенно после Американской революционной Война (1775-1783), культурная деятельность американских общественных интеллектуалов, КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 53 писатели и поэты должны были колонизировать прошлое, чтобы изобрести значимое начало, и они сделали это, сделав фигуру Колумба частью своей собственной колониальное и постколониальное наследие. Собралось много общественных деятелей и писателей вокруг Колумба как исторической личности, подтверждающей независимость Северной Америки, и они представили его как фигуру национального согласия, иллюстрирующую Американские национальные добродетели и американский национальный характер avant la lettre (ср. Хергет, «Побелка» 3). В политической культуре, в публичных обсуждениях мемориала практики и наименования, в поэзии, научно-популярной литературе и изобразительном искусстве, Колумбус фигурирует как покровитель и предок тех американцев, которые требовали независимость от Англии и впоследствии ставшие гражданами новой республики. 12 октября 1792 года Джереми Белкнап (1744-1798), основатель недавнего основал Историческое общество Массачусетса, выступил с обращением ко Дню Колумба восторженной публике в Бостоне. Он хвалит «смелые способности адмирала разум »(Мартин,« Литература »21), предполагая, что Колумб« знал »о земле масс на Запад - «от необходимости противовеса на Западе, ибо огромное количество земли, которая, как известно, находилась на востоке »(Белкнап, американская Биография 19). Согласно этому довольно любопытному рассуждению, Белкнап считает, что Колумб был полностью осведомлен о своем "открытии" и приписывает ему интеллект, мастерство и дальновидность, за что американцы были ему благодарны и восхищены. Следовательно, считает Белкнап, Америка должна была по праву быть названа «Колумбия». Он был не одинок с этой точкой зрения. Многие из его современников сетовали на "неправильное название" - как для полушария, так и для нации, - поскольку они считал роль Америго Веспуччи второстепенной по сравнению с ролью Колумба достижения. Географ и математик Мартин Вальдземюллер ввел название «Америка» для нового континента, нанесенного на карту в его «Cosmographiae». Introductio »в 1507 году после широкого распространения произведений Америго Веспуччи.письмо mundus novus о его третьем путешествии в Южную Америку в 1501 и 1502 годах, которые были немедленно опубликованы на разных языках. И имя застрявший. В конце 18 века большинство принимало это «неправильное наименование» как свершившийся факт. (см. Мартин, «Литература» 23). Тем не менее, историк Сэмюэл Велпли был среди те, кто занял несколько крайнюю позицию, когда жаловался на то, что континент и нация «Америка», а не «Колумбия» была «величайшим безумие, каприз, жестокость и несправедливость […], в которых когда-либо было виновно человечество » (qtd. там же). По его словам, новую нацию также следует строго различать. по названию с континента, и поэтому он заключает: «Есть серьезные и неотложные причины, по которым у Соединенных Штатов должно быть [собственное имя] » (там же.). 54 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Среди этих дискуссий о названии новой нации «Колумбия» неофициально «принята в качестве альтернативы Америке накануне американского Революция »(Бушмен, Америка 41). Это стало лирическим термином для предполагаемой Америки. как женская аллегорическая фигура в революционной поэзии. Африканский Американская поэтесса Филлис Уитли якобы первая использовала его в своем стихотворении «Чтобы Его Превосходительство генерал Вашингтон »(1776 г.): Небесный Хор! на трон в царствах света, Я пишу сцены славных трудов Колумбии. Пока свобода вызывает у нее тревогу по груди, Она ужасно вспыхивает в сияющих руках. Смотри, мать-земля оплакивает судьбу своего отпрыска, И народы смотрят на сцены, прежде неизвестные! (577; курсив мой) Уитли следует за своими современниками-мужчинами в спаривании Колумба и Джорджа. Вашингтон - главнокомандующий революционными войсками и первый президент Соединенных Штатов (и еще одного национального героя для более очевидных причин) - в патриотических целях (см. Bushman, America 54; Groseclose, «American Бытие »14). Этот тандем двух основополагающих фигур очевиден. в очень символической практике именования в ранней республике: столица США названный «Вашингтон», тогда как правительственный округ, уступленный Вирджинией и Мэриленд в 1791 году был назван «Округом Колумбия». Джорджа Вашингтона прощальное обращение опубликовано в 1796 году как Columbia’s Legacy (ср. Бушман, Америка 55). Множество географических названий (города, поселки и улицы), а также богатый мемориал культура напоминает нам о героизме, приписываемом Колумбу (и Вашингтону, конечно) в начальной фазе США. Лирическая ссылка Уитли далеко не единична. Филипп Френо (1752- 1832 г.), носившего звание «поэта американской революции» и являвшегося возможно, самый замечательный американский писатель 18 века, упоминает Колумба. во многих его патриотических стихах, например, в «Открытии», «Восходящей славе Америки» (с Генри Брэкенриджем) и «Картины Колумба». Френо, который принадлежит к новой американской элите, защищает Колумб как непризнанный гений, как блестящий штурман, опередивший свое время, как индивидуалист и идеалист, и как инакомыслящий, нашедший «новые миры для неблагодарных королей» (Френо, «Картинки» 122). Но Френо также обращается к темной стороне испанского языка. завоевание. В своем раннем стихотворении «Открытие», написанном в 1772 году, он критикует жестокость испанского колониализма, который под прикрытием миссионерской работы узурпировали континент, используя физическое и эпистемическое насилие: КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 55 Как мало кто плыл по благородному плану добродетели, Как мало мотивов, достойных мужчины! - Пока мы видели, как они уходят в глубоководные волны. Где они нашли человека, они сделали себе врагов […]. (86) Тогда как Френо выделяет Писарро как злодея испанского колониализма (ср. там же), Колумб прямо не упоминается в его критике испанского империя. Как и многие другие, поэт отделяет «открытие» Колумба от Завоевания Кортеса и Писарро (см. Бушман, Америка 48) и мысли Колумба заслуживает большей части похвалы, так как его знаменитое стихотворение «Восходящая слава Америка »свидетельства:Знаменитый период, когда впервые коснулся Колумб Эти берега так давно неизвестны - через разные труды, Голод и смерть герой пробивался, Через океаны, чреватые непрекращающимися штормами, И климат враждебен авантюристам. (49) В «Картинах Колумба» Френо находит Колумба заключенным в тюрьму по ложному обвинения и отказался от своих законных требований. Френо ожидает компенсации за это непризнание в далеком будущем: Мои труды были вознаграждены, и мои горести вознаграждены; Когда поднимаются империи там, где росли одинокие леса, Где Свобода будет преследовать ее щедрые планы. (122) Новообразованная республика США - мы можем сделать вывод - это поздняя компенсация Колумбу страдал как трагический герой в свое время. Рядом со стихами Френо «Колумбиада» Джоэла Барлоу (1807 г.) расширенная версия его "Видения Колумба" (1787 г.) - еще один ключевой текст для прослеживая, как Колумб и рассказ об «открытии» были представлены в Североамериканская поэзия XVIII - начала XIX веков. Его автором был государственный деятель, политический писатель и поэт, чей эпос вводит новое слово в Английский язык: Колумбиада - повторяя Илиаду, в которой рассказывается о падении Трой. Барлоу называет свое произведение «патриотической поэмой» (Columbiad 375); это празднует Колумб как «один из самых мудрых и лучших благодетелей человечества», тогда как он осуждает Кортеса как «вероломного мясника своей [американской] древней раса »(там же). Его предисловие, а также первые строки перекликаются с греческим исходным текстом: 56 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Я пою Моряк, который первым развернул Восточное знамя западного мира И научил человечество, где лежат будущие империи В этих прекрасных границах нисходящего дня Кто подменил момент, с заместительной властью Скипетр Иберии на вновь обретенном берегу Затем увидел пути, по которым прошли его добродетельные шаги Преследуемый алчностью и оскверненный кровью Племена, которые он взращивал отцовским трудом Вырвали из его руки и убили для их добычи Славяне, короли, авантюристы, завидовали его имени Наслаждался его трудами и похищал его славу И дал вице-королю, с его высокого места швырнул Цепи для короны, тюрьма для мира. (413-14) Барлоу признает, как и Френо, что после «Открытие» из-за жадности испанских колонизаторов. Но с республиканской будущее, обеспеченное американо-американской независимостью, наследие Колумба будет - почитают и лелеют, - пишет Барлоу. Эта перспектива предлагается Колумбу. как утешение (consolatio); в эпосе Барлоу, как в «Картинках» Френо, Колумб заключен в тюрьму и ожидает своей смерти, когда Геспер, ангел Уэст, показывает ему во сне последующую историю Америки. Колумбус в отчаянии, когда он видит разрушение Мексики Кортесом, проклинает его «Открытие» и умоляет Бога о прощении. Только в конце его сна ангел заставит его увидеть Северную Америку, обнадеживающее видение, чтобы улучшить его настроение: Более счастливое полушарие приглашает твой взгляд […] там лучшие сыновья Европы их места проследят и смена правительства улучшает гонку. (427) Затем Колумб с отцовским удовлетворением смотрит на своих североамериканских потомков. Теперь он может быть уверен, что, несмотря на годы агонии и страданий, (как народов Северной и Южной Америки, так и его собственной), его «открытие» было значимый и благословение для человечества. Соединенные Штаты Америки должны доказывают это и являются воплощением «идеи прогресса» Барлоу (Пирс, Непрерывность 65). Барлоу обращается к классической древности, чтобы интегрировать Колумба и история США в главный рассказ о западной цивилизации; Translatio imperii Барлоу предвосхищает величие новой нации США с его республиканские идеалы. Он, как и Френо, пишет в неоклассической манере своего КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 57литературный период, часто «облекающий [его] новый мир в архаичную литературную одежду» (Эллиотт, революционные писатели 124), но его использование таких терминов, как «Колумбиада» показывает, как он борется с ограничениями обычного языка адекватно охарактеризовать историю Америки: отметим «странное и неловкое неологизмы, искажающие язык стихотворения », - пишет ученый Сэмюэль Кеттелл в 1829 году («Джоэл Барлоу» 11). В роли Хельмбрехта Брейнига и Сюзанны Опферманн полагает, что неологизмы в работах Барлоу указывают на то, как ранние американские литература создает художественный язык нового политического образования и национального культура (ср. «Die Literatur» 43; ср. также Pearce, Continuity 67). Историки Белнап и Велпли, поэты Френо, Барлоу и Уитли - лишь несколько примеров более крупного феномена Колумба. поклонение. Почему он? И какие причины и риторические стратегии используются для подходит Колумбу как американскому герою? Во-первых, Колумб был удобной исторической фигурой по простой причине. что он не был британцем и, следовательно, не был вовлечен в британский колониализм; чай представление о Колумбе как об отце-основателе устанавливает неанглийское наследие для Соединенных Штатов (ср. Groseclose, «American Genesis» 12) на пике популярности конфликт между колониальной державой и ее колониями. Во-вторых, авторы американская революционная эпоха сочувствовала зависимости Колумба от монархической доброй воли и явно представил его как антимонархического, почти революционного фигура; они установили несколько искаженную аналогию между страдая под игом жадных монархов, не ценивших его гений и судьба североамериканских колонистов при Георге III. События эпохи «открытий» образуются типологически и становятся символ революционного периода (ср. Хергет, «Побелка» 3-5). В третьих, Поиски Колумбом «прохода в Индию» (Смит, Virgin Land 20) можно увидеть как прообраз американской экспансии на запад - с целью основать «могущественный нация простирается от побережья до побережья »(Бушмен, Америка 49). Колумб - это «Символ продолжающейся экспансии» и «широкой судьбы» (Мартин, «Литература» 20). С начала века и далее «смелость, настойчивость, и бесстрашие были названы необходимыми составляющими трансконтинентального стремление », и он« стал настоящим воплощением американского первопроходца » (Гросеклоуз, «Американский генезис» 14). В-четвертых, утверждается, что сила воли Колумба и стойкость перед лицом непреодолимых препятствий олицетворяли высшая степень индивидуализма - основная американская добродетель в ранних дискурсах республика, что «делает Колумба американцем по темпераменту» (Мартин, «Литература» 22). В-пятых, чувство провидения, которое окружало Колумба в исторической источники можно отнести как к религиозным, так и к светским образцам. В 58 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Североамериканское изобретение традиции, он становится частью «переговоров неизведанного интеллектуального и артистического пути из доминирующего религиозного видения Америка к новой националистической идеологии »(Elliott, Revolutionary Writers 17) в эпоха просвещения, когда американские писатели могли представить себе Колумба «[Со всем нравственным рвением американского кальвинизма восемнадцатого века позади их и перед ними простор открытого культурного горизонта »(там же 11). Таким образом, прославление Колумба совпадает с первой фазой формирования Американская гражданская религия.«Американизация» Колумба в революционный период продолжалась в 19 век. Подробная биография Вашингтона Ирвинга Колумба как а также "История Соединенных Штатов Америки" Джорджа Бэнкрофта - два самых выдающихся примеры, свидетельствующие об этой тенденции. Вашингтон Ирвинг, один из первых в Америке писатели рассказов и его первые канонизированные, а также всемирно популярные писатель, Шрив до сих пор считает «одним из первых истинных Колумба. ученые »(« Христофор Колумб »704). Его объемная жизнь и путешествия Христофор Колумб, написанный в Альгамбре в Гранаде, Испания, на основе архивных рукописей, принимает историческую фигуру как мост между «старый» и «новый» мир: Цель следующей работы - рассказать о делах и судьбах моряка, который сначала имел суждение к божественному и бесстрашное противостояние тайнам этого опасного глубокий; и который своим стойким гением, несгибаемым постоянством и героическим мужеством привели концы земли в сообщение друг с другом. Рассказ о его беспокойная жизнь - это связующее звено, связывающее историю старого мира с историей нового. (Ирвинг, Жизнь 10) Историк Джордж Бэнкрофт своим выбором названия указывает - История Соединенные Штаты Америки с открытия Американского континента - это он включает рассказ об «открытии» Колумба в американо-американском национальном истории и, кроме того, останавливается на этом первом периоде, потому что «он содержит зародыш наших учреждений »(6): Воображение зародило идею, что огромные населенные районы лежат неизведанными на западе; и поэты заявляли, что империи за океаном однажды откроются перед дерзкий штурман. Но Колумб заслуживает безраздельной славы, осознав эту веру. При жизни он не получил должного вознаграждения. Самолюбие испанцев монарх был оскорблен получением от иностранца по работе льгот, слишком больших для возмездие; и современники великого мореплавателя преследовали ту заслугу, которую они КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 59 не мог достойно вознаградить. Потомки не собирались собираться в законченный изобразите памятники его карьеры, вплоть до гения Ирвинга, с откровенностью, щедростью и оригинальное исследование, сделавшее запись его насыщенной жизни, и в мягких, но стойких цветах обрисовал его мрачную непоколебимость целей, его глубокий религиозный энтузиазм и бескорыстие великодушие его характера. (6-7) Изображение едва ли могло быть более хвалебным, а Ирвинг и Бэнкрофт только два среди множества хвалящих голосов. Как отмечает Мэтью Деннис в своем обзоре, «[В] пределах пятидесяти лет американской революции версии Колумба это имя украсило названия примерно шестнадцати периодических изданий, восемнадцати книг и полутора десяток научных обществ »(« Reinventing »128). Рисунок 3: неоклассицистское изображение пристанища Колумба Джон Вандерлин, Высадка Колумба на острове Гуанахани, Вест-Индия (1846 г.). Колумб также быстро продвинулся и стал американской иконой в визуальной культуре. и его высадка в Америке стала мощным «образом американского происхождения». (ср. Groseclose). Два наиболее представительных примера раннего американского картины, изображающие прибытие Колумба в Америку, принадлежат Дэвиду Эдвину. изображение Колумба в "Посадке Христофора Колумба" (1800), невероятно похож на портрет Джорджа Вашингтона Чарльзом Уилсоном Пилом 1779 года. в книге Джорджа Вашингтона в Принстоне (см. там же 14) и в книге Джона Вандерлина картина Посадка Колумба на острове Гуанахани, Вест-Индия 60 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ (1846), выставленная в ротонде Капитолия Соединенных Штатов в Вашингтоне ОКРУГ КОЛУМБИЯ .; Вандерлин иерархизирует «первооткрывателя» и его объекты «открытия». (одетые против обнаженных, гордых и прямых против робких и сбившихся, христиане по сравнению с нехристианами) и культурно переводит Карибский регион в более неуказанный, возможно, североамериканский в переносе, который мы уже знакомы с: одинокое дерево на картине «не пальма, а выглядит очень очень похоже на образец, который может расти в умеренном климате, такой как в Соединенных Штатах »(там же 16). Короче говоря, публичный дискурс, посвященный «открытию» Колумба - стихи Филипа Френо и Джоэла Барлоу, биография Вашингтона Ирвинга, ранние историография, а также ранняя американская визуальная культура, представляющая высадку Колумба - свидетельствует о возвышении Христофора Колумба и его «Открытие» к национальному мифу. Празднование 300-летия "открытия" в 1792 году стал первым кульминационным моментом в прославлении этой фигуры после 1592 г. и 1692 год наступил и ушел без особого внимания ни в «старом», ни в «новом»Мир. Игнорируя исторические свидетельства, Христофор Колумб был возведен в человек американский; его изображали хорошим колонистом (если вообще колонистом), ученый, ученый и гуманист, как глубоко религиозный человек, как Просвещение фигура впереди Просвещения и, следовательно, как трагическая фигура. Это не может всегда будет легко или даже возможно отличить «исторического Колумба» от «Героический Колумб», как предлагает Сэйл, мы должны (см. «Завоевание рая»), но еще в в случае американо-американского мифотворчества в конце 18 века крайний расхождение между историческими свидетельствами и приукрашиванием повествования весьма очевидно в том, как Колумб служит, несмотря на то, что он наделен полномочиями об особенностях его исторического, культурного и религиозного контекста. Далеко идущие последствия этого основополагающего повествования для всей Америки и ее Историк Джеймс Лоуэн указал на подходы к лечению в историографии: «Колумб был настолько важен, что, как и Иисус, историки используют его, чтобы разделить историю: Америка до 1492 г. называлась «доколумбовой» (Loewen, Lies 1). 4. ЧТО КОЛУМБУС? ИЗГОТОВЛЕНИЕ ЭТНИЧЕСКОГО ГЕРОЯ [Т] возраст создал его, и возраст оставил его. Нет более заметного Пример в истории человека, показывающего путь и теряющего его. ДЖУСТИН УИНСОР, КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБУС Во второй половине XIX века мы являемся свидетелями первой фазы ревизионизма. относительно мифического статуса Христофора Колумба в Соединенных Штатах. За КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 61 одно, к тому времени другие, более подлинно «американские» основополагающие нарративы развивались и продолжали формироваться (например, миф о Отцы-основатели, миф о Западе и миф о человеке, который сделал себя сам), что сделало "открытие" Колумба как историю об американских началах менее единственное и менее важное. В то же время миф о Колумбе как таковой был более внимательно изучены в свете продолжающихся дискуссий об изменениях и разработках в американском обществе и его демографическом составе. Усыновление Колумба как основополагающую фигуру в американских национальных дискурсах позднего XVIII и начало XIX веков мало отразили ряд аспектов, которые сейчас всплыло: что он был итальянцем, плывущим под испанскую корону, что он не на самом деле приземлился в Северной Америке, но на Карибах, и что он был католиком. Почему американцы узнали об этих фактах относительно «открытия» Колумба? теперь, через сто лет после того, как они сделали его своим национальным героем? В 19 веке США принимали миллионы иммигрантов из Европа - так называемая первая волна переселенцев с Севера и Запада. Европа в 1840-х и 1850-х годах и так называемая вторая волна иммигрантов в основном из Южной и Восточной Европы в 1870-х и следующих десятилетиях: «С 1880 по 1924 год около четырех миллионов иммигрантов из южной Италии приехал в Америку, присоединившись к более ранней группе итальянских иммигрантов, в основном из северный полуостров »(Деннис,« Новое изобретение »140). В ответ на большое количество вновь прибывших иммигрантов, американское население часто реагировало с тревогой и неприязнью. Последние десятилетия XIX века часто были характеризуется как период крайней ксенофобии, расизма и нативизма, особенно Американский термин для описания феномена «сильного противодействия внутреннее меньшинство по причине его иностранных (т.е. «неамериканских») связей »(Хайэм, Незнакомцы 4). Многие социальные и политические группы, созданные для защиты они считались чисто американским образом жизни. Джон Хайэм различил три основные темы американского нативизма: антикатолицизм, антирадикализм, и расовый нативизм, основанный на англосаксонской традиции и предположении о превосходстве англосаксов в США (там же 5-11). Историк Мэтью Джейкобсон проследил горячие споры вокруг расового состава США в 19 веке, когда «раса» не просто использовалась для различения «Черные» от «белых», но «англосаксы» от «кельтских», «славянских», «тевтонских», "Нордические", "иберийские", "латинские" и другие предположительно "иностранные" элементы и линии передачи (ср. Белизна 7). Согласно этой логике, иммигранты из разных частей Европы - особенно выходцы из католических стран - смотрели с недоверием и скептицизмом, реакция, которая часто вызывала массовую дискриминацию, а иногда даже физическое насилие. Острая полемика вокруг опасностей "иностранного проникновения" 62 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ кульминацией стало принятие Закона об иммиграции 1924 г., положившего конец массовой иммиграции. В Соединенные Штаты. Этот нативистский интеллектуальный климат повлиял на отношение к Кристоферу. Колумб как национальный герой. Юрист и дипломат Аарон Гудрич, автор книги А. История характера и достижений так называемого Христофора Колумба (1874 г.), и историк Джастин Винзор, член-основатель Американской Историческая ассоциация и автор книги Христофора Колумба и того, как он Получил и передал дух открытий (1890 г.), были среди тех, кто оспаривали «правдивость» и достоинства рассказа об «открытии», которое они утверждал, основанный главным образом на сочинениях самого Колумба. По словам Гудрича, На самом деле Колумб был «самим себе историком и прославителем» (History 128) и, следовательно, упущено очень много аспектов, которые могли бы бросить его в менее позитивном свете. Goodrich радикально пересмотрел миф о Колумбе и указал на ранее игнорировавшиеся источники и архивные записи; следует добавить, что с момента обретения независимости США стало доступно много новых источников для изучения ранней трансатлантической мобильности а затем использовались учеными для разных целей (см. Хениге, «В поисках»). Основываясь на своих исследованиях, Гудрич изображает Колумба «пиратом» и «рабом». торговец », у которого уже была« история пиратства и преступности »до въезда в Испанию. по сомнительным причинам в 1485 г. и исходил из самых низменных побуждений, намереваясь просто совершить набег на любое место, которое он сможет найти (История 129); Колумб не сделал ни того, ни другого заслуживает памяти как личность и не заслуживает похвалы ни в каком виде «открытия». Гудрич утверждает, что прибытие Лейфа Эриксона в Северную Америку был фактическим моментом «открытия» Америки за 600 лет до открытия Колумбом прибытия, и что это был «героический характер северян», а не «убогое величие» работорговца из Южной Европы (там же, 336) - это надолго сформировал американский характер. В этом, заключает Гудрич, « Американец вполне может почувствовать облегчение и гордость »(там же 87). Джастин Уинзор, ведущий историк своего времени подобным же образом осуждает итальянцев, которые могут такие люди, как Христофор Колумб или Америго Веспуччи, каждый раз в в то время как, но как нация неспособны держаться самостоятельно: Мы с вами не следили за приморскими народами Западной Европы в посадке и выращивании растений. защищая свои флаги на американских берегах, не замечая странной судьбы Итальянцы в том смысле, что они предоставили первопроходцев этим атлантическим странам, не имея обеспечили себе в Новом Свете точку опоры. (Христофор Колумб) Хотя Колумб, возможно, был несколько исключительной фигурой, его предприятие не хватало устойчивости, и его «открытие» было «ошибкой» (там же, 512) - недостатки, которые также объясняются «природой» итальянцев. 19 век КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 63Американские стереотипы в отношении итальянских иммигрантов делают их врожденными преступниками. ленивый, непригодный для демократии, и, как говорится в одном отчете секретной службы, «угроза в деревню »(Якобсон, Белизна 61). Хотя текст Винзора менее ясен чем у Гудрича, он все еще дышит распространенными расистскими настроениями того времени; обе Гудрич и Винзор используют стереотипы при индивидуальном профилировании Колумба и Итальянцы как «раса» в совокупности. С точки зрения нового историзма мы видим Дискурсы XIX века о «расе» и англосаксонском превосходстве нашли отражение в историография и мифотворчество об американском «происхождении». Что сделало Кристофера Колумб привлекателен на этапе основания США - этим он не был Британский - теперь заставил его подозревать. Конечно, эти новые голоса в американской исторической науке не полностью развенчать миф о Колумбе - далеко не так; это продолжает иметь твердое место в популярных дискурсах памяти и других формах публичных и популярных культура. Всемирная колумбийская выставка 1893 года (первоначально запланирована на 1892 г.) в Чикаго произошло грандиозное событие, описанное как «зрелище превосходного значимости »(Распродажа, Покорение рая 350), в котором отмечалась историческая фигура в более абстрактных терминах: длинный водный бассейн - центральный элемент Выставочный комплекс «Белый город» - символ долгого путешествия Колумба. в «новый мир»; однако стоящая рядом статуя не принадлежала Колумбу. но республики. Колумб не просто патриотическая фигура. здесь как символ прогресса и цивилизации по преимуществу. Таким образом, кажется что его путешествие имеет смысл только в контексте недавно возникших США империя и ее самопровозглашенная исключительность. Тем не менее, мы также можем заметить, что значение Колумба как основополагающей фигуры и национального символа становится все более очевидным. оспаривается, спорное событие. Деннис называет празднование 1892 года «запутанным Колумбийский дискурс »(« Reinventing »145). Праздник Колумба как герой и Америки как Колумбия (см. картину Джона Гаста 1872 г. Прогресс) сопровождалось разочарованием некоторых белых американских интеллектуалов. с Колумбом, с одной стороны, и отождествление с Колумбом с одной стороны. часть вновь прибывших иммигрантов (особенно тех, кого клеймили как иностранцы в США) с другой. С конца 19 века миф Колумба и «открытие» Америки, таким образом, больше не функционирует как однозначный универсальный национальный миф, но он включен в дискурсы новых меньшинств еврейскими, итальянскими и ирландскими иммигрантами в Америку, которые считают его своим основателем фигура. Таким образом, он остается фигурой инакомыслия, героизма и, иногда, непризнанное достижение, хотя и в измененной идеологической конфигурации - он становится этническим героем. Этот новый поворот в тропах Колумба как героя проявляется в культурной и мемориальной практике иммигрантов, в их поэзия и литература, а также их политика. 64 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Рисунок 4: Колумбия движется на запад Джон Гаст, Американский прогресс (1872 г.). В этом контексте неудивительно, что празднование 1892 года памяти Колумба «Открытие» явно подчеркивается американцами итальянского происхождения, которые празднуют Христофор Колумб как фигура их предков. Ведь он был уроженцем Геную и отплыл за генуэзский флот, прежде чем отправиться в Португалию, а затем в Испания. По этому случаю американцы итальянского происхождения из Нью-Йорка установили 75-метровую башню. Мраморная статуя Гаэтано Руссо высотой футов с надписью, предположительно напомните всем американцам о достижениях Колумба: КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 65 К ХРИСТОФОР КОЛУМБ ИТАЛЬЯЦЫ, РЕЗИДЕНТЫ В АМЕРИКЕ, ПРЕЖДЕ ЧЕМ, ВО ВРЕМЯ ПУТЕШЕСТВИЯ, ЛУЧШИЙ, ПОСЛЕ НЕГО, СВЯЗАННЫЙ, НАСКОЛЬКО ЩЕДРЫЕ, НАСКОЛЬКО УГНЕТЫ МИРУ ОН ПОДАРИЛ МИР. РАДОСТЬ И СЛАВА НИКОГДА НЕ ГОВОРИТЕ БОЛЬШЕ ЗАХВАТИТЕЛЬНОГО ЗВОНКА ЧЕМ ТО, ЧТО ЗНАЧИТ ИЗ ЗАВОЕВАННОГО ОКЕАНА ВИДОМ НА ПЕРВЫЙ АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ОСТРОВ ЗЕМЕЛЬНЫЕ УЧАСТКИ! ЗЕМЕЛЬНЫЕ УЧАСТКИ! Рисунок 5: Памятник Колумбу в Нью-Йорке (историческая открытка) Brooklyn Postcard Co. Inc., Памятники Колумбу и Мэну (1914). Этот мемориал свидетельствует о тенденции превращения Кристобаля Колона в Кристофоро Коломбо, 66 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ специфически итальянского героя, которого обняли коренные итальянцы, жаждущие прародителей своих новой нации (объединенной в 1861 г.) и растущим числом итальянских иммигрантов в Соединенные Штаты стремятся выдвинуть подлинную «американскую» фигуру как свою собственную. (Грязный, Завоевание рая 351) Сегодня в одном только Нью-Йорке есть одиннадцать памятников Кристоферу.Колумб: от мраморной статуи в Центральном парке до менее экстравагантных произведения в Бруклине и Бронксе, многие из которых являются частью итальянско-американского учреждения и / или были заказаны итальянскими американскими организациями. Чай включение Колумба в итальянско-американские культурные обычаи продолжается и в настоящее время: парады ко Дню Колумба в крупных городах Америки организованы Итальянско-американские общины; Итальянский американский писатель Марио Пузо (из Крестный отец славы) написал сценарий для Христофора Колумба - Открытие (1992); и телесериал HBO "Клан Сопрано" посвятил эпизод под названием «Христофор» к скандальному празднованию Дня Колумба в Нью-Йорке. Йорк (ср. Бонданелла, Голливудские итальянцы 303-4). Однако в конце XIX века не только американцы итальянского происхождения прибегали к Колумб в поисках «полезного прошлого». Эмма Лазарус, американка-еврей поэт, известный своим сонетом «Новый Колосс» (который начертан на пьедестал Статуи Свободы), одно из ее стихотворений названо «1492», которое здесь цитируется полностью: Ты двуликий год, Мать перемен и судьбы, Плакал, когда Испания извергала пламенеющим мечом, Сыновья пророков Господних, Князь, священник и люди, подстрекаемые фанатичной ненавистью. Преследуемый от моря до моря, от штата к штату, Запад им отказал, а Восток ненавидел. Никакой якорной стоянки известный мир не мог себе позволить Все порты были заперты, все ворота были заперты. Затем, улыбаясь, ты открываешь, о двуликий год, Девственный мир, где открываются двери заката, Сказав: «О, все, кто устает, войдите сюда! Там падает каждый древний барьер, который искусство Из расы, вероисповедания или ранга придуманы, чтобы вырастить Зловещая ненависть между сердцем и сердцем! » Поэма Лазаря признает два важных исторических события, которые произошли в 1492: изгнание евреев из Испании при короле Фердинанде и королеве КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 67 Изабелла, и их поддержка путешествия Колумба через Атлантику. В 1888 г. Поэма Лазаря изображает США как убежище для беженцев, нуждающихся в новый дом. Поэт, возможно, знал о слухах, указывающих на то, что Колумб сам был частично евреем. Хотя все еще мало доказательств, подтверждающих это давнее предположение, мы еще можем задуматься о «сроках» изгнание евреев из Испании и его путешествие, и соглашаются с Морисоном и Винно, что даже если сам Колумб не был евреем, вполне вероятно, что евреи, которые надеялся найти новый дом где-нибудь на Западе, среди членов его команды (см. Морисон, адмирал; Винно, Письмо и «Христофор Колумб»). Более недавно в книге Стива Берри "Дело Колумба" (2012) эта возможность и делает его центром современного заговора-триллера. Помимо патриотической поэмы Лазаря о Колумбе, еврейская американская литература и популярная культура - из автобиографии Марии Антин "Земля обетованная". (1912) к комедиям братьев Маркс - часто спорили с прославлением Колумба. «Проклятие Колумба!» стал частым каламбуром «в ироничном ответе к официальному нарративу страны »(Вебер,« Акценты »136; ср. Sollors, За пределами этнической принадлежности 33; Голдсмит, «Проклятие»). В романе Евреи без денег (1930) социалистического еврейского американского писателя, журналиста и активиста Майкла Один золотой персонаж восклицает в несколько типичной манере: «Все это бесполезно. В проклятие Колумба! Проклятие Америки, вора! Это земля, где вши наживаете состояния, и хорошие люди умирают с голода! »(79). Еврейский американский писатель Филипп Рот объявляет «Прощай, Колумб» в своей новелле 1959 года с тем же названием, комментируя по истории инициации молодого еврея-американца в комплекс система еврейско-американских классовых различий и последующий провал любовных отношений. Колумб стал не только фигурой предков для различных этнических групп, но и также считался покровителем католиков в протестантской Америке. Католики (в основном Ирландские и итальянские) иммигранты в Америке сильно чувствовали себя антикатолическими и антипапские настроения в американских нативистских настроениях и отреагировали на них, сформировав свои собственные учреждения. В 1882 году ирландское общество основало рыцарей Колумба. Американский католический священник в Нью-Хейвене, Коннектикут; эта организация была задуман как «крепость» против дискриминации, посвятил себя «колумбийству», и пытался «продемонстрировать совместимость римского католицизма и Американская демократия »(Кауфман, Вера 276). По словам историка Кристофера Кауфман, которому по заказу было поручено написать множество историй и документации, идеология организации формируется «смесью народное братство, американский католический патриотизм и традиционный католицизм » (Колумбийство 29). 68 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ[Рыцари Колумба] рассматривали открытие Америки как католическое событие, так же как Англосаксонские протестанты рассматривали высадку на Плимут-Рок как пуританское событие. Чай Рыцари Колумба неявно праздновали высадку Санта-Мария, Католический аналог протестантского Mayflower и корабль, прибывший 128 лет назад ранее. (Кауфман, Вера 276) Католический орден быстро распространяется по стране: в нем участвуют 6000 рыцарей. в параде Колумба 1892 года (см. Кауфман, Вера 91); к 1893 г. орден 550 000 членов в районе Бостона, и к 1905 году он распространился по всей Америке. штатов, а также в Мексику и Канаду. Вера и братство Кауфмана - это опубликовано по случаю 100-летия рыцарей в 1982 году, и переиздан к пятисотлетию прибытия Колумба в Америку в 1992 году. Сегодня орден гордится более чем 125-летней историей, в течение которой он также видел внутренние дебаты, фазы исторического ревизионизма, обсуждения расизм и гендерная дискриминация, а также критика со стороны католической церкви из-за своего названия - среди ревизионистов высказывались предложения переименовать орден «Рыцарей Христа» или любой другой менее спорный, т.е. политический имя (ср. Деннис, «Новое изобретение» 157). В целом Колумб перестал быть символом национального единства и сплоченности. конец 19 века, когда различные группы заявили о своих претензиях на «Америку» придерживаясь традиций Колумба и его «открытия», и это тенденция сохранялась на протяжении всего 20 века. Однако примерно в 1992 г. наступила наиболее мощная фаза ревизионизма. Поскольку 500-летие Приближалось «открытие» Америки, вопрос о том, кем и кем быть празднование казалось еще более актуальным. 5. 1992 год и споры о Колумбусе Для многих коренных американцев просить праздновать Колумба - это эквивалент просьбы евреев прославить Гитлера. ЭЛЛА ШОХАТ И РОБЕРТ СТАМ, НЕДУМЫЕ ЕВРОЦЕНТРИЗМ Der Amerikaner, der den Kolumbus zuerst entdeckte, machte eine böse Entdeckung. ГЕОРГ КРИСТОФ ЛИХТЕНБЕРГ Афоризм Лихтенберга указывает на то, что до периода американской Война за независимость, термин «американская» относился к коренным жителям КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 69 Американский континент, а не английским поселенцам. Необычная перспектива Лихтенберга о том, кто был обнаружен в Америке (Колумб, а не туземцы) используется во многих обсуждениях и новых публикациях начала 1990-х годов для перенастройки евроцентрический взгляд на «новый мир». Пятисотлетие «открытий» 1992 год стал переломным для сомнений в статусе Колумба как героя, авантюрист, оппортунист, работорговец и рабовладелец в ревизионизмах, которые приходят во множестве разных форм и проявлений. Литература и кино - два основных средства массовой информации, в которых претензии Колумба наследие не только оспаривается, но и сама идея «открытия» также были прямо опровергнуты. Для многих коренных американцев прибытие Колумба в Америка знаменует начало колониализма, геноцида, изнасилований, рабства, экспроприации и перемещение, а также культурная смерть. Колумб стоит на начало новой и смертоносной для многих жителей Америки эпохи. Авторы мультикультурной американской литературы и писатели-индейцы в в частности опубликовали очерки, романы, стихи и рассказы по этим вопросам. В 1992, Фонд До Колумба, основанный в 1976 году писателями Измаилом. Рид, Виктор Эрнандес Крус, Шон Вонг и Рудольфо Анайя вылетели Антология художественной литературы Фонда До Колумба с повесткой дня до и «за пределами» Колумба (Strads et al., «Введение» xi). Выход за рамки Колумб и его «открытие» также лежат в основе переписывания американских индейцев. «открытия». Многие из этих текстов исследуют темные области истории, часто с постмодернистским фантастическим уклоном (см. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction), как и Луиза Эрдрих и Майкл Доррис в Короне Колумба (1991) или даже более радикально, Джеральд Визенор в «Наследниках Колумба» (1991). Первое использование романтика современного кампуса, чтобы вновь посетить исторические свидетельства и место «Открытие» - изобретает фигуру обманщика, который пересматривает историческое наследие. сделав Колумба «перекрестно кровью» частично коренным жителем. Юмор и новое изобретение также являются частью нескольких других переосмыслений: Осейдж писатель и поэт Картер Ревард представляет пародийный переворот сцены открытия, на этот раз действие происходит в Европе:Возможно, европейцев невозможно цивилизовать. Когда я требовал Англии для осейджей Нация, в прошлом месяце возразили некоторые из английских вождей. […] Я сказал, черт возьми, с Англией для этой поездки и поехал во Францию, взял напрокат маленький Renault в Париже и проехал мимо замков в Биарриц, останавливаясь только для того, чтобы объявить, что все течет Луара и Сена прошлое было медведем. […] Люди там говорят не так, как в Лондоне, но их знаки во многом такие же - они используют, так сказать, лингва-франка - поэтому они признали мою визу карту и дали бензину Renault так же, как в Оклахоме, достаточно глобализированном, чтобы они не полностью отключены. Поняли ли они, что Франция теперь принадлежит нам, было 70 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ непонятно, но они были дружелюбны и хорошо кормили меня, принимая взамен несколько красиво расписанные бумажные и металлические диски с аллегорическими фигурами на них, с помощью которых они казались почти по-детски довольными […]. («Отчет» 333-34) Рассказ о путешествии Реварда о путешествии в Европу интертекстуально взаимодействует с Первое письмо Колумба из «нового мира» переворачивает европейскую перспективу "открытия" и "цивилизации" Америки. Прокламация Колумба о завладении Америкой от имени испанской короны перенастроен в голосе Первооткрывателя, означающего невежество и «Детство» европейцев, то есть французов, в анахроничном постмодерне мода, позволяющая главному герою - индейцу, «колонизирующему» Европу - и кто в европейском воображении, конечно, был связан преимущественно естественному состоянию - разъезжать на машине и пользоваться деньгами и кредитными картами. Сравнение «как в Оклахоме» перекликается с сравнением Колумба. между природой и климатом «нового мира» и Регионы Испании: Андалусия Колумба - это Оклахома Ревара. Ирония ревара совпадает с рефлексивным переосмыслением первого контакта афроамериканцем комик Флип Уилсон. Когда его Колумб разговаривает с королевой Изабеллой в Афро-американский диалект английского языка отправляется в Америку, чтобы открыть для себя Рэй Чарльз, он встречает туземцев, празднующих между собой: В тот день в Америке большой праздник, большой праздник под названием «Еще не обнаружено». Все индейцы на пляже празднуют. У них есть бутерброды, шесть пачек, три или четыре пакета того, что они кладут в трубу. Крис склоняется над поручнем корабля, он говорит: «Привет. Вы все. Где это? […] Меня зовут Кристофер Колумбус. Я должен открыть. Я открою Америку. Я собираюсь открыть вас всех. ("Христофор Колумб") Только когда «индейцы бросают камни, копья, пылающие стрелы, деревья сундуки […] выкрикивая кучу ненормативной лексики о матери Криса и всем остальном » (там же), что Колумб Вильсона, потерпев неудачу в колонизации, решает развернуть лодку и оставить дальнейшие «открытия» в «новом мире» пуритане. «Колумб» Уилсона дает нам мета-вымышленный комментарий на повествование об открытии и сомнительные претензии на истину, которых он придерживался, и противостоит давним представлениям о превосходстве Европы, а также наивность. В поэзии коренных американцев Джимми Дарем в стихотворении «День Колумба» (1983) обращается к опыту коренных американцев в американской школьной системе. почти за десять лет до кульминации спора о Колумбе: КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 71 В школе меня учили именам Колумб, Кортес, Писарро и Дюжина грязных убийц. Родословная вплоть до генерала Майлза, Дэниел Бун и генерал Эйзенхауэр. (10) Спикер Дарема не делает различий между Колумбом, с одной стороны, и С другой стороны, Кортес и Писарро, а также поэты американской революции: здесь все они - часть одной и той же криминальной истории эксплуатации. И это история распространяется на американских исторических деятелей, которые помещены в континуум с испанскими завоевателями, которые фигурируют как агенты западного расширение, Manifest Destiny и война.Собраны дальнейшие критические, историографические, художественные и лирические перспективы. в многочисленных антологиях. Назову только два: Америка 1492 года - альтернатива. история, в которой Элвин Джозефи собрал вместе известных писателей и ученых, среди них Н. Скотт Момадей и Фрэнсис Дженнингс, чтобы описать и способствовать пониманию «Америки и ее традиций накануне путешествия Колумба. Его ориентиром является Америка, а не Европа »(Джозефи, «Введение» 7); редактор Джозеф Брухак "Возвращение подарка: поэзия и проза" с Первого фестиваля коренных писателей Северной Америки - результат собрания более 300 местных писателей, проведенных в Нормане, Оклахома, в 1992 году. Фестиваль историк Гири Хобсон называет это «витриной индейской литературы» («На празднике» xxvii). Кроме того, Коко Фуско и Гильермо Гомес-Пенья выпустили "Radio Pirata: Colón Go Home!", которое транслировалось по национальной Radio и был напечатан в книге Фуско «Английский сломан здесь» (179–95). Самый престижный голливудский проект в контексте пятисотлетия - это Книга Ридли Скотта «1492: Завоевание рая» (1992), которая является «беспорядочно ревизионистской» но фундаментально защищает доброе имя Колумба. Здесь мерцающий красота кинематографа скрывает насилие завоевания в идеологии эстетики »(Шохат и Стам, Бездумное, 64). В то время как мы можем колебаться чтобы определить «идеологию эстетики», фильм недвусмысленно берет с точки зрения «первооткрывателей» и, таким образом, согласуется с общей схемой: «Большинство рассказов об открытиях помещают читателя на европейский корабль, земля видят (обычно в анахроничный телескоп), а «индейцы» мельком на пляже или за деревьями »(там же 71). Более явно ревизионистские фильмы, снятые в период дебатов 1992 года, варьируются от Выживший Колумб (1992) и Колумб на суде (1992) Робби Леппзеру 72 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Колумб не открыл нас (1992). Эти фильмы отдают предпочтение перспективе коренные жители по сравнению с европейскими захватчиками; они реконструируют племенные традиции, история коренных племен в различных регионах Северной Америки, и страдания коренных американцев из-за агрессии белых, миссионерской политики, и культурное и физическое перемещение. Помимо ревизионистской литературы и кино, мы находим другой вид историческая попытка «спасения», а именно археологический проект, который «До» Колумба, а не «за его пределами». Чарльз С. Манн исследовал предварительный контакт Америки в 1491 году: новые открытия Америки до Колумба и, совсем недавно, в «До Колумба: Америка 1491 года». находки антропологов, археологов и палеолингвистов, Манн опровергает много стереотипов о доконтактной родной жизни. Во-первых, Америка, он предлагает, были гораздо более городским, густонаселенным и технологически развитым регионом, чем общепринято; и индейцы, вместо того чтобы жить в статической гармонии с природой, радикально спроектировали ландшафты континентов до такой степени, что даже «вневременные» природные объекты, такие как тропический лес Амазонки, можно рассматривать как продукт вмешательства человека. (1491 г., обложка книги) Эта точка зрения отказывается согласиться с точкой зрения, что история Америки только начинается с европейского знания континента и, таким образом, составляет еще одна критика евроцентрической историографии и доктрины открытий. Со всеми этими ревизионистскими публикациями обращая внимание на то, что Колумб был замешан во внедрении дискурса насильственного этноцентризма в Северной и Южной Америки, неудивительно, что массовые торжества, посвященные Пятисотлетие были, мягко говоря, неоднозначными. Тонущий Колумб (2000) документы, как первоначальный план организационной комиссии, назначенной Правительству США «праздновать открытие Америки» в 1992 году не удалось. Тем не мение, авторы, Стивен Саммерхилл и Джон Александр Уильямс, оба участвовавшие в этих приготовлениях, парадоксальным образом рассматривают эту неудачу как успех: как официальная пятисотлетняя годовщина «безуспешно пыталась избежать анахронизма» (Тонет 181 г.), его заменила «неофициальная, другая пятисотлетняя годовщина. который дал голос нижнему »(там же 126). Вместо того, чтобы утверждать колумбийские наследие Соединенных Штатов в патриотическом духе, как это было сделано в Празднования 1792 и 1892 годов, поминки 1992 года явно принадлежали те, кто стал жертвой этого наследия; таким образом, мероприятие представило новый вид национальной мемориальной культуры и нового критического патриотизма. КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 73Рисунок 6: Колумб: Сэвидж Плакат, созданный для AIM Денвер, Колорадо Уолтом Пурье, Оглала Лакота (креативный директор, Nakota Designs). По случаю празднования Дня Колумба 12 октября 1992 г. карикатуры, пуговицы и брошюры усиливают точку зрения коренных американцев и протестуйте с такими эпиграммами, как «Откройте для себя наследие Колумба: 500 лет Расизм, угнетение и украденная земля »,« Разыскиваемый за геноцид: Христофор Колумб », и «Колумб: Дикарь». Более недавнее изображение в сообщении 9/11 указывает что борьба с терроризмом - более или менее успешно - была коренным американцем активности с момента прибытия Колумба и, таким образом, провокационно параллельны разрушению индейской культуры с разрушением мира в 2001 г. Торговый центр в Нью-Йорке. 74 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ В 1992 году к организациям коренных американцев также присоединились другие оппозиционные голоса. Деннис говорит об «антиколумбовой коалиции - американские индейцы, некоторые религиозные группы, экологи, борцы за мир, политические протестующие и другие »(« Изобретая заново »156). И все же главный парад Дня Колумба в 1992 году занимались итальянскими американцами в Нью-Йорке (многие другие отменен) к большому облегчению властей прошло гладко: Колумб может оспаривались, но он по-прежнему был фигурой консенсуса для многих американцев - и так же хороша, как и любая другая причина, чтобы иметь выходной на работе или в школе. Рисунок 7: Борьба с терроризмом с 1492 г. «Внутренняя безопасность (группа Джеронимо)», издательство Azusa Publishing (Интернет, 5 марта 2014 г.). Кстати о школе: несмотря на недавние сдвиги в перспективах, в американской начальной школе в школах преподавание героизма Колумба является обязательной частью учебной программы - ситуация, которая не изменится в ближайшее время. Таким образом, Шохат и Стам напоминают нам о более крупных ответвлениях мифа о Колумбе: [T] История Колумба имеет решающее значение для евроцентризма не только потому, что Колумб был важной фигурой в истории колониализма, но также потому, что идеализированные версии этого История служила для инициирования поколения за поколением колониальной парадигмы. За для многих детей в Северной Америке и других местах рассказ о Колумбе тотемичен; Это КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 75 знакомит их не только с понятиями «открытие» и «Новый мир», но и с идея самой истории. (Бездумно 62) Джеймс У. Лёвен посвятил целую брошюру тому, как миф о Колумбе «Открытие» преподают в американских школах. Его ревизионистская публикация называется провокационно лжет мне мой учитель о Христофоре Колумбе (1992) и опросы, среди прочего, пятнадцать широко используемых средних и средних школ. школьные учебники американской истории, чтобы узнать, о чем они говорят Христофор Колумб. Его выводы показывают, что «почти все [написанное о Колумб] либо неверно, либо непостижимо. Учебники взяли нас в путешествие сами по себе, подальше от фактов истории, в царство мифа »(Ложь 1). Тем не менее, с 1992 г. «особая версия праздника для американских индейцев» (Кубал, Культурные движения 75) были созданы в разных штатах и ​​регионах (в основном университетских городков): «Память американских индейцев о национальном происхождении» (там же) больше не игнорируется полностью официальными рассуждениями о 1492 году. Тимоти Кубал недавно использовал теорию политических процессов, чтобы показать, как этнические и политические меньшинства со временем использовали День Колумба, чтобы наделить себя и свои политические взгляды и мобилизовать через социальные движения и активизм, связанные с празднованием одного конкретного праздника. Противодействие таким группам, как AIM (Движение американских индейцев) или индейцы всех племен эффективно изменили значение и восприятие День Колумба в национальном воображении, изменение, которое также начинает просачиваются через разные уровни образовательных учреждений. 76 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ6. ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЕ Однажды в 1474 году, когда Америго Веспуччи было всего десять лет, его мать проснулась. он встал и сказал ему: «Америго, прошлой ночью мне приснился прекрасный сон. я мечтал что вы станете великим исследователем и однажды откроете совершенно новый континент будет назван в честь вас. Он будет называться Северная Веспучча. ИТАЛЬЯНСКАЯ ШУТКА Норвежцам грустно, что Америка до сих пор чтит этого итальянца, опоздавшего. в Новом Свете и случайно, кто даже не интересовался Новым Миры, но только в специях. В поисках порошка карри и горячего перец - человек, идущий в продуктовый магазин - он наткнулся на землю героические викинги и продолжили получать за это признание. А потом назвать это Америка после Америго Веспуччи, итальянца, который никогда не видел Нового Света но только сидел в Италии и рисовал ее невероятно неточные карты. По праву, это следует называть Эрикой в ​​честь Эрика Рыжего, который проделал эту работу пятьсот годами ранее. Соединенные Штаты Эрики. Эрика Прекрасная. Эриканец Лига ». ГАРРИСОН КЕЙЛЛОР, ОЗЕРО ВОБЕГОН ДНИ Было замечательно найти Америку, но было бы лучше пропустите это. МАРК ТВЕН Реконструировать генезис - создание и разрушение - мифа о Колумбе. также означает признание того, что, в конце концов, рассказ о прошлых событиях можно рассказать только во многих разных версиях. Есть ощущение регистрируемости и определенного степень вероятности процессов культурной мобильности, подобных тем, которые Колумб - его, а не другие - сначала в американскую икону, а затем переделал его в злодея. Сегодня мы остаемся с несколько непростым сосуществованием нескольких «Колумбов». и героические, и постыдные, или американские, испанские, еврейские, Американец итальянского происхождения, частично коренной народ, католик и т. Д. Миф о Колумбе и полемика вокруг этого раскрывает идеологические конфликты в самом сердце американского научная и популярная историография. Показывает ли это, что проект «Америка» все еще развивается и остается незавершенной (см. Кэмпбелл и Кин, American Cultural Studies 20), или указывает на то, что оно было сорвано начало - это вопрос, который все еще широко обсуждается. В любом случае мы должны платить внимание к «освоению» (ср. Уайт, Метаистория) истории, чтобы узнать только КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 77 как строятся и производятся повествование, причинно-следственная связь и «хорошая» история: история, которая может понравиться и повлиять на многих людей в течение длительного периода времени, история как «новизны», так и открытий ». Я хотел бы закончить эту главу транснациональной перспективой. Колумб - это не только основополагающий миф о США - конечно, он находится в центре многих «Старосветский» миф о «новом» - но, возможно, и европейский миф даже глобальный; и в эпоху глобализации он может принять новые символические смыслы. В испанском фильме Икиара También la lluvia (Даже дождь, 2010) Боллаин, мексиканская съемочная группа едет в Боливию, чтобы снять фильм о Христофор Колумб и его «открытие», казалось бы, подлинное (и все же дешевых) сайтов, даже несмотря на то, что фильм на раннем этапе признает проблемное смешение уроженцев Боливии с уроженцами Карибского моря, смесь, которая продюсер оправдывается, комментируя якобы «одинаковость» всех коренных народов народы. В процессе съемок фильма съемочная группа увлечена протесты 2000 г. в Кочабамбе, направленные против приватизации городского компания водоснабжения. Главный коренной актер в кинопроекте также очень важен. участвует в водной войне. В фильме показаны разные уровни историко-колониального и нынешняя неоколониальная эксплуатация путем пересечения сцены из фильмов и протесты, а различные уровни повествования часто становятся опутаны мощными визуальными образами, дезориентирующими нас во времени. Расстрел фильм, как предполагается, использует историческое завоевание как (единственную) культурную столицу коренного населения Америки, в то время как оно использует их как дешевую статистику. Мы узнаем в жестоких полицейских, которые используют собак, чтобы преследовать водников в городе испанские колонизаторы и их ищейки, которые охотились на беглецов Туземцев, чтобы снова поработить или убить их. И нынешние протестующие, и пленников колониализма связывают и избивают, когда их ловят. В замечательном сцена в фильме, режиссер спрашивает группу коренных женщин с младенцамипритвориться, что топит своих детей в знак антиколониального сопротивления: переводчик говорит им, что они должны войти в воду, быстро обменять младенцев для кукол, а затем держите их под водой для создания кинематографического эффекта. В то время как режиссер пытается настоять на этой сцене как на части своего художественного видения и камеры дразняще режет взад и вперед между ним и лицами (плачет) младенцы, женщины просто отказываются подчиняться. Переводчик раздраженно объясняет директор, которого они даже не могли представить, о чем он просит их. Поскольку они сопротивляются указаниям директора, женщины отказываются выполнять его версия их исторических страданий. Даже Дождь вызывает в воображении миф об «открытиях» в контексте непрерывной и / или возобновляемой и глобальной эксплуатации Северная и Южная Америка. Одновременно возвращая нас к первичной сцене встречи в выдуманный киносценарий и устранение современной экономической асимметрии. 78 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ попыток, фильм можно рассматривать как мощную критику глобализации, которая следует за неолиберальная логика. Такие представления указывают на полушарие, даже на глобальную перспективу. мифа о Колумбе, и продолжить культурную работу, связанную с одним ключевых основополагающих нарративов Америки. КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 79 7. ВОПРОСЫ ДЛЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ 1. Обсудите семантические значения слов «открытие, исследование» и «приземление». Какие еще термины можно использовать для описания географического положения Колумба? мобильность? 2. Каковы риторические стратегии Бартоломе де лас Касас, Фердинанда Колумба, а другие используют, чтобы изображать Колумба в положительном свете? 3. Опишите различные аспекты, которые сделали Колумба подходящим и годный к употреблению национальный герой времен основания США. 4. Опишите процесс, в результате которого Колумб стал итальянцем. Фигура американского предка. 5. Обсудите стихи Уолта Уитмена «Молитва Колумба» и «Мысль о Колумб »и объясняют их репрезентативные стратегии. 6. Обсудите последствия ревизионистской критики коренных американцев Миф о Колумбе как субнациональное и транснациональное вмешательство. Что означает ли в этом контексте неологизм «Колумбусинг»? 7. Сравните изображения Колумба в разных историях и / или школах. книги. Как они отражают различные версии мифа? 8. Посмотрите инсталляцию Тацу Ниши «Открытие Колумба» 2012 года по адресу Columbus Circle, Нью-Йорк (www.publicartfund.org/view/exhibitions/ 5495_discovering_columbus). Как этот арт-проект отражает мифическое качество исторической личности? 9. Можете ли вы вспомнить другие (американские) истории об «открытии» и / или приземлении? что увековечивает, воспроизводит или сходится с Колумбом? 10. В рамках сравнительного полушария вы можете изучить способы, которыми Колумб представлен в латиноамериканской литературе, например, в произведении Рубена Дарио. стихотворение «Колон» (1892), в Alejo Carpentiers El arpa y la sombra (1979), и / или в Vigilia del almirante Аугусто Роа Бастоса (1992). Какие отличия и сходство с американо-американским дискурсом Колумба? 80 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ 8. БИБЛИОГРАФИЯ Процитированные работы Антин, Мэри. Земля обетованная. 1912. Нью-Йорк: Пингвин, 1997. Бэнкрофт, Джордж. История Соединенных Штатов с момента открытия Америки в настоящее время. Полет. 1. Бостон: Боуэн, 1834 г. Барлоу, Джоэл. Колумбиада. Вашингтон-Сити: Миллиган, 1825 г. Бастос, Аугусто Роа. Vigilia del almirante. Буэнос-Айрес: Sudamericana, 1992 г. Байм, Нина и др. «Христофор Колумб (1451–1506)». Антология Нортона американской литературы. Короче 6-е изд. Под ред. Нины Байм и др. Нью-Йорк:Нортон, 2003. 25. Белкнап, Джереми. Американская биография или исторический отчет об этих людях Которые известны в Америке как авантюристы, государственные деятели, Философы, богословы, воины, авторы: понимание повествования о События, связанные с их жизнью и действиями, Vol. II. Бостон: Томас, 1798 г. Берри, Стив. Дело Колумба. Нью-Йорк: Баллантайн, 2012. Бонданелла, Питер. Голливудские итальянцы: Дагос, Палука, Ромео, Мудрецы, и Сопрано. Нью-Йорк: Континуум, 2004. Брейниг, Хельмбрехт и Сюзанна Опферманн. «Die Literatur der frühen Republik». Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. 2-е изд. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Штутгарт: Мецлер, 2004. 35-84. Bruchac, Joseph, ed. Возвращение дара: поэзия и проза Первого Севера Фестиваль американских писателей коренных народов. Тусон: Университет Аризоны, 1994. Бушмен, Клаудия Л. Америка открывает Колумб: как итальянский исследователь Стал американским героем. Ганновер: UP Новой Англии, 1992. Кэмпбелл, Нил и Аласдер Кин. Американские культурологические исследования: введение американской культуре. Лондон: Рутледж, 1997. Карпентье, Алехо. Эль арпа есть сомбра. 1979. Narrativa Completa. Полет. 7. Мадрид: Ediciones Acal, 2008. Колон, Фернандо. Жизнь адмирала Христофора Колумба его сыном, Фердинанд. [История С. Д. Фернандо Коломбо. 1571.] Пер. Бенджамин Увлеченный. 1958. Нью-Брансуик: Rutgers UP, 1992. Колумб, Христофор. «Письмо Колумба Луису Де Сан Анхелю» Объявление о его открытии (1493 г.) ». История США. http://www.ushistory.org/ документы / columbus.htm. 30 сентября 2013 г. КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 81 год Колумб не открыл нас. Реж. Робби Леппзер. Turning Tide Productions, 1992 г. Колумб на суде. Реж. Лурдес Портильо. Xochitl Productions, 1992. Комманджер, Генри Стил. «В поисках полезного прошлого». В поисках Полезное прошлое и другие очерки историографии. Нью-Йорк: Кнопф, 1967. 3-27. Дарио, Рубен. «Двоеточие». 1892. Никарагуа: Домашняя страница Эразмо Гутьерреса. http://www.oocities.org/erasgu2/colon.html. 30 сентября 2013 г. 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Фрид, Вивьен Грин. Искусство и Империя: Этническая политика в Соединенных Штатах Капитолий штатов, 1825-1860 гг. Нью-Хейвен: Йельский университет, 1992. Герби, Антонелли. Спор Нового Света: История Полемики, 1750-1900 гг. Питтсбург: Университет Питтсбурга, 1973. Хэндлин, Лилиан. «Открытие Колумба». Американский ученый 62.1 (1993): 81-95. Гейденрайх, Тит, изд. Columbus zwischen zwei Welten: Historische und literarische Wertungen aus fünf Jahrhunderten. 2 полета. Франкфурт: Vervuert, 1992. Кадир, Джелал. Колумб и концы земли: пророческая риторика Европы как побеждающая идеология. Беркли: Калифорнийский университет P, 1992. Каммен, Майкл. Мистические аккорды памяти: трансформация традиций в американской культуре. Нью-Йорк: Кнопф, 1991. Леманн, Хартмут. «Columbus als amerikanischer Nationalheld im 19. und 20. Джахрхундерт ». Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 45 (1994): 240-49. Лок, Кэтлин. «Прощай, Колумб, привет, Эйб! Изменение изображений в США Бумажные деньги и переговоры об американской национальной идентичности ». Всемогущий Доллар. Под ред. Хайнца Чахлера, Симоне Пафф и Ойгена Банауха. Вена: LIT, 2010. 81-101. Макнамара, Брукс. День юбилея: Великая эпоха публичных торжеств в Нью-Йорк, 1788–1909. Нью-Брансуик: Rutgers UP, 1997. Прескотт, Уильям Хиклинг. История правления Фердинанда и Изабеллы, Католик. 1837. Эд К. Харви Гардинер. Лондон: Аллен и Анвин, 1962. Шлерет, Томас Дж. «Колумбия, Колумбия и колумбийство». Журнал Американская история 79.3 (1992): 937-68. Wawor, Герхард. «Колумб: Der Augenblick der Landung in Wort und Bild». Kritische Berichte (1992): 82-92. Вавор, Герхард и Тит Хейденрайх. Колумб 1892/1992: Хельденверхрунг und Heldendemontage. Франкфурт: Vervuert, 1995. Венгер, Бет С. «Обряды гражданства: еврейские праздники нации». Чай Колумбийская история евреев и иудаизма в Америке. Под ред. Марка Ли Рафаэля. Нью-Йорк: Columbia UP, 2008. 366-84. КРИСТОФЕР КОЛУМБ И МИФ «ОТКРЫТИЕ» | 87 Воланин, Барбара А. «Художник Капитолия». Капитолий Соединенных Штатов: Создание и украшение национальной иконы. Эд Дональд Р. Кеннон. Афины: Огайо, UP, 2000, 171-95. Глава II. Покахонтас и миф о трансатлантической любви1. ПОЧЕМУ ПОКАХОНТАС? Когда в 1607 году в Америку прибыли первые постоянные английские поселенцы, их спонсоры не теряли надежды на интегрированное межрасовое сообщество. ЭДМУНД С. МОРГАН, АМЕРИКАНСКОЕ РАБСТВО, АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ СВОБОДА Корабль одиноких мужчин основал Джеймстаун, но все же миф о происхождении Вирджинии вращается вокруг женщины. ЭНН УРИ АБРАМС, ПАЛОМНИКИ И ПОКАХОНТАС Фигура Покахонтас лежит в основе американского мифа о том, что долгое время считалась первой любовной историей «нового мира» и таким образом, парадигма для описания межкультурных отношений в ранней колониальной истории Америки как гармоничных и мирных. Как индейская женщина Основополагающая фигура, Покахонтас может показаться менее заметной, чем европейский мужчина. Христофор Колумб и его миф об открытии (из-за ее пола и этническая принадлежность), но ее история получила огромный тираж. Романтизация Покахонтас и ее встреча с английскими поселенцами стала одним из наиболее устойчивые нарративы американской культуры: эта история была «переработана и пересказана чаще, чем любой другой исторический инцидент в Америке во время колониальных и довоенные периоды »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 1), указывая на« эволюцию Американское повествование »(см. Там же) на протяжении двух столетий и к дискуссии и переработка этого повествования в последующие века. В отличие от Колумба Покахонтас не оставляла писем или дневников, и многие ученые обратили внимание на безмолвие этой американской героини, которая была присваивается современниками - Джон Смит - единственный писатель, действительно ссылающийся на к словам, которые она якобы адресовала ему дословно, а также историками, писатели и критики XVII - XXI веков. Хотя менее исторически 90 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ далекие, чем «открытие» Колумба, исторические источники мифа о Покахонтас и ее очевидный романтический интерес к различным англичанам, таким образом, должен следует рассматривать со скепсисом и осторожностью. Моя реконструкция повествований о ней показывает, как она стала центральным элементом основополагающего мифа, который часто представляется «под видом истории» (Дженкинс, «Принцесса» 8), и это вложил значительные средства в идеологии построения нации и идентичности США и Америки политика. Как бы она ни использовалась в колониальных сказках об ассимиляции, она также по разному считалась основополагающей фигурой в неевроцентрических рассказ об американских началах. Вместе с Шэрон Ларкинс и Питером Халмом следующие "факты" Покахонтас жизнь можно рассматривать как подтвержденную историческими свидетельствами: что она родилась около 1595 г .; что она встретила капитана Джона Смита сразу после прибытие первых английских поселенцев в место, которое впоследствии стало Джеймстауном (названное после короля Англии Джеймса I) в 1607 году (в наиболее известной версии история этой встречи она спасла Смита от смерти от рук своего отца, Поухатан, глава могущественной конфедерации туземцев); что она помогла людям Джеймстаун и продолжал поддерживать отношения со Смитом; что Смит был был ранен в результате несчастного случая и вернулся в Англию в 1609 году, по мнению Покахонтас, ему умереть; что она была похищена капитаном Аргаллом в 1612 году и содержалась в плену в Джеймстауне англичанами; что она обратилась в христианскую веру в 1613 г., когда жил в Джеймстауне; что она вышла замуж за Джона Рольфа в 1614 году и что в 1615 году она родила сына Томаса; что она отправилась в Англию в 1616 г. и имела большой успех, так как «индийская принцесса» теперь называлась «леди Ребеккой» в английский суд; что в январе 1617 года она посетила знаменитую Двенадцатую ночь маска; что ее посетил Джон Смит во время ее пребывания и что у них был один последний разговор; что она умерла и была похоронена в Грейвсенд в 1617 году по пути обратно в Америку (ср. Ларкинс, «Использование»; Хьюм, Colonial Encounters 140–41).В различных пересказах ее жизни повествование Покахонтас часто распадается на две части: ее дружба с Джоном Смитом, «спасательный» инцидент и возвращение в Англию составляют первую часть; вторая часть включает ее плен среди англичан, ее обращение, ее брак с Джоном Рольфе, рождение ее сын, и ее визит в Англию. Во всех этих вариациях на уровне дискурса история первого контакта приобретает мифическое значение как аллегорический повествование о рождении нового (американского) общества. Также это первый американский история любви между колонизатором и колонизированными, которая заставляет нас поверить (по крайней мере, в традиционной версии), что Покахонтас «жертвовала своей жизнью, чтобы спасти ее (Белый) объект любви из ее варварского племени, чтение, которое исключает повествование об изнасиловании, культурном разрушении и геноциде »(Шохат и Стам, Бездумный 44). ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 91 Историческая фигура Покахонтас, псевдоним Матоака, псевдоним Леди Ребекка Рольф был представлен как индийская «девушка», «принцесса», женщина, «благородный дикарь», посредник, и фатальные женщины из числа коренных народов, в зависимости от соответствующих идеологических инвестиции, начиная от национальных, региональных, феминистских и этнических программ, до назовите лишь несколько. В этой главе прослеживается миф об «индийской принцессе» и ее трансатлантическая история любви через четыре фазы. Во-первых, это историзация мифа в ранние современные дискурсы экспансии и в контексте раннего американского колониальная культура и история с 1607 года, когда Джеймстаун был первым было основано постоянное английское поселение, в котором Покахонтас впервые встретила Английский заезд. До 1607 года мы уже находим обычные гендерные аллегории. "нового мира" как женщины, факт, который я кратко коснусь в следующем раздел. После реконструкции ранних лет Джеймстауна и Покахонтас повествование в 17 веке, во-вторых, я обращусь к использованию Покахонтас сказки в период ранней республики и вернуться к фабрикации романтическая история любви Покахонтас и Джона Смита в первые десятилетия 19 век. В-третьих, я расскажу о способах создания Покахонтас. в американскую «мать-основательницу» различными группами на протяжении 19-20 , и 21 века. И в-четвертых, я посмотрю на самые последние версии этого миф в американской популярной культуре и литературе, в котором ревизионизм вторая половина 20 века привела к новым акцентам; а не привилегии так называемая сцена спасения и дружба между Покахонтас и Джон Смит, недавняя стипендия и переписывания часто сосредотачиваются на ее браке с Вместо этого Джон Рольф. Опять же, эти фазы и тенденции не начинаются и не заканчиваются одним конкретный год или десятилетие; скорее они обнаруживают дискурсивные формации и сдвиги в течение более четырехсот лет. 2. АМЕРИКА - ЭТО ЖЕНЩИНА: ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ Новизна Америки всегда воспринималась откровенно сексуально. ПИТЕР ХАЛМ, КОЛОНИАЛЬНЫЕ ВСТРЕЧИ Чтобы понять тропу Покахонтас как парадигматическую женщину из «нового мира» и женщину-«благородного дикаря», нам нужно сначала контекстуализировать ее в дискурсе, который во времена первых английских поселений Америка изображалась как аллегорически феминизированное пространство. Эти изображения были частью «полной аллегорической традиция, согласно которой континенты - Европа, Азия, Африка, а теперь и Америка - были изображаются как женщины, окруженные репрезентативными атрибутами их соответствующих части света »(Хьюм,« Политропный человек »17). Хью Хонор имеет 92 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ исследовали эту традицию применительно к Северной и Южной Америке, показывая, как Север Америка как «страна аллегорий» визуально воплощается в виде женщины в неоднозначной иллюстрации европейских художников, таких как Филип Галле, Ян Саделер, Симон ван де Пассе, Теодор Галле и Ян ван дер Страат (ср. Хонор, Новая Золотая Земля). В Северная Америка, практика представления континента или его регионов женскими также очевидно в том, что Уолтер Рэли назвал «Вирджинию» в конце 16-го век; Рэли исследовал американское побережье в неудачной попытка основать постоянное поселение и колонию в Роаноке, прибрежном регион современной Северной Каролины между 1584 и 1590 годами - попытка очевидно, не породили основополагающего мифа об американском происхождении и что обычно называют «потерянной» или «заброшенной колонией» Роанок (ср. Купперман, Роанок). Роли назвал всю территорию Вирджиния, в честь королевы Елизаветы (1533–1603), «королевы-девственницы», которая за время поддерживал его затею. Эта территория, как следует из названия, выбранного Рэли, в якобы женской пассивности ждал европейского путешественника прибыть и колонизировать его. Гендерное определение Америки как "Вирджинии" предполагает мужчину-путешественника, который сталкивается с (девственным, т.е. пустым) феминизированным пространство и овладевает им; таким образом, это наводит на мысль о сексуализированном отношения между ними, которые построены как либидинальная связь между путешественник и территория (ср. Schülting, Wilde Frauen 49). Поэтому в 1607 году Вирджиния уже представленный как загадочное женское / феминизированное пространство, в которое нужно проникнуть, завоеваны и приручены английскими поселенцами. Двойственность, которую могут повлечь за собой такие гендерные представления, парадигматически закодировано уже на гравюре «Америка» конца 15 века Голландский художник Ян ван дер Страат на медной пластине 1619 года работы Теодора Галле. Это изображает встречу Америго Веспуччи с аллегорической женской фигурой, которая представляет континент, названный его именем. На Веспуччи все знаки отличия. европейского исследователя (флаг, крест и астролябия), а сладострастная Америка лежит обнаженная в гамаке, протягивает руку и манит посетителя к подойти ближе. Она - часть пасторальной сцены, соблазнительной, соблазнительной и соблазнительной. В однако при ближайшем рассмотрении обнаруживаются тревожные детали: на заднем плане картины Туземцы жарят над камином что-то подозрительно похожее на человеческая нога, а еще одну ногу можно увидеть у камина. Эротика и каннибализм здесь проявляется бок о бок, и опасность межкультурного контакта предусмотрено; при всем заявленном превосходстве европейского путешественника с точки зрения религии и технологий, инаковость аборигенов воспринимается как соблазнительная и одновременно угрожает и, таким образом, кажется, выходит за рамки европейцев. контроль. Могло ли приглашение путешественника этой красоты "нового мира" иметь скрытый повестка дня? В то же время за этой сценой соблазнения скрывается европейский колониальный ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 93 агрессии против коренного населения «нового мира» за мифом о эротическая встреча, возможно, даже любовь, коррелирующая отношения между европейцами и туземцы с якобы «естественным» порядком полов: выдающиеся Европейский мужчина так же рожден для «нового мира», как мужчина для женщины: т.е. высшее (ср. Schülting, Wilde Frauen 14). Иллюстрация 1: Америго Веспуччи «открывает» Америку Теодор Галле, Америка (1619 г.). Не только "новый мир" часто аллегорически изображался как женщина, но и в частности, «[в] английских гравюрах и гравюрах [это] часто показывали как раздетая индийская принцесса »(Бушмен, Америка 50). Э. МакКлунг Флеминг подробно описал исторические этапы, когда Америка впервые появилась как «индийская Королева », затем« Индийская принцесса, представленная как дочь Британии », и наконец, изображениями «индийской принцессы, атрибутами которой были символы суверенитета Соединенных Штатов »(« Американский образ »65). Фактически, Индийская принцесса была «старейшим и наиболее прочным представителем Соединенных Штатов Америки. Штаты »перед представлениями все чаще обращались к классицизму в XIX веке. века (Флеминг, «Из Индии» 39). Аллегория Америки как «индийского принцесса, таким образом, прокладывает путь для знакомства с Покахонтас при первом контакте сценарии на фоне основополагающей мифологии «нового мира». 94 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ В уже символически феминизированном пространстве она предстает как первая из плоти и крови. Коренные женщины, которых мы встречаем в европейских рассказах о Северной Америке. В На самом деле, как указывает Вернер Соллорс, «[а] легенда об Америке как об индийской принцессе часто сочетаются с рассказом капитана Джона Смита о Покахонтас »(Beyond Этническая принадлежность 79). Ярлык «Индийская принцесса» указывает на ее статус дочери вождя Поухатана и описывает коренные племенные отношения, используя европейские классификационная система аристократических различий, которая, очевидно, сама является актом символическое господство. Поэтому первое английское повествование о первом перманенте Основание английского поселения в «новом мире» - история женщины. уроженец американского континента, который дискурсивно присваивается и используется в различных обличьях с целью узаконивания европейского завоевания: как аллегорический представитель «нового мира» в соответствии с коннотациями экзотической женственности, как культурный посредник и сторонник европейского колониализма, и как модель для ассимиляции и обращения.3. ПЕРВАЯ ЛЮБОВНАЯ ИСТОРИЯ ИЗ «НОВОГО МИРА»? [Эта] история Покахонтас и Джона Смита рассказывает об «оригинальной» встрече которой не существует даже сносно «непосредственной» учетной записи, пустое место с не было позволено оставаться пустым. […] Основание, но наиболее проблематичное момент этой истории - «спасение». ПИТЕР ХАЛМ, КОЛОНИАЛЬНЫЕ ВСТРЕЧИ Начиная с «Энеиды Вергилия», предпочитали межкультурный роман. начало колониальных повествований. ГЕЗА МАКЕНТУН, МЕТАФОРЫ ИСПОЛНЕНИЯ Покахонтас была ребенком во время общения со Смитом. ЛИХ Х. ЭДВАРДС, «ОБЪЕДИНЕННЫЕ ЦВЕТА ПОКАХОНТАС» Статус центральной точки мифа о Покахонтас - сцены «спасения» в что она якобы вмешивается от имени Джона Смита и останавливает его казнь - был предметом обсуждения и изучения поколениями ученые колеблются между восторженным подтверждением его правдивости и полным скептицизм. Броские заголовки, такие как «Спасла ли Покахонтас капитана Джона Смита?» к J.A. Leo Lemay демонстрирует почти навязчивую приверженность этому вопросу, и поэтому оспариваемые истоки американского мифотворчества. Что поставлено на карту в Lemay’s вопрос в желании коренной женщины спасти белого мужчину и показать ему ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 95 что он не считается нарушителем и колонизатором в Северной Америке; в этом В смысле, «знаменитое предполагаемое спасение капитана Джона Смита, совершенное Покахонтас, стало спасение Америки »(Эдвардс,« United Colors »147) и, таким образом, легитимация колониальных усилий. По разным причинам подлинность знаменитой сцены спасения дошла до подвергаться сомнению в современной науке. Чтобы полностью осознать этот скептицизм, мы должны обратиться к историческим источникам рассказа. Текстовое свидетельство исторической встречи в Северной Америке между первыми английскими поселенцами а коренные жители редки и однобоки. Что касается встречи между Джоном Смитом и Покахонтас, это собственное сочинение Смита в его «Истинном» Связь таких происшествий и знаменательных происшествий, которые произошли в Вирджинии (опубликовано в 1608 г., а затем переработано в последующие издания и версии), нам нужно обратиться к первому. Сама Покахонтас не оставила никаких текстовых записей, только следы в чужих текстах, которые зачисляют ее рассказ в собственные идеологические маневры. В своем первом отчете о культурной встрече с североамериканскими коренных жителей, Джон Смит рассказывает о своем пленении среди алгонкинов, а также ранние стычки между английскими поселенцами и туземцами, и хотя он упоминает Покахонтас в этом раннем документе как посланница между Поухатаном и поселенцев, он не верит, что она спасла ему жизнь (об этом не упоминается в его Трудах 1612 г.). Другие источники начала 17 века, такие как тексты Сэмюэля Закупса, Ральфа Хамора и Уильяма Стрейчи также молчат. по поводу любого такого спасения. Уильям Стрейчи, секретарь Совета жителей Вирджинии и автор из «Истории Травейле в Вирджинию Британия» (1612 г.), важного текста запись о ранней истории колонии касается многих жен и детей Поухатана, среди них «юндж Покахунта, его дочь, которая когда-то пользовалась нашим крепость в прошлом »(54). Позже он рассказывает, как предыдущий вспомнил Почахонтас, красивую, но распутную девушку, Поухатана дочь, иногда прибегая к нашему форту, в возрасте одиннадцати или двенадцати лет, получает мальчики вышли с нею на рыночную площадь и заставили их катиться, упав на их руки, подняв свои каблуки вверх, за кем она последует и покатит так себя, голая, как она была, весь форт закончился. (65) В то время как Стрейчи изображает Покахонтас как своего рода девушку-эльфийку (более поздние тексты называют ее «лесной принцессой»), Ральф Хамор записывает подробности ее пленение, обращение и брак в его «Истинном рассуждении о настоящем сословии» Вирджинии (1615 г.), и Самуил покупает в Hakluytus Posthumus или покупает его 96 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУPilgrimes (1625) описывает великолепный прием Покахонтас в Лондоне, где «Она вела себя как дочь короля, и поэтому ее уважали» (Том 19 118). Это основные исторические источники. Даже если бы эти тексты были написанные современниками Покахонтас, это не значит, что они сами по себе более достоверны и надежны, чем романтические биографии XIX века, поскольку у английских авторов была собственная повестка дня при описании североамериканских уроженцы. И все же отсутствие места спасения, которое является центральным для американских мифология во всех ранних текстовых записях вызывает недоумение. Это в 1624 году, через 17 лет после публикации его первого текста о ранних годах. колонии Вирджиния, что Джон Смит впервые описывает спасение сцена в его "Общая история Вирджинии, Новой Англии и лета" Айлз в следующих словах, обращаясь к себе в третьем лице: У его [Джона Смита] входа перед королем [Поухатаном] все люди величайший кричать. Королеве Аппаматука было поручено принести ему воды для мытья рук, а другой принес ему пучок перьев вместо полотенца, чтобы сушить их: пировали его самым варварским способом, как только могли, был проведен долгий совет, но вывод заключался в том, что перед Поухатаном были принесены два великих камня: тогда целых мог возложить на него руки, потащил к себе, а на это положил голову, и будучи готовым с их дубинами, чтобы выбить ему мозги, Покахонтас, дорогая дочь королей, когда нет мольба могла преобладать, схватила его за голову и возложила свою на его, чтобы спасти его от смерти. (49) Таким образом, Смит добавляет эту сцену спасения к своему описанию первоначального межкультурного контакта. в Северной Америке почти через два десятилетия после инцидента, предположительно произошло и только после смерти Поухатана и Покахонтас. Помимо это дополнение учетная запись очень похожа на версию 1608, и «нет полностью когда-либо было предложено убедительное объяснение отсутствия спасателей на Счет 1608 года »(Хьюм, Colonial Encounters 140). Ученые предположили - основываясь на предположении, что сцена действительно имела место - что сначала Смит стесняется включить его спасение молодой девушкой из страха подорвать его образ героического солдата, способного позаботиться о себе (см. Mackenthun, Metaphors 210); в конце концов, его гербом было Vincere est Vivere - победить - значит жить. Другие пришли к выводу, что Смит вышил свою оригинальную версию для политических целей. цели и более драматическое самовыражение, и что его публикация 1624 г. отнюдь не случайность ввиду событий в колонии. Сочетая анализ колониального дискурса с чувствительностью нового историзма, историк Питер Халм связывает появление сцены спасения в картине Смита 1624 г. рассказывают о так называемой индейской резне 1622 года в районе Джеймстауна, которая ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 97 надолго изменившие отношения англо-коренного населения на враждебные и агрессивные (ср. Обсуждение Хьюма в метафорах Маккентаном 211). Хьюм предполагает, что Тогда Смит смог бы, через много лет после смерти Покахонтас, взглянуть на первобытную сцена межкультурной встречи ностальгически и представить ее как модель: [T] Его спасение можно сформулировать в виде повествования, в котором Покахонтас все больше центральную роль в доказательстве того, что алгонкинское признание ценностей европейского культура могла бы стать основой для гармоничных отношений, если бы не присущие злоба [других туземцев] разрушила всякую надежду на мирное сотрудничество. (Колониальный Встречи 172)Эта «порочность» стала очевидной, согласно английским летописцам, в резня 1622 г. и привела к изменению политики Англии в отношении туземцев. Опечанканоф, дядя Покахонтас и сводного брата Поухатана, понял что английские поселенцы приехали, чтобы остаться и возглавили сопротивление алгонкинцев против продолжающихся набегов английских поселенцев на Родину. Неудивительно, что англичане называют его прототипом «злого дикаря», который демонстрирует скорее сопротивление, чем согласие с английским колониализмом. Атаки в 1622 году погибла треть населения колонии, т.е. «более трехсот колонистов », и мог бы стереть с лица земли всю колонию, если бы не наезд тактика, примененная англичанами, которая в конечном итоге позволила перейти в контрнаступление (Келли и Кларк Смит, Джеймстаун, 69). Джон Рольф, тогда уже вдовец кто в последние годы жизни в колонии ввел и произвел революцию в и обработка табака, также погибли в этом конфликте (ср. Woodward, Pocahontas 190), факт, который связывает историю Покахонтас и резню в другой уровень: в то время как Покахонтас, «добрый индеец», любила и выходила замуж Джон Рольфе, «злые интриги» ее дяди, позже стали причиной его насильственной смерти. После того, как отношения между англичанами и туземцами окончательно испортились. превратился из плохого в худший, Смит подчеркивает исторический момент, когда ход событий был бы еще возможен, если бы коренные жители только следовали путь, который выбрала Покахонтас: обращение в другую веру и смешанные браки. Однако они этого не сделали. Фактически, на протяжении всего XVIII века исторические отчеты обвиняют коренных американцев сопротивление смешанным бракам и нежелание общаться более близко и более широкая шкала с английским для постоянно ухудшающегося английского - родного отношения. Несколько спекулятивно утверждалось, что с точки зрения фенотипа Внешний вид и культурные привычки коренных американцев в основном отталкивали английскими поселенцами из-за большого количества волос на лице и теле и пахучий пот. 98 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Другой проблемой, с которой столкнулась колония в первые годы своего существования, было большое количество поселенцы, которые покинули английское поселение, чтобы жить с туземцами, и которые были «быстро и беспроблемно ассимилированы» (Hulme, Colonial Encounters 143; ср. Crèvecoeur, More Letters 137), тем самым подрывая любую идеологическую конструкцию. английского превосходства. Индигенизация англичан, то есть переход на родное ' было обычным явлением и представляло угрозу самому существованию колонии не в последнюю очередь за счет нанесения вреда рекламным усилиям в Англии, направленным на больше людей поселиться в Вирджинии: из какой колонии бежали жители в «пустыню» неизвестного континента, чтобы жить с нецивилизованными людьми они даже не знали? Поэтому история Покахонтас пригодилась для сторонники колонизации и широко использовались в рекламной литературе поощрение дальнейшей иммиграции из Англии. В то время как тенденция «стать родным» среди английских поселенцев замалчивается, сказка о Покахонтас в то же время время использовалось идеологически, поскольку оно рекламировало принятие индейцами превосходство английской культуры. Покахонтас встала на сторону захватчиков, и стала англизированной героиней американского колониального романа - «непревзойденной», как ее называет Смит и как ее часто называют в раннем американском стипендия (ср. Гарнетт, Покахонтас) - образец для подражания всем. "Покахонтас" пересечение культурного разлома - как бы это ни толковалось - […] было совершенно исключительный »(там же. 142) просто потому, что она была единственной, кто сделал пересечь это. Повествование о Покахонтас «утвердилось в национальном сознании. присутствие европейцев в Америке по мифическому согласию коренных народов » играет Покахонтас как «экзотического миротворца» против остальных Туземцы как «кровожадные дикари» (Барингер, «Пленница» 2). Возвращаясь к тексту Смита, мы можем зарегистрировать как минимум два дополнительных интерпретирующих осложнения. Прежде всего, текст Смита похож на другие классические повествования. которую он, очевидно, взял за образец; Питер Халм указывает на сходство между Встреча Одиссея с Полифемом и циклопом у Гомера и Овидия и Собственное представление Смита о его взаимодействии с Поухатаном и алгонкинами(см. Colonial Encounters 153f.). Даже сцена спасения имеет черты классического рассказывание историй, основанное на межкультурной истории любви, для драматизации культурного конфликта. Кроме того, сцена спасения Смита очень напоминает другие части его собственного текста. заметно; он «утверждает, что ему как минимум дважды помогали красивые дамы. во время его ранней авантюрной карьеры в Турции и Тартарии […] и включает «Та благословенная Покахонтас» в его списке тех женщин, которые часто спасали мне жизнь »» (Mackenthun, Metaphors 217; ср. Smith, Generall Historie 41-42). Фактически, Смит не единственный, кто рассказывает такие истории: мы находим параллели в историях спасения другие путешественники того времени, поскольку «влюбленная принцесса» была литературным топосом, или ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 99 троп, скорее, заимствованный из дискурса ориенталистов »и был выбран Смитом в качестве «Организационный дискурс» его повествования 1624 года (Mackenthun, Metaphors 217). Однако после этих уточнений мы должны еще раз взглянуть на сцена спасения, которую описывает Смит, лишь бы еще больше усложнить ситуацию. Принимая эту историю за чистую монету, мы можем прийти к еще одному выводу: Этот опыт Смита был не спасением в строгом смысле слова, а своего рода ритуал усыновления у алгонкинов. Филип Барбур первым предложил это чтение в его исследование 1969 года «Покахонтас и ее мир»: «Церемония, на которой Смит это почти наверняка комбинация инсценировки казни и спасения, в знак усыновления в племя Поухатана »(24). Большинство ученых приехали согласиться с Барбуром в том, что Смит не лгал о том, что произошло, и что его Память не подвела и его, но он неверно истолковал ритуалы и практики туземцев. которые были ему непонятны. Тезис о культурном непонимании ритуал усыновления основан на «наших предположениях о хорошо подтвержденных индийских практиках» (Там же. 23) и подтвержден многими учеными за последние десятилетия. Барбур даже утверждает, что Смит включил эту сцену в более ранние версии его тексты, но его лондонский редактор удалил их (см. там же 24). Рассмотрение сцены спасения как ритуала усыновления также кажется правдоподобным в свете. о последней встрече Покахонтас и Смита в Англии. Питер Халм вкратце раскрывает диалог между Смитом и Покахонтас в Англии, прежде чем его смерть, на правдивость которой мы должны рискнуть, предлагает он, потому что то, что Покахонтас говорит Смиту, очевидно, для него пока что непонятно цитируется им довольно подробно; это, пожалуй, единственные «оригинальные» ее слова что у нас есть (ср. Hulme, Colonial Encounters 151-52). При встрече в Брентфорде после долгих лет разлуки и молчания Смит находит далекую Покахонтас. Чай слова, которые она ему направляет, записаны Смитом следующим образом: Ты обещал Поухатану, что твое должно быть его, и он тебе нравится; ты назвал его отцом, находящимся в его стране чужим, и по той же причине я должен поступить с вами: что, хотя я мог бы извиниться, я не осмелился допустить это звание, потому что она была Дочь королей; с хорошо поставленным лицом она сказала: если бы ты не боялся войти в мой отец, графство, и вызвал страх в нем и всех его людях (кроме меня) и боялся вас здесь я должен называть тебя отцом; Я говорю вам, что я буду, и вы назовете меня Дитя, и поэтому я будет впереди и впереди вашего графства. Они сказали, что ты мертв, и я знал нет другого, пока я не приеду к Плимофу; но Поухатан приказал Втаматомаккину разыскать тебя, и знайте правду, потому что ваше графство будет много лгать. (Общая история 122-3) Покахонтас напоминает Смиту о его обязанностях и обязательствах перед ней и ее людьми. Она требует взаимности и приверженности в связи с проведенным ритуалом усыновления. 100 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ в 1607 году, что сделало их родственными. Смит, не знакомый с алгонкинской общиной культура взаимности, кажется, не может или, по крайней мере, не хочет комментировать ее слова, хотя он их подробно цитирует. Текст Смита 1624 г., «Общая история», отличается от более ранних текстов тем, что это первый английский текст, который пытается написать историческое повествование о британских Америка - и такой национальный нарратив […] может развиваться только тогда, когда он основан у нас есть связное и значимое начало »(Mackenthun, Metaphors 210). В 1624 г., первая фаза колонизации - маскировка и преуменьшение колониальный проект во встрече с туземцами - окончен: английский нет больше притворялся, что приехал в Северную Америку только временно (как Смит сказал Поухатан во время одной из их первых встреч), и туземцы больше не делали вид, что не возражают против белого присутствия. Английское завоевание Северная Америка началась. Интеграция Смита и определение приоритетов спасениясцена в его повествовании была чрезвычайно эффективна для колониальной политики, поскольку успешно маргинализировал другие элементы истории Покахонтас, которые могли был менее пригоден для создания колониального, то есть национального мифа. Во-первых, построение межкультурной истории любви стирает историю Покахонтас пленение среди англичан до такой степени, что мы редко думаем о ней как о пленник вообще. Жанр раннего американского повествования о неволе с другой. рукой инсценирует пленение белых поселенцев среди Туземцы. Ребекка Фэйри показывает, как знаменитый рассказ о пленении Марии Роулендсон о своем опыте во время войны короля Филиппа (1675/76) перезаписывает история и опыт Покахонтас и, таким образом, надежно фиксируют плен как пленение белых среди «злых дикарей» как легитимизирующую стратегию колониальная экспансия (см. Картографии; см. также Робертсон, «Первый пленник»). Во-вторых, возникновение романтического интереса между Покахонтас и Джоном. Смит и позже между Покахонтас и Джоном Рольфом также скрывают тот факт, что в промежуточные годы между ее встречей с Джоном Смитом и до ее поимки, Покахонтас предположительно была замужем за Кодумом, членом ее племени. о которых мы знаем очень мало. Об этом упоминает Уильям Стрейчи (ср. История 54). Таким образом, когда капитан Аргалл похитил ее, чтобы оказать давление на ее отце Поухатане она, возможно, уже была замужем. «Если Уильям Сообщение Стрейчи о том, что Покахонтас вышла замуж в 1610 году за "рядового" капитан 'Кодоум, были правдой, [...] тогда англичане похитили женатого женщина и таким образом попустительствовали двоеженству »(Робертсон,« Первый пленник »97; ср. Барбур, Покахонтас 98-99). Однако этот более ранний «призрачный брак» (Барбур, Покахонтас 99) По-видимому, не было препятствием ни для ее обращения, ни для нее брак с Рольфе. Первый брак Покахонтас не упоминается в большинстве римских ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 101 рассказывали о ней, поскольку это считалось «языческим» ритуалом без всякого смысла перед Богом или Законом. Во время своего пребывания с женой и сыном в Англии Джон Рольф пишет свой собственный рекламный ролик. трактат, Истинное отношение штата Вирджиния (ср. транскрипцию на веб-страницу Энциклопедии Вирджиния), чтобы удовлетворить спонсоров колонии. Пока его брак «символизировал непростое перемирие» (Хьюм, «Политропный человек» 168) в Англо-коренные отношения, после его возвращения в Вирджинию вдовцом, он был около стать свидетелем вспышки насилия, которая должна была изменить отношения англо-коренных жителей в Северная Америка навсегда. На протяжении второй половины 17 и 18 веков Покахонтас и Джон Рольф фигурировал как «великий архетип индийско-белых супружеских отношений. союз »(Sheehan, Seeds 175). Однако в то же время Вирджиния была первой колонии, чтобы ввести законы против смешанного брака: в 1662 году законодательный орган принял Закон о расовой целостности, запрещающий смешанные браки между белыми и черными, а также белые и коренные жители. И все же Покахонтас и Джон Рольф продолжали считаться фундаментальные фигуры и план альтернативной версии того, что Американские расовые отношения могли быть такими. Это в значительной степени повлекло за собой понимание того, что все это развивалось - и так необратимо - иначе. Решение расового конфликты и территориальные споры из-за смешанных браков и смешанных браков казались меньше и менее осуществимо. Томас Джефферсон, возможно, был одним из последних американцев, публично заявить о своем видении и поощрять «объединение гонок как реальную возможность »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 24; также см. главу 5), если только успокаивают совесть американцев перед лицом перемещения коренных народов и смерть. В целом, смешанные браки становились все более табуированными. останавливаться на. Покахонтас и Джон Рольф, безусловно, были «первыми и, возможно, только англо-индийский брак в ранней истории Вирджинии »(Nash,« Image »215). После обретения Америкой независимости Покахонтас достигла своего легендарного мифа. статус в американской культуре и литературе. Утопия межрасовой любви, которая была символизируемый фигурой Покахонтас, превращается в миф о прошлом в В то же время проводится и проводится политика «удаления индейцев».102 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ 4. ПОКАХОНТАС И РОМАНТИЧЕСКИЕ ТРАДИЦИИ В лесу Поухэттена, Еще это говорят индийские огни, Как дочь их предков, Спас пленного англичанина. УИЛЬЯМ МЭКИПИС ТЕКЕРЕЙ, «ПОКАОНТАС» Когда я думаю о Покахонтас, я готов любить индейцев. ХЕРМАН МЕЛВИЛЛ, ДОВЕРИТЕЛЬ Ученые соглашаются, что это произошло после войны за независимость в США и, что более заметно, в начале 19 века, что мифическое измерение Повествование Покахонтас развилось наиболее сильно (ср. Янг, «Мать» 395; также ср. Тилтон, Покахонтас). Таким образом, наступила эпоха индийского переселения - официальная политика. депортации, приведшей к гибели тысяч коренных американцев на Trail of Tears - вот что Покахонтас становится полноценной американской иконой и миф. Чтобы мифологизировать Покахонтас в контексте глубокого антинативного настроений, пришлось использовать ряд дискурсивных стратегий: в первую очередь, большинство текстов и визуальных изображений изображают Покахонтас как спасительницу Джона Смита. а не как жена Джона Рольфе; вторая часть повествования становится навсегда изолированы, чтобы избежать проблемы смешанного брака - к тому времени даже более сильное культурное табу, чем в 17 веке. Во-вторых, цифры Покахонтас несколько ностальгически, как героиня прошлого и невинный американец начало. Раскол между «миролюбивой и христианской Покахонтас» (Uhry Abrams, Pilgrims 127) с одной стороны, и ее якобы вероломная, жестокая и бескомпромиссные коллеги-мужчины из числа коренных народов, с другой стороны, продолжаются и углубился. Эта глубокая феминизация повествования позволила избежать противоречий. между расовым дискурсом и основополагающим мифотворчеством. В-третьих, Покахонтас повествование претерпело поворот к сентиментализму, что еще больше отвлекает внимание от жестокость колониальной политики, и это защищает ее как романтический символ добровольный культурный контакт и самостоятельная ассимиляция с белой культурой. Именно в пьесах XIX века, в литературе, поэзии, а также в визуальной культуре мы найти проявления гендерной принадлежности мифа о Покахонтас, которые все еще отзываются эхом в современные культурные произведения. Покахонтас сделала свой первый американский учебник появление в издании 1797 года книги Ноя Вебстера «Американская подборка» уроков чтения и разговорной речи, но тем не менее первым автором, претендующим на известность История Покахонтас станет Джоном Дэвисом, англичанином, который приехал ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 103 в США в качестве гостя в начале 19 века. Дэвис быстро осознал потенциал этой ранней американской легенды и впервые применил ее анекдотично и несколько искаженным образом в его «Фермер из Нью-Джерси» (1800), где он сделал Джона Смита «индийским торговцем», а Покахонтас - «скво», который спасает ему. Три года спустя, в "Путешествиях за четыре с половиной года" в Соединенных Штатах. Америки В 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801 и 1802 (1803) годах он расширяет анекдот, опираясь на тексты Смита, местные знания и его собственное воображение, чтобы пересказывать историю Покахонтас в «отрезке из 37 страниц» (Дженкинс, «Принцесса» 14). Хотя его книга, строго говоря, представляет собой отчет о путешествии, Дэвис представляет мы здесь с первой беллетризованной трактовкой темы; сродни рассказу, нарратив отображает маркеры художественности, а не вложения в историзм (см. там же). Дэвис расширяет историю Покахонтас, и многие ученых с фабрикацией истории любви между Покахонтас и Джоном Смит, молодая девушка и пожилой мужчина по меркам 17 века. Манера в который он обработал историю, можно уловить из следующего отрывка, сцены это следует за Покахонтас, приносящей еду Смиту и поселенцам Джеймстауна: Приветствия толпы до слез поразили чувствительность Покахонтас; но ее смущалась врожденная скромность; и с радостью она повиновалась приглашению Капитану Смиту, чтобы побродить с ним вдали от вульгарного любопытства по берегам река. Именно тогда она дала волю всей бурной любви; висит на его руке и плач от красноречия сильнее слов. (Путешествие 278) Хотя из этого абзаца мы можем понять, почему сентиментальный рассказ Дэвиса никогда не стал каноническим, мы не можем переоценить культурную работу, которую выполняли его тексты в контексте основополагающей американской идеологии: он «раскопал» история Покахонтас; он «популяризировал и увековечивал его; но больше всего он романтизировал это и сделал исторический вымысел »(Дженкинс,« Принцесса »19). Дэвис дополнительно расширил исторический материал, добавив капитана Смита и принцессы Покахонтас и первые поселенцы Вирджинии, исторический роман (оба 1805 г.) его творчество, открыв дорогу многочисленным «романтическим реконструкциям повествование в девятнадцатом веке »за раз«Когда американцы начали исследовать колониальное прошлое в поисках фигур вроде Покахонтас и Смита, которые могли будут вознаграждены задним числом за свои прото-националистические настроения »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 33). Опять же, фраза Коммагера о «поисках полезного прошлого» приходит на ум. Своими своевременными, но теперь почти забытыми произведениями Дэвиса, который обычно считается «плодовитым, но второстепенным английским писателем-поэтом» (Дженкинс, «Принцесса» 8), обеспечила непреходящую популярность истории Покахонтас как романтика в послереволюционный период в США. Однако Дэвис 104 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ также способствовал значительному сдвигу в восприятии истории. Дэвис, а также писатели и поэты, которые следовали за ним, сосредоточились в основном на спасательной сцене, иногда почти игнорируя историю ее брака и тот факт, что у нее была смешанная раса ребенок с английским мужем. Как говорит Дженкинс несколько легкомысленно, если Смит […] сделал Покахонтас «девушкой с обложки» шестнадцатого века для своего прихода сюда брошюры », то, возможно, Рольф сделал ее первой из тех, кто мог быть назван« американским Мать года », и Дэвис своим творческим подходом к любовным интересам индийской принцессы, возможно, квалифицировал ее как первую американскую девушку, достойную титул «Мисс Америка». (там же 19) Вслед за Дэвисом другие американские авторы подхватили образ туземца. Американка и использование узнаваемых элементов истории Покахонтас в сюжетах культурных контактов, плена и любви, например, Кэтрин Мария Седжвик, которая в в ее романе «Надежда Лесли» (1827) используется персонаж коренной американки. Магависка демифологизирует повествование о Покахонтас и Джеймс Фенимор Купер, который в своем менее известном романе «Плакание о желании-тон-желание» (1829) переворачивает история Покахонтас, обращаясь к коренизации белого пленного воспитано коренным племенем (ср. Опферманн, «Лидия Мария Чайлд» и Хазельштейн, Die Gabe). Покахонтас упоминается американскими историками от Уильяма Стита (ср. History Первого открытия) и Джереми Белкнапа (см. американскую биографию) Джорджу Бэнкрофт (ср. История колонизации); однако, в отличие от Колумба, она нет такого биографа, как Вашингтон Ирвинг, чтобы восхвалять ее. Вместо этого он находится в драматическая традиция - помимо прозы Дэвис - что она глубоко поминали. Так называемые индийские пьесы XIX века популяризировали рассказы о Покахонтас и подобных, вымышленных персонажах в режиме ретроспективы ностальгия. Индийский герой или героиня изображается меланхоличной фигурой, обреченной на исчезнут с наступлением "цивилизации"; ассимиляция Покахонтас в белых культура и образ исчезающего индейца, таким образом, были двумя доминирующими способами представляющий это исчезновение. В 1808 году, через год после двухсотлетия основания Джеймстауна, вышла первая пьеса о Покахонтас на английском языке: Джеймс Нельсон Баркер Индийская принцесса, или La Belle Sauvage. Баркер представляет ту же версию, что и Тексты Дэвиса: один индивидуальный акт героизма - спасение Покахонтас Джона Смита - драматизируется как ключевой момент американской национальной предыстории (см. Тилтон, Покахонтас 48). В пьесе упоминается Джон Рольфе, но брак остается несогласованным, стандартная функция большинства версий 19-го века, которые ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 105 не уделять много внимания тому факту, что Джон Смит был не единственным англичанином в жизни Покахонтас. На протяжении XIX века пьес Покахонтас изобиловали: «Покахонтас играет, как и индийские пьесы в целом, стали неотъемлемой частью американской сцены во время первая половина девятнадцатого века »(Жаров,« Противоборствующие силы »485). Примерно с 1825 по 1869 было поставлено сорок пьес (см. там же; Куинн, захватывающие приключения 275). Помимо пьесы Баркера, довоенный драматург Книга Джорджа Вашингтона Кастиса «Покахонтас, или Поселенцы Вирджинии» (1830 г.) среди самых важных. Кастис был потомком Джорджа Вашингтона; его пьеса хорошо вписывалась в националистический и патриотический дух того времени и представляла одна исключительно популярная «индийская драма» (Тилтон, Покахонтас 72). И тем не менее, публикация пьесы в 1830 году также совпала с переселением индейцев. Закон, принятый Конгрессом США в том же году. Общий,кажущийся парадокс между политикой удаления индейцев и популярностью индийских играет убедительно. Как цитата из романа Германа Мелвилла в эпиграфе в этой главе показано, что идеализация Покахонтас как основополагающая фигура была в полной оппозиции демонизации коренных американцев в Публичный дискурс XIX века. Мы уже отметили, насколько "хорошо", то есть приемлемо, и «плохой», т. е. неприемлемые атрибуты «другого», распространяются на дополнительные стереотипы, такие как «благородный дикарь» и «неблагородный дикарь» (или «злые язычники»): с одной стороны, защита коренных американцев как маркер различия играл центральную роль в революционных дискурсах, чтобы отделить США от Англии: «фигура индейца стала удобной основы, на которой можно построить уникальный американский характер »(Жаров,« Противостояние Силы »485). Таким образом, Покахонтас фигурирует в истории и традициях, в которых белые американцы использовали коренных американцев в качестве символов расширения прав и возможностей: «Покахонтас согласие дает избранному народу белых американцев новую вымышленную линию благородного индийского происхождения »(Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 79). В конце концов, эти белые Американцы даже наряжались «индейцами» в знак протеста против колониального правления ( транскультурный феномен «игры в индейца» широко рассматривался Филип Делориа; ср. его книга с таким же названием). Но, с другой стороны, во внутреннем переговоры о различиях, коренное население совсем не репрезентативно Америки. Кэролайн Кэрчер комментирует этот парадокс: «белые американцы завоевать свою политическую свободу за счет истребленных ими индейцев и […] Они достигают своей культурной независимости путем экспроприации культур народы, которых они систематически унижали, обесценивали и лишали независимого идентичность »(Введение xxxiii). В этой беседе появляется Покахонтас. заметно как «самоотверженная индийская принцесса» (Жаров, «Противоборствующие силы» 486). Таким образом, игра Кастиса и Закон об удалении индейцев представляют собой два разных, но взаимосвязанных 106 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ стратегии того же колониального и расистского дискурса белой гегемонии - и «[Т] чем реже американские индейцы попадали в Соединенные Штаты, […] тем больше их история стала доступной для присвоения национальной культурой в поисках легитимация традиций идентичности »(Лёффельхольц,« Миранда »59). В отличие от традиционной романтизации Покахонтас в популярной Индийские пьесы, некоторые драмы избегали к тому времени предсказуемой расы и пола. стереотипы, из которых я кратко упомяну два. Лес Шарлотты Барнс Princess (1844) не использует стандартный репертуар повествования Покахонтас, и автор не сосредотачивает свою игру на сцене спасения или на каком-либо романтическом инвестиции; скорее, он «подрывает популярные индийские пьесы того времени, снабжая Покахонтас голосом, дающим ей политический статус и позволяющим отвергать колониальные господство »(Жаров,« Противоборствующие силы »483). Его репрезентативные стратегии контрастирует с патриотическим отстаиванием Кастисом национальной повестки дня Индии удаление. Пародия Джона Броэма 1855 года: Po-ca-hontas, или "Нежный дикарь" драматическая традиция пьес Покахонтас, чтобы посмеяться над ней. Его героиню называют «Поки», и пьеса Брума завершается свадьбой. Покахонтас и Джона Смита, оставив Рольфе жаловаться в сторонке. Брум - прозванный его современниками «американский Аристофан» (Хаттон qtd. в Moody, Introduction 402) - высмеивает модные мифологизирующие Покахонтас, а его пьеса - «прекрасная пародия на архетипический индийский героини драмы и романтики, все из которых в конечном итоге основывались на Изображения Джона Смита первоначальной принцессы Поухатана »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 75). На протяжении десятилетий игра Брумена быластандартный афтерпьект бурлеска в Нью-Йорке и в театрах по всей стране. Это было также популярно как солдатское шоу в армейских лагерях времен Гражданской войны. За почти тридцать лет своего сценическая жизнь ни один театральный сезон ни в одном американском городе не обходился без нескольких спектаклей из «Поки». (Moody, Introduction 401; также ср. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity) И Брум, и Барнс представляют исключения из правил: большая часть 19-го - столетия повествования Покахонтас сосредоточились на его первой части, потому что казался менее проблемным и оскорбительным и мог быть организован как межкультурный встреча, основанная на представлениях о романтической любви (ср. Тилтон, Покахонтас). Спасение Эта сцена также способствовала гораздо лучшему «колониальному началу», по словам Петра Халм (Colonial Encounters 141); очевидно, брак с Джоном Рольфом мог не считаться счастливым концом ее прерванных отношений с Джоном Смитом, если последнее должно было рассматриваться как «романтика республики»: роковая, грандиозная жизнь межкультурное увлечение. ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 107 Иллюстрация 2: Портрет Покахонтас Симон ван де Пасс, гравюра (1616 г.). В визуальной культуре важное место занимает сцена спасения: «Спасение Смита скудно одетая Покахонтас стала любимой темой для ряда популярных принтов. которые наводнили рынок с 1830-х до 1870-х годов »(Uhry Abrams qtd. в Тилтоне, Покахонтас 94). Это самый канонический элемент Покахонтас. история на протяжении 19 века и позже, и по сей день используется в американских школьные учебники для преподавания идеологически опасной, ортодоксальной версии американского начала. В 19 веке многие художники пытались визуализировать этот важнейший момент в ранней американской истории - момент, без которого, как предполагалось, с самого начала не было бы никакой американской истории. Эти визуальные представления Покахонтас варьируется от экзотики / примитивизма до классицизма, либо изображая ее обнаженной коренной девушкой или (судя по всему) белой молодой женщина. Позвольте мне вкратце обсудить наиболее выдающиеся образцы американского искусства. портретная живопись и живопись. Самый известный портрет Покахонтас, вероятно, 1616 г. Медная плита «Матоака, псевдоним Ребекка» Симона ван де Пасса, 108 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ изображает ее как английскую даму - «Леди Ребекка» - это имя, данное ей Английский в отношении библейской Ребекки, которой Авраам устроил привезен в Ханаан с места своего рождения в качестве жены своему сыну Исааку. Этот портрет сильно стилизован - нет ни следа женщины-туземца, даже в ее чертах - и следует современным правилам придворного портрета, чтобы подтвердить новая христианская идентичность дочери Поухатана, а также ее благородное происхождение. В Соединенных Штатах мемориальная культура, основанная на Покахонтас в XIX веке. века произвел несколько произведений искусства, особенно с точки зрения их местоположения очень важны. Одним из них будет рельеф 1825 года Антонио Капеллано. который расположен над западной дверью ротонды Капитолия в Вашингтоне, Д.К .: «Его включение в Капитолий на столь раннем этапе ясно показывает, что Спасение Смита Покахонтас долгое время считалось важным генеративным момент в истории Соединенных Штатов »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 95). В 1825 г. Американцы уже приняли Покахонтас как фигуру национального согласия. Иллюстрация 3: Покахонтас становится христианкой Джон Гэдсби Чепмен, Крещение Покахонтас (1839 г.).Одно из самых известных изображений XIX века, однако одно который также вписал Покахонтас в американскую культурную память и чье значение невозможно переоценить, является ли картина крещения Покахонтас Джон Г. Чепмен (1839 г.), который выставлен в ротонде Капитолия США, в ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 109 «сердце нации». Эта картина примечательна во многих отношениях. Прежде всего, по теме: это не знаменитая сцена спасения с Джоном Смитом и не ее брак Джону Рольфу, ни Покахонтас с сыном, отпрыском этого замечательного межкультурный союз, который мы находим здесь изображенным; скорее картина показывает Крещение Покахонтас, «хитро выбрав момент, когда европейский ритуал символизировал ее отказ от собственной культуры и ее включение в ряды спасенных »(Хьюм, Colonial Encounters 170). В рамках «Джеймстаунского сериала» (Ури Абрамс, Паломники 121) Чепмен вспомнил более ранние сцены, такие как "Первый корабль", "Приземление в Джеймстауне", Коронование Поухатана, Предупреждение Покахонтас и, конечно же, также изображение сцены спасения под названием «Покахонтас спасает жизнь капитана». Джон Смит. Однако за его работу по заказу Конгресса США он изображает другую сцену: крещение Покахонтас. Историк в В классическом понимании Чапмен избегает показывать Покахонтас полностью; скорее мы видим ее профиль. Тилтон предполагает, что Чепмен подчиняет Покахонтас мероприятию. это изображено, крещение, и что такое изображение позже стало общепринятым также для изображений сцены спасения, которая больше не представлена она как главный актер (см. Покахонтас 112). Из того, что мы видим о ней, мы можем удостовериться, что «Покахонтас светлее по тону кожи, чем другие индейцы в картина. […] Это условное изображение позволяет Чепмену предположить, что побледнение каких-либо отчетливо индийских расовых особенностей произошло через это Процесс христианизации »(там же 113). Ее поза напоминает стоящую на коленях Дева Мария найдена в вертепах (ср. Там же 114). Кроме того, она верна обратился к другим туземцам, которые традиционно одеты; ее белое платье, напротив, символизирует девственность, невинность и возрождение. Английские чиновники, Томас Дейл и Джон Рольф в кадре Покахонтас и преподобного Александра Уитакера. Чай освещение направляет наш взгляд на центральную иерархию между преклонившими колени Покахонтас и честный представитель английского духовенства. Сцена, верная исторический факт не включает Джона Смита; он включает, однако, различные другие исторические деятели ранней истории колонии. Покахонтас по сей день является только женщина-основательница или "мать-основательница", как ее иногда называют в ротонде Капитолия США среди мужчин, ряд выдающихся деятелей. Выбор крещения Покахонтас не был однозначно принят всеми Современники Чепмена. Критики, такие как Уильям Гилмор Симмс, видели крещение не как «основополагающая сцена», связанная с основанием Соединенных Штатов Штаты (ср. «Покахонтас»). Симмс, среди прочих, упрекнул Чепмена за то, что тот не представлял сцена спасения. «Поместив Покахонтас в роль получателя, Чепмен напоминает своим слушателям, что, по иронии судьбы, в тот момент она была язычницей. 110 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ о ее самом христианском поступке (спасении) и выдвигает идею, что ее крещение можно рассматривать как своего рода награду или осязаемое признание ее хорошо известного героизм »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 126). Крещение также ставит ее в пассивное состояние. роль, в то время как она считается активной в сцене спасения. Джон Рольф подчеркнул в письме Томасу Дейлу, что хочет обратить и жениться на Покахонтас не «из-за необузданного желания плотской привязанности, но для благо этой плантации, во имя нашей страны, во славу Бога » (Письмо 240). Сцена крещения наиболее ярко демонстрирует идеологический поворот и центральный парадокс в создании мифа о Покахонтас. В то время как она видна как "другой" туземца, ее крещение составляет - как это изображает Чепмен, в во всяком случае - силовой ритуал де-индигенизации. Рассказ о ее крещении, т.е. рассказ о ее обращении, создает новый взгляд на ее опыт плен как разновидность освобождения / эмансипации и возвращения:Покахонтас была буквально и духовно удалена от своих биологических родителей и «возвращена». ее истинному отцу, Христу. […] Исключение Покахонтас из ее кровной семьи, началось с ее поимки капитаном Аргаллом, было поддержано добровольно, потому что она ее крестные родители научили ее делать правильный выбор. (Фадж, «Покахонтас Крещение »24). Так рассуждали Джон Смит и другие. Версия «преобразование как возвращение », похоже, соответствовало логике реформатской веры. придерживался, в частности, сам Александр Уитакер. С этим рендерингом событий, Чепмен и другие надолго затмили рассказ Покахонтас о плен в пользу одной из конверсий. Картина является важной вехой в создании мифа о Покахонтас, но также указывает на некоторую двусмысленность в создании мифа в первой половине XIX в. век. Ури Абрамс, например, предполагает, что Чепмен «похоже, был пострадал от Следа Слез, который произошел за два года до того, как он установил его фреска в Капитолии. Реальность этого трагического марша может объяснить, почему он в финальной версии картины индейцы фигурировали более заметно, чем в предварительный набросок »(Паломники 124), который дал им лишь присутствие. В целом, картина Чепмена опиралась на тенденции увековечения Покахонтас в области художественной литературы, драмы и поэзии. После картины Чепмена 1840 года издание Уильяма Маккарти 1842 года патриотические американские песни включают три песни о Покахонтас (282-3, 287-8, 370-1), тем самым подтверждая ее присутствие в еще одном популярном американском СМИ. ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 111 5. ЧТО ПОКАХОНТАС? [A] n около двух миллионов […] человек […] по сей день прослеживают свою родословную обратно к индийской девушке. ФИЛИПП ЯНГ, «МАТЬ ВСЕХ НАС» Пока мы можем реконструировать процесс, в котором Покахонтас стала главным героем в национальном фундаментальном мифе с универсальной привлекательностью мы можем также усложнить эти находки, прослеживая миф на протяжении веков с большим вниманием к детали и отличия. Создание этого мифа могло быть вызвано национальной идеологии, но на нее также повлияли и другие, сильно отличающиеся друг от друга политические речи: в то время как в 19 веке Покахонтас провозглашалась «первой мифической Индианка »(Фидлер, Возвращение 64) и возведенная на престол как национальный герой, она была также заявлено во имя многих других повесток дня. Во-первых, многие писатели и критики считали Покахонтас главным фигура специфически южного мифа происхождения - как «ангел-хранитель» самая старая американская колония, Вирджиния (Янг, «Мать» 396), и многие патриотические публикации вышли из этого. Многочисленные исследования южных критиков из Дэвид Гарнет, обращаясь к Лео Лемею, не раз подчеркивал важность Покахонтас в регионалистском контексте южных традиций. Эти публикации о Юге и его культурных и литературных традициях также поговорим с Покахонтас. как центральная фигура в южных историографических и литературных текстах (см. Kindermann, Гещихте). Наиболее полно и убедительно Энн Ури Абрамс выступала за Покахонтас как за «миф о происхождении Вирджинии» (см. «Паломники»), который она сопоставляется с Массачусетсом (пуритане и паломники, с в следующей главе). Это сопоставление - «Паломники и Покахонтас» - исторически разворачивается как своего рода соперничество, иногда даже как битва за национальные доминирование, при котором южное наследие и наследие часто противопоставляется что Новой Англии. Ури Абрамс считает историю Покахонтас основополагающей женщина-спасительница из Вирджинии в отличие от мифов о происхождении Массачусетса. патриархальная колония (там же 149). Покахонтас как основательница из Вирджиниимать становится особенно важной в контексте Гражданской войны в США. (1861-65). В войне между Севером и Югом Покахонтас часто призывается обеими сторонами: Север пытался дискредитировать рассказ Джона Смита в чтобы опровергнуть авторитет первого белого "южанина". После 1860 г. авторы с Севера, среди которых Чарльз Дин и Генри Адамс, горячо «Бросьте вызов [d] правдивости истории о спасении» с помощью полемического «анти-Смита. тяга »(Тилтон, Покахонтас 172). Напротив, Юг противостоял этим атакам. и подтвердил правдивость рассказа Смита, в частности сцены спасения. Над 112 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ все, «Покахонтас и ее рассказ имели решающее значение для растущего чувства юга инаковость »(там же). Построение Покахонтас как южной прародительницы и многое другое буквально, будучи прародительницей многих членов элиты Вирджинии, многие писатели и ученые, такие как Джеймс Кирк Полдинг, относят ее к числу «опекунов». божества »Вирджинии (Letters Vol. 1 25). Как пишет Энн Нортон в своей книге "Альтернатива" Америка: На юге миф о Покахонтас все более выражал своеобразную секционную культура. Рыцарское поведение в мифе напоминало кавалера, звание и брак Покахонтас заверила в легитимности присутствующих жителей. Как индийская принцесса Покахонтас объединил естественный, индийский характер благородной дикости и природной добродетели с традиционное превосходство, согласовывая противоречивые требования Джефферсона и идеология, восходящая к эпохе Просвещения, с моделью Кавалера. Как южные настроения поскольку восстание […] усилилось, Покахонтас вызывалась все чаще. Тезис воспоминания связывали Покахонтас как частный символ насильственной независимости считается характеристикой индейцев в целом. (183) Таким образом, история Покахонтас стала яблоком раздора в горячих спорах. и не без иронии в этом контексте, что ВМС США, которые обычно называли свои линкоры в честь коренных племен и отдельных людей, отправить свои линкоры Powhatan и Pocahontas (единственный американский военный корабль названный в честь женщины в этот момент), чтобы служить в войне против южных сепаратистов, которые провозгласили ее своим предком (см. Тилтон, Покахонтас 146). В общем, мы должны признать, что попытки дискредитации Покахонтас повествование со стороны многих северян в годы национальной кризис не удался, поскольку к тому времени «имя и достижения индийской принцесса Покахонтас глубоко укоренилась в коллективном американском сознании. Ко второй половине XIX века ее героическая личность стала далеко за пределами любых подобных попыток демифологизации »(там же 175). Во-вторых, в совершенно ином ключе Покахонтас воспринималась как ранний Американская феминистка. В женской биографии Мэри Хейс 1803 года изображена Покахонтас как образцовая женщина, как «принцесса-политик» и как проявление «девятнадцатого века решительная женственность »(Дайер,« Трансатлантическая Покахонтас »302). В различных версий, ее история была предложена как повествование о расширении прав и возможностей для женщин, наделив ее исключительно женским агентством в патриархальном контексте мужского бряцания оружием. В пьесе Шарлотты Барнс "Лесная принцесса" видели следы этой феминистской повестки дня, которая часто также уклоняется от гиперболических романтическое оформление истории в пользу представления Покахонтас как самоуверенной, целеустремленная коренная женщина. Гендерные последствия и ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 113 к феминистскому потенциалу мифа о Покахонтас обращались различные авторов в разное время. Особенно в контексте феминизма первой волны в В Соединенных Штатах Покахонтас была обнаружена как фигура предка. Распространение идеи и образа «новой женщины» совпали с поискамиполезное феминистское прошлое. Пока женщины боролись за свое право голосовать в США (предоставлено в 1920 году 19-й поправкой к Конституции США), Покахонтас была представлена ​​в ряде пьес и стихотворений, в которых она использовалась как образцовая феминистка: в пьесе Маргарет Ульманн «Покахонтас» (1912) героиня самоуверенно отказывается от попытки Джона Смита соблазнить ее, когда они встречаются последнее время. В «Покахонтас» Наталии Крейн (1930) героические куплеты изображают всемирный коммунистический заговор, угрожающий нации, будущее которой только Последний потомок «индийской» принцессы Покахонтас может предупредить, кто в Стихотворение зачислено, чтобы защитить и спасти американский народ. Мэри Дирборн изучает использование письменности этнических женщин. рассказа Покахонтас как «единственная наиболее важная метафора женского этническая идентичность »(Дочери Покахонтас 97) в американских интеллектуалах и истории литературы, и определяет Покахонтас как символ американской женственности а также этничность и парадигматическая модель для ведения переговоров о тонкостях положение между двумя и более культурами. Изучив, как «гендер и функция этнической принадлежности в американской культуре »(там же 189), Дирборн указывает на« происхождение » и "сообщество" как ключевые категории в письмах американских этнических женщин это также придает форму повествованию о Покахонтас; полюса родства / спуска на с одной стороны, любовь, брак и согласие - с другой - решающие аспекты ее рассказа, напряженность которых в отношениях между американскими коренными жителями и иммигрантами этнические писательницы от Скорбящей голубки до Гертруды Стайн, от Нелла Ларсен к Максин Хонг Кингстон не раз пыталась озвучить (Там же 192). По словам Дирборна, этнические писательницы - это «Покахонтас. дочери »в том смысле, что они озвучивают то, что Покахонтас могла бы сказать чтобы «наполнить ее молчание словами» (там же 193) в еще одном присвоении исторической фигуры в контексте политики феминистской идентичности. 114 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Рисунок 4: Марка Покахонтас Почтовая служба США, Покахонтас 5 ¢ (1907 г.). Будь то прототип женщины или феминистки, Покахонтас не только считается мать-основательница этнических писательниц, но во всем остается символ, о чем свидетельствует марка 5 центов, выпущенная в 1907 году в ознаменование 300-летие основания Джеймстауна, штат Вирджиния. Есть, в-третьих, полноценный культ Покахонтас после Первой мировой войны среди группы Американские писатели-модернисты, которые также считают, что она американская основательница мать и как центральная эмблема коренных традиций Америки, которую необходимо противопоставить с европейскими традициями. Поэма Вачела Линдси «Наша мать Покахонтас» является ранним проявлением этого понятия. Хотя это стихотворение может и не быть написанная в особом модернистском стиле, она передает настроение этого модернистского настроения очень хорошо, как показывает этот отрывок: Потому что мы ее кукурузные поля; Потому что все наши огни возрождаются От бессмертных углей ее груди, Пылающий Как она помнит Весна И Вирджиния, Наша мама, Покахонтас. Джон Рольф не наш предок. Мы поднимаемся из ее души В родной стране чудес, Пока лучи солнца целовали ее руку, Весной, ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 115 В Вирджинии, Наша мама, Покахонтас. (116–117) Фигуру Покахонтас можно найти в работах многих модернистов. В одном из Эрнест Хемингуэй задается вопросом: «Есть ли у Покахонтас две стороны? Было ли у нее четвертое измерение »(« Банальная история »334), и она появляется,наиболее заметно в поэме Харта Крейна «Мост» (в части, озаглавленной «Дочь Поухатана»), которую Лесли Фидлер описывает как «справочник Американская мифология »(Возвращение 119). Отсылки к Покахонтас в модернистском в литературе отражается всеобщее восхищение «примитивом» и экзотика в литературе и искусстве того периода; в своей специфической американской вариант, это увлечение преследует символическое присвоение коренных американцев как воплощение исконного аутентичного образа жизни и, следовательно, как объекты ностальгическая тоска (ср. Визенор, Беглые позы; Хатчинсон, Индийское безумие). Но будь то южанин, феминистка или муза модернизма, никто из эти обрамления действительно влияют на статус Покахонтас как национальной иконы; вместо этого они кажется, еще больше увеличивают его. Однако они также сигнализируют о том, как историческая личность и ее встреча с англичанами были восприняты как «пустой пространство »(Hulme, Colonial Encounters 138) и использовались для различных идеологических надписи на разных этапах американской истории. 6. ПОКАХОНТАС, ВЫЖИВШИЙ - УНИКАЛЬНЫЙ АМЕРИКАНЦ И ПОСТКОЛОНИАЛЬНЫЕ ПЕРСПЕКТИВЫ Ребенок Покахонтас имеет решающее значение для смысла истории. ЭЛЛА ШОХАТ И РОБЕРТ СТАМ, НЕДУМЫЕ ЕВРОЦЕНТРИЗМ Выживание. ДЖЕРАЛЬД ВИЗЕНОР Безусловно, наиболее важная ревизионистская точка зрения на «смешанные браки Америки» история »(Эдвардс,« United Colors »147) - это история коренных американцев, который довольно энергично формулируется с 1960-х годов. Коренной американец ревизионизм мифа о Покахонтас бросает вызов, как и в случае с Колумбом, само понятие американского начала на условиях, которые были описаны так далеко. Конечно, нет ни одного однородного ответа коренных американцев. к многослойной «белой» мифологизации Покахонтас; мы можем вкратце обзор, определите несколько тенденций, которые варьируются от деконструкции 116 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ популярные стереотипы коренных американцев в целом и Покахонтас в частности к различным новым интерпретациям исторического момента культурного контакта между Покахонтас и английскими поселенцами / захватчиками и его последствия. Многие современные писатели-индейцы пытались представить, что Покахонтас могла или могла подумать или сказать, потому что у нас просто нет записи. Поэт коренных американцев Паула Ганн Аллен дала голос Покахонтас в одном из ее стихотворений под названием «Покахонтас ее английскому мужу Джону Рольф », в котором докладчик вспоминает: Если бы я не обнимал тебя О любимый коварный, Вы бы умерли. И сколько раз я тебя щипал От верной смерти в пустыне - Мой мир, через который вы наткнулись как бы слепой? […] Все же ты выжил, о мой прекрасный муж, И принес им золото Отжатый от урожая, я научил тебя Сажать. Табак. […] Я уверен Вы удивились моему молчанию, сказав, что я был Простая распутница, дикая служанка, Сумеречная дочь языческих производителей Кто катался голым по грязным городам Кто бы научился только путям благодати Под вашим твердым руководством через Ваше мужское правило: Без сомнения, без сомнения. Вы сказали, что я мало говорил. И ты меньше слушал […] Я хорошо тебя видел Я понял твои уловки и до сих пор Защищал тебя, доходя до смерти На твоем хранении - расточительство, Гниющая христианская смерть - и ты, ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 117 Обманщик, белый человек, отец моего сына, Выжил, пожинал больше богатства Чем вы когда-либо мечтали Из того, чему я тебя научил, и из-за растраты моих костей. (8f.) Стихотворение внешне имитирует поэтическую моду пуританской поэзии женщин. (например, известное стихотворение Анны Брэдстрит 1678 года «Моим дорогим и любящим Муж ») в обращении к любимому партнеру; но он не воссоздает обычное topoi скромности и покорности, равно как и текст Брэдстрита, описывают гармоничный и страстный союз - скорее, он создает позицию превосходство Покахонтас над ее мужем Джоном Рольфе. Ссылаясь к стратегиям колониального другого, говорящий переворачивает известные стереотипы: это он «другой» - невежественный, детский, беспомощный и зависимый; Это она спасает его не один раз, а много раз; и все же в его мире / дискурсе у нее нет голоса. В конце концов, она считает его ответственным за свою смерть, что неразрывно связано с его обретением славы и богатства.«Кости» Покахонтас, упомянутые в последней строчке стихотворения, также находятся в в центре постмодернистского изображения истории Покахонтас Джеральда Визенора в Наследники Колумба. Возбуждение дебатов о репатриации, вызванных Закон о защите могил коренных американцев и репатриации (NAGPRA) 1990 г., в романе есть главный герой, который стремится вернуть и перезахоронить останки Покахонтас, но убит альянсом Братства американских исследователей и агентов разведки, которых называют «дикарями интеллекта». В этом романе который пытается деконструировать главный рассказ о колониальной экспансии в мириадах пути, многое поставлено на карту в извлечении этих костей, которые чудесным образом исчезнуть в шаманском ритуале из комнат антропологического музея и таким образом, из архива выселения коренных американцев. С точки зрения коренных американцев, история Покахонтас - это не история обращение, ассимиляция и жертва, но это история выживания коренных жителей. Это из конечно, укладывается в общие постколониальные рамки, как Шохат и Стам указал (ср. Безмолвие). Покахонтас не только пережила первый контакт, но и родила ребенка, что можно рассматривать как начало альтернативной «перекрестной крови» Американская генеалогия (см. Vizenor, Landfill Meditation). Такая контргегемония строительство «национальных» начал резко контрастирует с странная культурная практика, когда белые претендуют на удаленное - если не сказать метафорическое - Индейское происхождение (однако, заключенное в их «белизне»), например, те два миллиона американцев, которые называют себя родственниками Покахонтас. Кроме из генеалогически задокументированных родословных, кажется, есть тоска по 118 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Покахонтас как "почетная белая" мать-основательница (лишенная коренного инаковости), что отражается в двусмысленном культурном образе «индийского бабушка », которую Вайн Делориа описал как индийскую бабушку. сложный: Белые, утверждающие, что кровь индейцев, как правило, укрепляют мифические представления об индейцах. Все, кроме одного человека, который утверждал, что кровь индейцев, утверждали это на стороне своей бабушки, за исключением одного. Однажды я сделал проекцию назад и обнаружил, что, очевидно, большинство племен полностью сука за первые триста лет белой оккупации. (Кастер 3) Образ "индийской принцессы" как фигуры предка экстраполируется из Покахонтас. стать «бабушкой всех индийцев». Коренные американцы (шошоны / чиппева) поэт Нила Норт, солнечная игра слов на тему, которой уже нет ограничивался фигурой Покахонтас - на самом деле, чероки раньше были самыми «Модное» племя, из которого ведут долгие годы. В ее стихотворении «глупый вопросы », - шутит спикер: вы знаете, моя прабабушка была принцессой чероки (вы знаете, она, должно быть, была чертовски шлюхой, потому что у всех одна и та же прабабушка) (217) Отвечая как на создание белых колониальных мифов, так и на маргинализацию женщин в исследованиях коренных американцев, Пола Ганн Аллен предлагает «положить женщины [как Покахонтас] в центре племенной вселенной », чтобы« выздороветь [] женское начало в традициях американских индейцев »(Sacred Hoop 264). Для Аллена - кто серьезно относится к месту спасения - тот факт, что Покахонтас смогла успешно вмешиваться от имени Джона Смита и против ее отца показывает отсутствие европейских патриархальных структур и власть женщин в гинократических племенных общества, такие как общества алгонкинов (ср. Покахонтас 6, 172-3). Покахонтас рассматривается как часть женского континуума в контексте специфической марка индейского феминизма. Индейский ревизионизм мифа о Покахонтас проявляется во всех формах. средств массовой информации и форм искусства, включая поэзию, художественную, документальную, музыкальную и визуальная культура; примерами могут служить индейский композитор Джордж Куинси мини-опера «Покахонтас при дворе Якова I» и «Дневники чокто» (2008) или Визуальный образ Р.Л. Моргана Монсо под названием «Matowaka» (1992). ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 119 Иллюстрация 5: Покахонтас в современном искусстве Р.Л. Морган Монсо, Матовака (1992). Постколониальная перспектива нарратива Покахонтас представлена Карибско-американская писательница Мишель Клифф в своем романе «Нет телефона в рай» (1987). Ее перемещенный главный герой смешанной расы с говорящим именем Клэр Сэвидж родился в Карибском бассейне и живет как в США, так и в Великобритании. В на британском побережье она встречает Покахонтас: 120 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Она встала и пошла к нему [памятник, HP] - издалека подозревали ее обучение. аллегория. Бронза. Женский. Одиночная фигура. Одиночное перо поднимается из кос. Ноги в мокасинах шагают вперед, словно собираясь сойти с пьедестала, на котором ее держали. А олицетворение Нового Света, посвященное какой-то бедной душе, погибшей в погоне за Это. Клэр подошла ближе. Это было совсем не так. Нет; это должно было обозначать одного человека и отметьте ее место отдыха. Буквы у основания статуи говорили ей об этом… Покахонтас. (136) Рассказчик Клиффа пытается деаллегоризировать и демифологизировать фигуру Покахонтас, прийти к ней «лицом к лицу» и увидеть в ней другого человека. Сокращение миф в пользу личности - это стратегия, которую многие современные авторы наняли. Кроме того, репрезентативная критика коренных американцев в различных формах и СМИ окружены критикой романтического мифа, написанной белыми авторами. На ранней стадии, Лесли Фидлер исследовала тропу «антипокахонтас» (Возвращение 81) в Американская культура. Американский писатель Джон Барт, например, заменяет это негативный образ идеализированной версии Покахонтас в его постмодернистском романе «Фактор сот-сорняков» (1960); в пересмотре Бартом мифа о Покахонтас Смит вынужден изнасиловать Покахонтас по просьбе отца, чтобы спасти свою жизнь и жизнь его человек. В высшей степени ироничный текст Барта указывает на женоненавистничество и расизм в Американская культура и литература, которые превращают Покахонтас в «Анти-Покахонтас», превратившая принцессу в проститутку, «шлюха, умоляющая быть ввинчиваемым »(Фидлер, Return 153). С постколониальной точки зрения эта гиперболическая представление о первом контакте может быть истолковано как обвинительный акт преимущественно насильственный характер взаимоотношений европейцев и коренных народов. На этом фоне мифологизировать одну индейскую женщину как «индийскую принцессу» - это но форма вытеснения белой вины и никогда не предотвращала очернение и негативные стереотипы в отношении женщин коренных американцев в целом, таким образом подтверждая дихотомия девственница / шлюха прочно укоренилась в западной патриархальной культуре. В качестве Лесли Фидлер отмечает, что «принцесса» в разговорной речи долгое время была уничижительное выражение для индейской проститутки (там же 81). По аналогии, такие выражения, как «скво» и даже «Покахонтас», часто использовались как оскорбления, как коренная американская актриса Ирен Бедард, которая дает свой голос Покахонтас Диснея хорошо помнит (см. Эджертон и Джексон, «Редизайн» 95). ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 121 7. СОВРЕМЕННЫЕ КОММОДИФИКАЦИИ ИСТОРИИ ЛЮБВИ Капитан Смит и Покахонтас Был очень безумный роман, Когда ее папа пытался убить его, она сказала: "Папа, не смей" Он дает мне жар своими поцелуями, Лихорадка, когда он меня крепко держит. Лихорадка - я его Госпожа, О, папа, ты не поступишь с ним правильно. ПЕГИ ЛИ, «ЛИХОРАДКА» Она хотела поглотить его любовью. Ее тело вело себя так, как будто оно больше не было часть женщины, которую она знала. […] Она чувствовала себя частью мужчины чье тело доставляло ей такую ​​радость, как будто его кожа принадлежала ей, словно их сердца были один. Иногда ей казалось, что она упадет в обморок от восхитительности своей плен. СЬЮЗАН ДОННЕЛЛ, ПОКАХОНТАС Если бы я был звероловом Я бы дал тысячу шкурок Спать с Покахонтас И узнайте, как она себя чувствовала. НИЛ ЯНГ, «ПОКАХОНТАС» Несмотря на критику коренных американцев и споры о ее статусе основополагающая американская героиня, фигура Покахонтас очень жива в Американская популярная и массовая культура, и романтика продолжает оставаться центральным парадигма ее нарративизации. В своем классическом исследовании формульной фантастики Джон Кавелти определил романтическую формулу как один из выдающихся архетипов шаблонных письмо: Важнейшей определяющей характеристикой романа является не то, что в нем снимается женщина, а то, что в нем организация действий - это развитие любовных отношений, обычно между мужчиной и женщина […]. Моральная фантазия романа - это любовь торжествующая и непреходящая, преодоление всех препятствий и трудностей. Хотя обычный исход - навсегда счастливый брак, более сложные виды любовных историй иногда заканчиваются смертью одного или оба влюбленных, но всегда таким образом, чтобы предположить, что любовные отношения были длительного и постоянного воздействия. (Приключения 41-42)122 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Иллюстрация 6: Покахонтас в популярной фантастике Обложка Покахонтас С. Доннелла (Berkley Books, 1991). Популярные повествования Покахонтас оперируют формулой романтики при представлении Покахонтас спасает Джона Смита от любви. Сцена спасения драматизирует общепринятый топос «любовь сильнее смерти», а также понятие жертвенная любовь, то есть любовь как бескорыстный альтруизм, который заставляет человека желать жизнь, чтобы пощадить других. В повествовании Покахонтас эта «фантазия вседостаточности любви »(там же 42) преодолевает языковые барьеры, а также культурное различие - и, разумеется, устраняет все вопросы колониального властные отношения. В течение ХХ века любовные сюжеты стали более смелыми. и более откровенно в их обращении с англоязычной сексуальностью и сексуальной ре- ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 123 д., но в то же время безнадежно анахроничен. Сьюзан Доннелл исторический романс «Покахонтас» (1991) - один из множества подобных пересказов. истории Покахонтас как популярной истории любви. Автор, самопровозглашенный «Прямой потомок в четырнадцатом поколении» Покахонтас, заявляет, что пишет «От сердца и истории» (Прим. Автора viii); наводящая на размышления обложка ее романа гласит: «Она была принцессой, дамой и легендой, ее история - это история Америки». Опять же, история Покахонтас предстает как фундаментальное повествование о нация. Как видно из второго эпиграфа к этому разделу, «пленение» Покахонтас - это метафорически воспринимается как желание и пленение, а не как насильственное похищение и политическая борьба. Покахонтас полностью искоренена на обложке книги Доннелл, не считая ее платья и трех перьев в черных волосах, которые являются стереотипными атрибутами в западных изображениях одежды коренных народов. Этот стратегия де-индигенизации Покахонтас, которую мы уже нашли в работе во многих представлениях 19-го века - наиболее заметно продолжено в наших эпохи позднего капитализма культурным производством, которое принесло новые и беспрецедентные известность старой легенде: Покахонтас Уолта Диснея (1995). Этот анимированный Кинофильм положил начало настоящему увлечению Покахонтас, подпитываемому «125 миллионами долларов. маркетинговый блиц »(Эдвардс,« United Colors »162), который« достиг вершины летом 1995 год на волне Покахонтас рюкзаки, воздушные шары, салфетки, подушки, ночные рубашки, формы для кексов и пластмассовые фигурки, связанные с мультфильмами Диснея » (Робертсон, «Первый пленник» 73). Товары Покахонтас также включали загорелую и черноволосая кукла Барби Покахонтас в сопровождении своих друзей-животных, Уроженец "воин" Кодоум и Джон Смит. Фильм Диснея был положительно воспринят как сбалансированный, политкорректный представление первого контакта в Северной Америке, даже как «единственная лучшая работа когда-либо сделанное Голливудом об американских индейцах »(qtd. в Edgerton and Jackson, «Редизайн» 34), но его также критиковали как еще одну романтическую фантазию. об «индейцах», которые замалчивают историю геноцида и лишения прав собственности (см. там же), и, таким образом, романтизирующий колониализм (ср. Тернер, «Игра»). Ли Эдвардс превосходный анализ Диснеевской Покахонтас ставит под сомнение «попытку фильма превратить Джеймстаун в родину мультикультурализма »(« United Colors » 149). Создатели фильма Диснея, как отмечает Эдвардс, «изменили [] ее [Покахонтас, HP] возраст, так что роман между ними [Покахонтас и Джон Смит, HP] становится более осуществимым »(там же 151). После того, как дружба сформировалась и Покахонтас спасла Смита от казни, в фильме есть второй сцена спасения, в которой Смит получает пулю в Поухатана; тяжело ранен, Смит должен вернуться в Англию, чтобы поправиться, тем самым обеспечив сюжету причина разлучить его с его любимой Покахонтас. Этот повествовательный маневр «Вытесняет фактическое смешение рас из повествовательной рамки» (там же), что фильм 124 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ также делает, опуская отношения Покахонтас с Джоном Рольфом. Визуально фильм изображает Покахонтас как «исторически невозможное полиэтническое тело», тело это было произведено аниматором Диснея Гленом Кином как «этническая смесьчье выпукло изогнутое лицо - африканец, а темные раскосые глаза - азиатские и чьи пропорции тела кавказские »(Keane qtd. в Tillotson,« Cartoons » C8). Покахонтас, таким образом, включает мультикультурализм как «недифференцированное визуальное сборник небелых национальностей »(Эдвардс,« United Colors »152) и как «Икона западных стандартов экзотической женской красоты» (там же 154). Мы можем считают Покахонтас Уолта Диснея эмблемой постфеминизма, которая в то же время время становится «учителем мультикультурности Диснея» (там же, 155); в духе политкорректность, даже урожай «нового мира», табак, обменивают на кукурузу. В целом, история неуклюже обработана: нет упоминания о Покахонтас. плен или всплеск насилия в бело-коренных отношениях. Фильм некритично воображает и празднует то, что Лесли Фидлер назвал американо-американским «Миф о любви в лесу» (Возвращение 50). Конечно, популярность этого версия повествования Покахонтас обращается к архетипическим образцам человеческого воображение. Нам нравится думать о культурных контактах не с точки зрения насилия, а с точки зрения любви и привязанности. Возможность прихода Европы и Америки вместе в мирной встрече, ведущей к дружбе и любви, а не к войне а геноцид - это фантастика, которую люди все еще любят развлекать. Фильм Терренса Малика "Новый мир" (2005) предлагает высоко эстетизированный хотя в то же время менее анодинная версия исторического повествования, Покахонтас как «идеальная племенная Ева» (Уэтерстон, «Когда спит» 11) для английский «Адам» в «новом мире», и это пытается отдать должное двусмысленностям повествования, рассказывая его (не очень счастливый) финал вместо того, чтобы оставить выключен после спасения и отъезда Смита. Для Малика Покахонтас явно первая Американец. Совсем недавно долговечность повествования о Покахонтас в американско-американском культура была подтверждена (без поправки на инфляцию) в настоящее время самой высокой фильм на все времена, Аватар Джеймса Кэмерона (2009), научно-фантастический версия истории Покахонтас с антиколониалистской повесткой дня. Фильм белый героя дважды спасает коренная персона Покахонтас: в первый раз она помогает ему, чтобы выжить в "пустыне" вымышленной луны Пандоры, второй раз она спасает его от других колонизаторов. В конце концов, именно он становится полностью и безвозвратно искоренена, а не искоренена. Военно-промышленное (нео-) колониальное предприятие с земли успешно на Пандоре - чтобы продолжить аналогию: Джеймстаун на Пандоре - это стерто. Блокбастер Кэмерона на первый взгляд может быть обычным по разыгрыванию. межкультурной романтики и, по общему признанию, чтит местные традиции ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 125 которые доступны только с помощью самых передовых технологий (см. Theweleit, «Menschliche Drohnen»), но настаивает на том, чтобы герой был коренной. с земли в нави-культуру Пандоры представляет собой мощную критику американского неоимпериализм. Своевременный фильм Кэмерона сочетает в себе переделку истории Покахонтас с критикой американо-американских военных интервенционизм как часть межрасовой истории любви между мужчиной с земли и женщина Пандора. Имея в виду миф о Покахонтас, мы можем читать Аватар как комментируют и обновляют основной американский миф того времени глобализации. В пересказе Кэмерона для Америки 21 века и всего мира аудитории мы можем увидеть подрывной, антифундаментальный потенциал и критические импульс пересмотренного мифа о Покахонтас. 8. ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЕ Измученная сентиментальностью, Покахонтас терпит и поддерживает все обращение наших святых. Она незаметно вошла в наш фольклор, где живет как популярная басня. ФИЛИПП ЯНГ, «МАТЬ ВСЕХ НАС» Проследив миф о Покахонтас через несколько столетий американо-американского истории и культуры, мы обнаруживаем, что стратегия де-индигенизации замысловато переплетается с деполитизацией. В проекте энциклопедического масштаба Клаус Тевелейт рассмотрел отголоски повествования Покахонтас как яркий пример сексуализации насилия в контексте колонизации (ср. «Ты вызываешь у меня жар»). Помимо всех, казалось бы, невинных конфигураций романтическая любовь и межкультурный альтруизм, утверждает Тевелейт (временами импрессионистически и ассоциативный стиль), что это отношения между коренными сексуальность и насилие колонизатора, которое находится в центре Покахонтас повествование - отношения, которые могут быть в некотором роде конкретно американо-американскими и в некоторых аспектах, но также соответствует одному из самых архетипических троп в западном мире. история культуры от античности до наших дней. Из транснационального полушария перспективу, мы можем обсудить Покахонтас вместе с такой фигурой, как Малинче,переводчик Эрнана Кортеса во время его завоевания Мексики или в контексте похожие колониальные романтические сюжеты, организующие либидинозные межкультурные энергии и подтверждать патриархальные представления о превосходстве белых в условиях насильственной колонизации. Несмотря на то, что Покахонтас может отображаться только как «наполовину гоночный» в версиях миф, который лишает ее коренных народов, ассимилирует ее и заявляет, что она обращена в христианство. 126 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ и западные обычаи, как фигура в колониальных и колонизаторских заговорах она тем не менее, «полностью сексуально» (см. «Покахонтас» на веб-странице Университета Вирджинии), т.е. сексуализированы и эротизированы в соответствии с западными стандартами «экзотической красоты». с другой стороны, как индийская принцесса и благородная женщина-дикарь, Покахонтас - одна из самые известные и самые известные женские фигуры в американском детском книги (ср. Янг, «Мать») и по сей день является одним из самых популярных Хэллоуинов. костюмы для девочек; таким образом, к лучшему или худшему, она остается каждой школьницей (и школьная) мечта. ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 127 9. ВОПРОСЫ ДЛЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ 1. Какие элементы повествования Покахонтас делают его таким полезным в контексте создания значимого начала / фундаментального мифа? 2. Какое значение имеет категория пола в ранних колониальных столкновениях? и как в этих отношениях фигурирует Покахонтас? 3. Что можно сказать о процессах отбора, в которых была «сцена спасения»? Обращение Покахонтас и / или ее брак с Джоном Рольфом появлялись в различных экземпляры исторической памяти? Что бы вы посчитали самым важный образ Покахонтас, т.е. самая важная часть Покахонтас повествование для построения национального начала? 4. Кратко сформулируйте различные идеологические вложения и стратегии, с помощью которых нарратив Покахонтас на протяжении веков использовался Южане, феминистки и т. Д. Как эти ассигнования отражаются на образах Американская идентичность? 5. Проанализируйте тексты песен Нила Янга («Покахонтас») и Пегги. Ли («Лихорадка»). 6. Проанализируйте визуальное представление мифа в «Покахонтас» Уолта Диснея. и «Новый мир» Теренса Малика. Какие сходства и различия вы обнаруживаете? 7. Рассмотрите и обсудите повествовательные и визуальные аспекты Покахонтас как героиня детских книг, например, Ингри и Эдгара Парин Д'Олер (Покахонтас, 1946); Клайд Роберт Булла и Питер Берчард (Покахонтас и Незнакомцы, 1971) и Джозеф Брухак (Покахонтас, 2003). 8. Образ «индийской принцессы» наиболее тесно связан с Покахонтас, но есть и другие женские фигуры из числа коренных народов, которые играли похожие роли. Изучите фигуру Сакагавеа в истории культуры США, мемориал культуры и кинематографических репрезентаций (например, в The Far Horizons, 1955). 9. Сравните изображения Покахонтас и Малинче с точки зрения их символические «карьеры». Какие различия и сходства вы можете найти? 10. Как связан роман Арно Шмидта 1953 года "Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas" к американскому мифу? 128 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ 10. БИБЛИОГРАФИЯ Процитированные работы Аллен, Пола Ганн. Покахонтас: знахарка, шпион, предприниматель, дипломат. Нью-Йорк: Харпер, 2003. -. «Покахонтас - своему английскому мужу, Джону Рольфу». Жизнь - смертельная болезнь: Собрание стихов 1962–1995. Альберкерке: Вест-Энд, 1997. 6-7. -. Священный обруч: восстановление женственности в традициях американских индейцев. Бостон: Маяк, 1986. Аватар. Реж. Джеймс Кэмерон. 20th Century Fox, 2009. Бэнкрофт, Джордж. История колонизации Соединенных Штатов. Vol. 1. Бостон: Литтл и Браун, 1841 год. Барбур, Филипп. Покахонтас и ее мир. Бостон: Хоутон, 1969. Барингер, Сандра. «Пленница?» Переписывание Покахонтас в трех Современные индейские романы ». Исследования в литературе американских индейцев: Журнал Ассоциации изучения американских индейцев Литература 11.3 (1999): 42-63. Баркер, Джеймс Нельсон. Индийская принцесса, или La Belle Sauvage. Филадельфия: Т. и Г. Палмер, 1808. Барнс, Шарлотта. Лесная царевна Или два века назад: пьесы, проза, и Поэзия. Филадельфия: Батлер, 1848 г.Барт, Джон. Фактор сорняков. Город-сад: Даблдей, 1960. Белкнап, Джереми. Американская биография: или исторический отчет о них Люди, известные в Америке как авантюристы, государственные деятели, Философы, богословы, воины, авторы и другие замечательные персонажи. Осмысление изложения событий, связанных с их жизнью и Действия. Vol. 1. Бостон: Томас, 1794. Брэдстрит, Энн. «Моему дорогому и любящему мужу». Работы Анны Брэдстрит. Эд. Жаннин Хенсли. Предисловие Адриенн Рич. Кембридж: Гарвардский университет, 1967. 225. Брум, Джон. По-ка-хонтас, или Нежный дикарь. 1855. Драмы из Американский театр, 1762–1909. Эд. Ричард Муди. Кливленд: Мир, 1966. 397-421. Брухак, Джозеф. Покахонтас. Бостон: Хоутон, 2003. Булла, Клайд Роберт и Питер Берчард. Покахонтас и незнакомцы. Новый Йорк: T.Y. Кроуэлл, 1971. Бушмен, Клаудия Л. Америка открывает Колумб: как итальянский исследователь Стал американским героем. Ганновер: UP Новой Англии, 1992. 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Альтернативная Америка: чтение довоенной политической культуры. Чикаго: Университет Чикаго P, 1986. северное солнце, нила. «Глупые вопросы». Возвращение подарка: Поэзия и проза из Первый фестиваль коренных писателей Северной Америки. Эд. Джозеф Брухак. Тусон: U of Arizona P, 1994. 217-18. Опферманн, Сюзанна. «Лидия Мария Чайлд, Джеймс Фенимор Купер и Кэтрин Мария Седжвик: диалог о расе, культуре и поле ». Мягкий Каноны: американские писательницы и мужские традиции. Эд. Карен Л. Kilcup. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999. 27-47. Полдинг, Джеймс Кирк. Письма с юга: Северянин. Vol. 1. Новый Йорк: Харпер, 1835. «Покахонтас, половинчатая и полнополая: почти пустое означающее и Американская иконография ». Американские исследования в Университете Вирджинии. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/poca/POC_race.html. 19 августа 2013 г. Покахонтас. Реж. Майк Габриэль и Эрик Голдберг. Буэна-Виста, 1995. 132 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Покупки, Сэмюэл. Hakluytus Posthumus или покупает свои Pilgrimes: Contayning «История мира в морских путешествиях и путешествиях по земле» англичан.1625. Vol. 19. Глазго: МакЛехоз, 1905. Куинси, Джордж. Покахонтас при дворе Якова I и дневники чокто. Лирихорд, 2008. Куинн, Вернон. Захватывающие приключения капитана Джона Смита. Нью-Йорк: Фредерик А. Стоукс, 1928 год. Робертсон, Карен. «Первый пленник: Похищение Покахонтас». Женщины, Насилие и английская литература эпохи Возрождения: Очерки в честь Пола Йоргенсена. Эд. Линда Вудбридж и Шэрон Билер. Темпе: Центр Аризоны исследований Средневековья и Возрождения, 2003. 73–100. Рольфе, Джон. Письмо от Джона Рольфа. Рассказы из ранней Вирджинии, 1606-1625 гг. Эд. Лион Гардинер Тайлер. Нью-Йорк: Scribner’s, 1907. 240–44. -. Истинное отношение штата Вирджиния Лефте сэра Томаса Дейла Найта в Май Прошлый 1616. 1617. 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Бостон: Эстес и Лориат, 1881. 274. Новый мир. Реж. Терренс Малик. New Line Cinema, 2005 год. Theweleit, Клаус. «Menschliche Drohnen:« Аватар », номинирован на премию« Оскар », ist ein perverser Film ». Spiegel 9 (2010): 132-33. -. «От тебя у меня жар»: Арно Шмидт, Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas: Die Sexualität schreiben nach WW II. Франкфурт-на-Майне: Штремфельд / Ротер Штерн, 1999 г. Тиллотсон, Кристин. «Мультфильмы и индейцы: Дисней выдумал факты, чтобы превратиться в индейцев» Героиня в Everbabe ». Миннеаполис Стар и Трибьюн 13 (1995): C8. Тилтон, Роберт С. Покахонтас: Эволюция американского рассказа. Кембридж: Кембриджский университет, 1994. Тернер Стронг, Полина. «Играя в Индию в 1990-х: Покахонтас и Индеец в шкафу ». Голливудские индейцы: изображение аборигенов Американец в кино: расширенное издание. 2-е изд. Эд. Питер С. Роллинз и Джон Э. Коннор. Лексингтон: Университет Кентукки, 2003. 187-205. Ури Абрамс, Энн. Паломники и Покахонтас: противоборствующие мифы Америки Источник. Боулдер: Вествью, 1999. Ульманн, Маргарет. Покахонтас: Конкурс. Бостон: Poet Lore, 1912. Визенор, Джеральд. Беглые позы: сцены отсутствия и присутствия коренных американцев. Линкольн: Университет Небраски, 1998. -. Наследники Колумба. Ганновер: Wesleyan UP, 1991. -. Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories. Ганновер: Wesleyan UP, 1991. Weatherston, Розмари. «Когда пробуждаются словари сна. информатор из числа туземцев ». Post Identity 1.1 (1997): 113-44. Вебстер, Ной. Американская подборка уроков чтения и разговорной речи: Рассчитано на то, чтобы улучшить ум и вкус молодежи: на что Существуют префиксные правила в красноречии и инструкции по выражению принципала Passion of the Mind: Быть третьей частью Грамматического института Английский язык. Хартфорд: Хадсон и Гудвин, 1797. Вудворд, Грейс Стил. Покахонтас. Норман: Университет Оклахомы, 1976. 134 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ Молодой, Филип. «Мать всех нас: новый взгляд на Покахонтас». Кеньон Обзор 24 (1962): 391-415. Дальнейшее чтение Аллен, Пола Ганн. Бабушки света: справочник знахарок. Бостон: Маяк, 1991.Баркер, Фрэнсис, изд. Европа и другие: материалы конференции в Эссексе по социологии литературы, июль 1984 г. Colchester: U of Essex P, 1985. Биркль, Кармен. «Межкультурные интерфейсы в визуальных представлениях Покахонтас». Межкультурная Америка. Эд. Альфред Хорнунг. Гейдельберг: Зима, 2007. 239-56. Кори, Марк Э. «Романтическая Америка: размышления о Покахонтас в современном мире». Немецкая художественная литература ». German Quarterly 62.3 (1989): 320-28. Деринг, Тобиас. «Покахонтас / Ребекка». Figuren der / des Dritten: Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume. Эд. Клаудиа Брегер и Тобиас Деринг. Амстердам: Родопы, 1998. 179-209. Флетчер, Джон Гулд. Джон Смит, также Покахонтас. Нью-Йорк: Брентано, 1928 г. Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. От Девы до Диснейленда: природа и ее Недовольство в США вчера и сегодня. Амстердам: Родопи, 2001. Яловиц, Алан Дж. «Дочери Пенелопы: традиции и инновации в Американские эпосы среди женщин ». Подходы к англо-американским женщинам Эпос, 1621-1982 гг. Эд. Бернард Швейцер. Берлингтон: Ashgate, 2006. 141-58. Джозеф, Бетти. «Повтор (игра) Крузо / Покахонтас: Circum-Atlantic Stagings в Американка. Критика 42.3 (2000): 317-35. Кирван, Джеймс. «Путешествие постмодернистов в природу: от Филона Александрийского. Покахонтас и обратно, через Жан-Франсуа Лиотара ». Херцогенрат, из целинной земли 33-52. Купперман, Карен Ордал. Джеймстаунский проект. Кембридж: Гарвард UP, 2007 г. Киора, Сабина и Уве Швагмайер, ред. Возвращение к Покахонтас: Kulturwissenschaftliche Ansichten eines Motivkomplexes. Билефельд: Aisthesis, 2005. Моран, Рэйчел Ф. Межрасовая близость: регулирование расы и романтики. Чикаго: Чикаго, 2001. Моссикер, Фрэнсис. Покахонтас: жизнь и легенда. Лондон: Голланц, 1976 г. ПОКАХОНТАС И МИФ О ТРАНСАТЛАНТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛЮБВИ | 135 Нил, Эдвард Д. Покахонтас и ее товарищи: глава из истории лондонской компании Virginia Company. Олбани: Джоэл Манселл, 1869. Дарлингтон Цифровая библиотека. http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/books.html. 8 марта 2010 г. Преда, Роксана. «Возвращение к« Ангелу в экосистеме »: Покахонтас Диснея и этика постмодерна ». Херцогенрат, из целинной земли 317-40. Шекель, Сьюзен. «Приручение драмы завоевания: Покахонтас Баркера» на популярной сцене ». American Transcendental Quarterly 10.3 (1996): 219-30. Сандквист, Асебрит. Покахонтас и Ко: вымышленная женщина из американских индейцев в Литература девятнадцатого века: исследование метода. Атлантическое нагорье: Гуманитарные науки Pr. Междунар., 1987. Цукерман, Майкл. «Фальсификация идентичности в ранней Америке». William and Mary Quarterly 34.2 (1977): 183-214. Глава III. Паломники и пуритане и миф об обетованной земле 1. ПОЧЕМУ ПАЛОМНИКИ И ПУРИТАНЕ? [Пуритане] считали американский рай воплощением пророчество из Священного Писания. САКВАН БЕРКОВИЧ, ПУРИТАНСКОЕ ПРОИСХОЖДЕНИЕ САМОСТОЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ АМЕРИКИ Вряд ли будет преувеличением сказать, что исход является одним из центральных событий Америки. темы. WERNER SOLLORS, ЗА ПРЕДЕЛАМИ ЭТНИКИ У нас есть последний шанс сделать это реальным Чтобы торговать этими крыльями на некоторых колесах Поднимитесь назад, небеса ждут на рельсах О, возьми меня за руку Сегодня вечером мы выезжаем на помощь Земле Обетованной. БРЮС СПРИНГСТИН, «ГРОЗОВАЯ ДОРОГА» Паломники и пуритане, поселившиеся в Новой Англии в первой половине XVII в. века, прибыв в Америку немного позже, чем поселенцы Джеймстауна, Вирджиния - главные герои основополагающего мифа, который сохранился столетия как история об истоках Америки, характеризующихся религиозностью, идеализм, жертвенность и утопическое видение, основанное на теологии. Многие ученые считал пилигримов и пуритан Новой Англии «первыми американцами» в дух того, что позже переросло в полноценное понятие американского исключительность. Часто их противопоставляли поселенцам в Вирджиния, которых считали «авантюристами», якобы заинтересованными в материальной выгоде. только (ср. Брин, пуритане), тогда как пилигримы и пуритане, как утверждалось, пришли по духовным причинам и считали себя религиозными беженцами (ср. 138 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ там же.; Токвиль, Демократия Том. 1 31-32). Эти религиозные диссиденты из Таким образом, Англия часто считалась выше в моральном отношении людей из Вирджинии. Компания в ранней американистской науке и «колыбель американской цивилизации» часто располагался в их ранних поселениях в Новой Англии. Мораль Однако праведность паломников и пуритан вызывает споры. Часто они в неблагоприятном и стереотипном отношении представлялись как откровеннонабожный, стоический, ограниченный, нетерпимый и даже фанатичный. Хотя они требовали сами имеют право на несогласие с ортодоксами англиканской церкви, они, в свою очередь, как утверждается, отрицали тех, кто не придерживался их собственных доктрин такое же право на свободу вероисповедания. И пока рассказ о происхождении сказал о Вирджинии бросили Покахонтас, коренную женщину, на главную роль «Массачусетс миф был основан на патриархальной иерархии, хотя женщины составляли относительно большой процент населения Плимута »(Ури Абрамс, Паломники xv). Кем были паломники Плимута и пуритане Массачусетского залива Колония? Это были две группы английских религиозных диссидентов, находившихся под влиянием Реформация, в частности кальвинизм, отвернувшаяся не только от Католик, но также из англиканской церкви и стремился основать новую "Святую Церковь". Содружество в Северной Америке. Они считали Америку своим Обетованным Земля, таким образом принимая библейское писание как пророчество и ожидая его исполнения в их собственная прожитая реальность в Северной Америке. В истории и науке сроки «Паломники» и «пуритане» иногда используются как синонимы, и это смешение указывает на то, что у этих двух групп было много общего. По причинам исторического точность, однако, мы должны быть точными в терминологии: Паломники были религиозными сепаратистами, которые достигли Америки в 1620 году на борту корабля. Мэйфлауэр с Уильямом Брэдфордом (1590–1657); при плавании за «новым мир », они получили землю и поддержку от компании Вирджиния, однако, приземлившись дальше на север на побережье, они «пропустили» Вирджинию - возможно, намеренно так - и основал Плимут, как гласит легенда, на месте скалы. В пределах несколько лет в колонии проживало 2500 человек, и она содержала довольно строгий общественная жизнь. Пуритане - изначально уничижительный термин, они не относились к себе как к таковым - прибыли в 1630 году на борту «Арбеллы» и несколько других кораблей под управлением Джона Винтропа (1588-1649) после того, как они получил право основать новую колонию от Карла I и основал город Бостон, долгое время остававшийся центром штата Массачусетс Колония залива. Таким образом, пилигримы и пуритане изначально сформировали разные сообщества, но взаимодействовали друг с другом (а также с коренным населением). Так называемое Великое переселение народов (1630-40 гг.) Принесло много переселенцев из ПАЛОМНИКИ И ПУРИТАНЕ И МИФ ОБ ОБЕЩАННОЙ ЗЕМЛЕ | 139 От Англии до колонии Массачусетского залива, которая вскоре превзошла численностью населения Брэдфорда. Плимутская колония, безусловно. К 1640 году здесь насчитывалось около 10.000 поселенцев. Три поколения спустя, в 1691 году, английская колониальная политика в конечном итоге объединила два колонии в так называемую провинцию Массачусетского залива. До тех пор жители обеих колоний пережили формирующий опыт, который ушел, поскольку многие ученые утверждают, что «постоянный след в американской истории» (Холл, «Введение» 1); эти знаки наиболее очевидны в национальном мифологическом репертуаре США. Иллюстрация 1: Посадка Мэйфлауэра (Историческая открытка) Smith’s Inc., Mayflower, 1620, Плимут, Массачусетс (1929). Далее я реконструирую генезис мифа об американском происхождении в пилигримы и пуритане и представление об Америке как обетованном библейском Земли были тесно связаны. Священная история евреев побег из рабства в Египте и обещанное им путешествие в новую землю by God - одно из самых сильных повествований иудео-христианской традиции. Это религиозное повествование было превращено в культурный миф путем переконфигурирования составляющие библейской истории - человеческие страдания в рабстве, милосердие Бога для угнетенных, божественное провидение, священное путешествие в Землю Обетованную, и притязания на данные Богом права - в мощный рассказ американского начала (ср. Мазур и Маккарти, Бог 25-6), что составляет ядро основополагающий миф Соединенных Штатов. Чтобы установить хронологию этого процесса, я сначала обращусь к ранней истории Плимута и Массачусетса 140 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУЗаливные колонии и рассказы об истоках, сформированных в 17 веке. постреформационный дискурс пуританства. Чтобы понять этот дискурс и его развитие в годы с 1620 (высадка Mayflower) и 1630 (высадка Арбеллы) до 1691 г. (конец большей части автономии колоний) от британской короны), необходимо учитывать, что Америка была воображали в Европе как утопию со времен Возрождения и, таким образом, казались очевидное место, чтобы вообразить и основать новое утопическое общество в начале 17 век. Во-вторых, я обращусь к основному периоду Соединенных Штатов. Государств и узнать о роли утопического наследия пуритан и Паломники в этом контексте. В-третьих, я прослежу, как после обретения Америкой независимости история паломников и пуритан стала фундаментальной историей, превратился из регионального повествования о Новой Англии в национальный миф, и решающий в этом. В-четвертых, я прослежу миф до 19 и 20 гг. столетий и посмотрите на ревизионистские, а также на положительные ссылки и представления. В то время как миф защищался против альтернатив с Юга, С запада, из-за Атлантики и в контексте Гражданской Война, была довольно успешной в преодолении других конкурирующих нарративов национального генезис, топос Земли Обетованной в то же время использовался как форма культурная критика с целью расширения прав и возможностей групп, которые скорее попали в ад чем их Земля Обетованная в Соединенных Штатах. В первую очередь среди тех группы были афроамериканскими рабами, в религиозной культуре которых он из-за его освободительной тяги. И тогда как модернисты в первые десятилетия ХХ века критиковали пуританское наследие, миф о на Землю Обетованную одновременно претендовали иммигранты и этнические писатели в религиозная или полурелигиозная мода. В области американистики миф был создан учеными в этап становления дисциплины в 1930-х гг. как доминирующая генеалогическая повествования, и его можно охарактеризовать как «миф, который сделал американские исследования», но подвергались основательным (и длительным) вызовам в трудах новых американистов с 1980-х гг. Последние испытали влияние социальных протестных движений. 1960-х и 1970-х годов, которые оспаривали предвзятость белых мужчин и исключительность телеологический импульс этого основополагающего повествования. По следам американского мифа Земли Обетованной на протяжении веков, мы можем легко увидеть, что она была один из самых распространенных национальных мифов Америки. Будь то утверждают, что поселения пилигримов и пуритан содержали семена Американская демократия по-прежнему остается предметом споров. Тем не менее, артикуляция этот миф не только способствовал идеализированному описанию американской истории, но также, как мы увидим, использовали троп обетованной земли как средство радикального культурного инакомыслия. ПАЛОМНИКИ И ПУРИТАНЕ И МИФ ОБ ОБЕЩАННОЙ ЗЕМЛЕ | 141 2. АМЕРИКА КАК УТОПИЯ: ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ Примечательно, что вскоре после его открытия Америка фактически стала местом для разнообразие воображаемых […] утопических построений. ДЖЕК П. ГРИН, ИНТЕЛЛЕКТУАЛЬНОЕ СТРОИТЕЛЬСТВО АМЕРИКИ Amerika, Du hast es besser als unser Kontinent, der alte. ИОГАНН ВОЛЬФГАНГ В. ГЕТЕ, КСЕНИЕН В так называемую эпоху открытий и исследований европейцы часто представляли себе Америка как место утопических сообществ, объединяющих «возникающие ожидания об Америке »с« последующим развитием утопическоготрадиция; " это парадигматически сделано в «Утопии» Томаса Мора (1516 г.), в автор которой «обнаружил Утопию в Атлантике и использовал опытные путешественник только что вернулся из путешествия с Веспуччи из «неизвестных народов» и земли Нового Света »как его центральный литературный прием (Грин, Интеллектуальная Строительство 26). В начале 16 века ряд других писателей также обнаружил их видение утопических обществ в Америке или ее окрестностях: Томмазо Кампанелла в Городе Солнца (1602), Иоганн Валентин Андреа в Христианополисе (1619) и Фрэнсис Бэкон в Новой Атлантиде (1624). Большинство из них имеют сильную религиозное измерение: Кампанелла предполагает, например, теократию, Андреа Протестантская (лютеранская) утопия; Бэкона - единственный среди канонических утопические тексты того времени, ставящие науку выше религии. Однако эти географические границы воображения не были подтверждены эмпирически; Европейские исследователи и путешественники не встречали чудесного утопии в Америке. Местные общины, с которыми они столкнулись в их глазах не представляли собой экстраординарные альтернативные образы жизни, достойные эмуляция; построенный их евроцентрическим взглядом как радикальное изменение, а не жизнеспособные альтернативы, коренные культуры Северной Америки казались бесполезными и хуже, чем в Европе. Коренные американцы считались быть едва человечным, поскольку «язычники» не готовы к христианизации, их можно было принудительно удалить, чтобы освободить место для пришельцев. Таким образом, европейцы все чаще заменяли свои надежды обнаружить утопию в Америка с размышлениями о том, как построить там себя: еще до Паломники и пуритане поселились в «новом мире», будущие английские поселенцы - нет. более длинная «мысль о том, чтобы найти существующую утопию, но основать ее в относительно «пустые» и привлекательные пространства Северной Америки »(Грин, Интеллектуал Строительство 51). 142 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ На протяжении 17-18 веков многие религиозные сепаратистские группы существовали в Англии и в Европе в целом, многие из которых мигрировали в Америка. Как отмечает Марк Холлоуэй, «Европа даже в XVI веке была полна […] сект. Преследования, какими бы жестокими они ни были, не уменьшили их пыл. А когда Америка была колонизирована, огромное количество из них эмигрировало в поиск религиозной свободы »(Heavens 18). Таким образом, паломники и пуритане были самыми ранними и, безусловно, наиболее известными из этих групп, но означает единственные. Другие религиозные группы, стремившиеся создать свои собственные «Небеса на земле» (ср. Там же) в Северной Америке были, например, Уильям Пенн (1644- 1718) и квакеры, Женское общество Иоганна Келпиуса (1673-1708) в Wilderness и «Дункерс» Иоганна Конрада Бейселя (1691-1768), которые все поселился в Пенсильвании; Мать Энн Ли (1736-1784) и Шейкеры, которые поселился в северной части штата Нью-Йорк; и моравы, пришедшие в Северную Америку в 1735 г. как пиетистские и реформистские миссионеры и основал Уинстон-Салем в Северная Каролина. Ни одна из этих групп, многие из которых до сих пор являются частью богатых множество деноминаций в Соединенных Штатах сегодня - когда-либо были близки к тому, чтобы быть символически могущественны, как пилигримы и пуритане, единственные религиозных групп, чтобы сформировать краеугольный камень основополагающего повествования о «новом мир ». Ни одно из множества утопических сообществ, число которых достигло своего исторический апогей в 1840-х и 1950-х годах, а к концу XIX в. века, когда-либо вызывали такое же восхищение, как и первые поселенцы Новой Англии. На протяжении XIX и XX веков представление об Америке как об утопии постоянно менялось. оставалась очень привлекательной для различных групп и новичков и была модифицированы и присвоены согласно их соответствующим программам; это больше недавнее видение Америки как Земли Обетованной все еще формируется и продвигается религиозная риторика паломников и пуритан. ПАЛОМНИКИ И ПУРИТАНЕ И МИФ ОБ ОБЕЩАННОЙ ЗЕМЛЕ | 143 3. ПАЛОМНИКИ В АМЕРИКЕ: УИЛЬЯМА БРЭДФОРДА С ПЛИМУТСКОЙ ПЛАНТАЦИИ[Не получив обещаний, но увидев их издалека, и были убедил их, обнял их и признался, что они пришельцы и паломники на земле. ПАВЛ АПОСТОЛ, «ПОСЛАНИЕ ЕВРЕЯМ» Идеальные сообщества всегда формировались движениями меньшинств. МАРК ХОЛЛОУЭЙ, НЕБО НА ЗЕМЛЕ Джей Парини выбрал «Хронику Плимутской плантации» Уильяма Брэдфорда как одну из «тринадцати книг, которые изменили Америку» (см. его книгу того же [суб-] заглавие). Брэдфорд в своей книге действительно много сделал для «создания» Америки в соответствии с Обетованием. Земля пилигримов и тем самым резко изменила Америку, которую он найденный. «Плантация Плимута» - это ключевой текст об истоках «нового мира», саморепрезентация. опыта паломников, важнейший исторический источник и видный основной текст Соединенных Штатов. Его автором был самый единственный важный человек в поселении пилигримов в Плимуте: Брэдфорд был губернатор Плимутской колонии с 1620 года почти постоянно до самой смерти в 1657 г. и написал историю колонии, стремясь «через свою историю к сохранить как запись, так и факт отдельной идентичности Плимута »(Delbanco и Хеймерт, «Уильям Брэдфорд» 51). Плимутской плантации охватывает период с 1606 по 1646 год и состоит из двух томов: Первая книга описывает история паломников до их высадки в «новом мире» (1606-1620 гг.), Книга Два рассказывает о первых годах пилигримов в Плимуте (1620–1646). Брэдфорда Работа сохранилась как важный документ о Северной Америке 17 века. Конечно, мы не знаем и не можем реконструировать, в какой степени Отчет Брэдфорда заслуживает доверия; тем не менее, для наших целей очень важно изучить как он описал и представил предприятие Пилигримов как исход из Англии в Землю Обетованную, и тем самым установил мощный фоном для толкования раннего европейского поселения в Северной Америке. Тем не менее, в то время как самоуверенный рассказ Джона Смита о своем опыте и наблюдения в Вирджинии и его рассказ об основании Джеймстауна были немедленно доступный для его современников в печати, историография Уильяма Брэдфорда, написана между 1620 и 1647 годами, была напечатана только в 1856 году. немедленная литературная сенсация - не в последнюю очередь из-за добавленного пассажира Брэдфорда список, который, наконец, позволил американцам буквально проследить свою родословную к Mayflower, усилия, которые ранее основывались в основном на 144 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ домыслы. До публикации текста Брэдфорда лишь несколько священнослужителей и ученые имели доступ к рукописи - не в последнюю очередь потому, что она пропала в Война за независимость и вновь всплыла в лондонской библиотеке в 1850-х годах - и тем не менее, «именно из этих намеренно избирательных и дидактических интерпретаций развился миф о пилигримах »(Ури Абрамс, Паломники 23). В целом ранний клерикальный историки рассматривали путешествие паломников из Европы в Америку как «Религиозная хиджра» (там же 24) и «в течение двух столетий это толкование колониального история преобладала и внесла большой вклад в миф о том, что первые поселенцы Массачусетс были набожными пуританами, иммигрировавшими, чтобы получить религиозную свободу », даже при том, что это «не совсем так, как это написал Брэдфорд» (там же). Фактически, когда мы исследуем текст Брэдфорда, мы часто обнаруживаем двусмысленность, сомнения, скептицизм и разочарование по поводу прогресса паломников в понимании их Земля Обетованная в Северной Америке. Тем не менее, во всех его мемуарах ключевой текст для исследования мифотворчества паломников, Брэдфорд продолжает ссылаться на библейские рассказ о Земле Обетованной, тем самым последовательно противопоставляя нынешнее угнетение и опасения по поводу обещания будущей свободы и спасения. В первой части повествование Брэдфорда повествует об испытаниях паломников. сначала переехал из Англии в Нидерланды, чтобы избежать преследований, а затем обратно в Англию, чтобы подготовиться к путешествию через Атлантику. Повествование таким образом начинается со страданий паломников во враждебной их среде. религиозные верования. По словам Брэдфорда, именно с Божьей помощью группа удается избежать своего тяжелого положения и сохранить свою веру и сообщество. В течение их путешествие в Северную Америку, особое провидение Бога открывается Паломники разными способами, например избавившись от опасности и ужаса сильный шторм. Им также показаны последствия богохульства и безбожия. поведение, например в несколько резком и весьма показательном эпизоде ​​о молодой моряк на борту корабля, который часто издевался над паломниками во время их путешествие: Был один дерзкий и очень непристойный молодой человек, один из матросов, который заставил его тем более властным, который всегда беспокоил бедных людей в их болезнях, и ежедневно проклиная их ужасными проклятиями, и, не колеблясь, говорил им, что он надеялся помочь выбросить половину из них за борт до того, как они подошли к концу своего путешествия. Если он были нежно осуждены кем угодно, он ругался и ругался самым горьким образом. Но это понравилось Боже, прежде чем они перешли за половину моря, чтобы поразить молодого человека тяжелой болезнью, от чего он умер в отчаянии, и поэтому сам был первым, кого выбросили за борт. Таким образом, его проклятия обрушились на его голову, что поразило всех его товарищей, поскольку они увидели, что это было Справедливая рука Бога на нем. (Брэдфорд, Плимут 41) ПАЛОМНИКИ И ПУРИТАНЕ И МИФ ОБ ОБЕЩАННОЙ ЗЕМЛЕ | 145 Брэдфорд использует этот эпизод, чтобы (несколько самодовольно) проиллюстрировать Божье провидение в направляя паломников в их священное путешествие в Землю Обетованную и позволяя гибнут те, кто хочет навредить своему прогрессу. Дух товарищества в Бог завершает так называемый Мэйфлауэрский договор, который был составлен и подписанный 41 мужчиной на борту «Мэйфлауэр», которые при этом написали новый «гражданский политический орган»: Во имя Бога, аминь. Мы, чьи имена подписаны, лояльные подданные нашей ужасный суверенный лорд, король Джеймс, милостью Божией Великобритании, Франка и Ирландия, король, защитник веры и т. Д., Взявший на себя обязательства во славу Бога, и продвижение христианской веры и честь нашего царя и страны, путешествие на посадку первая колония в северных частях Вирджинии, этим подарками торжественно и взаимно в присутствии Бога и друг друга заключаем завет и объединяемся в гражданская политическая организация, для нашего лучшего порядка и сохранения, а также для достижения целей вышесказанное и на основании настоящего Закона принимать, устанавливать и устанавливать такие справедливые и равные законы, указы, акты, конституции и должности, время от времени, как должно быть подходят и удобны для общего пользования Колонией, чему мы обещаем покорность и послушание. (Брэдфорд, Плимут, 49) Мэйфлауэрский договор - это коллективный речевой акт белой мужской элиты и прагматическая попытка определить тех Паломников, которые стремятся к своему Обетованному Высаживайтесь в Северной Америке как самостоятельную социальную единицу. Во многих аккаунтах есть идеализировал и мифологизировал этот договор как начало американской демократии, или даже как первая американская конституция (среди них Джорджа Бэнкрофта История США XIX века); но на самом деле он намеревался достичь полная противоположность: удерживать власть и власть в руках элиты, исключить из нее других поселенцев и туземцев, а также установить контроль над тем, как идеальное общество должно было выглядеть. Это было одновременно самоутверждающим заявлением о лояльность, а также автономия сепаратистов. В книге «Плантация Плимута» Уильям Брэдфорд описывает прибытие в Обетованное Земля, на которой, пишет он, они пали на колени и благословили Бога Небес, который перевел их через огромный и яростный океан и доставил им от всех опасностей и невзгод, чтобы снова встать на ноги и твердая земля, их собственная стихия (ср. 42-3). Место поселения названо Плимут, после того, как они отправились в Англию. Тем не менее, этот сайт сначала не выглядят вообще как Земля обетованная. Брэдфорд, по сути, сравнивает себя стоящим на дюны Кейп-Код до Моисея, стоящего на горе Фасга, но под разными и более трудные обстоятельства, так как паломники не могли уйти 146 | МИФЫ, КОТОРЫЕ СОЗДАЛИ АМЕРИКУ до вершины Фасги, чтобы увидеть из этой пустыни страну более подходящую, чтобы прокормить их надежды; как бы они ни обратили свои взоры (кроме восхода к Небесам!), они не мог получить утешения от любых внешних объектов. Лето закончилось, все перевернулось на них обветренное лицо; и вся страна, полная лесов и зарослей, представил дикий и дикий вид. (там же 43) Thus, it is still a big leap from the “savage wilderness” to God’s “heavenly kingdom” (ibid.), and it is this ambiguity – the radical discrepancy between dogma and experience, between ideological construction and empirical reality – that continues to preoccupy Bradford even as the vision of America as the Promised Land for the Pilgrims propels his narrative. This kind of interpretation of God’s will and intentionality is characteristic of both Pilgrim and Puritan diction; the world and every detail in it become intelligible only as signs of God’s divine plan. Bradford in this way also justifies the Pilgrims’ sense of entitlement toward the ‘new world,’ which is “fruitful and fit for habitation, though devoid of all civilized inhabitants and given over to savages, who range up and down, differing little from the wild beasts themselves” (ibid. 13). Whereas Bradford recognizes the Natives at least nominally and acknowledges their presence even when denigrating their way of life as “brutish,” another text from the first half of the 17th century claims more drastically that the extinction of the indigenous population was God’s work, who by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives by the smallpox a little before we went thither […] [made] room for us there;” to the anonymous author, this revealed how “the good hand of God favoured our beginnings” (New England’s First Fruits 65). It becomes apparent in these sources that the Pilgrims’ notions of the Promised Land and of God’s divine scheme served to justify and legitimate the displacement and destruction of other peoples. Yet, apart from his condescending attitude toward the indigenous population and despite descriptions of early English-Native conflicts and skirmishes, Bradford overall portrays the interaction with the Natives as relatively peaceful, which is mainly due to two Native figures: Squanto and Massasoit. Squanto is introduced as a Native American who upon their arrival “came boldly among them, and spoke to them in broken English, which they could well understand, but were astonished at it” (Bradford, Of Plymouth 51). Squanto, the only survivor of the Patuxet tribe, spoke English because of his previous captivity on board an English ship and a seafaring life that had brought him several times across the Atlantic, to the Mediterranean Sea, all the way up to Newfoundland, and eventually back to New England – just in time to greet the Pilgrims. His (mostly PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 147 involuntary) geographic movements were quite exceptional at that time, and the Pilgrims therefore marveled at an English-speaking Native. Squanto appears as an “eccentric native,” as a “disconcertingly hybrid ‘native’ met at the ends of the earth – strangely familiar, and different precisely in that unprocessed familiarity” (Clifford, “Travelling” 19). He carved out a space for himself as the mediator between the culture of the newcomers and that of the Natives and was extremely helpful to the Pilgrims in showing them many things they did not know, because despite their claim to be culturally, religiously, and morally superior to the indigenous population, they were in fact utterly helpless and disoriented. From Squanto they learned how to survive that first long winter – after all, they had arrived at Cape Cod in November. Not surprisingly perhaps, the Pilgrims took Squanto’s presence not as an effect of the globalizing force and violence of colonialism of which they themselves were a part, but primarily as another token of God’s providence, which never ceased to amaze them: […] Squanto stayed with them, and was their interpreter, and became a special instrument sent of God for their good, beyond their expectation. He showed them how to plant their corn, where to take fish and other commodities, and guided them to unknown places, and never left them till he died. (Bradford, Of Plymouth 52) Whereas Squanto was a native informant, Massasoit was the chief of the Wampanoags, who lived in the area where the Pilgrims settled. Massasoit from the beginning met regularly with the Pilgrims and initiated and negotiated a peace treaty in 1621, the first of its kind. Little did he know that those newcomers felt they were entitled to his people’s land on the basis of their interpretation of a story in a text collection compiled thousands of years before their arrival in America. Yet, the pilgrims managed to live peacefully with the Wampanoags for the first 50 years, while the nearby Puritans and the Virginians to the south were already fighting the local indigenous peoples over land and resources. The peace agreement between the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims lasted until 1675, when an armed conflict often referred to as King Philip’s War broke out. But, to return to Bradford’s account of English-Native relations: as already mentioned he describes them mostly positively, yet at the same time he and his fellow Pilgrims are extremely condescending toward the Natives. For all the good intentions to give a balanced, even sympathetic portrayal of the indigenous population, Bradford repeatedly echoes Columbus’s representation of the American natives in his first letter from the ‘new world;’ a milder and more strongly religiously invested but not altogether different colonial hermeneutics emanates from Bradford’s text. The religious discourse of the Pilgrims is permeated by cultural assump- 148 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA tions of their own (i.e., white) superiority; as we can see here, religion does not transcend (English) culture – rather, it is part of it. This is also evident in the writings of other Pilgrims; Edward Winslow for instance writes in a letter on December 11, 1621: We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us, very loving and ready to pleasure us. We often go to them, and they come to us. […] Yea, it hath pleased God so to possess the Indians with a fear of us, and love unto us, that not only the greatest king amongst them, called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us […]. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are people without any religion or knowledge of any God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just. The men and women go naked, only a skin about their middles. (qtd. in Young, Chronicles 51) Due to the lore that has developed around the experience of the Pilgrims’ first winter in North America as well as due to the absence of major hostilities in the early decades of the Plymouth Colony, the Pilgrims’ settlement is often connected to notions of Native hospitality and peaceful intercultural relations – notions which inspired then-President of the United States Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863 in order to commemorate that very first ‘Thanksgiving’ which took place in Plymouth in 1621. However, Bradford himself does not dwell on this event in his text, which has only been fleshed out and embellished by subsequent writers. Lincoln in his efforts to promote an ideology of peace and domestic harmony at a time when the ‘United’ States were at war with each other (cf. Seelye, Memory’s Nation 17) chose Thanksgiving as a day of commemoration, yet the ambiguity of Thanksgiving in the ideology of the Pilgrims is apparent: they gave thanks to God for their survival but hardly to their Native fellow men and women, who, they believed, acted not of their own accord but merely as instruments of God’s will. In Bradford’s text, the world is interpreted according to typological doctrine and biblical literalism in an often futile attempt to brush aside or smooth over ambiguity and uncertainty. The second volume of Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, which accounts for the settlement’s development in the early decades of its existence, is imbued with a rhetoric of damnation as well as reward; it is permeated by a sense of sinfulness and reveals that the colony was embroiled in tremendous generational conflict. It is here that Bradford’s writings show a deep ambivalence about the analogy of the Promised Land. He increasingly realizes a “failure of Plymouth to fulfill its original purpose as a selfless community,” and also makes note of “the PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 149 concurrent completion of the Reformation through Cromwell’s victories in Old England” (Delbanco and Heimert, “William Bradford” 51). Bradford implies a causal connection – that “Plymouth’s congregational polity informed Massachusetts Bay and that the example of the larger colony in turn inspired the ecclesiastical revolution in England” (ibid.) – yet he also thinks that the colony is in decline because of its consolidation with the Puritan community, and nostalgically reminisces about the early ‘golden days’ of Plymouth, and even about the Dutch exile in Leyden. In revisiting the early days of the colony, Bradford not only chronicles history but also reminds his brethren of their vision and the strength of their faith, which he seeks to re-invigorate by calling to mind the divine signs which assured the Pilgrims of God’s providence. Bradford “seems intent on showing what might have been if a deeper devotion of all to all had prevailed,” and he is anxious that a great “change” will come over the colony, which he finds now devoid of “its former glory” (Rosenmeier, “With My” 100). Late in his life, William Bradford taught himself Hebrew to be able to read “that most ancient language and holy tongue, in which the Law and Oracles of God were writ” (qtd. in ibid.). About his Hebrew studies, he writes that “I am refreshed to have seen some glimpse hereof; (as Moyses saw the land of Canan a farr off)” (qtd. in ibid.). The Promised Land of William Bradford in the 1650s is no longer America but the Hebrew Scriptures, one might conclude. (Re)turning to the holy text more than thirty years after his arrival in North America, Bradford prepares for his own “resurrect[ion] to new and literal life” (ibid. 106) in a Promised Land not of this world: he dies in 1657. His history of the Pilgrims today appears to be much more complicated and ambivalent than has often been acknowledged, and moreover has in fact been straightened out and idealized by generations of religious scholars and historians, and by Americans who have celebrated Plymouth Rock – the site where the Pilgrims supposedly first set foot on American soil – as a symbol of ‘new world’ beginnings. Bradford sailed to the ‘new world’ in order to find/found a Promised Land, yet the high expectations in this self-proclaimed ‘exceptional’ community remained unfulfilled. As much as Bradford insisted that God had “preserved their spirits” through “crosses, troubles, fears, wants, and sorrowes” in the establishment of the colony (Of Plymouth 381), the whole enterprise ultimately seemed somehow incomplete, and dubious in its consequences for all parties involved – it was as if the Pilgrims had never really left the biblical wilderness and were perpetually stuck in a painful moment of delay in which the Promised Land was beckoning in the distance but could still somehow never be reached. 150 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 4. THE PURITANS AND THEIR PROMISED LAND We shall be as a city upon a hill. JOHN WINTHROP Hayle holy-land wherin our holy lord Hath planted his most true and holy word Hayle happye people who have dispossest ourselves of friend, an meanes, to find some rest For your poore wearied soules, opprest of late For Jesus-sake, with Envye, spight, and hate To yow that blessed promise truly’s given Of sure reward, which you’l receve in heaven. THOMAS TILLAM, “UPON THE FIRST SIGHT” What went you out to the wilderness to find? SAMUEL DANFORTH, “A BRIEF RECOGNITION” Whereas the history of the Pilgrims was primarily represented by William Bradford, there were many chroniclers, orators, and commentators among the Puritans. In fact, the New England Puritans “were highly self-conscious about their achievements and began interpreting themselves for posterity as soon as they arrived in the New World” (Morgan, Founding 3). In promotional tracts, sermons, histories, and autobiographical conversion narratives, the Puritans fashioned themselves as the founders of a model colony that realized God’s will. Whereas the Pilgrims had arrived in North America ten years earlier than the Puritans, “with the formation of the Massachusetts Bay Company and with the arrival on the scene of Governor John Winthrop in 1630, Massachusetts became the spearhead of Puritan emigration to the New World” (ibid. vii) – although not all of the Massachusetts settlers were Puritans in the strict sense of the term, and by far not all of them were members of the rather exclusive Puritan congregation. Aside from the aforementioned John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, Samuel Danforth, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather would also become influential Puritan theologians. New England Puritanism was not homogeneous though and cannot be interpreted monolithically; in fact, the experience of ‘America’ crucially transformed the Puritan religious dogma and increasingly led to conflicts among the Puritans about what their Promised Land should look like. PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 151 Illustration 2: Portrait of John Winthrop Unknown Artist, John Winthrop (ca. 1800). Though they were less radical dissenters than the Pilgrims, the Puritans too accepted neither the Pope nor the English King as religious authorities beside or above the Scriptures. Like the Pilgrims, the Puritans were strongly influenced by Calvinism’s doctrine of predestination, which contends that salvation can occur only through the grace of God and that the individual is responsible to God only. As a powerful reformist grassroots movement, Puritanism had been forced underground by the end of the 16th century, as it was considered an affront to England’s clergy and king; King James I (after whom Jamestown, Virginia, and the English translation of the Bible commonly referred to as the King James Bible have been named) supposedly threatened: “I will harry them out of the land” (qtd. in Schmidt, William Bradford 12), and his successor Charles I (crowned in 1625) was even less tolerant toward the Puritans. Unlike the Pilgrims, however, the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists but reformists; they believed that their New Jerusalem in North America was going to set an example that would be emulated on the other side of the Atlantic, allowing them eventually to return to a fundamentally changed and reformed England. Yet, even if the Puritans may have considered their sojourn in North America to be only temporary (as has been argued most famously by Perry Miller), ultimate- 152 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ly only 10 percent of the first settlers of the Great Migration ever went back to England. John Winthrop, who led the first group of Puritans to North America in 1630 (700 passengers on 11 ships), was a key figure in the founding of Massachusetts with a pronounced sense of self-importance, of which he has left ample evidence himself: “From the time he set foot on the Arbella until his death in 1649, he kept a journal, the historical purpose of which is suggested by the fact that after the first few days he refrained from using the first person singular and wrote of himself as ‘the governor’” (Morgan, Founding 174). Most famously, John Winthrop declared that the Puritans in the ‘new world’ would be “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630). His famous lay sermon (Winthrop was never ordained officially as a minister) laid out the terms of religious and social coexistence in the colony, a blueprint for the founding of a new community: For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us. (216) Winthrop’s use of the biblical topos of the heavenly city evokes the exceptionality of the Puritans as a model for others, if not mankind. He references Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus tells his followers “you are the light of the world” and “the salt of the earth.” Whereas Bradford likened himself to Moses leading his people out of bondage to the Promised Land, Winthrop refers to both Jesus and Moses in the closing passage of his sermon. While exhorting the Puritans with words from the Sermon on the Mount, he admonishes them with references to Moses’s farewell to the people of Israel “to love the Lord our God and love one another” (Winthrop Papers 295), so that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whether wee goe to possesse it: But if our heartes shall turne away soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other Gods […] we shall surely perishe out of the good Land whether wee passe over this vast Sea to possesse it. (ibid.) Included in Winthrop’s vision of the holy community is also a kind of social contract. He likens the Puritans’ future civil society to an organism by describing it as “knit together in this worke as one man,” and states that its aim is to “par- PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 153 take of each other’s strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe.” “The care of the public,” Winthrop preached, “must oversway all private respects” (ibid.). Winthrop’s vision of communal life in the Promised Land of North America is characterized by hope, harmony, and religious freedom as well as by discipline and social control. Similar to Bradford’s text, Winthrop’s sermon was published rather late: For two centuries, the sermon circulated in various manuscript versions; upon its first publication, by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1848, it became known as the classic statement of the Puritans’ understanding of their place in history, their mission, and their ideals. (Delbanco, “John Winthrop” 3) The Exodus and Promised Land rhetoric runs through much of Puritan writing as a kind of “Colonial Puritan hermeneutics” (Bercovitch, Puritan Origins 186) throughout the 17th century and well into the 18th century, from Winthrop’s sermon to the rather unorthodox and somewhat ironic “New England Canaan” by Thomas Morton of Merrimount. However, on closer inspection, we can detect shifts in the authors’ attitude toward the realization of the Promised Land in the colony. At first, many texts equate the Promised Land with America, i.e. New England. John Winthrop initially describes his new home with the following words: “here is sweet air, fair rivers, and plenty of springs, and the water better than in England” (History 375). As Puritan scholar Alan Heimert has noted: “America was to be ‘the good Land,’ […] a veritable Canaan. The Atlantic, if not the Red, was their ‘vast Sea,’ and the successful conclusion of their voyage, the end of their tribulations, their emergence from the ‘wilderness’” (“Puritanism” 361-62). This initially positive impression also resonates in Thomas Tillam’s eulogy on New England titled “Upon the First Sight,” which in the beginning connects the Scriptures to the experiences of the Puritans in New England but soon gives way to less enthusiastic sentiments and at times very different observations. Immediately after their arrival in North America, the Puritans began to experience difficulties which played themselves out internally in communal strife and externally in conflicts with the indigenous population. In fact, “the first decades of settlement were characterised by an ongoing dialogue over the shape that the colony’s institutions should take” (Bremer, Puritan Experiment 128). As early as the 1630s, theological disputes about the exercise of power over the members of the congregation as well as heavy skirmishes with the Native tribes ensued. Only six years after their arrival in Massachusetts, those conflicts come to a head. In 1636, Thomas Hooker leaves the colony and founds Hartford (in today’s 154 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Connecticut); he is followed by Roger Williams, a dissident banned from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for suggesting a more liberal handling of church membership and for approaching the indigenous population with curiosity rather than disdain. Williams authors the first dictionary of Native languages (titled A Key to the Languages of America; cf. Complete Writings) and founds Providence, Rhode Island, in 1636, where he is joined by Anne Hutchinson, an antinomian who rejected all political and theological authorities in favor of her own version of ‘true’ Puritanism, which is condemned as heresy by Winthrop, who suppresses Hutchinson and her followers “because she set her private revelation above the public errand” (Bercovitch, Puritan Origins 174). In 1638, John Davenport settles the colony of New Haven (later to become part of Connecticut), further diversifying the socio-religious scene of New England. John Winthrop, who plays a crucial role in policing the Puritans and comes down hard on what he perceives as unauthorized dissent, is commemorated by Puritan historian William Hubbard with the words that he was “a worthy gentleman, who had done good in Israel” (qtd. in Morgan, Founding 134). Trying to ban ‘difference’ outside and inside the community, Winthrop sought to preserve the ‘Holy Commonwealth’ that had come at such a high cost. As Stephen Foster suggests, the New England clergy were “required to reconcile their movement’s conflicting demands” (Long Argument 152) at a time when “boatload after boatload brought ashore the refugees” from England’s Church, and that they managed to do so is considered by Foster to have been a “masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship” (ibid. 151). As we take a closer look at the early history of the colony, it becomes more and more apparent that the rhetoric of the Promised Land and divine providence on the one hand aims to uphold an ideological construction of the ‘new world’ which quite obviously was at odds with the actual experiences of the “saints” (as the Puritans called each other), and on the other serves as a legitimization of colonial rule, an instrument of control, and a means to homogenize the colony by defining norms of conduct and marginalizing or excluding those who do not adhere to those norms. As the population of the colony grew rapidly with the Great Migration, the local tribes, among them the Pequots, fought against the increasing incursions the English settlers made into their land. The Pequot War culminated in the Mystic Massacre in 1637, in which hundreds of women and children were killed. Ultimately the entire tribe was exterminated; survivors were dispersed or sold into slavery. Although victorious, the Puritans themselves experienced this conflict as a major crisis that threatened the existence and future of the colony. The Pequot War shows that the interaction of the Puritans with the indigenous population was far less peaceful than that of the Pilgrims in the first decades, and PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 155 the ruthlessness with which it was fought reveals the brutality of English colonialism even (or especially) when it is cloaked as religious destiny, as in the case of the Puritans’ quest for the Promised Land. Although the war could well have been taken as an indication of God’s anger, the victory of the English over the Pequots was readily interpreted as a merciful act of God instead, yet again demonstrating the arbitrariness of ideology. In sum, the Puritan experience as American experience is characterized by a number of transitions that engendered some paradoxes. The first transition, of course, is their physical movement from England to North America, which entailed events that could not be integrated into the biblical script which they attempted to follow. These discrepancies were initially suppressed, of course, but surfaced time and again over the years. The second transition concerns the Puritans’ transformation from an oppressed minority of non-conformist believers into an oppressive ruling elite; yet their efforts to uphold religious orthodoxy in the colony from the beginning were met with heavy resistance. Third and most importantly perhaps, even the firmest of believers became increasingly doubtful whether North America in fact was the Promised Land they had been looking for. How were they to interpret the obstacles and difficulties with which they had to wrestle daily? And why did this Promised Land look like a wilderness? The Puritans’ anxieties grew in tandem with internal and external conflicts and led to increased pressure of the Puritan elite on any form of dissent; to them, the violence against the Native tribes seemed both necessary and providential, and thus fully legitimate. Yet, the “Puritan struggle of self-knowledge, relentless introspection, [and] tortured uncertainty” mirrored the tenuousness of their faith and time and again threw into doubt the endeavor of Puritanism, and “[t]he burden of such doubt has never quite lifted from what we once would have called the American soul” (Delbanco and Heimert, “Introduction” xv). In many texts of the 1630s and 1640s, America figures as an ambiguous force to be reckoned with rather than as a safe haven: “They were […] uncertain whether New England was to be their Israel or their Wilderness of Sinai – that is, a permanent dwelling place for the elect of God, or a temporary refuge in which their religious affections and institutions would be tried, purged, and perfected” (Slotkin, “Introduction” 11). Patricia Caldwell has identified this ambiguity in many of the early conversion narratives: For most, it was an America neither of joyous fulfillment nor, on the other hand, of fearsome, howling hideousness, but a strange, foggy limbo of broken promises. […] [T]he 156 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA America encountered by these yearning souls was no visible saint but an invisible, everreceding, unloving god. (Puritan Conversion Narrative 134) Caldwell’s analysis of the ambiguities of North American Puritan conversion narratives evidences that the “specific shift to America,” the “motion to New England,” reverberates with emotional turmoil and trauma: “[T]he new world is not just a disappointment; it is a positive setback, and one from which many people scarcely recover” (ibid.). Alan Heimert has argued that the colonizing experience so crucially altered Puritan attitudes toward the meaning of their physical surroundings that it was imaginatively transformed from a Promised Land (back) into a wilderness (cf. “Puritanism” 361). The experience of America shocked the Puritans out of their belief in the Promised Land, so to speak, and left them bewildered in the ‘wilderness’ of America: “The conditions of life in the colonies did not make for the sort of education that the Puritans had originally conceived. […] American conditions posed threats to the Puritan system that they could not have anticipated” (Slotkin, “Introduction” 14). And it is from this discrepancy between doctrinaire belief on the one hand and the physical experience of North America on the other that a specifically American Puritan culture with its own particular conversion rituals, religious practices, and rhetoric developed, which put the sacred journey as well as the experience of America at the center of both their narrative of the past (genealogy) and their narrative of the future (mission). After the hardships of the early years (1620-1640), the colony seemed no longer threatened by extinction after the mid-1650s; quite to the contrary: the “Puritan adult of 1670 emerge[d] to a condition of relative ease and prosperity” (ibid. 9). With this prosperity came a decline in church membership, as American-born Puritans no longer wanted to submit to the strict regime of congregational life, and focused more on worldly rather than on religious concerns. In order to keep church membership numbers up, the Puritan elite finally allowed for a half-way covenant (i.e., partial church membership with limited rights) by softening the original membership requirements. This liberalization was the subject of controversial discussions among the Puritan clergy and was also accompanied, once again, by conflicts with other groups living in and on the edges of the colony. Having reviewed the initial enthusiasm and certainty of the first and second generation of Puritan settlers that was soon followed by anxiety, disappointment, and disorientation, we witness in the rhetoric of the Puritan clergy of the later decades of the 17th century repeated attempts to re-invigorate the early Puritan PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 157 faith and dogma against the backdrop of a changing American Puritan culture. In this light, we may read sermons such as Samuel Danforth’s famous “Errand into the Wilderness,” which later gave the title to two seminal works of Puritan scholarship (cf. Miller’s book of the same title and Bercovitch, “Rhetoric”). Addressing the assembled delegates on the election day of the Massachusetts General Court, the sermon poses the question of Puritan uniqueness and exceptionality. Danforth quotes Jesus – “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” (Matthew 11:7) – in order to confront his congregation with the question of why they had come to America. Danforth criticizes those who have of late been more concerned with worldly rather than religious matters. As a direct consequence of the colonists’ sins, Danforth identifies God’s punitive measures against them. Yet, he also renews the “promise of divine Protection and Preservation,” and offers his listeners the opportunity to “choose this for our Portion, To sit at Christ’s feet and hear his word; and whosoever complain against us, the Lord Jesus will plead for us [...] and say. They have chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from them” (“Errand”). By quoting from the Bible, Danforth takes his audience back to their ‘new world’ beginning, and prophesies in the rhetorical mode of the American jeremiad that by turning away from materialism and worldly pleasures, the Puritans could still transform their environment into the Promised Land. He thus both consolidates and transforms the myth of the Promised Land: Whereas he displaces it into the future and admits that the colony so far has not become the Promised Land, he also affirms the possibility that it may still happen. What we witness in Danforth’s text is the transfer of the Promised Land topos from space into time: if the colony falls short of being the realization of God’s Promised Land now, it will have to strive harder to attain this status in the future. The discrepancy between what is and what should be propels Danforth’s prophecy. Sacvan Bercovitch uses Danforth’s sermon to demonstrate the specific structure and formula of the American jeremiad: Danforth’s strategy is characteristic of the American jeremiad throughout the seventeenth century: first, a precedent from Scripture that sets out the communal norms; then, a series of condemnations that detail the actual state of the community (at the same time insinuating the covenantal promises that ensure success); and finally, a prophetic vision that unveils the promises, and explains away the gap between fact and ideal. (American Jeremiad 16) Closing the gap between the wilderness of North America and the Promised Land of the Chosen People, then, Danforth suggests, is the unfinished task of the Puritans that will be achieved in the future. 158 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Whereas Danforth’s theological discourse rekindles the idea of turning the American wilderness into God’s Promised Land, the events in the colony provide a different kind of closure for the Puritan experiment. In the mid to late 1670s, King Philip’s War raged in the American colonies and threatened the survival of the white settlements in an unprecedented manner. This violent confrontation between a coalition of Native tribes led by Metacomet (a.k.a. ‘King Philip’) and the English settlers spread over the entire territory of the early American frontier, and became one of the most devastating in American history: For all their suffering, the English fared well compared to New England’s Native American peoples. […] One account estimated that three thousand Native Americans were killed in battle. In a total population of about twenty thousand, this number is staggering. (Schultz and Tougias, King Philip’s War 15) At that time, the English settlers face major problems not only in the confrontation with the indigenous population but also within the colony, and with colonial rule. Increasingly, the English monarchy tightened the reigns on the ‘new world’ dominion of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, paving the way for a final eruption of the inner contradictions and conflicts of interest which culminated in the Salem witch trials and the executions of 19 people in the course of a year. The witchcraft hysteria, which has elicited a whole range of interpretations from social and economic to feminist and psychoanalytic, marks another climax of the inner turmoil of a colony placed under ever tighter control of the English Crown. Soon, the colony was forced to practice religious toleration. In 1692, self-governance was curtailed, and the colony had to accept a royal governor sent from England to North America, whereas before the Massachusetts Bay colonists had appointed this official from their own ranks. “By the end of the seventeenth century,” as Ursula Brumm puts it succinctly, “the beginnings of the new world were already history” (“What Went” 1). Faith in the Promised Land was severely shaken, if not quite lost. Yet, the Puritan elite were neither ready nor willing to concede the shortcomings of their project. In 1702, theologian Cotton Mather (son of Increase Mather, grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton) published his magnum opus, Magnalia Christi Americana, in which he insisted on an affirmative perspective: I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe to the American Strand: And, assisted by the Holy Author of the Religion, I do with all the conscience of Truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth itself, Report the Wonder- PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 159 ful Display of his Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness and Faithfulness, wherewith his Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian Wilderness. (Day 163) By that time, the original charter of the colony had been revoked. “These changes meant the end of the society that Winthrop and Cotton had originally envisaged” (Hall, “Introduction” 5). Mather tries to defend the values of the colony’s founders against both royal rule and against widening the eligibility for church membership to include those who would not have been considered pious enough by the first and second generation Puritans. Yet, Mather’s own exuberant language, “its baroque style” (Brumm, “What Went” 1) and hyperbole reveal that he has come a long way from the sober, understated, and reflective writings of the early Puritans. Mather makes an almost desperate plea for the preservation of the ‘New England Way,’ reiterating once more the role of the colony in a global scheme of redemption and salvation. He is the first Puritan to call himself ‘American’ in writing – “I that am an American” – the term having been used until then exclusively to refer to the Native American population (cf. Herget, “Anders” 44). Even if the realization of the Promised Land remained doubtful, the making of Americans in the process of negotiating the terms of (co)existence in a heavenly utopia are explicated in Mather’s epic. And, as Alan Heimert has noted, the realization that the New England wilderness was not the Promised Land may have contributed to the continuation of a search in time and space: As Danforth’s exhortations admonished the Puritans to lead better lives, the “heaven on earth” that the Puritans were looking for could still be imagined by following generations further west in the less populated and ‘purer’ regions of North America (cf. “Puritanism” 375). Even though the historical record of the Pilgrims and the Puritans unambiguously shows that the realization of a utopian community on American soil utterly failed, their rhetoric has survived their social experiments in remarkable ways. It is a rhetoric that thrives on the vision of a Promised Land in this world, not the next: The Promised Land could be realized – in the near future, and in America. It is this rhetoric of providence that turned those early settlers into forefathers of mythical proportions, even though subsequent conceptualizations of the Promised Land may have diverged greatly. As Christopher Bigsby so succinctly put it: America has so successfully colonized the future that it has mastered the art of prospective nostalgia. Its natural tense is the future perfect. It looks forward to a time when something will have happened. It is a place, too, where fact and fiction, myth and reality dance a curious gavotte. It is a society born out of its own imaginings. (“Introduction” 1) 160 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA The Puritan myth of the Promised Land both generates and displays this dynamism. 5. THE PILGRIMS AND THE PURITANS IN REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA AND THE 19TH CENTURY The Mayflower cult, the Pilgrim legend, was built up in New England at the end of the eighteenth century and developed in the first half of the nineteenth. It was spreading west into the prairies by the mid-century. […] The ideas of New England were carried across the continent. CRISPIN GILL, MAYFLOWER REMEMBERED Thomas Jefferson, co-author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States of America, early on realized the usefulness of the Exodus narrative for American nation-building. He wanted to place the inscription “the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night” on the Great Seal of the United States, as John Adams, then delegate to the Second Continental Congress and later second President of the United States, wrote to his wife in 1776 (qtd. in Buckley, “Thomas Jefferson” 46). Time and again, Jefferson returned to the myth of the Promised Land to describe the special relationship of Americans with God. In his second inaugural address, Jefferson refers to “that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land; and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life” (qtd. in ibid.). In Jefferson’s political rhetoric, “the Exodus event in and through which God had formed his chosen people prefigured the formation of the American nation” (ibid.). In the ways that the rhetoric of the Promised Land became partially secularized for the purpose of nation-building, we can observe how the memory of the Pilgrims and Puritans was preserved and adapted into a specific US-American civil religion (to be discussed in detail in the following chapter). PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 161 Illustration 3: Plymouth Rock Photograph by James Freeman and Cindy Freeman (2006). The memorial culture surrounding the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans has both a regional as well as a national tradition. At the site of the founding of Plymouth, a veritable cult of the Pilgrim Fathers started to develop in the second half of the 18th century that continued well into the 19th century. One element of the Pilgrims’ story which cannot be found in the 17th-century sources and which is difficult (if not impossible) to authenticate is Plymouth Rock, which became the focus of a narrative of mythical proportions. The rock supposedly marked the spot where the Pilgrims first set foot on American soil and was turned into a fetish of New England beginnings, even though Bradford does not mention it anywhere in his text. It is only in the revolutionary era that promotion of the Rock as “a political icon” sets in (Seelye, Memory’s Nation 1). By focusing on the physical contact between the feet of the Pilgrim Fathers and a rock at the coastline, this mythology distracts attention away from and displaces the more difficult issue of cultural contact between the indigenous peoples and the Pilgrims – a rock does not speak or fight back, after all. The rock is mentioned for the first time in 1741 and in the following decades is cherished, fenced in, and protected against the weather – especially after 1774. In the 1830s, the famous French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the cult around Plymouth Rock, which then was in full swing: 162 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show how all human power and greatness are entirely in the soul? Here is a stone which the feet of a few poor fugitives pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, a fragment is prized as a relic. (Democracy Vol. 1 34) The term ‘relic,’ of course, already connotes the sacral and holy that turns a worldly thing (here a rock) into an object of worship. This symbolic surplus constitutes the mythic quality of lifeless matter in the foundational framework of a nation. Udo Hebel has in great detail chronicled the rise and demise of Plymouth Rock’s role in the New England imaginary and in that of the nation. He has pointed out that the “history of the commemoration of the arrival of the Mayflower in Plymouth harbour as Forefather’s Day dates back to 1769” (“Rise” 142), even as Plymouth Rock’s symbolic power diminishes with the rise of Thanksgiving as the more prominent national holiday. To be chosen to compose and to deliver the annual Forefather’s Day oratory next to the rock was one of the greatest honors that could be bestowed upon a member of the community. Among the more famous speakers chosen for that occasion was the lawyer, politician, and orator Daniel Webster, who gave an address called “First Settlement of New England” at the bicentenary celebration of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth in 1820; the bicentenary was organized by the newly founded Pilgrim Society, which not only took good care of the rock but by 1824 had turned Plymouth into a popular tourist attraction (cf. Uhry Abrams, Pilgrims 45). Webster’s speech shows how the effort of commemoration is inextricably intertwined with mythmaking, and contains all the elements characteristic of the Pilgrim’s myth of origin in New England. First, he delineates the ‘new world’ as a safe haven for the religious refugees from England, calling New England “the place of our father’s refuge” (“First Settlement” 26). Second, he strongly idealizes the Pilgrim Fathers and their “voluntary exile,” states that they sought “a higher degree of religious freedom” and “a purer form of religious worship” (ibid. 29), and turns them into victims and quasi-martyrs: theirs “was a humble and peaceable religion, flying from causeless oppression” (ibid. 31). Third, Webster mythologizes the landing and fetishizes the rock by invoking its spiritus loci, which “inspires and awes us” at this “memorable spot […], this Rock […] on which New England received the feet of the Pilgrims” (ibid. 27). Fourth, Webster emphasizes the distinctness of the Plymouth Colony from all other colonial projects past and present. He even casts the Pilgrims’ arrival at the shore as a radical and singular form of a new beginning built upon religious prophecy that made them feel and act ‘at home’ in the ‘new world’ immediately (cf. ibid. 36) – PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 163 thanks to the Mayflower Compact. Their settlement was not a colonial outpost or a mere extension of the motherland, but marked a radical new beginning “with the very first foundations laid under the divine light of the Christian religion” (ibid. 36) that led to progress and democracy built on “morality and religious sentiment” (ibid. 49). Briefly chastising the slave trade and the institution of slavery, Webster concludes, “let us not forget the religious character of our origin” (ibid. 51). His speech explicitly declares the Pilgrims to be the true founders of the United States of America by inextricably linking the US of 1820 to the New England beginnings of 1620 and assigns this colony an exceptional status. The Pilgrims’ endeavor thus figures as an exceptional venture, and the moment of landing is described as a singular temporal constellation, or kairos. While Webster explicitly refers to the Pilgrims, the Puritans are also championed in his skilful oratory. Forefather’s Day annually commemorated the landing of the Pilgrims in North America and gave ample opportunity for public addresses to affirm the Pilgrims’ importance for the American republic. Among the orators were poet William Cullen Bryant (who could trace both of his parents back to the Mayflower), lawyer and politician Rufus Choate, Samuel Davies Baldwin (who gave a speech titled “Armageddon: Or, the Overthrow of Romanism and Monarchy; the Existence of the United States Foretold in the Bible”), as well as Massachusetts politician John Gorham Palfrey, author of a compendious pro-Puritan history of New England (cf. History). All in all, these commemorative speech acts were important cultural practices and political rituals that further bolstered the myth of the Pilgrims and the Puritans in the Promised Land. Other facets of 19th-century American memorial culture reveal the foundational quality attributed to the Pilgrims and the Puritans as mythical figures of the American past. In the same way that the (competing) origin myth of Virginia became part of the national mythical repertoire, the myth of the Pilgrims and Puritans quickly achieved a national dimension. In the United States Capitol, there are three images of Pilgrims and Puritans in and around the rotunda, and additional images of individuals can be found in the Statuary Hall (a statue of Roger Williams) and in the Hall of Columns (a statue of John Winthrop). All of these images attest to the centrality of the Pilgrims and the Puritans for the foundational narratives of the nation and frame them in terms of their religiosity as well as of God’s providence. Contrary to the figure of Pocahontas discussed previously, they reference the European, i.e. the English origin of the United States of America. 164 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Illustration 4: The Pilgrims Prepare for the ‘New World’ Robert W. Weir, Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1843). Enrico Causici’s 1825 relief Landing of the Pilgrims, 1620 in the Capitol depicts a family in a boat welcomed by a Native offering an ear of corn; the fresco Landing of Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass., 1620, which is part of the Frieze of American History, is a similarly sedate rendering of the landing. The painting The Embarkation of the Pilgrims at Delft Haven, Holland, July 22nd, 1620 (1843) by Robert W. Weir however is placed even more prominently inside the rotunda of the US Capitol. Weir’s painting, like Chapman’s Pocahontas painting, highlights the theme of salvation: whereas “Pocahontas saved Virginia for the Anglican Church, the faith of the Pilgrims saved the United States from paganism” (Uhry Abrams, Pilgrims 39). The painting suggests that “God willed the transportation of Protestantism to America” (ibid.). Weir focuses on the departure from the ‘old world,’ not on the arrival in the ‘new.’ His painting mythologizes the moment of departure and celebrates the trust in God’s providence. Geographically, it identifies the founding of Plymouth Colony as an English/European project, by which we can discern a fundamental difference in perspective between the myth of Pocahontas and the myth of the Pilgrims and the Puritans that would continue to fuel controversial discussions. All of the visual representations of the Pilgrims and Puritans at the meeting place of the national legislature are highly affirmative and work as foundational representations. They are in accordance with contemporaneous historiographies PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 165 of the United States, most prominently again those by New England historians such as George Bancroft, author of the well-known History of the United States: The pilgrims were Englishmen, Protestants, exiles for conscience, men disciplined by misfortune, cultivated by opportunities of extensive observation, equal in rank as in rights, and bound by no code but that of religion or the public will. (History 23) As a historian of the romantic school, Bancroft sees liberty and God’s providence as the defining moments in American history, and thus also accords the Pilgrims a central role. Yet, the mythologization of the Pilgrims and the Puritans in the 19th century did not only affirm a regional identity and extrapolate from it a national imaginary, but also pursued three major strategic goals in relation to what New Englanders perceived as rival influences coming from three different directions. First, the New England Way is pitted against the genealogy of the South and its foundational mythology. In his oratory, Daniel Webster takes an abolitionist stance and openly opposes the South’s system of slavery – an opposition he would later compromise in the so-called Webster-Hayne debate. Within the United States, the North and the South became increasingly polarized. It was in the midst of the sectional conflict that Thanksgiving was pronounced a national holiday in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln in an act that seemed to proclaim the dominance of the North over the South. Thus here it is against the South’s political and cultural aspirations that the myth of the Pilgrims and the Puritans as a foundational American myth is implicitly directed. Second, the West was perceived by the Protestant elite of New England as a major arena in the cultural battle over dominance with the South and as a fruitful field for missionary activities. Renowned clergyman (and father of Harriet Beecher Stowe) Lyman Beecher for example argues in Plea for the West for what Ray Allen Billington refers to as “the Protestant Crusade” (cf. his book of the same title): to spread Puritanism and Protestantism in the West and to contain slavery in the South – an agenda that was shared by many of his contemporaries. In this logic, the West was to become part of the Promised Land of white American Protestants descended from Puritan stock. Third, we need to consider the narrative that insists on casting the Pilgrims and Puritans as the founders of New England and of the nation as a reaction to the contemporaneous non-English Catholic (and Jewish) immigration from Europe. Mythologizing the Protestant rebels helped to establish a hierarchical contrast to the Catholic newcomers: The “Catholic system is adverse to liberty, and the clergy to a great extent are dependent on foreigners opposed to the prin- 166 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ciples of our government, for patronage and support,” Beecher somewhat selfrighteously contends (Plea 61). In opposition to other ethnic and religious groups living in and coming to the USA during the second half of the 19th century, the “Plymouth settlers [were cast] as a master race” (Uhry Abrams, Pilgrims 145-46). Throughout the 19th century, the laudatory commemorations of the Pilgrims and Puritans in public and political discourse continued, and “by the end of the century the Puritans were generally regarded as the founders of American democracy” (Hall, “Introduction” 1). This hegemonic discourse is obviously exclusionary – for one thing, because it is profoundly racialized. 6. WHERE IS THE PROMISED LAND? THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE When Israel was in Egyptland Let my People go Oppressed so hard they could not stand Let my People go Go Down, Moses, Way down in Egyptland Tell old Pharao let my people go. SLAVE SPIRITUAL (JUBILEE SINGERS, 1872) We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us. MALCOLM X The fundamental theme of New World African modernity is neither integration nor separation but rather migration and emigration. CORNEL WEST, KEEPING FAITH From the perspective of Africans who were brought to North America and forced to work on the cotton fields and in the plantation households, America is obviously not the Land of Freedom but figures as the site of cruel enslavement and bondage, forced labor, cultural destruction, and death. The Middle Passage – the leg of the transatlantic triangle which brought Africans from the coast of West Africa to the Americas – was not a ‘sacred journey’ but rather a trip to hell, a journey through the underbelly of Western modernity. America was built, at least to a considerable degree, “on the backs of blacks” (cf. Morrison’s essay of PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 167 the same title). The first ship with Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, and thus earlier than the Puritans; in fact, slavery was a crucial part of early colonial history. After almost two hundred years of trading and owning slaves, all northern colonies and states abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804 in the wake, it is often suggested, of the American Revolutionary War. Slavery in the southern states continued and intensified until the American Civil War. But before we turn to African American responses to the myth of the Promised Land, we should remind ourselves of racial discourses in the historical context. Puritan congregations were exclusionary entities that for the most part barred servants and women from membership – not to mention the indigenous population and Africans/African Americans. Slavery in America presented a fact that was camouflaged by an ideologically fraught racial discourse that portrayed America as a land of freedom and deliverance. From the beginning, religious groups such as the Quakers, intellectuals, and politicians wrestled with this conundrum and sought ways to solve this dilemma, but slavery continued to be an integral part of American society well beyond independence; it was sanctioned by the Constitution, and was abolished only after the American Civil War (1861- 65). The post-abolition period was characterized by continued and in some ways even worse oppression of African Americans and by the most extreme excesses of racist violence, such as lynching. In the context of his first presidential campaign, Barack Obama even referred to slavery and racism against African Americans as “America’s original sin” (qtd. in Leeman, Teleological Discourse 55-56). From the beginning, Protestant evangelical groups argued for the abolition of slavery, and Protestantism is an important factor in the history of abolitionism in the United States; often it is used to distinguish New England (where slavery was abolished in all states by 1804) from Virginia in particular, and the South in general. Many critics contrasted the economic system of the North with the South’s exploitation of slave labor, for example Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of the New York Central Park, who contended that Virginians had “never done a real day’s work in their lives before they left England” and again refused to do so after the first shipload of Africans had arrived on their shores (qtd. in Uhry Abrams, Pilgrims 167). How can we relate the existence of slavery to the myth of the Promised Land? What position did the religious tradition that had formulated this horizon of expectation take on slavery, and what impact did it have on slavery and the slaves themselves? In order to tackle these questions, we will briefly turn to the antebellum South. Historians of 19th-century American history have for a long 168 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA time debated the complicated role of the Protestant religion in African American slave culture. Some scholars have claimed that religious indoctrination and conversion were used as an effective instrument of social control. The Christian religion, it is argued, taught the slaves submissiveness, docility, and a negative self-concept based on claims of their unworthiness in the eyes of God; slaveholders frequently drew on the Bible (mostly the Old Testament, and especially the Curse of Ham narrative) to justify slavery to the slaves and to white abolitionists (cf. Jordan, White 17-20). For many critics, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional Uncle Tom – an extremely pious character who does not even try to escape from slavery because of his faith – exemplifies the harmful effects of religious ‘education:’ even when he is brutalized and finally killed by his master, he suffers without resistance and forgives his tormentor (cf. Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin). On the other hand, scholars have insisted that Christianity offered African American slaves access to symbolic resources which they could use for their own purposes and that the relative freedom in which they could gather to practice their faith allowed them to secretly engage in other social, cultural, and political practices. Most importantly, however, the biblical story of the Exodus and the Promised Land – which explicitly addresses the unjust and unjustifiable evil of slavery – provided them with a (religious) narrative model of emancipation, escape, and freedom. This story was as attractive to the African American slaves as it had been to the English Puritans. Stripped of its ideological investment, the story of the Promised Land can be seen (from a structuralist point of view) as a blueprint for collective empowerment, which can thus be appropriated for the purpose of cultural and political critique. Although the 17th-century Puritan construction of the ‘new world’ as Promised Land excluded Africans and African Americans, the latter would try to partake in this promise through an appropriation and ideological reconfiguration of the myth. Popular African American spirituals used biblical themes and stories from the Exodus narrative to envision freedom, and turned Moses into an African American hero. To give just one example: Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the black theologian who came to fame during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, wrote his MA thesis on the “Treatment of Biblical Passages in Negro Spirituals” (1969) and discusses biblical narratives (such as the Exodus) as strategies of empowerment for black slaves. African American intellectual and former slave Frederick Douglass in the 19th century described religious practices already as what later theorists would call ‘signifyin’ practices’ (cf. Smitherman, Talkin, and Gates, Signifying Monkey) used as a kind of code by the black slaves: PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 169 A keen observer might have detected in our singing of O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan, Something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan. “I thought I heard them say, There were lions in the way; I don’t expect to stay Much longer here. Run to Jesus – shun the danger. I don’t expect to stay Much longer here,” Was a favourite air, and had a double meaning. On the lips of some it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits, but on the lips of our company it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage toward a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery. (Life 109) The “double meaning” that Douglass refers to is apparent in many spirituals, whose lyrics frequently focus on deliverance, salvation, and the topic of mobility. “The escape motif appears in hundreds of songs: the slaves are always sailing, walking, riding, rowing, climbing, and crossing over into Canaan” (Blassingame, Slave Community 142). Most evident was the subversive effect of religion on a slave in the singular incident that took place in Southampton, Virginia in 1831 and is often referred to as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, in which Turner and a group of fellow slaves killed most whites they encountered until the insurrection was squashed. In The Confessions of Nat Turner, written down by Thomas R. Gray before Turner’s execution and later used by William Styron in his 1967 novel of the same title, Turner claims that God appeared to him in a vision and told him to deliver his people from enslavement and to punish the whites: [W]hite spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened – the thunder rolled in the heavens, and blood flowed in streams – and I heard a voice saying, “Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.” (qtd. in Blassingame, Slave Community 219) Turner, feeling that his actions were in accord with the will of God, set out to kill whites and to free slaves, deeds for which he was later executed. 170 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA The subversive use of the Exodus narrative is not restricted to male fugitives and abolitionists. Most notably, female African American abolitionist activist Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) is referred to as “the Moses of her people” in a book by Sarah H. Bradford (cf. Harriet) published under the auspices of Susan B. Anthony. Tubman is compared to Moses because she repeatedly went back to the South after her own escape and led more than 70 slaves to escape to the North. These rescue missions became even more difficult after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required the North to cooperate with and assist in the attempts of the South to recapture fugitive slaves. Canada, which no longer had institutionalized slavery in the mid-19th century, then became the ‘New Canaan’ in place of the North of the United States. The similar spelling of Canada and Canaan further reinforced the notion that the Promised Land for African Americans and fugitive slaves lay beyond the national border. Kathryn Smardz-Frost’s I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad (2007) picks up this notion in recounting the complicated and paradigmatic escape of Lucy and Thornton Blackwell. Other scholars also affirm the vision of Canada as the Promised Land for African Americans (cf. Winks, Blacks). Approximately 60.000 blacks fled to Canada before the outbreak of the Civil War, half of whom supposedly went back after the war was over, the other half staying mostly in small towns in lower Ontario and in Toronto. The Promised Land topos may thus be seen as a floating signifier that was used by African Americans to refer to various regions or territories. While the foundational national narrative focuses on the arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in the Promised Land and thus locates freedom from oppression in America, African American appropriations of the biblical story locate freedom from oppression in a Promised Land that is always elsewhere, so to speak, and often outside of US. The Great Migration of African Americans to the northern cities at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century is often represented as a ‘second exodus,’ which is evidenced by such titles as Milton C. Sernett’s Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (1997), and Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991). In African American literature addressing the experience of migration, however, there is often an ambivalent evaluation of the Promised Land rhetoric and the expectations with which black characters move from the South to the urban centers of the North. James Baldwin’s first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) for example expounds the redemptive quality of migrating from the South to the North, but at the same time addresses the sense of loss, confusion, and displacement of the first generation of African Americans the PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 171 raised in the urban North. African American writing has thus not only promoted but also deconstructed white American versions of the myth of the Promised Land. Along the same lines, Toni Morrison’s historical migration novel Jazz (1992) “is a portrait of a people in the midst of self-creation, a document of what they created and what they lost along the way” (Griffin, Who 197). A third variation of the African American Exodus narrative reroutes the journey to Africa and can be seen as the most radical and consequential inversion of the Puritan myth of the Promised Land in America. Edwin S. Redkey’s Black Exodus (1969) discusses Black Nationalism and Back-to-Africa movements since 1890. Many African American intellectuals, among them most prominently Marcus Garvey, proposed in the 1920s a re-migration across the Atlantic; Garveyism became a forceful movement that rested on a radical critique of American society and racist US national discourse. Africa as a place of belonging, as an ‘imaginary homeland’ and as a site of liberation and cultural and political autonomy has always figured prominently in African American culture. Thus, Black Nationalist discourse is explicitly counter-hegemonic as well as anti-foundational in its repudiation of narratives that idealize the US as the Promised Land. In the second half of the 20th century, the myth of the Promised Land found resonance in the American civil rights movement and in the rhetoric of emancipation used by religious leaders in anti-racist activism. In April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. in his very last speech before his assassination encourages his audience to persevere in the face of often violent resistance to the movement’s goals, and emphasizes the worldly and the spiritual dimension connected in the image of a better world: But it doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not go there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. (“I’ve Been”) In a rhetorical move very similar to that of William Bradford more than 300 years earlier King uses the Exodus narrative to draw a parallel between himself and Moses being led by God to the Promised Land. Only in King’s sermon it is 172 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA the African Americans who are cast as Pilgrims hoping for salvation from racism and oppression – it is they who are God’s chosen people. African American rewritings of the Promised Land narrative adapted and appropriated the biblical story in various ways and for different ideological and counter-hegemonic purposes. At times it may be difficult to ascertain whether these adaptations rest on the Bible directly or rather rewrite the Puritan narrative – or even the semi-secular national narrative into which it evolved. The wide spectrum of interpretations and re-interpretations of the Promised Land myth in any case suggest, first, that it powerfully addresses the human longing for freedom in general, and second, that it lends itself readily to a variety of contradictory evaluations of the project that is America from national, subnational, and transnational perspectives. 7. IMMIGRANT VISIONS: INHERITING THE PROMISED LAND? The myth of the promised land is a tale told by strangers. It is the mythology of a people adrift, of a population without location, the rootless and the restless, the displaced, the exiled. DAVID F. NOBLE, BEYOND THE PROMISED LAND The invention of Plymouth (and especially Plymouth Rock) as an exclusivist ethnic symbol replaced earlier ideological readings in revolutionary, religious and abolitionist contexts at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. WERNER SOLLORS, “AMERICANS ALL” Every ship that brings your people from Russia and other countries where they are ill-treated is a Mayflower. MARY ANTIN, “THE LIE” Despite the fact that the Pilgrim and Puritan myth of origins in the mid-19th century was used by nativists to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment in the face of increased Catholic and other ‘foreign’ immigration from Europe, many of these immigrants cherished their own version of America as the Promised Land. The Jewish immigrants, for example, clearly recognized in the narrative of the Promised Land their own story of repression, bondage, release, and salvation. The comparison between the Puritans and the Jewish immigrants has often been drawn with regard to typological interpretation, i.e. the collapsing of Holy Scrip- PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 173 ture and worldly experience. After all, was not William Bradford one of the first immigrants from Europe and his work, Of Plymouth Plantation, America’s first immigrant narrative? Illustration 5: Jewish Immigrants as the ‘New Pilgrims’ 1912 title page of The Promised Land by M. Antin. The most prominent and programmatic author in the field of Jewish immigrant writing is Mary Antin (1881-1949), who immigrated to the United States with her mother and her sisters in 1894 to join her father, who had three years earlier fled the Czarist pogroms. Her autobiographical narrative The Promised Land (1912) relates the Puritan topos of the Promised Land to her own exodus from an Eastern European shtetl to Boston and New York. In that text she affirms the willingness of immigrants in general and of herself in particular to assimilate into American society, thereby countering nativist claims that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were unwilling or unable to integrate. Repeatedly, Antin refers to the Pilgrim Fathers as “our forefathers” (cf. also They Who Knock), thereby claiming a common ancestry of American-born and immigrant 174 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA citizens. Chapter headings like “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Exodus,” “Manna,” or “The Burning Bush” evidence that Antin’s (spiritual) autobiography strongly references the Old Testament (including the Exodus narrative). The Promised Land has become canonical in American studies not only for its topicality but also, as Werner Sollors reminds us, for its subtle aesthetics and versatility: “Antin continued the portraiture of America as a new Canaan from an immigrant’s point of view, while leaving no doubt that the metaphor of the promised land was especially suited to Jewish immigrants” (Beyond Ethnicity 45). In what was criticized as a “cult of gratitude” (cf. Tumin’s article of the same title) “characterized by excessive assimilation and submissiveness,” she “claimed the American egalitarian promise defiantly by equating [herself] with George Washington” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 45) – and with the Pilgrim Fathers, one might add; the immigrant girl symbolically adopted American foundational figures as her forefathers. Antin’s autobiographical text resonates in the writings of other Jewish American authors, for example in Anzia Yezierska’s short story “America and I,” which (also) features a female Jewish immigrant protagonist-narrator: “I began to read the American history. I found from the first pages that America started with a band of Courageous Pilgrims. They had left their native country as I had left mine. They had crossed an unknown ocean and landed in an unknown country, as I” (20). This analogy is then used by the narrator for personal empowerment as an immigrant struggling for inclusion: “I saw that it was the glory of America that it was not yet finished. And I, the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower” (33). Yezierska, like Antin, rhetorically authorizes her protagonist by establishing a connection between 20th-century Jewish immigrants and the 17th-century Pilgrims. Many authors beside and after Antin and Yezierska have worked with the myth of the Promised Land to make sense of their American experience, as Werner Sollors’ enumeration of titles by ethnic and immigrant writers proves: Lewis E. MacBrayne, “The Promised Land” (1902); Sidney Nyburg, The Chosen People (1917); W. Forest Cozart, The Chosen People (1924); Rudolph Fisher, “The Promised Land” (1927); Martin Wendell Odland, The New Canaan (1933); Margaret Marchand, Pilgrims on the Earth (1940); Stoyan Christowe, My American Pilgrimage (1947); Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land (1957); Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965); and Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). (Beyond Ethnicity 46) PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 175 Since Sollors’ 1986 study, many more titles have appeared, of which I will briefly discuss two contemporary examples in order to demonstrate new and at times ironic turns in the appropriation of the myth. In Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Gish Jen takes up Antin’s reconfiguration of the myth by portraying a Chinese immigrant family, the Changs, who in the fictional New York neighborhood of Scarshill – which is strongly suggestive of Scarsdale, the New York suburb in which Antin had lived at the beginning of the century – are considered the “New Jews” (3). The Changs’ new family home is anything but new, as Mona, the Chinese American immigrant protagonist-narrator, quips: “Their house is still of the upstanding-citizen type. Remember the Mayflower! It seems to whisper” (ibid. 4). Mona’s life is decisively shaped by the old Jewish American community her family has moved into, whose members have come a long way from their turn-of-the century ancestors described in Mary Antin’s text. As a high school student, Mona has “been to so many bar and bas mitzvahs, she can almost say herself whether the kid chants like an angel or like a train conductor. At Seder, Mona knows to forget the bricks, get a good pile of that mortar. Also she knows what is schmaltz” (ibid. 6). Early on, Mona wishes to become a Jew, and indeed converts to Judaism. To her bewildered and somewhat alarmed parents, Mona explains: “‘Jewish is American […]. American means being whatever you want, and I happened to pick Jewish’” (ibid. 49). She studies the Torah with Rabbi Horowitz, who “assigns so many books that Mona feels like she started on a mud bath, only to end up on a mud swim” (ibid. 35). At the end of the novel, however, the Rabbi also ‘converts’ and marries a non-Jewish woman (cf. ibid. 267). Overall, the novel deftly mocks the Puritan tradition of conversion and offers an ironic, postmodern take on the myth of the Promised Land and the theme of assimilation, which it adjusts to the zeitgeist of multiculturalism and to theories of cultural performativity. Even more recently, the Jordanian American writer Laila Halaby puns on the myth of the Promised Land in her novel Once in a Promised Land (2007), in which she chronicles the decline of the marriage of Jassim and Salwa in Tucson, Arizona after the events that occurred in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. The title, which is suggestive of a fairy tale beginning, already indicates the sense of disillusionment and of things falling apart that pervades the narrative. Jassim kills a teenage boy in a car accident, and is targeted by the authorities for being an Arab American; Salwa has a miscarriage, and starts an affair with a colleague who turns out to be mentally disturbed and violent. Both Jassim and Salwa are exiles as much as they are immigrants. In this narrative of descent, the Promised Land is no more than a fairy tale – a mere fiction/fantasy. To conclude: immigrant writers have inverted, rejected, mocked, s 176 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA re-arranged and expanded the myth of the Promised Land to fit their own collective experience, to contest dominant regimes of representation, and to call into question the founding myth in its singular historical meaning. 8. MODERNIST REVISIONS: BLAMING THE PURITANS But Puritans, as they were called, if they were pure it was more since they had nothing in them of fulfilment than because of positive virtues. By their very emptiness they were the fiercest element in the battle to establish a European life on the New World. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. H.L. MENCKEN What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? […] They came largely to get away – that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. D.H. LAWRENCE, STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE After the Pilgrims and Puritans had been mostly celebrated as founding figures of New England since the late 18th century, had acquired mythic proportions during the revolutionary period, and had been idolized in 19th-century national discourse, they came under closer scrutiny in modernist texts. Of course, there had been quite a few critical voices earlier; during the so-called ‘American Renaissance’ (cf. F.O. Matthiessen’s 1941 book of the same title) of the 1850s – which actually was a ‘New England Renaissance,’ if anything – writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville among others were quite ambivalent about early Puritan history and mythmaking. Hawthorne most prominently scrutinizes the repressive forces of Puritan doctrine and dogma in his historical romance The Scarlet Letter (1850) and in short stories such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Maypole of Merrimount.” His introduction of the Puritan crowd at the beginning of The Scarlet Letter is revealing: A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 177 of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. (45) Hawthorne casts the new world utopia in a rather “gloomy” and “sad” light and throughout the text maintains an ambiguous stance toward Puritan rigor and American exceptionalism. His protagonist, Hester Prynne, is convicted of adultery and sentenced to wear a scarlet ‘A’ on her breast as a lasting reminder of her ‘crime.’ And yet, as Prynne gains the admiration of many community members for the dignity with which she bears her punishment (and also refuses to name her extramarital partner, a hypocritical Puritan clergyman), the narrator concedes that apparently “the scarlet letter had not done its office” (145; cf. Bercovitch, Office). The reluctance of Hawthorne and other writers of the ‘American Renaissance’ to embrace the foundational myth of the Pilgrims and the Puritans anticipates the skepticism and disillusionment of modernist writers and critics, who thought that Puritanism wielded an immensely detrimental influence on American culture, literature, and intellectuality. From the moderns’ point of view, America’s early colonial history had been a Dark Age of fanatic religiosity from which Americans had recovered only gradually and to a limited extent, with Puritanism’s moralistic and anti-intellectual tendencies continuing to affect American cultural life. With Freudianism en vogue, critics engaged in “blaming the Puritans for the repressive tendencies in American life” (Hall, “Introduction” 1). This “Anti-Puritanism” led some intellectuals to suggest that “the central theme of Massachusetts history was the gradual emancipation of society from the authority of the ministers” (ibid. 2), a sentiment that is shared by George Santayana (cf. Genteel Tradition), Waldo Frank (cf. Our America), James Truslow Adams (cf. Epic; Founding), and Vernon L. Parrington (cf. Main Currents). Much of American historiography in the 1920s – in stark contrast to the previous 178 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA predominance of positive if not idealizing portrayals – is markedly critical of the Pilgrims and Puritans, who it either viewed as religious fanatics or as a sanctimonious plutocracy that camouflaged its interest in maintaining power under a cloak of religiosity. Hence, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was not, as had previously often been suggested, the ‘cradle’ of American democracy; instead, Puritanism was criticized as inherently anti-democratic. James Truslow Adams quotes John Winthrop describing democracy as “the meanest and worst of all forms of government” (Epic 39) and stating that there “was no such government in Israel,” which for him meant that to have it in Massachusetts would be “a manifest breach of the 5th Commandment” (Founding 143). And G.P. Gooch pointedly quips that democracy may have been a child of the Reformation, yet not of the reformers (cf. History 8). Illustration 6: Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne The Scarlet Letter (dir. Victor Sjöström, 1926). James Truslow Adams in his study The Founding of New England (1921) approaches the Puritans from yet another revisionist angle. He argues that economic, not religious motives were crucial for emigration to North America. He points out the exclusivist nature of Puritan congregations, which granted church membership to only one out of five men in Massachusetts and barred all others from becoming members. Adams (among others) suggests that people continued to emigrate to America regardless of this exclusionary practice because they simply did not care about religious practice and religious orthodoxy: PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 179 They came for the simple reason that they wanted to better their condition. […] They wanted to own land; and it was this last motive, perhaps, which mainly had attracted those twelve thousand persons out of sixteen thousand who swelled the population of Massachusetts in 1640, but were not church members. (Founding 122) More recently, Uhry Abrams confirms this assessment when she states that “there was far less religious or social conformity than the myths would have one believe” (Pilgrims 29). In the field of literature, William Carlos Williams’s 1925 collection In the American Grain is a good example of the modernists’ tendency to criticize the Puritans and the New England Way as repressive. Intolerance, hypocrisy, and religion are “substitutions for life” for those who with “tight-locked hearts” (63) stressed “the spirit against the flesh” (66): “The jargon of God, which they used, was their dialect by which they kept themselves surrounded as with a palisade” (63). “They must have relied on vigorous hypocrisy to save them – which they did” (67). Williams comments on the Salem witch trials in the colony in 1692 to conclude his argument: In fear and without guidance, really lost in the world, it is they alone who would later, at Salem, have strayed so far – morbidly seeking the flame, – that terrifying unknown image to which, like savages, they too offered sacrifices of human flesh. […] And it is still today the Puritan who keeps his frightened grip upon the world lest it should prove him – empty. (67) By likening Puritanism to barbarism (“like savages;” “sacrifices of human flesh”), Williams inverts the hierarchy between Puritans and Native Americans that was established in colonial discourse (civilization vs. savagery) and thus articulates the most radical critique of his time. Modern writers and essayists thus lamented the harm that the Puritan narrative of origins had done to generations and generations of Americans. They reconfigured the Puritan master narrative of divine liberation and emancipation into one of purposeful oppression both on an individual as well as on a collective level. As a consequence, the Puritans were considered useless if not obnoxious ancestral figures for a modern, 20th-century America, which resulted in a call for disidentification and for the deconstruction of a national narrative obsessed with the Pilgrims and Puritans’ Promised Land and some rock on a beach. As early as 1918, Van Wyck Brooks’s essay “On Creating a Usable Past” argued for the creation of pasts other than the Puritan in the face of a pluralistic America – a 180 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA timely call that, however, would only be heeded seriously in the second half of the 20th century. 9. PURITAN ORIGIN VERSUS “MESSY BEGINNINGS” IN AMERICAN STUDIES The place of the Pilgrim Fathers in American history can best be stated by a paradox. Of slight importance in their own time, they are of great and increasing significance in our time, through the influence of their story on American folklore and tradition. And the key to that story, the vital factor in this little group, is the faith in God that exalted them and their small enterprise to something of lasting value and enduring interest. SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America. PERRY MILLER, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS During the emergence of American studies as a discipline in the 1930s and ‘40s, the story of the Pilgrims and the Puritans has often been studied as a foundational narrative of American beginnings in order to explain the cultural specificity of what would later develop into the United States of America. The formation of national identity and national cohesion has repeatedly been delineated as a continuous evolution from the Puritan errand to the ‘new world’ and from the first generation of English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the present. Titles such as The Puritan Origins of the American Self by Sacvan Bercovitch indicate the degree to which the concepts of the Puritan errand and covenant with God served as models for accounting for later, specifically US-American, social, cultural and political developments and practices. Not surprisingly, Harvard University – founded by the Puritans in 1636 as the first institution of higher education in North America – became the center of Puritan scholarship beginning with the long-since canonical work of Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller, among others. It is a remarkable fact that the scholarly reappraisal of the Pilgrims and Puritans took off at the moment when American studies as a new academic discipline was launched in the 1930s. Both Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison found the Puritans to be not dull conformists, but intellectuals who were ‘exhilarated’ by their faith. Miller’s influential studies such as The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 181 (1939), The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), and Errand into the Wilderness (1964) as well as Samuel Eliot Morison’s seminal study Builders of the Bay Colony (1930) placed the Puritans at the center of a national foundational narrative, which thus also became foundational for American studies. Conservative Puritan scholar Samuel Eliot Morison argues that the Puritans believed what they preached and he sees it as Winthrop’s intention “to inspire these new children of Israel with the belief that they were God’s chosen people; destined, if they kept their covenant with him, to people and fructify this new Canaan in the western wilderness” (Builders 106). It should be noted that Native Americans, however, hardly figure in early Puritan scholarship, which thus contributed to no small degree to popular misconceptions about early North American history. Sacvan Bercovitch argues in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) that “[t]he persistence of the myth is a testament to the visionary and symbolic power of the American Puritan imagination” (186) and that “the Puritan myth prepared for the re-vision of God’s country from the ‘New England of the type’ into the United States of America” (136). That the (re-)discovery of the Puritans in American history and the establishment of American studies under the arch of American exceptionalism coincide is by no means accidental. Scholars of the so-called Myth and Symbol School turned to the Puritans and Pilgrims and the New England Way in order to identify culturally specific symbols and patterns to bolster the notion that the US was indeed exceptional (there is an astounding amount of Puritan scholarship in the establishment and consolidation of American studies as an academic discipline, of which for the purposes of this chapter I could reference only a fraction). The foundational paradigm of Puritanism embraces the assumption that the origins of American society are exclusively white and European, and credits white AngloSaxon Protestants with the formation of the US nation. Not all of the Myth and Symbol scholars shared the same affirmative interpretation of Puritan culture, but the majority placed the Puritan elite center stage and marginalized all other groups – Native Americans, Africans/African Americans, women, indentured servants, etc. – in their work on American beginnings. It is thus unsurprising that this body of work led subsequent generations of Americanists to criticize it for heralding and backing an exclusivist US-American ideology. Philip Fisher’s analysis of the first generation of Puritan scholars in American studies points in that direction: Beginning with the work of Perry Miller in the late thirties, the explanation of America as a long history of Puritan hope and decline resulted from the fact that academic intellec- 182 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA tuals, looking into the past to find not necessarily its chief actors but precisely those congenial figures whose analytic and critical stance most resembled their own, discovered in the Puritan writers what was for them the most intelligible feature of the past, the one mirror most filled with familiar features. They too were intellectuals engaged in holding up a mirror of admonition or exhortation to their society. In theocratic New England they found embodied the secret self-image of all intellectual cultures, a society in which the critics and intellectuals were not marginal, but actually in power. (“Introduction” x) Fisher’s statement shows that scholarship is tied as much to the time in which it is practiced as it is about the time that it addresses; if scholars fail to reflect on their own positionality, the outcome of their work may be easily marked by – more or less subtle – ideologically motivated simplifications of their subject matter. Crispin Gill, for instance, sees in the study of Puritanism and, by implication, in the model of the Puritans an effective antidote to the protest movements of the 1960s in America: In time, youth finds that its new discoveries, like sex, are not really original. There were Harvard students who, during the early days of the 1969 troubles on the campus, realized that there had been a rebellion in America before them. […] [T]he men and women of the Mayflower have much to say to the young rebels of today. What is more, the Pilgrims were constructive rebels. They were not content with denouncing one form of society, they persevered until they had built another which did give life and reality to their ideals. (Mayflower 182) In a somewhat similar vein, Andrew Delbanco describes the first generation Puritans as follows: “[T]he founders of New England were drop-outs – with all the indignation, idealism and wounded righteousness that the term implies” (“Introduction” xxii). Yet, whereas in 1970, Richard Reinitz could still write that “Puritanism was an English movement which became the single most influential factor in the shaping of American culture and society” (“Introduction” i), such aggrandizement was no longer acceptable in the 1980s and ‘90s. In 1984, Jan C. Dawson – following the earlier critique of the modernists and Van Wyck Brooks’s writings – declares America’s Puritan tradition “the unusable past” (cf. her book of the same title). Richard Slotkin, a representative of the Critical Myth and Symbol School, has pointed to the violence at the center of the Puritan experience in the ‘new world’ (cf. Regeneration 5). Other critics look for alternative ‘possible pasts,’ stressing the fact that the Puritans were not the only residents in North America at that time. Uhry Abrams sees the myth of the Pilgrims and the Puritans as a regional New England narrative that for a long PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 183 time has erroneously dominated discussions of American beginnings by ignoring for instance the Jamestown colony, which was founded more than a decade before Bradford landed in America and more than two decades before Winthrop’s Puritans arrived there, after all (cf. Pilgrims); she thus holds that Puritanism as a paradigm in American studies scholarship not only presents a highly idealized version of American beginnings but also marginalizes other stories of American genesis. Whereas Uhry Abrams in her book of the same title rather schematically contrasts “the Pilgrims and Pocahontas,” more recent work done on early American history adopts a postcolonial studies approach and operates with the concept of “messy beginnings” (cf. Schueller and Watts’s essay collection of the same title) with a three-fold aim: first, to analyze the Puritan project beyond the rhetoric of the Promised Land as colonization, pure and simple – the Pilgrims and Puritans were part of a hierarchical settler colony and acted as colonizers upon the indigenous population; second, to draw attention to other groups in early American history and their versions of the national prehistory; third, to analyze the complicated ways in which these different groups interacted. Approaching early American history and specifically the settlements in New England from the perspective of postcolonial criticism, Schueller and Watts suggest that the colonization of what became the United States and the formation of the nation involved a complex series of political negotiations, machinations, violent encounters, and legal maneuvers that attempted to define differences among various groups: the Puritan clergy, the emergent bourgeoisie, the white backwoodsmen, the mixed-bloods, American Indians, and African Americans. (“Introduction” 5) Thus, the earlier scholarship of the Myth and Symbol School in its historical, cultural, and political context must from a postcolonial studies perspective inevitably come into view as part and parcel of the master narrative of white AngloSaxon Protestant America. 184 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 10. CONCLUSION: BURYING THE ROCK OR PREPARING THE TURKEY? The white people made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it. RED CLOUD Finding is the first act The second, loss. EMILY DICKINSON Whereas the mythology of the Pilgrims and Puritans, the Promised Land, Plymouth Rock, and Thanksgiving still is firmly embedded in national narratives, iconography, and cultural practices, protest against this WASP version of American beginnings has not abated. Native American organizations have enacted a counter-cultural practice at Plymouth: Burying the rock. On Thanksgiving, November 23, 1995, Moonanum James (Wampanoag), leader of the United American Indians of New England, gathered over 300 Native people and supporters of all nationalities at Plymouth Rock, where “the protesters climbed across a fence to get to the rock and buried it covering it with sand and erecting an indigenous warrior flag on top of it” (“Native People”). This symbolic burial of Plymouth Rock, as the activists explain, “capped the 25th anniversary of the National Day of Mourning speak-out held here in Plymouth. The Day of Mourning is a protest against the U.S. celebration of the mythology of Thanksgiving, and against the racist ‘Pilgrim’s Progress Parade’” (ibid.). The parade referred to here reenacts Pilgrims walking to church, muskets and bibles in hand. Moonanum James comments that “[t]hey want to act as though we sat down and ate turkey and lived happily ever after. That is simply not true – and we keep coming back year after year in order to give answer to their lies” (qtd. in ibid.). And in regard to the Mayflower Compact, he states: There was no room in that Compact for women, lesbians and gay men, and the poor, let alone for Native people or our sisters and brothers of African descent. We call on all oppressed people to unite and join the fight against the racist and murderous ruling class, and not glorify the Mayflower Compact but to condemn it and the system it created. (qtd. in ibid.) PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 185 Illustration 7: ‘Illegal Pilgrims’ Yaakov Kirschen, The First Thanksgiving (2006). Political protest not only counters sanitized versions of American history in which the Pilgrims and Puritans are painted as victims of an oppressive society rather than as genocidal colonizers, but also other commemorative rituals that are part of the national fantasy of the Puritans which arguably function to suppress the more gruesome aspects of their story. Many aspects of Thanksgiving, “America’s most loved holiday” (Dennis, Red 81), are by and large later fabrications: The turkey, for one thing, was certainly not part of the Thanksgiving celebration in 1621. Archaeologist James Deetz, who worked at the site of the first settlement of the Pilgrims, points to a long-standing misconception: We finally found some turkey bone after ten years of digging. The circumstantial evidence is that it wouldn’t be likely [that the Pilgrims ate turkey]. Turkeys are very hard to kill and the matchlocks of the period weren’t very good for hunting. (qtd. in Dennis, Red 100-101) 186 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Dennis elaborates how the American turkey industry has fabricated the traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner in the latter decades of the 19th century (cf. ibid.). The Thanksgiving turkey turns out to be a fiction – and a market-driven capitalist fiction at that. And yet, religio-political devotion to the idea that the USA is a (or the) Promised Land and the fantasy of Puritan national origins are still somewhat hegemonic. Many comparisons have been drawn between the Protestant legacy of the Pilgrims and the Puritans and contemporary Evangelicals in the United States, as both groups adhere to Biblical literalism, strive for a theocratic society, and do not allow for a functional differentiation of the social world: in their view, religious doctrine underlies all aspects of public and private life. And religious fundamentalism and evangelicalism cannot be neglected as a political force. But even more structural reverberations of Puritan thought can be found in contemporary politics: Kevin R. den Dulk discusses what he refers to as “Evangelical Internationalists” (cf. his article of the same title), and Jeremy Mayer has pointed out the ideological proximity between US-American evangelicals and conservative religio-political groups in Israel, who share, and bond over, an exceptionalist and Promised Land rhetoric: chosen people both (cf. “Christian Fundamentalists”). We may consider this a transnational dimension of the Promised Land myth. PILGRIMS AND PURITANS AND THE MYTH OF THE PROMISED LAND | 187 11. STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Relate the Promised Land myth to the biblical Exodus narrative. What kind of correspondences did the Pilgrims and Puritans construct? 2. Discuss William Bradford and John Winthrop as religious leaders in the context of Promised Land mythmaking. 3. Compare the myth of the Promised Land to the myth that has been constructed around Jamestown and Pocahontas. Can you establish similarities and differences between them? 4. Discuss the presence/absence of Native Americans with regard to the myth of the Promised Land. 5. In what way did African Americans appropriate the Promised Land myth? Give examples from the text and from other sources. 6. Discuss Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) as a modern pilgrimage. How does the text make use of the myth of the Promised Land? 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New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967. –. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, 1958. Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday. New York: Vintage, 1996. Norton, Anne. Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. Plumstead, A. W., ed. The Wall and the Garden: Selected Massachusetts Election Sermons, 1670-1775. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1968. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. New York: Harper, 1843. Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. Boston: Little, 1965. Watkins, Owen C. The Puritan Experience. London: Routledge, 1972. Young, Alexander, ed. Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, 1602-1625. New York: Da Capo, 1971. Ziff, Larzer. Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World. New York: Viking, 1973. Chapter IV American Independence and the Myth of the Founding Fathers 1. WHY THE FOUNDING FATHERS? Who Fathered America? TIM LAHAYE, FAITH OF OUR FOUNDING FATHERS When in doubt, in American politics, left, right, or center, deploy the Founding Fathers. JILL LEPORE, THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES The myth of the Founding Fathers constitutes an American master narrative which has enshrined a group of statesmen and politicians of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period as personifications of the origin of American nationhood, republicanism, and democratic culture. More so than with the previously discussed individuals and groups, the Founding Fathers epitomize a political myth of origin that is phrased in a language of kinship. The term ‘Fathers’ suggests tradition, legitimacy, and paternity and creates an allegory of family and affiliation that affirms the union and the cohesion of the new nation. When the colonists in the revolutionary decade argued that they were no longer subjects of the British King and that they could now govern themselves (cf. Declaration of Independence), they claimed not only the maturity of the colonies and its ruling elite but also their capacity to produce progenitors in their own right. The construction of ‘new world’ authority and the logic of reproduction went hand in hand. Second, in contrast to the myths previously discussed, which date back to the era of exploration and colonization, the chronology of the Founding Fathers coincides with the actual founding of the nation, beginning (roughly) with Ben- 198 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA jamin Franklin’s birth (1706) and ending with James Madison’s death (1836). As a myth, founding fatherhood would only be installed firmly much later though – arguably only in the 20th century, as we will see. The Founding Fathers denote a secular myth that in its hegemonic version claims that the US evolved from the Puritans’ Mayflower Compact to the political maturity of republicanism. It also constitutes a myth of a new beginning effected through a revolution. Even though this revolution has been interpreted in many different ways, it certainly carries that “specific […] pathos of the absolutely new, of a beginning which would justify starting to count time in the year of the revolutionary event” (Arendt, On Revolution 29-30). In many ways, the American calendar begins with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Revolutionary War, and this new beginning is commemorated each year on the Fourth of July. The myth of the Founding Fathers is also intimately connected to the first explicit articulations of an American civil religion. In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington refers to the bonds among the US states as ‘sacred ties’ to be preserved and cherished on the basis of the Constitution and thus translates the European religious idiom of the ‘holy union’ into a civil religious framework that would be particularly influential in constructions of the American nation (cf. Spalding and Garrity, Sacred Union). Third, the myth of the Founding Fathers (like that of the Pilgrims and Puritans) focuses on a group of historical actors; it symbolizes cooperation and interdependence by toning down internal conflicts among those actors and by erasing the contingency of their plans and actions, their local and regional (rather than national) interests, and all sorts of major and minor disagreements. Even though members of this group have been heroized individually (George Washington, above all), they still form a collectivity whose military, political, intellectual, and diplomatic talents and efforts have led it to perform what has been referred to in hegemonic versions of the myth as nothing less than “a miracle” (Schachner, Founding Fathers vii), or “almost a miracle” (cf. Ferling’s book of the same title). It also strongly personalizes the origins of American nationhood, republicanism, and democracy by presenting them as the results of the political genius, virtue, and audacity of extraordinary individuals. The myth has been affirmed by American and European writers, critics, and scholars alike, ranging from Richard Hofstadter to Clinton Rossiter and from Alexis de Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt. Who exactly is or is not to be included among the Founding Fathers is a matter of scholarly debate, as this term has only been applied retrospectively and inconsistently. Technically, the Founding Fathers were the delegates of the Thirteen Colonies who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 199 later the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Some of those “164 Patriots,” as Jack Stanfield calls them (cf. America’s Founding Fathers), are little known today, while others figure prominently in memorial discourses. Richard Brown looks at the “ninety-nine men” – the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the members of the Constitutional Convention (between whom exists some overlap) – and identifies the Founding Fathers as the “uppermost layer of the Revolutionary leadership” (“Founding Fathers” 465). Richard Bernstein even more inclusively describes the Founding Fathers as those who, by word or deed, helped to found the United States as a nation and a political experiment. Thus, beyond the “seven who shaped our destiny” named by Richard B. Morris, the term includes those who sat in the Congress that declared American independence; it even includes a delegate such as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who opposed independence and refused to sign the Declaration but fought for the American cause in the Revolutionary War, and a polemicist such as Thomas Paine, who only briefly held political office but was an extraordinarily effective educator and mobilizer of public opinion. It also encompasses others who fought on the American side in the war, or played important roles (as framers, ratifiers, opponents, or effectuators) in the origins of the Constitution of the United States and the system of government it outlines. (Founding Fathers 7-8) Gore Vidal in contrast singles out Washington, Adams, and Jefferson as the Founding Fathers of the American republic, even though he refers to Alexander Hamilton as often as to the three aforementioned figures, and quite frequently also to John Jay and James Madison (cf. Inventing). As Bernstein’s reference to Morris’s 1976 book Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny in the above quotation shows, the epithet ‘Founding Fathers’ often refers to seven individuals, namely Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison; it is by and around these quite iconic figures that the Founding Fathers myth of origin has been predominantly constructed (even if there are other suggestions and additions such as Harlow Giles Unger’s rather laudatory appraisal of James Monroe as The Last Founding Father [2009]). So whether there were three, seven, ninety-nine, or 164 founding fathers (and some accounts come up with still other numbers) is contentious, and has been subject to processes of canonization and revision time and again. While we may refer to the American elite of the late 18th century as Founding Fathers (alternatively: framers, founders) and while the group later referred to as the Founding Fathers was already commemorated in early American popular print culture, the phrase ‘Founding Fathers’ as a label became a fixed expression only in the early 20th century after it was used for the first time in 1916 by War- 200 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ren G. Harding in a talk at the Republican National Convention (cf. Bernstein, Founding Fathers 3; cf. also Lepore, Whites). Harding again used this phrase in his 1921 inaugural address: Standing in this presence, mindful of the solemnity of this occasion, feeling the emotions which no one may know until he senses the great weight of responsibility for himself, I must utter my belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers. Surely there must have been God’s intent in the making of this new-world Republic. Harding’s speech may well be considered a founding moment of the Founding Fathers discourse even though group portraits and images of those American politicians and statesmen had, of course, been circulating much earlier. My aim in this chapter is neither to provide a full-fledged discussion of the merits of American republicanism and constitutionalism as debated and created by the Founding Fathers, nor to present in-depth analyses of the foundational documents, nor to address each of the Founding Fathers as private and public figures, but rather to reconstruct the processes through which the myth of the Founding Fathers developed. In this chapter I will first revisit the historical moment of the American founding; second, trace the affirmative, i.e. foundational memorial culture surrounding the founders in the 19th century; third, consider American slavery in the context of the Founding Fathers myth and the role of Abraham Lincoln as a belated Founding Father, or, more specifically, as the Founding Father for African Americans; fourth, address the long-neglected role women played as ‘Founding Mothers’ in the metaphorical paradigm of procreation; fifth, direct our attention to the memorial practices of the 20th century, more specifically to the Founding Fathers of Mount Rushmore, a prestigious and very controversial project that, among other things, sheds light on Native American perspectives on the founders; sixth, discuss the latest revisions of the Founding Fathers myth in the context of the Tea Party movement and ‘founders chic,’ which seem to re-affirm the exclusivity of the Founding Fathers as, again in a civil religious vein, the American ‘apostles of freedom;’ seventh, and in conclusion, consider the mutable meanings of this myth in the 21st century in national as well as transnational contexts. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 201 2. SEVEN FOUNDING FATHERS – AN OVERVIEW Politicians are an integral part of “the mysteries of national formations.” ROBERT A. FERGUSON, READING THE EARLY REPUBLIC America’s founding fathers, the men who engineered a constitutional convention and drafted a new form of government for the loosely-joined states in 1787, succeeded through the force of personal authority. JOYCE APPLEBY, INHERITING THE REVOLUTION Despite never-ending debates of who should or should not be considered a member, some definitions of the Founding Fathers have remained more or less constant in American historiography; thus, in order to sketch the dominant version of the myth, let me name and very briefly introduce those who are most often included in the Founding Fathers canon: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) is the oldest member of the Founding Father group and still holds a central place among their ranks as a supposedly multitalented politician, public educator, and scientist, and as a major representative of the American Enlightenment. In his autobiography, which has issued powerful self-representations of the homo americanus and has become a highly canonical text, Franklin fashioned himself as the “good parent” who “treats all Americans as his offspring” (Morgan, Benjamin Franklin 127). Due to his participation in the campaign for colonial unity, he was often referred to as “the first American” (cf. H.W. Brands’s book of the same title). Benjamin Franklin’s selfconcocted and self-declared combination of frugality, hard work, community spirit, intellectualism, and democratic participation was highly influential in later mythmaking. He was famously portrayed by Joseph Siffred Duplessis and is commemorated on the one hundred-dollar bill. During his lifetime, the Franklin cult was already international in scope and garnered a substantial transatlantic following. More recently, James Srodes has re-affirmed his centrality by calling him the “essential founding father” (cf. Benjamin Franklin). Somewhat different are the grounds on which George Washington (1732- 1799), one of the three Virginians in this group, has been elevated as a Founding Father. Washington was commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775-1783 (and as such successful against the British military); he then oversaw the writing of the Constitution in 1787, and was later unanimously voted the first President of the United States (1789-1797). During his presidency many aspects 202 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA and rituals of the US government were established that are still being practiced today, among them the presidential inaugural address. Washington has often been given the epithet ‘Father of his Country’ and thus holds a particularly prominent place among the founders. In affirmative versions of the founders myth, he is often referred to as “a modern-day Cincinnatus” (Furstenberg, “Washington’s Farewell Address” 122; cf. Wills, Cincinnatus 35-37, 248-9) because he allegedly did not strive for political power and planned to return to his plantation after the war for independence was won. As a Virginian, Washington was also “a staunch advocate of American expansion” (Taylor, Writing 176) and was among those Founding Fathers who owned slaves. Foundational Washington iconography includes the famous portraits by Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart, the biographies by John Marshall (cf. Life), Washington Irving (cf. Life), and Mason Locke Weems (cf. History), as well as the sculptures by Jean Antoine Houdon and Horatio Greenough. Washington’s Birthday is a federal holiday celebrated on the third Monday of February. Karal Ann Marling has comprehensively documented Washingtonia in her book George Washington Slept Here (1988), and François Furstenberg has tried to show that the “freely given,” voluntary worship of Washington effectively created a civil religious, national consensus among Americans (In the Name 70). Like Washington, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was a member of the Virginia planter elite and thus a slaveholder; he served as delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress and later on became the third President of the United States (1801-1809). On his gravestone, Jefferson allegedly wished to be remembered for three things: as the author of the Declaration of Independence, as the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and as the founder of the University of Virginia. He purchased the Louisiana territory from Napoleon in 1803, thus doubling the size of the US territory, and supported the Lewis and Clarke expedition (1804-06) to explore it. The ideal of Jeffersonian democracy is often described as an agrarian vision of an imagined “empire of liberty,” which is formulated in his Notes on the State of Virginia (query 14). The neoclassical Jefferson Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C. was completed in 1947, and he is depicted on the rare two-dollar bill. Because of the inconsistencies and contradictions of Jefferson’s contribution to the national founding, Joseph Ellis has called him the “American Sphinx” (cf. his book of the same title). In biographical appraisals, he has been given credit for his contribution and successes by Merrill Peterson (cf. Jefferson Image) and others, yet he has also been cast quite negatively as “the greatest southern reactionary” (Lind, Next American Nation 369) and as an influence on the Ku Klux Klan (cf. O’Brien, Long Affair). AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 203 James Madison (1751-1836) is the third Virginian plantation owner in the ranks of the Founding Fathers. As a member of Congress (1780-3), he urged the revision of the Articles of Confederation in favor of a stronger national government. As the primary author of the Constitution, he is often called ‘Father of the Constitution’ and ‘Father of the Bill of Rights.’ In co-authorship with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay he wrote the Federalist Papers. Power must be divided, Madison argued, both between federal and state governments, and within the federal government (checks and balances) to protect individual rights from what he famously called “the tyranny of the majority” (“Advice”). With Jefferson, Madison formed the Republican Party. As the fourth President of the United States (1809-1817), he entered a war against Britain which is often referred to as the War of 1812 (also called ‘Mr. Madison’s War’); it ended inconclusively but was considered a success by Americans and is thus often also labeled the ‘second war for independence.’ Although he is considered one of the key Founding Fathers, John Adams (1735-1826) never became the object of any large-scale national individual personality cult, which he seems to have anticipated himself: The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical Rod, smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod – and henceforth these two conducted all the Policy, Negotiations, Legislatures and War. These underscored lines contain the whole Fable, Plot, and Catastrophe. (qtd. in Ferguson, Reading 1) Adams was a lawyer, a political theorist, and the author of “Thoughts on Government,” which early on promoted “a checked, balanced, and separated form of government” (Bernstein, Founding Fathers 51) and suggested a bicameral legislature anchored in the Constitution. As delegate for Massachusetts to the Continental Congress he nominated George Washington as commander-in-chief and supposedly prompted Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. He served as Washington’s vice president and later became the second President of the United States. Adams is often considered in relation to various famous family members – his wife, Abigail Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, who was the sixth President of the United States, and his great-grandson Henry Adams, a historian and novelist. Like Franklin and Adams, John Jay (1745-1829) was from the North and the delegate to the First Continental Congress from New York; he also drafted New York’s first state constitution. At first, Jay was, in John Stahr’s view, somewhat of a “reluctant democrat” (John Jay xiii) and apparently always favored a strong national government. Next to being one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, 204 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA he wrote the voluminous pamphlet Address to the People of the State of New York. As head of the Federalist Party, Jay became Governor of the State of New York (1795-1801), and in this function effected the abolition of slavery in this state. Jay also was involved in what is often referred to as the Jay Treaty (1794), which, for a while, secured peace between the US and Britain. In contrast to other Founding Fathers, Jay has no monument or memorial on the National Mall dedicated to him. It has been repeatedly noted that Jay’s legacy has been somewhat overshadowed by that of other Founding Fathers and that he is often “forgotten and sometimes misrepresented” (Stahr, John Jay xiii) due in part to his less than exciting lifestyle; Stahr quips somewhat polemically: “He did not die in a duel, like Hamilton, or sleep with a slave, like Jefferson” (ibid. xiv). Alexander Hamilton (1755/57(?)-1804) is, according to Gore Vidal, “the one true exotic” (Inventing 17) among the national founders. Born and raised in the West Indies, Hamilton came to North America for his education (he attended King’s College, now Columbia University). He was a delegate to the Congress of the Confederation from New York, a delegate to the 1786 Annapolis Convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, and one of New York’s delegates at the Philadelphia Convention that drafted the new constitution in 1787. Hamilton wrote most of the Federalist Papers and is often considered a nationalist who emphasized a strong central government. In his political maneuvering, Hamilton has often been cast as authoritarian, even “monarchizing,” and has been considered by his political opponents as a “closet Caesar” (Knott, Alexander Hamilton 215). Hamilton resigned from office in 1795 but remained influential in politics; he supposedly helped Jefferson defeat Adams in the 1800 presidential elections and had a notorious rivalry with Aaron Burr, who eventually killed Hamilton in a duel. Foreign born, and, we can assume, without the proper habitus of either the Southern planters or the New England intellectuals, Hamilton has often been considered the odd one out among the inner circle of the Founding Fathers – a mere “upstart,” an immigrant of illegitimate birth, even “un-American” (ibid. 7; 11). Jefferson once noted that there was a somewhat “faintly alien […] odor of (his) character and politics” (qtd. in ibid. 230). He has been memorialized in paintings by John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale, outdoor statues by Carl Conrads (1880), William Ordway (1893 and 1908), and Adolph A. Weinman (1941) in Manhattan as well as a statue in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, and, most recently, the PBS production Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton (2011). From these short biographical sketches we can already gather, first, that most sources on the founders have a tendency to affirm the Founding Fathers myth and to contribute to their mythologization (even when they are scholarly publica- AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 205 tions); and second, that the founders had pronounced differences in background and upbringing, in political vision and experience, in temperament and in career. These differences suggest that their group identity is anything but stable. Benjamin Franklin had a clear sense of the differences among them when he reminded his peers: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately” (Works Vol. 1 408). Franklin’s admonishment to “hang together” and to pursue the independence of the colonies as a common cause reveals what was perceived as the danger of factionalism at the time. What many of the elite of the founders indeed had in common is that they were authors – of farewell speeches, pamphlets, constitutions, declarations, bills, essays, autobiographies, letters, etc. – who engaged in at times heated debates and exchange. In the historical context, Robert Ferguson notes: In the 1770s the Founders are competing propagandists who trade in treason for an uncertain cause and a mixed audience. Confused and divided, they face enormous problems in deciding what to say to whom and when. Neither the British nor the French but factionalism is and remains their clearest enemy. Indeed, the possibility of collapse through internal dissension continues to haunt both political considerations and the literary imagination for generations. (“‘We Hold’” 4) Based on their writings on republicanism and constitutionalism, Hannah Arendt lauds “the thoughtful and erudite political theories of the Founding Fathers” (On Revolution 16) and their “deep concern with forms of government” (ibid. 50). This political myth has provided a cohesive national discourse for the United States at a time when it still was characterized by strong local and regional interests. Still, the conflicts among the Founding Fathers and their different political trajectories have led Robert Levine to suggest in hindsight that there was “no single ‘American ideology’” or “national narrative” at the time of the founding (Dislocating 67). 206 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 3. REMEMBERING THE FOUNDERS IN THE 19TH CENTURY: JOHN TRUMBULL’S PAINTING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE [A]n Olympian gathering of wise and virtuous men who stood splendidly above all faction, ignored petty self-interest, and concerned themselves only with the freedom and well-being of their fellow-countrymen. STANLEY ELKINS AND ERIC MCKITRICK, “THE FOUNDING FATHERS” [A] staid group of white men, frozen in time. RICHARD B. BERNSTEIN, THE FOUNDING FATHERS RECONSIDERED When discussing the iconography of the Founding Fathers, one has to turn once again to the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. and to the rotunda, where crucial scenes from US foundational mythology are exhibited. Whereas George Washington appears in the rotunda in the Trumbull painting General George Washington Resigning His Commission (1824) as commander-in-chief, the focus here will be on the representation of the group of founders in The Declaration of Independence (1818), also by Trumbull, who painted a series of four rotunda paintings. The painting titled The Declaration of Independence is one of the most canonical renderings of the foundational moment of the ‘exceptional union’ called the United States; its title does not reference the founders’ names but their performative act of declaring independence as well as the document confirming that act. It is one among several iconic renderings of foundational moments in US history displayed in the rotunda today, including Howard Chandler Christy’s The Signing of the Constitution (1940) as well as Barry Faulkner’s murals The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States (1936, exhibited in the National Archives Building). John Trumbull, who is referred to by Irma B. Jaffe as the “patriot-artist of the American Revolution” (cf. John Trumbull), was well acquainted with Thomas Jefferson (who he also painted), and regularly met with him in Paris in 1786. Clearly, the scene in Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence depicts not the July 4 meeting of the founders, but an earlier one – probably the June 28 meeting at which the committee appointed to present a draft of the document offered it up for consideration by the US Congress (cf. Cooper, John Trumbull 76). At the center of the composition, Jefferson submits the parchment to John Hancock, then-President of the Continental Congress and the first signer of the Declaration. Jefferson is surrounded by the other members of the drafting committee, some of which are more readily considered Founding Fathers than others: John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin. In the AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 207 background, 48 congressmen are clustered in groups of varying size, most of them with their heads turned attentively to the committee. Contemporaneous criticism of this painting held that it was static and repetitive, unoriginal, lacking in refinement, and historically inaccurate. Regardless of these critical responses, the painting has forcefully impacted the way the political founding of the US has been viewed and remembered, even if the Founding Fathers discourse has shifted to include George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay and to exclude Sherman, Livingston, and Hancock, who are less prominent today. Illustration 1: Signing the Declaration of Independence John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence (1818). And for all the criticism of Trumbull’s image, art scholar Irma B. Jaffe has reminded us that there was no precedent for a painting such as the Declaration of Independence at the time: [H]ow was one to show a large group of ordinary-looking men, dressed not in the glamorous costumes of European courts or the crimson robes of English lords, but in everyday American garb; placed in a room undistinguished by any architectural elegance; seated not on crimson and gold but plain wood Windsor chairs; leaning not on marble and ormolu tables but desks covered with dull green baize; watching not the collapse of a national leader but a committee presenting a report to the president of their body. How was one to 208 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA take these elements and make a painting that would speak to a nation’s people as long as that nation survived? (John Trumbull 108-109) Thus, we need to take into account that Trumbull (who had previously painted mostly religious scenes and battle scenes) tried to work out an iconography (and hagiography) of American democracy by focusing on what he considered to be the central aspects of its foundation: the Founding Fathers and the foundational document in a situation of rational contemplation and ceremonial order (cf. Christadler, “Geschichte” 321). In 1818, Trumbull’s iconic painting (still on the back of the US two-dollar bill today), which was recognized to be of “enormous national interest and historical significance” (Cooper, John Trumbull 78), was displayed in New York in the American Academy of the Fine Arts, where some 8.000 people came to see it in only one month; it then toured Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before it arrived in Washington in December 1819 and was presented to Congress. “The tour was a tremendous success” and “the high point of Trumbull’s career” (ibid.). That this image, which attempts to balance the “silence and solemnity of the scene” with the wish for a “picturesque and agreeable composition,” as Trumbull himself phrased it in the catalogue of an early exhibition (qtd. in Cooper, John Trumbull 76), is highly stylized appears to be obvious. Many scholars have emphasized the chaotic state of affairs and the uncertainty of the outcome of any political action at the time. Furthermore, there was a lack of protocol in the constitutional sessions that often led to a less orderly conduct than is portrayed in the Trumbull painting. Here, “the impression prevails that Congress united faces the central group, intent on what is occurring” (Jaffe, John Trumbull 105). Asked whether to exclude those delegates from the painting who did not sign the declaration and argued harshly against it, both Jefferson and Adams advised Trumbull not to do so for reasons of accuracy and authenticity. The result is a piece of art that was supposed to start “a great national artistic tradition” (Burns and Davis, American Art 102). Trumbull’s iconic image is an example of affirmative 19th-century memorial culture in regard to the US foundational narrative. Even if Trumbull’s painting does not visualize all the dimensions of the Founding Fathers myth, it does serve as a classic commemoration of the founding and, in many ways, is an instance of cultural nationalism in a state-dominated memory system (cf. Bodnar, Public Memory 251); in what follows, it will serve as a backdrop against which different representations of and perspectives on the Founding Fathers will be discussed. For now, we will take it as a point of departure for discussing AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 209 questions of legitimacy and authority connected to the foundational moment so powerfully portrayed in this image. 4. EXCURSUS: THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND THE QUESTION OF LEGITIMACY Government requires make-believe. Make believe that the king is divine or that he can do no wrong, make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or that the representatives of the people are the people. Make believe that the governors are the servants of the people. Make believe that all men are equal, or make believe that they are not. EDMUND S. MORGAN, AMERICAN HEROES I began this chapter by pointing out how the myth of the Founding Fathers partly relies on their authorship of foundational documents and how these documents, in turn, have enhanced, time and again, the fame of the Founding Fathers, particularly when it comes to discussions of original intent. Thus, the Founding Fathers and the founding documents continually reinforce each other’s mythical status. Today, a visit at the National Archives on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. easily demonstrates the civil religious dimension of those founding documents. Upon arrival, visitors to the National Archives Building are led through airport-like security to stand in line and slowly work their way forward to the repository in the dimly-lit Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom in which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are displayed. Military guards ask the tourists to line up in single-line files and to stand shoulder to shoulder with their feet touching the stairs at the bottom of the last steps one has to climb in order to enter the sacrosanct center. Visitors are also reminded that the chewing of gum is not allowed and that “proper reverence” for the place and the occasion is required. The fact that one can hardly read the documents due to the physical distance visitors have to maintain, the high security vaults, the dim, shadowy lighting, and the constant admonishment from the attending guards to continue moving along, make it clear that it is not the content of the documents one is supposed to take in, but their auratic quality – to imagine being present at the historical moment of founding among those who wrote and signed the Declaration and the Constitution. Pauline Maier has criticized this “imprisonment” of the founding documents “in massive, bronze-framed, bulletproof glass containers filled with inert helium gas” because in her view this ironically 210 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA contradicts the sense of a “living” constitution that is actually quite “dead” (American Scripture ix, xiv). One may argue that this sacralization of beginnings camouflages the absence of authority and legitimacy at the very core of the founding enterprise. Illustration 2: Signatures on the Declaration of Independence Declaration of Independence (1776). One of the defining acts of the Founding Fathers certainly is the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It constitutes a moment that has been thoroughly mythologized in spite of (or maybe because of) its in many ways precarious status that is incommensurate with its foundational quality but also presents a particular problem in terms of legitimacy, both overlooked by Trumbull and by the presentation at the National Archives. How did the signers become the Founding Fathers of a new nation? What kind of authority did they have as signers? The various commemorations or presentifications of the signing have been critiqued by revisionists to uncover their ideological investments as well as overall biases in American historiography. The most radical critique has been brought forward by Jacques Derrida, who in his essay “Declarations of Independence” (1986) revisits the scene of the signing and asks: [W]ho signs, and with what so-called proper name, the declarative act which founds an institution? Such an act does not come back to a constative or descriptive discourse. It performs, it accomplishes, it does what it says it does: that at least would be its intentional structure. (8) Derrida goes on to ponder the question of authority and of representation in relation to signatures. In the historical drama of the founding, Jefferson is the “draftsman” “drawing up” the declaration (ibid). The representatives of the people of the future state are “the ultimate signers” (9). Of course, contrary to his claims Jefferson was not the sole author of the Declaration of Independence, as AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 211 he took much from George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and also borrowed freely from other sources (cf. Taylor, Writing 197); yet, Derrida follows Jefferson’s own version of text production: But this people does not exist. They do not exist as an entity, it does not exist, before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in the act of the signature. The signature invents the signer. (“Declarations” 10) Michael Schudson – in referring to the Constitutional Convention – calls it somewhat less formally “a complex chicken-and-egg problem” (Good Citizen 51): The whole event of the Declaration of Independence (along with, following Schudson, the subsequent Constitutional Conventions) thus is in the future perfect. Derrida deconstructs the notion of a foundational moment; he not only addresses the contingency of the historical moment of a/the founding, but in revisiting that moment dis-covers the absence that is gaping at its core and that remains implicit. The declaration is “performative” (not “constative”) in nature: it is not the people who create the Declaration, but the Declaration that creates the people (cf. de Ville, “Sovereignty” 89). “Language [and the Signing] in this model is [thus] understood as simply ‘supplementing’ presence;” there is no “break in presence” but a “continuous, homogenous modification of presence in representation” (ibid. 93). Thus, declarations inevitably have a repetitive or citational structure (cf. ibid. 103). Signatures do not carry with them the legitimacy they claim; it is this slippage, this fundamental uncertainty that is covered up by and transposed into a heroic discourse of paternity, legitimacy, and founding; and it is the very “firstness” of the Founding Fathers (Bernstein, Founding Fathers 40) that in precluding any doubt at the same time provokes it. In the historical context, this doubt was significant. To gain acceptance for the founding documents among the states and their delegates, i.e. the people, Edmund Morgan suggests, it was necessary “to persuade Americans to accept representation on a scale hitherto unknown” (American Heroes 240) – namely on a national rather than on a local or regional level. To achieve this goal, the Founding Fathers created a “new fiction” (ibid. 239) – i.e., an “American people capable of empowering an American national government” (ibid). It seemed uncertain for quite some time whether Americans would accept this new fiction arguing for a national union of the individual colonies as a matter of survival. How can a small group of individuals speak for “the people”? How could the delegates claim to be “at the point of origin?” (Schudson, Good Citizen 52). Numerous pamphlets as well as the Federalist Papers were written to produce 212 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA the much needed consent among the ‘American’ people and to encourage them to consider themselves as such: American. The founders themselves, I should add, were well aware at least of the legal problem of their actions and procedures, even though many historians of the founding and worshippers of the Founding Fathers were not. Derrida’s text provides a perspective from which to explore the ‘foundational momentum’ of US democracy/democratic culture in terms of authority, legitimacy, and genealogy, and the problem of an absence retroactively occluded and tacitly installed as a presence. It is this sense of crisis and this struggle for legitimacy that provide a point of entry for reviewing the narratives and counter-narratives of the foundational moment of the Declaration. To see the Founding Fathers as having little legitimacy to begin with and as being propelled by their own political, social, and economic interests rather than by abstract ideals is now part of a tradition of revisionism that includes Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) and John Franklin Jameson’s The American Revolution (1926), in which the author considers “the American Revolution as a social movement” (8); much of Progressivist historiography until 1945 and the new social history of the 1970s and 1980s has focused on that claim with varying results (cf. Herbert Aptheker’s study of slave revolts). Class, race, and gender, as we will see, have been the variables in revisionist, critical readings of the political founding by scholars such as Gary Nash (The Forgotten Fifth), Linda Kerber (Women of the Republic), and Woody Holton (Forced Founders), who reconsider “the radicalism of the American revolution” (cf. Wood’s book of the same title) and inquire about alternative narratives of American beginnings. Even as it has been affirmed and reinvigorated time and again, the myth of the framers has come under scrutiny (particularly in the 20th century) for its omissions, falsifications, and onesidedness, and for celebrating slavery along with the national beginning. Thus, we find very different interpretations of the historical events commemorated by Trumbull and others in counter-narratives that include individuals and groups left out of conventional representations of the founding (Black Founding Fathers, Founding Mothers, as well as forgotten founders of all kinds). We will consider some of these revisionist perspectives in the following sections. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 213 5. CONTRADICTIONS AND OPPOSITION: BLACK SLAVES AND BLACK PROTEST VS. THE FOUNDING FATHERS The simultaneous development of slavery and freedom is the central paradox of American history. […] George Washington led Americans in battle against British oppression. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration, but the Constitution and its first ten amendments as well. They were all slaveholders. EDMUND S. MORGAN, AMERICAN SLAVERY, AMERICAN FREEDOM There is a painting in Philadelphia of the men who signed it. These men are relaxed; they are enjoying the activity of thinking, the luxury of it. They have the time to examine this thing called their conscience and to act on it. They need not feel compromised because they do not need to compromise. They are wonderful to look at. Some keep their hair in an unkempt style (Jefferson, Washington), and others keep their hair well groomed (Franklin). Their clothes are pressed, their shoes polished; nothing about their appearance is shameful. Can they buy as much land as they like? Can they cross the street in a manner that they would like? Can their children cleave to their breasts until death, or until the children simply grow up and leave home? The answer is yes. JAMAICA KINCAID, “THE LITTLE REVENGE” Even if in the context of the American Revolution, ‘slavery’ often referred metaphorically to the political situation of being colonized (cf. Foner, Story 29), the continued existence of real slavery in the young republic has to be seen as one of the most glaring contradictions at the heart of the new political system created by the Founding Fathers. Despite the anti-slavery imperative of the Declaration of Independence, the founding documents not only do not abolish slavery, but the Constitution ultimately affirms it by way of the Fugitive Slave Clause and further regulations concerning the representation of the slave states in the federal government (such as the Three-Fifths Compromise), which has led Paul Finkelman in his Slavery and the Founders to refer to the Constitution as a “proslavery compact” (34); even if “the word ‘slavery’ is never mentioned in the Constitution,” “its presence was felt everywhere” (ibid). Thus, the articulations of independence, freedom, and liberty in the founding documents cast a dubious light on some of the Founding Fathers and their status as slaveholders. As mentioned previously, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington were among those Founding Fathers who owned slaves, i.e. they held human beings as property, like chattel. 214 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Edmund Morgan has analyzed the “ordeal” of Virginia regarding its racial politics (cf. American Slavery). To be sure, many Founding Fathers (defined in a broad sense) owned slaves, including practically all of the Virginia delegates. Whereas we have little or no information about most of these slaves, individual slaves have become modestly well-known in the context of the American Revolution: these include Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings and her brother James, both of whom accompanied Jefferson as servants to Paris (Sally was also Jefferson’s mistress); Washington’s slave and groom Henry/Harry Washington, who later escaped from slavery; Hercules, who was Washington’s chef at the White House; and James Madison’s manservant and ‘factotum’ Paul Jennings (cf. Dowling Taylor, Slave xx), who gained his freedom many years after Madison’s death with the help of then-senator Daniel Webster at the age of 48 (cf. ibid. xxi). Jennings composed what became known as the first White House memoir, in which he recounts his time in the White House with the Madisons and which has recently been reprinted in Elizabeth Dowling Taylor’s careful study of Jennings’s life and career within the larger context of politics, abolitionism, and African American culture. It is also recorded that Harry Washington, who was born around 1740 in Africa, after repeated attempts to escape from slavery eventually managed to do so and became part of the group of black loyalists who sided with Britain in order to gain their freedom and boarded a ship to Nova Scotia; his name (along with those of many other fugitive slaves of the Founding Fathers) is recorded in the “Book of Negroes” that lists all of those who escaped to the North. Jill Lepore records Harry Washington’s path to Nova Scotia and back to Africa in 1792, where he was one of many to build a colony in Sierra Leone and thus became a founding father of sorts in his own right. By 1799, the colony was plagued by disease und unrest; after Harry Washington briefly became the leader of a group of exile rebels, he ultimately died not far from where he had been born (cf. Lepore, “Goodbye Columbus”). The histories of those black American fugitives who tried to gain their freedom at the same time yet in dramatically different ways than the American colonies have long been neglected. For many slaves, “the vaunted war for liberty was […] a war for the perpetuation of servitude” (Schama qdt. in Davis, America’s Hidden History 159). Cassandra Pybus and Simon Schama have traced the fugitive slaves’ paths to many places, including Africa and Australia (cf. Pybus, Epic Journeys; Schama, Rough Crossings). Lepore suggests that we may want to think about those fugitives as “honorary Founding Fathers” (cf. “Goodbye Columbus”). Hercules, Washington’s cook, was more than a mere provider of warm meals; historical sources refer to him as “a celebrated artiste” and “as highly AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 215 accomplished a proficient in the culinary art as could be found in the United States” (Custis, Recollections 422). He earned money on the side by selling leftovers from his kitchen. Given the freedom to walk the city by himself, he eventually failed to return and made the black community of Philadelphia his new home. His former owner, George Washington, assumed that it would discredit him as President of the US in the North to aggressively try to recapture one of his slaves, an estimation that worked to Hercules’s advantage – he was never caught. Singularly prominent by now is the story of Sally Hemings and her family at Jefferson’s Monticello estate. Recent scholarship, such as Annette GordonReed’s study The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009), as well as popular cultural productions have dealt with the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings; her descendants, proven to be indeed descendants of Jefferson by DNA tests in 1996, may now also be interred on the burying ground of the Jefferson family at Monticello. The fate of their children was already the topic of William Wells Brown’s sentimental novel Clotel, Or the President’s Daughter (1853), published in London and considered to be the first novel by an African American; Clotel, the protagonist, time and again escapes enslavement, yet ultimately cannot protect herself or her daughter, who becomes Clotel’s former white lover’s servant and commits suicide by jumping into the Potomac River near the White House, where her father had once lived. The 2012 exhibition Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty, held at the National Museum of American History (which is part of the Smithsonian Institution), detailed the lives of six slave families (among them the Hemingses) living at Monticello as slaves of Jefferson. Of all the slaves he owned, Jefferson only ever freed four: Sally Hemings, and three children he had with her. The stories of Paul Jennings, Harry Washington, and Sally Hemings not only evidence the complicated and close relationships some of the Founding Fathers had with some of their slaves who yet did not figure in their scheme of independence and emancipation, but also what canonical historiography has ignored for a long time and what has only recently been addressed: the symbolic significance and cultural authority of the slaves’ and fugitives’ stories for creating newly foundational and anti-foundational narratives regarding the myth of the Founding Fathers. American fugitives like Harry Washington not only left America, they also disappeared from American historiography, as Jill Lepore notes (cf. “Goodbye Columbus”), and need to be put back into the picture. And Saidiya Hartman contends that whereas “assertions of free will, singularity, autonomy and consent necessarily obscure relations of power and domination,” any “genealogy of freedom, to the contrary, discloses the intimacy of liberty, 216 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA domination, and subjection” (Scenes 123). Thus, a genealogy of the myth of the Founding Fathers reveals the dialectic of free and unfree, of master and slave that is at the core of that myth. The mixed-race heritage explicated by Clarence E. Walker in his study Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (2009) renders Hemings a black founding mother, and Jefferson and Hemings “founding parents” (29) of an (albeit often unacknowledged) American “mixed-race state” (17). Of course, we must not romanticize the Jefferson-Hemings union, as it took place in a context of glaring asymmetries between a master and a slave, i.e. a person considered property and used for profit (cf. e.g. Henry Wiencek’s 2012 study The Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves). The stories of the slaves of the Founding Fathers serve to disqualify once and for all statements such as Arthur Schlesinger’s that “to deny the essentially European origins of American culture is to falsify history” (“When Ethnic” A14). The African American revolutionary experience has often been left out of history books, from which “it would appear that the British and the Americans fought for seven years as if half a million African Americans had been magically whisked off the continent” (Nash, Forgotten Fifth 4). Important contributions to black revolutionary historiography were made by Herbert Aptheker, Benjamin Quarles, and, most recently, Gary Nash, who chronicles, among other things, the many “freedom suits” in which African American individuals sued successfully for their freedom from slavery in the courts of New England in the revolutionary era (cf. Forgotten Fifth 18), as well as the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) that led to Haitian independence from the French colonial empire and to the first black republic in the Americas. In particular, Nash stresses the very different conditions that black Americans faced in the revolutionary moment: [T]he black American people, who composed one-fifth of the population, had to begin the world anew with only the rudimentary education and often with only the scantiest necessities of life. […] They [their emerging black leaders] could not write state constitutions or transform the political system under which white revolutionaries intended to live as an independent people. But the black founding fathers embarked on a project to accomplish what is almost always part of modern revolutionary agendas – to recast the social system. (Forgotten Fifth 50) Slavery has repeatedly been referred to as the unfinished business of the American Revolution by which a system of bondage was continued that ran counter to AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 217 the ideals of liberty and freedom supposedly at the core of American independence, even as a substantial number of slave-owning Southerners freed their slaves “to the extent that one of every eight black Virginians was free by the year of Washington’s death, 1799” (ibid. 105). It has also to be noted that the Northern states, one after the other, legislated for the gradual emancipation of slaves. Northern abolition came into increasingly stark contrast with Southern slaveholding and plantation life. By 1810, 75% of all blacks in the North were free, and in 1840 virtually all of them had been emancipated (cf. Kolchin, American Slavery 81). Of course, abolition in the North did not imply racial equality, quite the contrary – free black people were subjected to racism in all matters of daily private and public life. The paradoxes, contradictions, and (negative) dialectics in the Founding Fathers’ political vision revealed by slavery and racial inequality did not remain uncommented on by those who suffered from exclusion on the basis of race. Black protest continually addressed the grievances of disenfranchised African Americans, slaves and free, in the US, and the rise of the black press in the 19th century created new platforms for these articulations. Among the early, most vocal voices of opposition is David Walker (1785-1830), the author of David Walker’s Appeal (published in 1826), which Robert Levine considers “one of the most influential and explosive black-nationalist documents authored by an African American” (Dislocating 70). Walker was the son of a free black mother and an enslaved father; born in Wilmington, North Carolina, he apparently traveled quite a bit before he went to live in Boston in the 1820s. He was a member of the Methodist Church and an active abolitionist. In 1827, he became an agent and writer for the newly founded Freedom’s Journal. In 1829, one year before his death, he published his famous Appeal, which expresses as much anger and despair about racial hatred in the North than about the system of slavery in the South, and articulates an open attack on American society and the founders. Many in the South wanted him dead, and in fact Walker did die shortly after the publication of his Appeal under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It is particularly Thomas Jefferson whom Walker takes to task for his views on race and for what Walker sees as his feeble attempts to justify slavery and racism; the Appeal elaborately chides him for his writings on race, African Americans, and slavery, particularly in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and offers a harsh and biting critique of Jefferson’s pseudo-scientific findings, abstractions, and generalizations concerning black people. Walker claims natural rights for African Americans – “nothing but the rights of man” (qtd. in Levine, Dislocating 66) – and repeatedly accuses slaveholders of cruelty and barbarity. Walker ends the four articles of his Appeal by quoting from the Declaration of 218 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Independence’s list of grievances addressed to the British King, and challenges his white readers: Do you understand your own language? […] Compare your own language above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us […]. Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your suffering under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you? (75) Walker’s strategy is twofold: on the one hand, he identifies the gap between the vision of freedom and the reality of black people in the republic in no uncertain terms; on the other hand, he uses the Declaration as a model of resistance and empowerment for African Americans by enlisting Jefferson’s revolutionary and liberatory rhetoric for his own cause (cf. Levine, Dislocating 96f.). Clearly, David Walker is one of the more militant voices of black opposition and nationalism, particularly by early 19th-century standards. Another rhetorical masterpiece which engages the political legacy of the Founding Fathers from the perspective of a former African American slave is Frederick Douglass’s famous text “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1841). In this text, Douglass debunks the myth of the American founding by addressing his white audience as “you” (celebrating “your National Independence” and “your political freedom”) and as “fellow citizens” at the same time, which marks the paradox that he is invited to give a speech at an event commemorating American independence while at the same time being excluded from what is celebrated on the Fourth of July: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. (“What”) The myth of American ‘independence’ crumbles under Douglass’s harsh criticism. What indeed is there to be celebrated for African Americans on July 4, 1841? For Douglass, the patriotic rhetoric of Fourth-of-July festivities mocks AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 219 African Americans in their continued plight by ”veiling” the injustices perpetrated in the name of American independence and democracy, and he describes slavery as a singularly barbaric aspect of American exceptionalism. With Douglass, we may consider the slaveholding Founding Fathers as savages who led a nation of savages into independence on the backs of enslaved blacks who cooked their meals, groomed their horses, and took care of all aspects of their physical wellbeing. The sentimentality of the festivities appalls Douglass, who considers them hollow and hypocritical. The texts of both Walker and Douglass thus hold the founders up to the egalitarian ideals articulated in the founding documents and present a stark contrast to the image of sober reflection and cultural refinement attached to the Founding Fathers in many representations; John Trumbull for instance certainly did not represent “savages” or “barbarians” in his painting. Yet, from the perspective of African Americans, the founding of the US with its continued tolerance of and acquiescence to the system of slavery may very well be considered a barbaric act, as it consolidated some people’s freedom at the expense of the freedom of others. In many ways, the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, has been viewed as the founding document for African Americans. The Proclamation along with the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of the Civil War is often called a “second founding” or a “re-founding” (cf. Quigley, Second Founding; Kantrowitz, “Abraham Lincoln”) with regard to the preservation of the national union, the abolition of slavery, and the granting of citizenship to blacks, whereby nearly four million people were freed from lifelong bondage. Quigley introduces the term “Second Founding” in his 2004 study and suggests that “[b]ack in 1787, America’s first founding had produced a constitution profoundly skeptical of democracy. James Madison and his coauthors in Philadelphia left undecided fundamental questions of slavery and freedom. All that would change in the 1860s and 1870s” (Second Founding ix). For many scholars “the ‘Second Founding’ marked the beginning of constitutional reforms that aimed at establishing an interracial democracy” (Twelbeck, “New Rules” 179). Much of the discourse on these efforts at reform still crystallizes in the figure of Abraham Lincoln as a symbol of integration, even if the historical accuracy of this assessment is debatable. Lincoln has been referred to as the founding father for African Americans, particularly in the context of civil rights in the 20th century. Stephen Kantrowitz even calls him “the only, the lonely founding father of the modern United States that emerged from the ashes of the civil war” also (but not only) with regard to racial politics (“Abraham Lincoln”) and also regards him as the author of a “New American Testament” (with refer- 220 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ence to Pauline Maier’s “American Scripture” metaphor for the founding documents of the 18th century; cf. her book of the same title) (ibid.). Illustration 3: Barack Obama as Founding Father Drew Friedman, cover ill. for The New Yorker (Jan. 26, 2009). © Condé Nast Barack Obama has invoked Lincoln’s presidency and his legacy for African American political culture both as presidential candidate and as elected president. Like Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson before him, Obama takes up Lincoln’s place in a collective black imagination and affirms the great role of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution passed during and after the Civil War. Obama’s 2008 speech “A AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 221 More Perfect Union” has been compared to Lincoln’s Cooper Union Speech of 1860 and his Gettysburg Address of 1863. Lincoln and Obama have also been compared because of their shared background in law and Illinois politics. Probing the visual iconography of the election of the first non-white American president, The New Yorker featured a picture of Obama on the cover dressed up like George Washington, i.e., a founding father; this anachronistic fashioning draws attention both to the perceived ‘whiteness’ of the US presidency and the Founding Fathers and to the fact that this whiteness may itself have become as anachronistic as a wig. Within the national paradigm, the various contestations of the Founding Fathers myth discussed in this section call into question the narrow canon of (white) Founding Fathers by recognizing and reflecting upon the different roles of African Americans in the context of independence, revolution, and nationbuilding. 6. FOUNDING MOTHERS: GENDER, NATURAL RIGHTS, AND REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD All Men Are Created Equal – But What About the Women? SLOGAN OF THE 20TH -CENTURY WOMEN’S MOVEMENT When you hear of a family with two brothers who fought heroically in the Revolutionary War, served their state in high office, and emerged as key figures in the new American nation, don’t you immediately think, “They must have had a remarkable mother”? COKIE ROBERTS, FOUNDING MOTHERS [I]ndeed, I think you ladies are in the number of the best patriots America can boast. GEORGE WASHINGTON To identify a core group of Founding Mothers may be even harder than to identify a core group of Founding Fathers. Whereas the Founding Fathers are usually considered in light of their political activism during and after the American Revolution, the concept of ‘Founding Mothers’ is an attempt to come to a genderspecific correlation by way of analogy that may be skewed in a historical context in which women were not considered political actors at all and in which a private-public distinction was firmly in place. This may be one of the reasons why 222 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Mary Beth Norton’s study Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society goes back to colonial New England’s gender discourse, in which structures of family and community were not yet clearly defined by a private-public dichotomy, and focuses on such foundational figures as Anne Hutchinson and Anne Hibbins, whose initiatives, deeds, and statements indeed have to be considered as a form of political participation, and a transgressive one at that. Closer to the revolutionary moment, white women of privilege were bound to their “small circle of domestic concerns” (Norton, Liberty’s Daughters 3) even as they may have shared political ideas with their male contemporaries. In the historical context of the Revolution, women were mostly excluded from the political realm; New Jersey was the only state that permitted women to vote after the Revolutionary War, and this right was revoked in 1806 (cf. Collins, America’s Women 83-4). Women only slowly (re)gained the right to vote in local elections (first and predominantly in New England by the end of the 19th century) and were only granted full suffrage with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Even though women were barred from the constitutional debates and none ever attended a single constitutional meeting, we can index their role as Founding Mothers in the revolutionary age and in the early republic and look at their contributions to the revolutionary political discourse of the time. Abigail Adams (1744-1818) for instance, the wife of John Adams, is often considered a Founding Mother in her own right. Her letters to her husband have become canonized in the Norton Anthology of American Literature for their political radicalism as well as for their rhetorical beauty. Most famously, in March 1776, she admonished her husband with the following words: I long to hear that you have declared an Independancy and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. (Quotable Abigail Adams 356) AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 223 Illustration 4: Portrait of Abigail Adams Gilbert Stuart, Abigail Smith Adams (1815). Abigail Adams used “Portia” as her penname (in reference to Roman senator Marcus Junius Brutus’s wife), by which she implied that she was “the obscure wife of a great politician” (Gelles, Portia 47). Contrary to this image of submissiveness, modesty, and domesticity, Adams’s writings exhibit a proto-feminist streak; she is commonly considered a radical in regard to women’s rights at a time when “[m]ost founders could not imagine a society where women were free and equal, and were governed by their own consent […]. Generally, the founders took patriarchy for granted and forgot the ladies” (Kann, Gendering 7). John Adams outright dismissed his wife’s request: “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh” (qtd. in ibid. 8). Yet, “the ladies” – at least some of them – articulated their own views, and thus we can identify female participation in the revolutionary effort on many levels and in many forms. First of all, women were authors and publicists who wrote letters, diaries, pamphlets, and commentaries; second, they were caretakers, farmers, and entrepreneurs who through their work enabled their husbands to go off to war and to conduct politics in often far-away places; third, women were considerably involved and depended upon as fundraisers for the war effort, founded associations to develop the needed infrastructure (e.g. the Ladies Association of Philadelphia), called meetings, and gave speeches; fourth, they con- 224 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA tributed in many other minor and major ways to the war effort, e.g. by sewing uniforms or by joining the military cross-dressed as men (cf. Roberts, Founding Mothers 125ff.). All of the individuals involved in these revolutionary activities may be considered Founding Mothers of some sort. The different dimensions of women’s activities for the new republic both affirm and contest the ideological constructions of women at the time of the political founding of the US, and reveal the ambivalences women had to navigate in their social roles. In fact, the term ‘Founding Mothers’ may be read, in view of biological essentialism, as a form of containment that links women to their reproductive function and not so much to some sort of authority in the public sphere. The five justifications for the exclusion of women from political life rooted in stereotypes of women in the late 18th century are reminiscent of the cult of True Womanhood that would dominate much of the 19th century: women’s domesticity, women’s dependency, women’s passions, women’s disorders, and women’s consent to patriarchy (cf. Kann, Gendering 23). And yet, the new republic also created a new ideology of gender roles and gender relations. The discourse of Republican Motherhood (cf. Kerber, Women) has been particularly useful to grasp the contradictions of a doctrine that both consolidates and expands women’s domestic realm. Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton have pointed out how, in the name of the republic, women were esteemed as mothers of future citizens, and how their education, as teachers of the next generation, became more relevant and more acceptable. New educational opportunities opened up, and formal schooling for women improved immensely. As Republican Mothers, women were to raise the citizens and leaders of the republic while remaining firmly confined to the domestic sphere without any direct political participation in a kind of domestic patriotism. In fact, by granting women these educational opportunities, one could claim “that women needed no further political involvement, since they already possessed the power to mold their husbands’ and sons’ virtuous citizenship” (Scobell, “Judith Sargent Murray” 12). In historical and feminist scholarship, the Republican Mother has alternately been considered a figure of empowerment or of confinement, and clearly remains an ambivalent role model. At the time that this discourse is forming in the soon-to-be-independent colonies, we can find women who actively engaged in political activities despite the fact that revolutionary womanhood and Republican Motherhood often may not have been easily reconcilable. For the sake of briefly reviewing the revolutionary activism of American women, I want to turn to Judith Sargent Murray (1751- 1820) and Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). In her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790), Judith Sargent Murray proposes the idea of a companionate AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 225 marriage (such as the one she led with her second husband, John Murray), and argues for the inherent rationality of women and for women’s political participation. She pleads for women’s education on the basis of a subversive reinterpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which she casts Eve as being thirsty for knowledge rather than content and complacent in the Garden of Eden (cf. Scobell, “Judith Sargent Murray” 11). Further, she criticizes women’s domestic role within the patriarchal household, through which women “should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or the sewing the seams of a garment” (Murray, “Equality” 7). Murray further suggests that “from the commencement of time to the present day, there hath been as many females, as males, who, by the mere force of natural powers, have merited the crown of applause; who, thus unassisted, have seized the wreath of fame” (ibid. 134, 135). Murray was somewhat of a public figure of her time, and was portrayed by John Singleton Copley in 1763 (who would later paint political figures such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere) and by Gilbert Stuart, who also famously portrayed George Washington. Murray’s writings, in particular her contributions to the Massachusetts Magazine, were very popular and in 1798 appeared in a three-volume collection titled The Gleaner under the pen name Constantia. The collection has been reissued in 1992. Along with Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), who self-identified as a “politician” (Kerber, Women 84), has become recognized for her contribution to American revolutionary thought, which she articulated in poems, plays, and pamphlets. Like Murray, Warren frequently adopts a satirical, farcical tone in her writings, which include very prominently female protagonists who struggle within their ‘domestic economy’ in much the same way the author did. Warren also sought “to live in both the world of intellect and the world of domesticity” (ibid. 256). Warren (just as Murray) did not completely reject the traditional roles of wife and mother, quite the contrary; this resulted in an ambivalence exemplified by her outstanding History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), the first history of the American Revolution and for a long time the only female-authored one, in which Warren perhaps somewhat self-consciously and defensively pays almost no attention to women’s revolutionary experiences and efforts but instead focuses on the deeds of the ‘great men,’ i.e. the Founding Fathers (in 1848, Elizabeth Ellet’s The Women of the American Revolution would remedy Warren’s omissions). In her lifetime, Warren was a highly esteemed publicist and, like Murray, was portrayed by John Copley; memorials in her honor were erected in many New England towns, and a US cargo ship launched during World War II, the SS 226 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Mercy Warren, was named after her, perhaps somewhat ironically affirming her (rhetorical) power. It is thus in the prose and dramas by early republican women writers such as Murray and Warren as well as Eliza Foster Cushing, Susan Sedgwick, and others that we find female protagonists and characters who defy women’s exclusion from politics. As women were not included in the political discourse of the founding, they “were left to invent their own political character” (ibid. 269) and fought for full citizenship by creating their own foundational discourse on the basis of a natural-rights rhetoric: The founding fathers had used the language of natural rights to argue for the protection and preservation of their prerogatives of citizens. Women could not start from the same place. While no one was likely to deny that they were citizens, it was clear that female citizenship was not the same as male citizenship and that men and women in practice had very different civic duties and prerogatives. Woman’s rights advocates, therefore, had to use Locke not to argue for the preservation of their rights but to gain their rights in the first place. (Hoffert, When Hens Crow 40) American women arrived at a full-fledged feminist agenda with the Declaration of Sentiments, a document prepared for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, which was the first convention of a national women’s movement; in contemporary newspapers, it was ridiculed as “the hen convention” of “divorced wives, childless women, and some old maids” (qtd. in Clift, Founding Sisters 13). More than 300 people gathered on July 19, a regular weekday, in the small town of Seneca Falls in Upstate New York. With their Declaration of Sentiments, which was rhetorically modeled after the Declaration of Independence, women’s rights activists fashioned themselves as Founding Mothers: By their act of mirroring, the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments generated a critique of the Declaration of Independence that made it impossible to read the original text in the same way ever again. The Seneca Falls Convention took aim at the Founding Fathers’ ambivalence toward their own “high ideals” with the weapon Homi Bhabha describes as “the displacing gaze of the disciplined […] that liberates marginal elements and shatters the unity of man’s being through which he extends his sovereignty.” (Wexler, “All Men” 352) The small canon of revolutionary Founding Mothers that Cokie Roberts identifies for the 18th century, which includes next to Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren also Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, and Betsy Ross, seems as exclusive and elitist as the ranks of the canonical AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 227 Founding Fathers. When considering the contributions and achievements of the women under consideration, we have to acknowledge their privileged positions in colonial and postcolonial US society. Somewhat in contrast, we have already discussed the symbolic power of Sally Hemings as a Founding Mother, and we may also note that many African American women were active in the women’s movement. Most famously, Sojourner Truth delivered her speech “Ain’t I a Woman” at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851, in which she demanded equality not only between whites and blacks, but specifically between white and black women. Beyond the founding phase and the early 19th-century initiatives to organize and institutionalize women’s political participation, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Isabella Hooker, and many others, all of whom Eleanor Clift refers to as “founding sisters,” worked successfully toward the passage of Amendment XIX, which they considered their victory at the end of a “seventy-two year battle” (Founding Sisters 4). The slogan of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s opening this section brings us to the question of gender in our discussion of the Founding Fathers, as they appear to be a paternal if not a patriarchal construction. A feminist revision of the myth of the Founding Fathers not only implies adding women to the canon of male founders, but also points to the Founding Fathers as a patriarchal and paternalistic invention that claimed to speak for women and that denied their natural rights, which – according to Lockean principle – should have been acknowledged. For more than one hundred years after the founding, Motherhood had trumped women’s humanity in philosophical discourse; ‘Founding Mothers’ therefore remains a precarious concept. 7. DISPOSSESSION AND EMPIRE: THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF MOUNT RUSHMORE (AND BEYOND) Why are those four men up there? WILLIAM ZINSSER, AMERICAN PLACES Beyond discussions of who in the context of the War of Independence and the early republic is and should be commemorated as a founder of the US, there have also been discussions of which more recent historical figures should be added to the canon of the most important founders and preservers of the nation. One of the most extraordinary examples concerning these ongoing discussions is the controversial Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. While 228 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA South Dakota’s state historian Doane Robinson originally planned to boost state tourism by having figures from local history carved into the Black Hills, sculptor Gutzon Borglum gave the project a national rather than regional focus and turned it into “a colossal undertaking commemorating the idea of union” (Borglum qtd. in Bergman, “Can Patriotism” 92). Construction began in the 1920s and was concluded in 1941 by Borglum’s son, aptly named Lincoln. The sculpture consists of the faces of four presidents carved into Mount Rushmore: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, who signify the “founding, growing, preservation, and development” (ibid.) of the United States of America; Washington clearly symbolizes the nation’s founding, Jefferson its expansion (via the Louisiana Purchase), Lincoln the ‘preservation’ of the Union, and Roosevelt, again, expansion of American hegemony. Thus, each in his own way contributed to the existence and expansion of the US as empire. Simon Schama refers to Mount Rushmore as a “landscape myth” (Landscape 15) which in sheer scale suggests the “sculptor’s ambition to proclaim the continental magnitude of America as the bulwark of its democracy” (ibid. 15-16), and many other scholars have also described the monument more or less critically along those lines: as a patriotic icon and “a site of national symbolism” (Bergman, “Can Patriotism” 89), as “patriarchy fixed in stone” (cf. Boime’s article of the same title), or as a “commemoration of US expansionism” and “a monument to imperialism” (Bergman, “Can Patriotism” 94). Tom Saya considers Mount Rushmore a “glittering billboard of imperial supremacy” (“Whiteness” 145). Blair and Michel regard Mount Rushmore as a “shorthand for patriotism” (“Rushmore Effect” 156) and “as constituting a dwelling place of national character, a construction of the national ethos” (ibid. 159). Alfred Runte sees US national parks as compensating for the absence of castles, ancient ruins, and cathedrals in the US, and Mount Rushmore seems to be a particularly grand example of this kind of compensation (cf. National Parks). Along those lines, William Zinsser refers to Mount Rushmore as “four pharaohs in the sky” (American Places 6). Many scholars note that it is the sheer size that creates the quasisublime character and aesthetic experience of the monument while diverting attention from its political implications: Like Disneyland, Mount Rushmore transformed history into theatre, something only a megalomaniacal actor with boundless energy and confidence could have pulled off. […] Mount Rushmore, like the Statue of Liberty, succeeds primarily through the impact of scale rather than through its aesthetic quality. (Boime, “Patriarchy” 149) AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 229 Illustration 5: The Mount Rushmore National Memorial Photograph by Jim Bowen (2005). Perhaps not surprisingly, for the entire duration of the construction (1927-41) and even after its completion, the monument has been a matter of contention. The logic of empire resides in its scope as much as in its location, as it is built on land belonging to and considered holy by the Lakota: It seems difficult to imagine now […] that there was not substantial negative reaction to the memorial’s theme […]. It is especially astonishing when we take into consideration the irony of location. Here was a planned monument honouring “continental expansion,” sited in a territory that, by treaty, still belonged to the Lakota, and that the local Native people considered consecrated ground. (Blair and Michel, “Rushmore Effect” 169) The Lakota referred to the Black Hills into which Borglum carved the ‘White Fathers’ as the ‘Six Grandfathers,’ and the site for them clearly had a spiritual connection. When dedicating the monument in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge wore an Indian headdress to symbolically give credit to and appease indigenous protest and resentment. In hindsight, this form of ‘playing Indian’ seems to mock the protesters. 230 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie limited the land ownership of the Sioux to the Great Sioux Reservation, a region west of the Missouri River which included the Black Hills. This treaty was violated during the years of the gold rush by settlers whose presence was validated by new treaties and forced requisitions of Native land through legislation enacted by the US Congress in 1877, 1889, and 1890. The 1877 usurpation of the Black Hills is still considered by the Lakota an illegal act for which they have refused compensation in the amount of $106 million in 1980, and they continue to demand the return of the land (cf. Lazarus, Black Hills/White Justice 38). Thus, from its very inception, the monument has been viewed by the Lakota and other tribes as a symbol of dispossession and oppression. Throughout its construction and again with new urgency since the 1970s, Native Americans have challenged the rightfulness, validity, and legitimacy of the memorial. To Franklin Roosevelt’s calling Mount Rushmore the “shrine of democracy,” Dennis Bank, leader of the American Indian Movement, has responded by calling it a “hoax of democracy” (qtd. in Fleming, “Mount Rushmore;” cf. also Bergman, “Can Patriotism” 99); the sculpted faces have also been labeled “faces of killers” and “national graffiti” desecrating Native sacred ground as well the “white faces” of “the founding terrorists” (Perrottet, “Mt. Rushmore”). The resistance to the transformation of Native sacred ground into an American civil religious monument opens up a discussion of indigenous history and its presence and role in the processes of founding. In Forced Founders, Woody Holton has argued that indigenous peoples, usually marginalized in canonical accounts of the American Revolution, were in fact instrumental for bringing about the events of 1775. According to Holton, the revolutionary effort itself was a strategy of the white gentry to contain the pressures of Native claims. He thus holds that the catalyst of the Revolution was Native action and sees the Founding Fathers as reacting to their pressures rather than taking a “confident step” toward independence (Forced Founders 164). Clearly, the revolutionary events were not beneficial for the indigenous population, as its claims and pressures were contained and repelled after the founding even as it had been involved in the process: it is still little known today (and the object of controversy) that representatives of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes were asked to attend the constitutional meetings and that the Iroquois longhouse served as a model for the framing of the US Constitution (cf. Grinde and Johansen, Exemplar; Starna and Hamell, “History;” Johansen, Forgotten Founders). In this light, the Mount Rushmore National Memorial may appear as a celebration of the (white) American triumph over the native population of North AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 231 America. Symbolically, the monument has been the “battleground for defining the very nature of American society” (Jacobson, Place 23). As controversial as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial is the initiative of eight chiefs of the Lakota tribe to counter the monument by a Crazy Horse Memorial to display Native heroism in similar fashion to Borglum’s project (cf. Crazy Horse Memorial website). The work on this counter-monument, which is to even exceed the Mount Rushmore monument in size and scope, began in 1948 and is ongoing. This project has been criticized by Native representatives as imitating the megalomania of white memorial culture and as giving a distorted sense of ‘Indianness.’ To this day, information and orientation films at Mount Rushmore do not acknowledge Native land rights, ongoing legal disputes, and the larger history of empire and dispossession paradigmatically revealed in the monument. Instead, the self-representations in the expository material at the visiting center have moved in a mildly revisionist manner from championing Borglum and his notion of American greatness to stressing the hardships of those workers who labored in the mountain (cf. Bergman, “Can Patriotism” 104). This more recent bottom-up perspective may present a more ambiguous view of the monument by acknowledging the plight and death toll of the workers, yet it does not pose a radical critique of the foundational character of the monument itself, as it still focuses on its genesis rather than on its legitimacy. Today, Mount Rushmore still draws millions of visitors each year. In many ways, tourism of this sort – visiting this monument or any other of the numerous Founding Fathers heritage sites – is a cultural, even civil religious practice that thrives on national myths such as that of the Founding Fathers creating tourist destinations, and thus is also a form of nationalist consumerism. Another controversy surrounding Mount Rushmore concerns the question of its patriarchal bias. Rose Arnold Powell for example campaigned for the inclusion of women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony on Mount Rushmore: “I protest with all my being against the exclusion of a woman from the Mount Rushmore group of Great Americans. […] Future generations will ask why she was left out of the memorial […] if this blunder is not rectified” (qtd. in Schama, Landscape 385). Even though Powell spent much of her life lobbying for Anthony’s inclusion in the sculpture and was able to enlist considerable public support for her cause, she was put off time and again by Borglum and others (Borglum’s compromise proposal to have Anthony’s head carved into the back of the mountain, of course, was unsatisfactory). The inclusion of Anthony as a Founding Mother would certainly have given the monument a decidedly different twist – 232 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA so radically different, in fact, that in hindsight it seems obvious that Powell’s plea had no chance of success. The Mount Rushmore National Memorial thus personifies the patriarchal myth of American genesis and continued American greatness as a group of white men, although some early visitors to the monument actually thought that a female figure was included: “[Jefferson] appears younger and more feminine than the other Presidents, partly because of his wig. Many early visitors were disappointed. They said it wasn’t a good likeness of Martha Washington” (Zinsser, American Places 11). The Mount Rushmore National Memorial may easily be considered the most spectacular and controversial project of commemoration in the 20th century. Its popularity was further enhanced by being included in many cultural productions, for example in the climactic finale of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest (1959). But it has also frequently become the object of caricature, parody, and ridicule, for instance in the films Mars Attacks! (1996) and Team America: World Police (2004). Way beyond Mount Rushmore, the Founding Fathers continued to figure in narratives, plays, and films throughout the 20th century. Just to mention one more example: the musical libretto 1776 (1969) by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards is a semi-comical and quasi-campy rendering of the events leading to the Declaration of Independence. After a steady trickle of popular commemoration in the 20th century, a new popular Founding Fathers ‘cult’ sets in at the beginning of the 21st century: founders chic. 8. FOUNDERS CHIC AND THE CONSUMPTION OF AN AMERICAN MYTH What would the Founding Fathers think? CAROL BERKIN, A BRILLIANT SOLUTION Even though a number of critics have suggested moving “beyond the founders” (cf. e.g. Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreicher’s essay collection of the same title) in the writing of (political) history, the Founding Fathers have had a comeback in the new millennium. Of course, elite revisionism does not rule out the public commemoration and commodification of national history; ideology critique and revisionist projects to some degree have always co-existed with affirmative modes and rituals of commemoration, as was shown in the preceding chapters of this book. Still, we can observe that elite and popular discourses converge in an unprecedented way in the phenomenon of founders chic, and we AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 233 may wonder whether the recent popularity boost that the Founding Fathers myth has experienced has implications for and connections to the multicultural rewritings of ‘new world’ beginnings resulting from the canon debates and ‘culture wars’ of the post-civil rights era. Against the backdrop of the above-referenced revisionism, the renewed interest in the myth of the Founding Fathers seems ill-timed and awkward. But what exactly is the so-called founders chic in relation to this renewed interest? Founders chic is often said to begin in 2001 with David McCullough’s bestselling biography of John Adams and the HBO series based on it. The term itself was coined by a Newsweek journalist, Evan Thomas, in an article titled “Founders Chic: Live from Philadelphia” (July 9, 2001), and was subsequently picked up by scholars. It has been described as “an excessive fascination with the thoughts and actions of a small group of elite men at the expense of other political actors and social groups” (Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson 8). After decades of social history and multicultural and bottom-up approaches to the American Revolution, founders chic directs our attention back to the founders and to a “Founder-based beginning” (Nobles, “Historians” 141). The ‘biographical bang’ diagnosed by some historians at the beginning of the 21st century led to an upsurge in historical and fictional narratives about the founders: Adams, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton all became the subject of new biographies often written by scholars with little (or no) scholarly inclinations. Sean Wilentz in a review for instance harshly criticizes McCullough’s biography of Adams for being adulatory (“the essential goodness of John Adams is the central theme of this long book”), for its lack of intellectual rigor – implying McCullough himself may have understood little of Adams’s systematic political theory –, for its focus on domestic details, and for its lurid prose (“America Made Easy”). Wilentz furthermore sees McCullough’s John Adams as characteristic of “the current condition of popular history in America,” which he views as mere “gossip about the past” that makes history appear as a kind of “valentine” (ibid.). Wilentz is not alone in his critique of what he calls “crossover professors” who in their new biographies of the founders have left some of the standards of their profession behind; others have also severely criticized Joseph Ellis for his book Founding Brothers, H.W. Brands for his Franklin-biography The First American, which was described as “light on analysis but rich in the description of settings, personalities, and action” (Nobles, “Historians” 141), and even Edmund Morgan for his Benjamin Franklin. Apart from new individual and collective biographies of the Founding Fathers, we encounter a whole range of founders-chic products on the postmillennial literary market that often lack historical veracity and clearly are pre- 234 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA dominantly fictional: these include historical novels as well as books dealing with the private lives, families, love interests, and even the hobbies of the Founding Fathers. When we survey the phenomenon of founders chic, we cannot but concede that the Founding Fathers have become a best-selling brand: The founders are marketed as Founding Gardeners (cf. Andrea Wulf’s book of the same title), architects (as in Hugh Howard and Roger Straus’s Houses of the Founding Fathers), and anglers (as in Bill Mares’s Fishing with the Presidents). For children, there is the Jr. Graphic Founding Fathers series, whereas Thomas Fleming delves into The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, and books such as Dennis J. Pogue’s Founding Spirits: George Washington and the Beginnings of the American Whiskey Industry show that there is hardly a thing to which the founders are not linked (more or less facetiously) in founders chic literature. Beneath all the human interest, these products revitalize the notion of individual heroism that had already largely been dismissed in critical work on the founders. Reiterating the purposefulness and telos of the founding and reinstating the Founding Fathers as authority figures and role models at the beginning of the 21st century may be considered as an indication of some sort of crisis; founders chic, then, on one level, registers and is symptomatic of that crisis, whereas, on another level, it is an attempt to overcome that crisis. Most of the manifestations of the founders chic phenomenon are utterly nostalgic; they pretend to return us to “an earlier era of genuine statesmen” in both private and political life (Thomas, “Founders Chic 48). Thus, they have been read as reinforcing moral standards (for instance, McCullough’s comparison of John and Abigail Adams’s marital union with Bill Clinton’s “extramarital exploits” (Nobles, “Historians” 139). In another commentary we find references to a “post 9/11 crisis” that would endear Americans to the founders once again (ibid.). Founders chic writer Edith Gelles finds comfort in these texts herself: “Perhaps because our times are so complex and out of control it is nice to recall as well that there were dangerous times in our past, more dangerous probably, where great people were needed and rose to the occasion” (qtd. in Nobles, “Historians” 139). Gelles’s wording clearly returns us to the 19th-century Bancroftian romantic-historicist approach and does away with 150 years of critical reinterpretation. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 235 Illustration 6: Founding Father Cuisine Cover of Thomas Jefferson’s Crème Brûlée (2012) by T. Craughwell. One realm in which the branding of the Founding Fathers has recently flourished particularly is the cookbook market, which in and of itself is one of the largest segments of the US publishing industry, with annual revenues of $780 million. Recent culinary publications on the Founding Fathers include Dave DeWitt’s 2010 The Founding Foodies: How Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin Revolutionized American Cuisine (note the somewhat unconventional usage of ‘revolution’); Pelton W. Pelton’s 2004 Baking Recipes of Our Founding Fathers; and Thomas J. Craughwell’s 2012 Thomas Jefferson’s Crème Brûlée: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America. Not only are there a plethora of new cookbooks such as these, but also reprints of older ones, for instance of the famed cookbook by Martha Washing- 236 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ton, and of early American recipe collections which also invoke the Founding Fathers as a frame of reference. The list of examples is sheer endless. For a closer inspection of cookbook founders chic I will exemplarily look at DeWitt’s The Founding Foodies. This book offers historical trivia and recipes of dishes such as terrapin soup and salted cod; it falsely suggests that Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of popcorn, then referred to as parched corn (DeWitt fails to mention its indigenous source), and that we find the first description of grits and polenta in Franklin’s papers. We learn about Paul Revere’s rum punch and rum flip, Philadelphia pepper pot soup, and Thomas Jefferson’s French connection; in the subchapter titled “America’s First French Chef: The Culinary Education of the Slave James Hemings” (104-26), we learn that apparently “Jefferson was charged twelve francs a day” for Hemings’s culinary education and lodging in Paris “in extravagant circumstances with a member of the French royal family” (ibid. 106). DeWitt suggests that “[i]ndeed, Hemings lived a charmed life,” while Jefferson was apparently doing all the hard work (ibid.). We also learn that Jefferson was obsessed with maple sugar, imported waffle irons from Amsterdam to Virginia, introduced deep-fried potatoes (French fries) to America, and wrote recipes himself (one for ice cream, for example; cf. ibid. 123). Similarly edifying information is provided on George Washington, whose culinary culture according to DeWitt owed much to his slave Hercules, who made “presidential fruitcake” and lots of meat dishes before disappearing from sight when Washington relocated to Mount Vernon after his presidency. Even though many of the recipes in DeWitt’s book are in fact taken from Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook The Virginia Housewife (reissued in 1984 by Karen Hess), the alleged link to the Founding Fathers is always affirmed. And the author also distances himself from the so-called “fakelore” (cf. Smith, “False Memories”) by which the heritage of certain dishes is falsely attributed – after all, Jefferson did not introduce vanilla and macaroni to the US (cf. DeWitt, Founding Foodies 121). The Founding Foodies is mostly anecdotal and provides a mixed bag of insights into the Founding Fathers’ culinary inventiveness, yet the author opens his collection on a pseudo-conceptual note which is worth quoting at length: In their never-ending attempts to fully understand American history, historians began using the phrase “Founding Fathers” to designate the men and women, mostly early politicians, who founded the United States or were influential in its founding. At first, the phrase referred to three superstar fathers, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. That list was later expanded to include James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay. Eventually, the list of the Founding Fathers was expand- AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 237 ed further to include many of the lesser-known signers of the Declaration of Independence, members of the Constitutional Convention, and others. Given the number of Founding Fathers, it should not come as any surprise that some of them had a very profound interest in food and drink. Some might think that by calling these people, some of the most famous and talented people in American history, foodies I am trivializing them. I don’t think so. To the contrary, I am elevating them into a new dimension of humanity, one that transcends politics. Today, the Founding Fathers would be superstars of sustainable farming and ranching, exotic imported foods, brewing, distilling, and wine appreciation. In other words, they would be foodies. (ibid. xv) Never mind that it was not historians who coined the term ‘Founding Fathers,’ that the women somehow disappear after the first lines of this passage, and that it contains several non sequiturs; the relevant part comes at the end, where DeWitt elevates the Founding Fathers in a way that transcends politics. How to transcend politics, one may ask, but DeWitt’s logic can be succinctly analyzed with reference to Lauren Berlant’s critical assessment of the sentimental nation: sentimentalism of the kind we see at work here “develops within political thought [or within what should be primarily a political discourse] a discourse of ethics that, paradoxically, denigrates the political and claims superiority to it” (Female Complaint 34); at the same time it camouflages “the fundamental terms that organize power,” which remain unaddressed (ibid). The function of the cookbook in the discourse of founders chic more clearly than many other texts and practices turns the political into the domestic and the revolutionary kitchen into a “post-public public sphere” (ibid. 223) with a “displacement of politics to the realm of feeling” (ibid. xii). DeWitt and others enact a culinary white reconstruction on the backs of blacks and other nonwhites in an essentially nostalgic mode and thus re-install an image of a predominantly white nation. The “sentimental cultural politics” (Berlant, Queen 4) of DeWitt in particular, and of founders chic in general, separate the political from politics. Berlant argues that the political public sphere thus has become an intimate public sphere which produces a “new nostalgia-based fantasy nation” (ibid. 5), and it is in this sense that we may talk about the consumption of American democracy. What is striking about this “fantasy nation” envisioned in The Founding Foodies and similar founders chic publications in which the Founding Fathers once more reign supreme, is that (1) it re-inscribes social hierarchies; (2) it reerects and legitimates discursive systems of oppression and exclusion (it definitely flirts with past injustices such as slavery, etc.); (3) it re-establishes a European genealogy of American national culture by way of French cuisine (obviously the black slave would not be able to cook if he had not been trained to do 238 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA so in France); (4) it romanticizes consumption and obscures the conditions of production, i.e. slave labor – after all, it is slaves who put into practice all of the glorious ideas about composting, fermenting, wine-growing etc.; (5) it (re)sacralizes the Founding Fathers by giving them celebrity status – visiting Monticello or Mount Vernon in person or through the consumption of founders chic products may qualify as a kind of civil religious ‘pilgrimage’ as much as visiting Washington, D.C.; (6) it operates in a discourse of ‘cultivating’ and ‘civilizing’ the ‘new world’ palate, adding culinary refinement to statesmanship and republicanism; (7) it condones an “utterly privatized model of citizenship and the good life” (Giroux, Public Spheres 56) with the Founding Fathers as exemplary entrepreneurs and private agents in a public sphere (in fact, they would have thrived in any neoliberal market economy); and (8) it re-organizes a national memorial culture and re-installs the myth of a ‘domestic’ nation in a double sense (cf. Berlant, Queen). At the same time, the sentimental discourse of the “intimate public sphere” in which we find “nostalgic images of a normal, familial America” (ibid. 3-4) infantilizes and trivializes this displacement of political critique: from the perspective of a nostalgic cookbook, the Founding Fathers hardly seem controversial. Who would argue over old recipes? In getting into the kitchen with Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin, we follow and condone their immunization from political critique as well as the immunization of those who so often use them for their own political ends. Founders chic thus clearly is part of a broader marketing of nostalgic images of a “normal,” “familial” America: “Sentimental politics are being performed whenever putatively suprapolitical affects or affect-saturated institutions (like the nation and the family) are proposed as universal solutions to structural […] antagonism” (Berlant, Female Complaint 294). This is also reflected in the way that the Founding Fathers mythology is used for instance by the activists and advocates of the Tea Party movement. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 239 9. CONCLUSION: THE FOUNDING FATHERS AS NATIONAL FANTASY IN TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS When I first saw a painting of George Washington framed by a toilet seat, hanging on the walls of a local junior college, I realized that the history revisionists had gone too far. TIM LAHAYE, FAITH OF OUR FOUNDING FATHERS At a resonant 1,776 feet tall, the Freedom Tower — in my master plan, second in importance only to the 9/11 memorial itself — will rise above its predecessors, reasserting the preeminence of freedom and beauty, restoring the spiritual peak to the city and proclaiming America’s resilience even in the face of profound danger, of our optimism even in the aftermath of tragedy. Life, victorious. DANIEL LIBESKIND, “GROUND ZERO MASTER PLAN” The Liberty Tower at Ground Zero symbolizes a national fantasy that refers, by way of its height of 1,776 feet, to the year of the Declaration of Independence. This new architectural symbol also reinforces and re-invigorates the myth of the founding and the Founding Fathers. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, we can observe a political climate in which many Americans were protective of the Founding Fathers again. Thus, we may relate the comeback of the founders in founders chic to other political developments and movements which affirm their role for the national founding; as Jill Lepore has pointed out, the new historical revisionism initiated by the Tea Party movement and religious groups alike presents a confused discursive conglomerate that is “conflating originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism” and which “amounts to fundamentalism” (Whites 16). In this fundamentalist discourse, the Founding Fathers serve as the historical authority for neoconservative and evangelical agendas; this imagined alliance highlights the activists’ lack of historical knowledge or their willingness to purposefully misrepresent history to further their own ends. It is well-known that, in an interview with Glenn Beck on January 13, 2010, former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin (R) invoked the “sincerity of the Founding Fathers” and yet was at first unable to name even one of them (cf. “Sarah Palin”). Similarly, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Min) falsely claimed that “the very founders that wrote those [founding] documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States […],” and went on to say that John Quincy Adams “would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country” (Amira, “Michele Bachmann; cf. McCarthy, “John Quincy Adams”). Adams, who died in 1848, 240 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA did rest before slavery was abolished. This skewed and counterfactual version of history shows that the Founding Fathers are used here as a projection screen for the present which enables a fantasy of the nation through a retrospectively imagined original, primary moment. The Tea Party movement has been considered by many commentators and scholars to advocate an extremist political agenda based on anti-elitism and antistatism, even as it lacks a consistent common ideology (cf. Greven, “Die TeaParty-Bewegung” 147). Thomas Greven refers to a “tea party-brand” (ibid. 145) that includes ‘Don’t tread on me’ merchandize and a rhetoric of ‘re-founding’ and ‘taking back’ the country that seems as regressively nostalgic as founders chic memorabilia. In the context of evangelical popular culture, Tim LaHaye, co-author of the phenomenally successful Left Behind series of books, is one of the most prominent evangelical Christian ministers and speakers to have contributed to the debates around the Founding Fathers. In Faith of Our Founding Fathers, he champions the evangelical origins of the US, which he is able to do only by offering an alternative set of Founding Fathers: James Madison, Robert Morris, Roger Sherman, Alexander Hamilton, and George Mason. Argumentatively, LaHaye employs a revisionist rhetoric when he refers to the “untold story” of the Christian origin of the country and to the “debt owed to the Founding Fathers;” he bemoans “the distortion of history in the state-approved textbooks” and “the total absence of the Christian religion in them,” whereby in his view “a whole generation of schoolchildren is robbed of its country’s religious heritage” (1). Much can be said about LaHaye’s claim regarding the foundational quality of Christianity as opposed to secularism (he hardly ever takes into account the American Enlightenment). According to him, “secular humanists” in the US have produced a “moral holocaust” (note the metaphor) by blindly attacking “Christianity and its moral values” (ibid. 4) and by engaging in a “deliberate rape of history” (ibid. 5). LaHaye suggests in his culture war on US-American paternity that “evangelical Protestants who founded this nation” (qtd. in Lepore, Whites 121) should be reinstalled whereas both Jefferson (who “had nothing to do with the founding of our nation” [ibid]) and Franklin (who in LaHaye’s view was not a Christian) should be discounted. LaHaye’s hagiographic fashioning of the Christian Founding Fathers explains historical events through individual achievement and character rather than through systemic forces and contingency (cf. ibid. 36). In many ways, LaHaye offers a counter-narrative to secularization and the Enlightenment by (mis)reading a civil religious discourse as religious (more specifically, Christian) and thus by projecting religion back onto the newly emergent revolutionary civil religion. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 241 The so-called “teavangelicals,” as David Brody calls them appreciatively (cf. his book of the same title), even as they present two distinct groups (i.e., Tea Party movement activists and evangelical Christians), can be considered aligned on a variety of issues. For one thing, both converge in a new embrace of the myth of the Founding Fathers under political and religious considerations, respectively, and share a unilateral, patriotic discourse that identifies outside, ‘foreign’ influences and US international involvement as harmful to the US. These anxieties come to the fore in discussions of Obama’s birth certificate (revolving around the question of whether he is a foreigner, i.e. ‘un-American’), in blaming foreign (European) influence for the secularization of the US, as well as in post-9/11 discussions of the ‘terrorist threat.’ LaHaye is forcefully antiFrench and anti-European in general, complaining in his book that at the revolutionary moment, ‘old world’ forces already attempted to secularize and corrupt the American Founding Fathers. Thus, the discussion of the Founding Fathers continues to be deeply polarized, and the founders’ original intent is time and again debated in political arguments that are still often quite divisive. In order to describe the social, cultural, and political chasm within American society that these debates seem to reveal, John Sperling and Suzanne Wiggins Helburn have used the framework of a conservative “retro America” vs. a liberal “metro America” (cf. Great Divide), and Stanley B. Greenberg similarly identifies “two Americas” (cf. his 2004 book) divided along the lines of religion and politics. In stark contrast to the reinvigoration of the Founding Fathers myth as a national fantasy, we find much historical evidence corroborating the transnational dimension of the political experiences of men like Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Jay, Hamilton, and Madison. From a transnational perspective, the Founding Fathers, of course, were retrospectively contained in a national paradigm that was nonexistent at the time of the American Revolution and has more recently become an anachronism. A number of recent studies have addressed this conundrum: Gordon S. Wood in his The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004) reopens a discussion of the founders outside the nationalist paradigm by looking at Franklin as “the principal American abroad” (Americanization 201), who enjoyed life in France. At a time when “[c]ultural nationalism had not yet developed enough to disrupt the cosmopolitan republic of letters that made learned men like Franklin ‘citizens of the world’” (Bender, Nation 89), many of the Founding Fathers would have defined themselves as part of a broader international culture. Similarly, Francis Cogliano has pointed out that for Jefferson “the spread of liberty was, and must be, an international movement” (Thomas Jefferson 264) that may have begun in the Thirteen Colonies yet should expand 242 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA to other parts of the world. It was a “global republicanism” (ibid. 265) that he had in mind: reading him as an American statesman misses “the international outlook at the heart of Jefferson’s beliefs” (ibid). Similarly reading back a cosmopolitan internationalism into the founding phase of the republic, Thomas Bender has elaborated on the many ways in which the American past is not “a linear story of progress or a self-contained history” (Nation 60). He considers the American Revolution as, among other things, part of “a global war between European great powers” (France and England more specifically) in which the colonies in North America were caught up and in which they constituted one actor among many (ibid. 61). Any account of the American Revolution should thus also consider the French Revolution as well as the Haitian Revolution, which for Bender clearly was the most radical in the Americas in the 18th century. Regarding Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, Gore Vidal notes that “[i]t is a triple irony that three of the principal inventors of the United States should have been abroad in Europe during the Constitution-making period” (Inventing 62). Heroizing the Founding Fathers has always been an attempt at keeping contingency at bay, as “[t]here is very little about the events of 1776 that, on close examination, suggests inevitability” (ibid. 33). And Thomas Bender further notes that [t]he new nation was independent, but very limited in its freedom of action. Far from being isolated, it was perhaps more deeply entangled in world affairs, more clearly a participant in histories larger than itself, than at any other time in its history. (Nation 103) Thus, scrutinizing the complexity of the Founding Fathers myth may necessitate looking beyond the national context. The American Revolution also bespeaks a transnational moment, and recent scholarship has begun to reconstruct just that. While the Founding Fathers as a collective myth have come into being relatively late, their symbolic capital in American public life and political culture today clearly exceeds that of Columbus, Pocahontas, and perhaps even that of the Pilgrims and Puritans; in fact, the status of the Founding Fathers is quite elevated among the foundational mythological personnel. It is therefore important to note the various processes in which the making, remaking and (partial) unmaking of this myth has unfolded. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 243 10. STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Define the ‘Founding Fathers’ 1) in a narrow and 2) in a broader sense. 2. In retrospect, what unites the Founding Fathers as a group and what differences can we discern between them in the historical context? 3. Discuss the notion of a “second founding” of the US. What does it refer to? 4. Give an interpretation of the New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama as a Founding Father. 5. Crispus Attuck, Richard Allen, Barzillai Lew, Peter Salem, Prince Whipple, Jenny Slew, Mum Bett, Harry Hosier, Daniel Coker, and James Forten have been to varying degrees referred to as Black Founding Fathers and Mothers. Research and discuss their stories! 6. Eliza Pinckney, Deborah Sampson, Lydia Darragh, Emily Geiger, Sybil Luddington, Catherine Littlefield Greene, Margaret Beekman Livingston, and Annis Boudinot Stockton have been to varying degrees referred to as Founding Mothers. Research and discuss their stories! 7. In her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt argues that “[n]o revolution has ever taken place in America” (17). Daniel Boorstin in The Genius of American Politics (1953) refers to the historical event as a “revolution without dogma.” Discuss! 8. When Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington (modelled after a statue of Zeus) was displayed in the rotunda of the US Capitol in 1841, responses were quite mixed. 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The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. New York: Free, 1998. Scobell, Sara. “Judith Sargent Murray: The ‘So-Called’ Feminist.” Constructing the Past 1.1 (2000): 4-21. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 251 Smith, Andrew F. “False Memories: The Invention of Culinary Fakelore and Food Fallacies.” Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2000. Ed. Harlan Walker. Devon: Prospect, 2001. 254-60. Spalding, Matthew, and Patrick J. Garrity. A Sacred Union of Citizens: George Washington’s Farewell Address and the American Character. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Sperling, John, and Suzanne Wiggins Helburn. The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America. Sausalito: PoliPoint, 2004. Srodes, James. Benjamin Frankin: The Essential Founding Father. Washington, D.C.: Regnery/Gateway, 2003. Stahr, Walter. John Jay: Founding Father. New York: Hambledon and Continuum, 2006. Stanfield, Jack. America’s Founding Fathers: Who Are They? Thumbnail Sketches of 164 Patriots. Universal, 2001. Starna, William, and George R. Hamell. “History and the Burden of Proof: The Case of Iroquois Influence on the U.S. Constitution.” New York History 77 (1996): 427-52. Stone, Peter, and Sherman Edwards. 1776: A Musical Play. New York: Penguin, 1969. Taylor, Alan. Writing Early American History. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Team America: World Police. Dir. Trey Parker. Paramount, 2004. Thomas, Evan. “Founders Chic: Live from Philadelphia.” Newsweek 9 July 2001: 48-51. Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman.” 1851. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985. 253. Twelbeck, Kirsten. “The New Rules of the Democratic Game: Emancipation, Self-Regulation, and the ‘Second Founding’ of the United States.” Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture. Ed. Christa Buschendorf, Astrid Franke, and Johannes Voelz. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 175-208. Unger, Harlow Giles. The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness. Cambridge: Da Capo, 2009. Vidal, Gore. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Walker, Clarence E. Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. 252 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. 1829; 1830. Ed. Sean Wilentz. New York: Hill, 1995. Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Boston: Manning and Loring, 1805. Washington, George. “Washington’s Farewell Address 1796.” The Avalon Project. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp. 27 Oct. 2013. Weems, Mason Locke. A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1918. Wexler, Laura. “All Men and Women Are Created Equal.” Marcus and Sollors, New Literary History 349-53. Wiencek, Henry. The Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. New York: Farrar, 2012. Wilentz, Sean. “America Made Easy: McCullough, Adams, and the Decline of Popular History.” Rev. of John Adams, by David McCullough. The New Republic 2 July 2001. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/ 90636/david-mccullough-john-adams-book-review. 30 Sept. 2013. Wills, Garry. Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment. London: Hale, 1984. Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004. –. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992. Wulf, Andrea. Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. New York: Knopf, 2011. Zinsser, William. American Places: A Writer’s Pilgrimage to Sixteen of This Country’s Most Visited and Cherished Sites. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2007. Further Reading Ackerman, Bruce. The Failures of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. Cambridge: Belknap, 2005. Adair, Douglass. Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair. Ed. Trevor Colbourn. New York: Norton, 1974. Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Bailyn, Bernard. To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders. New York: Vintage, 2003. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 253 Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill, 1999. –. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence. New York: Knopf, 2005. Bernstein, Richard B. Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution. With Kym S. Rice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Burns, Eric. Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Burstein, Andrew. America’s Jubilee. New York: Knopf, 2001. Chaplin, Joyce. The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. New York: Basic, 2006. Clough, Wilson Ober, ed. Intellectual Origins of American National Thought: Pages from the Books Our Founding Fathers Read. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Corinth, 1961. Cohen, Bernard I. Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison. New York: Norton, 1995. Combs, Jerald A. The Jay Treaty: Political Battlegrounds of the Founding Fathers. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. Cornell, Saul. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Craven, Wesley Frank. The Legend of the Founding Fathers. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1956. Cunliffe, Marcus. George Washington: Man and Monument. Revised ed. New York: Mentor, 1982. Farquhar, Michael. A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing. New York: Penguin, 2003. Gelles, Edith B. Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage. New York: Harper, 2009. Gerber, Scott Douglas, ed. The Declaration of Independence: Origins and Impact. Washington: CQ, 2002. Gibson, Alan. Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates Over the Origins and Foundations of the American Republic. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2006. Goldford, Dennis J. The American Constitution and the Debate Over Originalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Grant, James. John Adams: Party of One. New York: Farrar, 2005. 254 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Hamilton, Alexander. A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress. New York: James Rivington, 1774. Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Knopf, 1951. Homberger, Eric. “Image-Making and the Circulation of Images: Peale, Trumbull, and the Founding Fathers.” European Journal of American Culture 24.1 (2006): 11-38. Kaminski, John P., ed. The Founders of the Founders: Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. Kammen, Michael. A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination. New York: Knopf, 1978. Kersch, Rogan. Dreams of a More Perfect Union. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Lambert, Frank. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. –. Religion in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Lepore, Jill. The Story of America: Essays on Origins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Lhotta, Roland, ed. Die hybride Republik: Die Federalist Papers und die politische Moderne. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010. Lipset, Seymour Martin. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. New York: Norton, 1979. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1972. McGuire, Robert A. To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Meacham, Jon. American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Random, 2006. Meister, Charles W. The Founding Fathers. Jefferson: McFarland, 1987. Middlekauff, Robert. Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Morgan, Edmund S. The Birth of the Republic 1763-89. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1956. Morgan, Jeff. “The Founding Father: Benjamin Franklin and His Autobiography.” Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology. Ed. Carolyn A. Weber. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. Morris, Richard B. The American Revolution Reconsidered. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS | 255 –. The Emerging Nations of the American Revolution. New York: Harper, 1970. Nell, William C. The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. New York: Arno, 1968. Pole, J.R. The Pursuit of Equality in American History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Rakove, Jack. The Beginnings of National Politics. New York: Knopf, 1979. Roberts, Kenneth. Rabble in Arms. Garden City: Doubleday, 1950. Rossiter, Clinton. 1787: The Grand Convention. New York: Norton, 1966. Savage, John. Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Shuffelton, Frank, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Smith, Rex Alan. The Carving of Mount Rushmore. New York: Abbeville, 1985. Spragens, William C., ed. Popular Images of American Presidents. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Spurlin, Paul Merrill. The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984. Taliaferro, John. Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore. New York: Public Affairs, 2002. Trees, Andrew S. The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Varg, Paul A. Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1963. Waldman, Steven. Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. New York: Random, 2008. Warren, Charles. The Making of the Constitution. Boston: Little, 1928. Wright, Louis B. Tradition and the Founding Fathers. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1975. Chapter V E Pluribus Unum? The Myth of the Melting Pot 1. WHY THE MELTING POT? Imagine if you can, my dear friend, a society comprising all the nations of the world: English, French, German. […] All people having different languages, beliefs, and opinions. In short, a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without national character. […] What ties these very diverse elements together? What makes a people of all this? ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE TO ERNEST DE CHABROL, JUNE 9, 1831 Was it not possible, then, to think of the evolving American society not simply as a slightly modified England but rather as a totally new blend, culturally and biologically, in which the stocks and folkways of Europe were, figuratively speaking, indiscriminately mixed in the political pot of the emerging nation and melted together by the fires of American influence and interaction into a distinctly new type? MILTON GORDON, ASSIMILATION IN AMERICAN LIFE A widely known rendering of the melting pot idea is the phrase E Pluribus Unum, on which the US Department of the Treasury provides the following information: The motto “E Pluribus Unum” was first used on our coinage in 1795, when the reverse of the half-eagle ($5 gold) coin presented the main features of the Great Seal of the United States. “E Pluribus Unum” is inscribed on the Great Seal’s scroll. The motto was added to certain silver coins in 1798, and soon appeared on all of the coins made out of precious metals (gold and silver). In 1834, it was dropped from most of the gold coins to mark the change in the standard fineness of the coins. In 1837, it was dropped from the silver coins, 258 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA marking the era of the Revised Mint Code. An Act of February 12, 1873 made the inscription a requirement of law upon the coins of the United States. “E Pluribus Unum” does appear on all coins currently being manufactured. The motto means “Out of Many, One,” and probably refers to the unity of the early States. (US Department of the Treasury website; cf. also below) Illustration 1: Great Seal of the United States Wikimedia Commons (Web, 4 May 2014). E Pluribus Unum is also engraved on the globe at the feet of the Statue of Freedom, the classical female allegorical figure at the top of the US Capitol dome. It can be regarded as an unofficial motto of the United States, and has become a standard manifestation of the melting pot myth, which more than any other foundational myth evokes a vision of national unity and cohesion through participation in a harmonious, quasi-organic community that offers prospective members a second chance and a new beginning and molds them into a new ‘race,’ a new people. Whereas the myths discussed in the preceding chapters (Columbus, Pocahontas, the Pilgrims and Puritans, and the Founding Fathers) established a ‘usable past’ for the nation and commemorated heroic figures of ‘new world’ beginnings, the melting pot, just as the myths discussed in the remaining chapters (the West and the self-made man), is a myth about the making of American society. In its dominant version, it envisions the US in a state of perpetual change and transformation that is partly assimilation, partly regeneration, and E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 259 partly emergence, and emphasizes the continuous integration of difference experienced by both immigrant and longer-established sections of the population. As imagined communities (cf. Benedict Anderson’s book of the same title), nations not only need narratives of origin, but also narratives of their future – in the case of the US, which looked upon itself as a nation of immigrants, such a forward-looking narrative needed to address how differences of origin and descent could be transcended, and the melting pot seemed to be the perfect model to describe the particular composition of US society: In general, the cluster of ideas [surrounding the melting pot] included the belief that a new nation, a new national character, and a new nationality were forming in the United States and that the most heterogeneous human materials could be taken in and absorbed into this nationality. (Gleason, Speaking 5) Of course, from the beginning, the melting pot has been seen as an ambiguous symbol of American unity; it has been looked upon as a myth providing cohesion and a sense of evolving Americanness on the one hand, and as an instrument of forced acculturation and violent assimilation on the other. Several questions suggest themselves when assessing this myth: Who is in the ‘pot’ and who is doing the ‘melting’? What exactly is melted down? Which elements would prove to be resilient or dominant in the process, and with what result? In my discussion of the melting pot myth, I will point to narrative variations, iconic symbolizations, and ritualistic practices that have shaped it across time. This reconstruction reveals, as we will see, that the melting pot myth emerges from a rather confused discourse: the melting pot has been used, first, as a phrase with which historical developments in the US have been described and projected into the future; it has been used, second, as a normative concept in order to affirm the melting pot at various moments in American history; and it has been used, third, as an analytic term in order to study cultural, social, and demographic processes in American society. These three different modes (descriptive, normative, and analytical) are usually not properly distinguished, which at times makes it difficult to keep them apart; normative frameworks in particular often appropriate a descriptive mode and/or immunize themselves against criticism by pretending to be analytical. The melting pot in all three modes (as history, program, and analytical category) appears to be infused with an exceptionalist logic and a civil religious dimension that invariably reinforce its mythic quality. Melting pot rhetoric often describes the overcoming of cultural and national differences in general, but at times it more specifically is about racial, religious, or class differences. These oscillations and variations contribute to the elasticity of the myth 260 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA even as they often render discussions of the melting pot quite ambiguous and contradictory. In what follows, I will sketch several phases in the making, remaking, and unmaking of the myth of the melting pot. First, I will trace melting pot mythmaking from the foundational phase of the United States in the second half of the 18th century, during which a number of now canonical texts articulated this myth in powerful ways, all the way through the 19th century. Second, I will address Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot (1908) in some detail, as it is a singularly important narrative of melting pot rhetoric and aesthetic and as such will serve as a touchstone for subsequent discussions of the myth of the melting pot. Third, I will reconstruct responses to the myth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period in which it became a central reference point for discussions of immigration and America’s future and a highly contested metaphor of Progressivist thinking that was attacked from different positions on the political spectrum – from advocates of cultural pluralism on the left as well as from advocates of eugenics on the right. Fourth, I will look at sections of the population that have been regularly excluded by melting pot rhetoric: minority groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans. If nation-building is intricately intertwined with racialization (cf. Weinbaum, “Nation”), then the melting pot metaphor – despite its ostensibly inclusivist orientation – implies exclusionary practices, just as any other model that constructs a homogenous national body from a racially diverse population. Debates around forms of “American Apartheid” (cf. Massey and Denton’s book of the same title), taboos on miscegenation, and a new emphasis on religious difference within the melting pot discourse also need to be addressed in this section. Fifth, I will turn to the post-World War II period in order to show how the melting pot controversies were continued and renewed in the wake of the social protest movements and new immigration legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in discussions of Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan’s by now classic study Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). I will then outline how more recent discussions of the melting pot have been informed by notions of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity. In recent years, we have also seen a (re)turn to models of assimilation (cf. e.g. Salins, Assimilation) which often affirm and rehash older, rather conservative positions; at the same time, alternatives to the melting pot such as the mosaic, the salad bowl, cultural hybridity, etc. have been discussed in American studies and postcolonial studies scholarship. The melting pot myth thus has been used in very different ways and for different political purposes. It has been the subject of sociological discussions as E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 261 well as of immigrant love stories; it is a model of literary aesthetics as well as a metaphor for change and hybridity, and it is also at the core of some strands of utopian thinking. Above all, one might say that it is a myth of cultural mobility and cultural sharing. Despite having lost mainstream popularity in recent years, melting pot rhetoric still enjoys some currency, as the issues that the melting pot myth tackles – i.e., processes of voluntary or coerced political, social, and/or cultural integration – are still on the agenda. In fact, recent scholarship stresses the “ideological variability of the melting pot” (Wilson, Melting-Pot Modernism 7) and identifies it with the first cultural turn in American history (cf. ibid. 198). However, the notion of culture and society that the metaphor of the melting pot conjures up remains problematic and does not lend itself easily to ideological rearticulations: alloying, the metaphor’s source, always involves a primary constituent into which the other constituents are dissolved. Literalizing the melting pot metaphor thus points to built-in asymmetries, limitations, and pitfalls of the concept which the foundational and exceptionalist version of the myth has often successfully managed to camouflage. 2. “WHAT THEN IS THE AMERICAN, THIS NEW MAN?” The bosom of America is open to the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions. […] Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people. GEORGE WASHINGTON The time […] is anticipated when the language, manners, customs, political and religious sentiments of the mixed mass of the people who inhabit the United States, shall have become so assimilated, as that all nominal distinctions shall be lost in the general and honourable name of Americans. JEDIDIAH MORSE, THE AMERICAN UNIVERSAL GEOGRAPHY The first author to be credited with describing American society as a melting pot is John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813) (cf. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 75), a French aristocrat who emigrated to North America in 1755. While back in Europe in 1782, he arranged for the publication of his Letters from an American Farmer in London, which is the key text for tracing the history and origin of the melting pot myth and may very well be looked upon as “the first sustained attempt by a European-born writer to define Americanness” (Moore, 262 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Introduction ix). The Letters consist of semi-autobiographical accounts of rural life in 18th-century America, American flora and fauna, politics, family life, and culture; but most noteworthy in the context of my discussion of the melting pot myth is Crèvecoeur’s description of the ‘American’ in the third letter: What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. (43) Crèvecoeur envisions the ‘melting’ of distinct Western and Northern European ‘races’ (French, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian) into a new American one. He “uses the word ‘new’ seventeen times in letter 3, often in company with such words as metamorphosis, regeneration and resurrection” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 75; cf. Nye, American Literary History 157). At various points in his letters, Crèvecoeur also includes Native Americans in his melting pot, a fact that has often been omitted in standard interpretations of the Letters. In a recent edition of Crèvecoeur’s writings, we find the following description (rendered in the original version in which he wrote it): the Sweed the low the high dutch the French the English the scotch the Irish, Leaving behind them their National Prejudices soon Imbibe those of the new country they are come to Inhabit, they mix with Eachother or with the Natives as conveniency or chance may direct. (More Letters 137) Whereas Native Americans became more and more identified in public discourses of the 18th and 19th centuries with savagery (in contradistinction to the ‘civilized’ white Europeans) and were thus increasingly excluded from whiteauthored melting pot visions of the future American (along with African Americans and Asian Americans), in Crèvecoeur’s account of America/nization they are (still) included (albeit in a homogenized fashion). ‘Mixing with each other and with the Natives,’ Europeans are transformed into Americans by a process of biological hybridization that is invested in a heteronormative ideology of repro- E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 263 duction. Concerning the relations between Europeans and Native Americans, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) in a similar vein and around the same time proposes “to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people [i]ncorporating themselves with us as citizens of the U.S.” (To Benjamin Hawkins Washington). Jefferson’s semantics of ‘blending’ comes close to ‘melting’ and indicates the potential he sees for a kind of ‘new race,’ a potential that is also expounded by other founding fathers (George Washington, for instance; cf. this section’s first epigraph). In fact, “several prominent southerners in the eighteenth century proclaimed intermarriage the solution to the Indian problem” (Dippie, Vanishing 260). However, Jefferson’s utopian “vision of interracial nationhood” (Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire 52) is ambivalent as it also prefigures and accepts the dissolution of the Native Americans and their cultures through racial mixing; ultimately, he did not favor the melting pot as an allembracing model but instead argued for “the separation, or elimination, of disparate ethnic groups – Indians and blacks – who refused to disappear through civilization and assimilation, or were, in his view, incapable of participating as citizens in the republic” (Anthony Wallace, Jefferson 338). Today, Jefferson is seen as both “the scholarly admirer of Indian character, archaeology, and language and as the planner of cultural genocide, the architect of the removal policy, the surveyor of the Trail of Tears” (ibid. vii). When he tells the chiefs of the Upper Cherokee that “your blood will mix with ours” (qtd. in Roger Kennedy, “Jefferson” 105), it is not quite clear whether this is meant as a promise or a threat. In later scholarship, this vision will be explicitly connected to AngloAmerican plans to annihilate the Native population through racial mixing. According to the phrenologist Charles Caldwell (1772-1853), the “only efficient scheme to civilize the Indians is to cross the breed” (qtd. in Haskins, History 111). This view was also shared by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), the founding figure of American anthropology, who noted that “the only way to tame him [the Indian] is to put in the white blood” (qtd. in Bieder, Science 225; cf. also Eggan, “Lewis H. Morgan”), and by cartographer and geologist John Wesley Powell, who thought that “mixing blood” was a way to avoid “spilling blood” and spoke out in favor of “rapid amalgamation” (qtd. in Dippie, Vanishing 248). As Brian Dippie points out, amalgamation fit very well with the larger programmatic notion of the ‘vanishing Indian:’ “Assimilation would effect the same end as extermination and more insidiously and more surely because it annihilates without raising a sword or a murmur of protest” (Vanishing 244). The notions of ‘melting’ and miscegenation in this melting pot design thus point to and justify what amounts to extermination policies – or what Matthew Jacobson in a different context has termed “malevolent assimilation” (cf. his essay of the 264 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA same title, esp. 154) – that were part of what white colonizers liked to call their ‘civilizing mission’ (cf. Bieder, Science 226, 231-33). Echoes of the melting pot myth as a foundational narrative of the American experience and as an American ideal reverberate beyond Crèvecoeur’s articulation of the idea of the melting pot and Jefferson’s half-hearted (or even disingenuous) embrace of a mixed-race future America in essays, poetry, and historical works by a number of writers in 19th-century North America. These texts prefigure the immigration debate that was to gain momentum in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through melting pot imagery – referred to by this or any other name – that is often ambiguous, idiosyncratic, and impressionistic. Most of these articulations of the melting pot take a top-down rather than a bottom-up perspective and display the same kind of inherent tension and volatility that we have found in Jefferson and, to a lesser extent, in Crèvecoeur, especially as to questions of inclusion and exclusion and the potential or problems anticipated in the process of mixing. Whereas we can note that “[b]y the middle of the nineteenth century it was widely accepted in America that the nation had a cosmopolitan origin and that the unifying element of American nationalism for the time being was neither a common past, nor common blood, but the American Idea” and that “[t]he motto of American nationalism – E Pluribus Unum – stresses the ideal of unity that will arise out of diversity” (Lissak, Pluralism 2), the perspectives on just how this ideal was to be achieved varied greatly and were mostly inconclusive. Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is among the American writers of the 19th century who are often considered to be proponents of the melting pot. References to Emerson’s usage of the (s)melting pot metaphor are linked to the following passage from a journal entry: Man is the most composite of all creatures. […] Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent, – asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cosacks, and all the European tribes, – of the Africans, and of the Polynesians, – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. La Nature aime les croisements. (Entry 119, Journals Vol. 9, 299-300) E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 265 Emerson includes Europeans, Africans, and even Polynesians, but no Native Americans in his version of the melting pot. Although he seems to champion racial and cultural amalgamation and thus to contest notions of racial and cultural purity, as with Crèveceour and Jefferson, we need to look beyond the canonized passage quoted above to get a fuller sense of Emerson’s ‘smelting pot;’ his American ‘Corinthian brass’ is informed as much by cultural exchange as by processes (and theories) of natural selection. Emerson’s conceptualization of the “genius of the American race” is referred to by Luther Luedtke in an overall assessment of his oeuvre as harboring a “eugenics of American nationhood” (“Ralph Waldo Emerson” 7). While Emerson clearly speaks out against nativist and anti-immigration polemics, he also writes in a Darwinist spirit that “the Atlantic is a sieve” (qtd. in ibid. 10) through which immigrants on their passage to America are filtered to sort out the ‘unfit.’ Even though he refers to “the legend of pure races” (Emerson, “Race” 49) and to the fact that “all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races” (ibid. 50), he still clings to a strict racial hierarchy: in reference to the chapter titled “Race” in his English Traits, Luedtke holds that for Emerson, “the emergence of higher forms of human life entailed not only the hybridization of races but also the extinction of existentially inferior forms” (“Ralph Waldo Emerson” 8; cf. also Nicoloff, Emerson 46-47), and John Carlos Rowe has pointed to Emerson’s complicity in mid-19th-century discourses of race as well (cf. At Emerson’s Tomb). Reading Emerson with Jefferson thus may shed light on why Native Americans are not mentioned in his smelting pot vision: Even though Emerson’s metaphor of (s)melting is often placed in a smooth continuum between Crèvecoeur in the late 18th and Zangwill in the early 20th century, it reveals on closer inspection that it is based as much on processes of cultural transformation as on the discourses of biological determinism increasingly popular and accepted at that time. In many ways, Emerson’s vision is reflected in the works of Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose writing has been credited as exemplifying the American melting pot by way of a “a new language” and “a new literary idiom appropriate to what Whitman saw as uniquely American experiences” (Archambeau, “Immigrant Languages” 79). In his preface to the 1855 edition of his magnum opus Leaves of Grass, Whitman refers to “the Americans of all nations” as a “race of races” and to the United States as not merely a nation but “the nation of many nations” (22). However, Whitman employs different melting pot metaphors in the various versions of Leaves of Grass: in the 1855 version, the speaker addresses the American “[o]f every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion, [n]ot merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia” (23), while in the last version, now titled “Song of Myself” and newly organized in sections, 266 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA the speaker describes himself as an American “[o]f every hue and caste […], [o]f every rank and religion, [a] farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, [p]risoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest” (87). Clearly, the 1855 text is more open and inclusive than the 1881 version, to which Whitman added a somewhat nativist streak: “Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same” (71). The melting pot rhetoric is less radical in this final version, which stresses American sameness rather than immigrant difference. This change can be read as an indication of the larger ideological shift toward nativism in the period of mass immigration from Europe. Whitman’s final version of his famous poem, then, appears to partially turn away from the melting pot idea and to emphasize an Ur-American genealogy. Toward the end of the 19th century several historians offered various models of national amalgamation, all of which relied to some degree on melting pot imagery for conceptualizing the transformation of immigrants from Europe. The historian Francis Parkman (1823-1893) contended that [s]ome races of men seem moulded in wax, soft and melting, at once plastic and feeble. Some races, like some metals, combine the greatest flexibility with the greatest strength. But the Indian is hewn out of a rock. You can rarely change the form without destruction of the substance. (Conspiracy 45) Racial difference thus figured prominently in Parkman’s explanation of the failure of the “wilderness melting pot” (Saveth, American Historians 102); in addition to the supposedly unchangeable Natives, Parkman also dismissed in no uncertain terms as not fit for progress Catholic groups, especially North Americans of French descent. The jurist, historian, and statesman James Bryce (1838-1922), who served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1913, states in his voluminous treatise on the US titled The American Commonwealth (1888): What strikes the traveller, and what the Americans themselves are delighted to point out, is the amazing solvent power which American institutions, habits, and ideas exercise upon newcomers of all races. […] On the whole we may conclude that the intellectual and moral atmosphere into which the settlers from Europe come has more power to assimilate them than their race qualities have power to change it. (Vol. 2 922-23) The image of America’s “solvent power” affirms once more the idea of ‘melting down’ racial difference, even if race here (as in many 19th-century texts) refers to European groups such as the Nordic, Iberic, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Slavic, or E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 267 Teutonic races (cf. Jacobson, Whiteness 7) rather than to ‘whites,’ African Americans, Native Americans, or Asian Americans. Over all, the 19th century largely consolidated a racialized version of the melting pot idea and with it “the institutionalization of a racial order that drew the color line around, rather than within, Europe” (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 65). The melting pot myth thus seemingly describes but actually produces an implicit and highly normative conception of whiteness that has become more inclusive over time but at the same time also continued to be profoundly exclusivist. Following up on Bryce at the very end of the 19th century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) used the melting pot metaphor to describe processes of Americanization at what he refers to as the ‘frontier.’ In his lecture on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner suggests: The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people […]. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. The claim that this “amalgamation is destined to produce a new national stock” (ibid.) here is obviously used to assert US distinctness from England and to bolster the notion of American exceptionalism. This new national stock, in which “no element remained isolated,” again relates mostly to European immigrants, even if Turner refers to “immigrants from all nations of the world.” Turner’s frontier thesis – to be addressed in more detail in the following chapter – echoes Crèvecoeur’s melting pot, yet Turner never mentions his name or quotes from his writings. By describing the frontier melting pot as a specifically rural phenomenon, Turner programmatically shifts the site of Americanization from the Eastern Seaboard to the Midwest and thus positions the West at the center of the nation (later critics would turn to the American city as the major arena of assimilation processes). While historians, essayists, politicians, and poets in the 18th and 19th centuries, as we have seen, referred in their appraisals and critiques of the melting pot idea to the mixing, (s)melting, and blending of differences in America in very different ways and often quite unspecifically, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the melting pot emerged as a particularly prominent yet controversial and often very differently accentuated model to describe the potential effects of mass immigration. Turner (among others) was skeptical about the ‘melting’ of one immigrant group in particular: the Eastern European and, specifically, Jewish immigrants, since he saw them as a ‘city people’ who did not experience the transforming effects of the frontier in the same beneficial way as other immi- 268 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA grant groups. In view of this assessment, it may seem ironic that it is a dramatic text by a Jewish (and British) author that at the beginning of the 20th century fuelled public debates on US national identity with its rendering of an urban melting pot scenario of mythic proportions. 3. ISRAEL ZANGWILL’S THE MELTING POT: JEWISH IMMIGRANTS AND AMERICAN ALCHEMY [T]he real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you – he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman. ISRAEL ZANGWILL, THE MELTING POT In the passage quoted above, the protagonist of Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot portrays the American experience as a process of amelioration through amalgamation out of which the future American will arise like a “superman.” Zangwill’s play widely popularized the idea of the melting pot and was “[a]dvertised as a ‘Drama of the Amalgamation of Races’” (Goldstein, Price 99); it opened in Washington, D.C. on October 5, 1908 in front of an audience that included then-president Theodore Roosevelt and his family. It ran for six months in Chicago and ran for 136 performances in New York in 1908 and 1909. Whereas theater critics at first had little enthusiasm for the play due to its sentimentalism, the audience flocked to it: “[T]he public crowded the performances […]. It is a play of the people, touched with the fire of democracy, and lighted radiantly with the national vision” (review qtd. in Gleason, Speaking 7). From 1909 until the US entered World War I in 1917, it was republished yearly and widely read in schools and colleges (cf. Browder, Slippery Characters 149). Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), the author of this huge success, was a playwright, journalist, essayist, and activist whose family emigrated from Czarist Russia and Poland to England. He was a central figure of Anglo-Jewish intellectualism and politics and was considered by many as “an interpreter of Jewish life” (Nahshon, Prologue 3) but was also seen as a somewhat controversial figure within the Jewish community because of his marriage with non-Jewish British writer and feminist Edith Ayrton. When his play The Melting Pot premiered in Washington, Zangwill traveled to the US to be in the audience. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 269 Illustration 2: Celebrating Assimilation? Cover of The Melting Pot: The Great American Drama by Israel Zangwill (1916). The Melting Pot, Zangwill’s best-known play, is a melodrama whose plot revolves around David Quixano, a Jewish-Russian musician who immigrates to the United States after his family has been killed in the Kishinev pogrom. In New York, he meets Vera Revendal, the daughter of wealthy Russian immigrants, who does charity work in a housing project; as their relationship progresses and they fall in love with each other, they learn that it was Vera’s father who had been responsible for the brutal murder of David’s family. At this point in the play, a shocked David leaves Vera, and it seems as if their budding relationship cannot overcome the trauma of the past: David (In low, icy tones): You cannot come to me. There is a river of blood between us. Vera: Were it seven seas, our love must cross them. […] David: Love! Christian love! For this I gave up my people – darkened the home that sheltered me – there was always a still, small voice at my heart calling me back, but I 270 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA heeded nothing – only the voice of the butcher’s daughter. Let me go home, let me go home. (347-9) Later on, David acknowledges that he has been wrong in rejecting Vera’s love and embraces the redemptive influence of melting pot America, which in the play acquires the aura of the Redeemer Nation so cherished in exceptionalist rhetoric: I preached of God’s Crucible, this great new continent that could melt up all race differences and vendettas, that could purge and recreate, and God tried me with his supremest test. He gave me a heritage from the Old World, hatred and vengeance and blood, and said, “Cast it all into my Crucible.” And I said, “Even thy Crucible cannot melt this hate, cannot drink up this blood.” And so I sat crooning over the dead past, gloating over the old bloodstains – I, the apostle of America, the prophet of the God of our children. (360) David interprets his tragic family history (Vera’s father having murdered his parents) as a trial used by God to put his faith to the test. By mastering this religious crisis, repenting his skepticism, and converting once more, and firmly, to the American creed, David’s faith in the melting pot is not only reassured but strengthened. In the last part of the play, David and Vera overcome the painful history of ‘old world’ anti-Semitism and make a new start in America; David creates a musical vision of melting pot America that moves the hearts of his immigrant audience, while Vera is “[m]elting at his touch” (315). The second chance offered to them by the American crucible does away with all past suffering and guilt and makes them literally new (cf. Browder, Slippery Characters). In discussions of the play, it is mostly its happy ending that is quoted as evidence for its endorsement of melting pot ideology. The play concludes with the following lines: It is the fires of God round His Crucible. There she lies, the great Melting-Pot – listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth […] Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross – how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all the races and nations come to labour and look forward! Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent – the God of our children give you Peace. (362-63) E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 271 With these words, which echo Promised Land rhetoric, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and American civil religion, the play fades out after allowing a final glimpse of the torch of the Statue of Liberty in the background while a patriotic song is played. Thus, the final scene calls for unconditional identification with the US, reaching out to the audience on all available channels. Zangwill’s play thus has been read and canonized as a programmatic illustration and optimistic confirmation of the workings of the melting pot in American society which dramatizes the ‘new world’ as a place of new beginnings that discounts the individual’s past and affirms that “old ethnic loyalties would diminish in the face of an inexorable process which emphasised those values that Americans held in common rather than those which kept them apart” (Campbell and Kean, American Cultural Studies 54). Rather than focusing merely on the assimilation of immigrants, “The Melting Pot made an explicit bid for a more expansive sense of U.S. nationhood” (Browder, Slippery Characters 150) and was seen as an affirmation of a universal ideology of cultural mixing and cultural change. Yet in contrast to this canonical reading of the play, it has been argued by some scholars that its conflict may be resolved a little too nicely at the end. Neil Shumsky for example finds the play’s rendering of the melting pot myth more complex than is generally acknowledged, and more ambivalent than the final scene suggests; he points out that the play “does not merely present the melting pot theory” (“Zangwill’s The Melting Pot” 36) but structurally calls into question the message of its ending. Shumsky sees the anti-climactic moment of the play in David’s ultimate moment of crisis when he finds out about the murder of his parents at the hands of Vera’s father and his belief in the melting pot is shaken. Vera affirms her love, but he cannot accept it; he is unable to eradicate the past and wants to go home. The melting pot is ‘only a dream:’ One could logically argue that The Melting Pot should end at this point. Its hero has admitted the futility of his dream and recognized that it cannot come true; but the play continues. It has a second conclusion which seems contrived and appears to contradict much of the play’s development. In this anticlimax, David and Vera have finally realized that their futures lie apart and seem reconciled to that fact. Then suddenly, and for no apparent reason, David begs her to stay. (Shumsky, “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot” 35) Shumsky’s reasoning that the play has two endings throws into doubt its ending’s unequivocal affirmation of the melting pot myth: what if the myth is a 272 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA dream? Who is dreaming it? And whose agency and interest propel the dreamlike vision? Scholars have further complicated the picture by pointing to the role of Judaism in Zangwill’s The Melting Pot and have argued that the play is not so much about Americanization but about the future of the Jewish people in the diaspora. The question then is: Do the characters become Americanized or do they become Judaized? According to Biale, all Americans in The Melting Pot become “crypto-Jews” (“Melting Pot” 20); Vera Revendal in the beginning holds anti-Semitic attitudes but sheds her prejudices as the play continues – ultimately, she even wants to convert to Judaism for David’s sake. In so far as Vera feels that she should assume David’s cultural heritage, Zangwill’s play is a narrative of conversion rather than an affirmation of melting pot ideology. In discussing David with her father, she says that [I was] never absolutely sure of my love for him – perhaps that was why I doubted his love for me – often after our enchanted moments there would come a nameless uneasiness, some vague instinct, relic of the long centuries of Jew-loathing, some strange shirking from his Christless creed – […] But now, now, David, I come to you, and I say in the words of Ruth, thy people shall be my people and thy God my God! (347) Like Vera, the Quixano’s Irish Catholic maid Kathleen overcomes her prejudices against Jews, develops an appreciation for Jewish rituals, and even participates in them herself. Vera and Kathleen may serve as examples that the play prominently engages with anti-Semitic prejudices and turns them around. Non-Jewish characters in The Melting Pot want to become (like) Jews rather than Americans, it has been argued: “Zangwill’s cosmopolitanism turned out to be something like a form of Jewish particularism” (Biale, “Melting Pot” 19). This way of reading the play would have been more acceptable to those Jewish American contemporaries of Zangwill who felt compelled to embrace the melting pot as a political strategy while in fact being opposed to intermarriage as a form of assimilation (cf. Goldstein, Price 101). The influence of The Melting Pot cannot be overstated: “[m]ore than any social or political theory, the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity, including most notably the language of self-declared opponents of the melting-pot concept” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 66). The melting pot concept echoed in ethnic and immigrant literature of the 1910s and 1920s, a period in which nativist sentiments were on the rise as a reaction to mass immigration from Europe. Yet, the concept was neither uncontested, nor E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 273 did its appropriation always occur in the melodramatic mode of Zangwill’s play. Quite the contrary: we find a number of attempts to critique the metaphor by taking it more or less literally. Orm Øverland has shown how the melting pot as a symbol of assimilation was contested rather than whole-heartedly embraced in Scandinavian immigrant fiction (cf. Immigrant Minds), for example by Waldemar Ager (1869-1941), Norwegian immigrant and author of On the Way to the Melting Pot (1917), who describes the road toward assimilation as a process of loss, not of gain or liberation. Lars, the protagonist of the novel, is portrayed as assimilated and as culturally and socially impoverished at the same time; the process leading to that condition is described by another character in the book as follows: First they stripped away their love for their parents, then they sacrificed their love for the one they held most dear, then the language they had learned from mother, then their love for their childhood upbringing, for God and man, then the sounds they learned as children, then their memories, then the ideals of their youth – tore their heritage asunder little by little – and when one had hurled from his heart and mind everything which he had been fond of earlier, then there was a great empty void to be filled with love of self, selfishness, greed, and the like. […] Thus they readied themselves for the melting pot’s last great test. (197) And Lars’s employer, a factory manager, muses not without irony that “[h]e could not recall having seen a single typewriter, an electric motor, a usable sewing machine or piece of farm machinery wander into the melting pot” (173): obviously, valuable and fully functioning things would not be melted down. Perhaps it is not accidental that Ager’s critique of the melting pot was originally published in the Norwegian language for the thriving Norwegian American community and was translated into English only in 1995. In Ager’s view, “[t]he melting pot […] was primarily a metaphor of destruction, more about the killing of the old man than the creation of the new” (Øverland, “From Melting Pot” 53), a metaphor used “to denationalize those who are not of English descent” (ibid). Almost two decades later, another immigrant writer includes a very unusual melting pot image in his work: In the climactic scene of Henry Roth’s (1906- 1995) novel Call It Sleep (1934), the protagonist, a young Jewish immigrant by the name of David Schearl (another David), touches the electrified rail of the trolley tracks on Avenue D in New York’s East Village with a milk ladle, which results in “a surrealistic melting pot melange” (Sollors, Ethnic Modernism 140) accompanied by “lightning” and “radiance” (Roth, Call It Sleep 571). In literalizing the melting pot metaphor, David’s experience with electricity is cast as an 274 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA epiphany in the Joycean sense, as a moment of total presence: “[h]e views the electric current as if it were a divine power” (Sollors, Ethnic Modernism 141); David’s almost-fatal ‘melting’ however can be read more fruitfully as a personal rite de passage that gives his life another turn rather than as a ritual of Americanization. Ager and Roth are only two exemplary cases that show how the melting pot myth is criticized, perhaps even ridiculed, in the writings of first generation immigrants to the US; far beyond the realm of fiction, however, the melting pot becomes fiercely contested in debates on the future of US society in the Progressive Era, which will be discussed in the next section. 4. CONTESTING THE MELTING POT: CULTURAL PLURALISM VS. RACIAL HYGIENE? America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. LOUIS DEMBITZ BRANDEIS, “TRUE AMERICANISM” We in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy, or the equality of all men, that we have left out of consideration the matter of blood or natural inborn hereditary mental and moral differences. No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing, as you know. HARRY H. LAUGHLIN In the face of more than 18 million immigrants entering the US between 1891 and 1920, the idea of racial and cultural amalgamation was discussed controversially by intellectuals as well as the public at large at that time. In these discussions, the melting pot concept provided a kind of middle ground between irreconcilable perspectives on the left and on the right: while liberals such as Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne criticized the melting pot idea as a model of assimilation that led to homogenization and suggested alternative models geared toward ethno-cultural plurality and diversity instead, nativist anti-immigration critics and specifically eugenicists such as Madison Grant and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard perceived the melting pot as an imminent threat to (Anglo-) American society, welcomed the restrictive immigration legislation that curtailed large-scale immigration in 1924, and called for measures to secure the ‘national E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 275 health’ on overtly racist grounds – proto-fascist notions of racial hygiene and racial purity are of central concern in their writings about American society. Kallen, Bourne, and others perceived the melting pot as a repressive concept rather than as “genuine assimilation to one another,” as John Dewey called it (qtd. in Wilson, Melting-Pot Modernism 14). Their critique of the melting pot as an ideology of Americanization grounded in coercive homogenization narrowly defined the melting pot as full assimilation to Anglo-Saxon culture. Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Jewish American philosopher who had emigrated to the US as a child, proposed in his influential essay “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” (1915) a democracy of various nationalities, a nation of nations, rather than a melting pot America: Thus “American civilization” may come to mean the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of “European civilization” – the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Europe being eliminated – a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind. As in an orchestra, every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form; as every type has its appropriate theme and melody in the whole symphony, so in society each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its temper and culture may be its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization. (116-17) Kallen argues that cultural pluralism (a term he has been credited with coining), ethnic affiliation, and national pride are indeed compatible; he envisions America as a “nation of discrete nationalisms” and identifies ethnic diversity as “a national asset” (Hansen, Lost Promise 95) rather than seeing immigrants’ loyalties to their countries of origin as an obstacle to the national coherence of the US. To illustrate his position, Kallen repeatedly uses musical metaphors that he seems to have borrowed from Jane Addams’s 1892 essay “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements:” If you have heard a thousand voices singing in the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s “Messiah,” you have found that the leading voices could still be distinguished, but that the differences of training and cultivation between them and the voices of the chorus were lost in the unity of purpose and the fact that they were all human voices lifted by a high motive. This is a weak illustration of what a Settlement attempts to do. (25) Addams’s use of Händel’s oratorio to describe her settlement project Hull House is similar to the function of David’s American symphony in Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (which in fact has a non-fictional counterpart in Antonin Dvořák’s 276 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Symphony No. 9, which he composed in the US in 1893 – popularly known as the New World Symphony, it has since become one of the most popular symphonies in the romantic repertoire). That both advocates of cultural pluralism as well as melting pot advocates have used musical metaphors to stress the harmonious result of their respective approaches may be taken as indicative of how difficult it is at times to distinguish between the two positions. In a similar vein to Kallen, writer and intellectual Randolph Bourne (1886- 1918) argues in his essay “Trans-National America” (published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916) that Americanism should not be equated with AngloSaxonism and that immigrants should retain their languages and customs: “What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity,” he writes; immigrants “merge but they do not fuse.” Bourne holds that US society consists of “a unique sociological fabric” which would allow it to become a “federation of cultures.” Thus Bourne, like Kallen, criticizes the Anglo-Saxon elite for pushing their own culture as an American leitkultur and strictly opposes assimilation, which he deems undemocratic and even inhumane. He affirms the ethnic diversity of the US and defends the tendency of immigrants to maintain ties to their countries of origin against xenophobic and nationalist sentiments that in the context of World War I (which the US would formally enter in April 1917) had been on the rise. The pressure exerted on immigrants to conform and to assimilate in these years is enormous, but many of them do not bow to these pressures. While conservative critics lament this “failure of the melting-pot,” Bourne, who values cultural difference and abhors uniformity, views it positively: The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find that we have all unawares been building up the first international nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal, however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the outlines are already E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 277 too clear not to give us a new vision and a new-orientation [sic] of the American mind in the world. (“Trans-National America”) Bourne advocates an American internationalism that leaves behind European factionalism and violent conflict; he is convinced that within the democratic framework of the US, all the cultures of the world could peacefully coexist. Bourne’s views are articulated in the context of American Progressivism, a reform movement consisting “of shifting, ideologically fluid, issue-focused coalitions, all competing for the reshaping of American society” (Rodgers, “In Search” 114), and stand in stark contrast to more conservative positions that finally won the day. Illustration 3: The Mortar of Assimilation Ill. by C.J. Taylor (Puck, 26 June 1889). Contrary to the reformist positions of Kallen, Bourne, and other leading intellectual progressive figures such as John Dewey, Jane Addams, Robert Park, 278 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA and Franz Boas, conservative critics were opposed to the melting pot idea for quite different reasons. Kallen for example expressly attacked one of them, the American sociologist and eugenicist E.A. Ross (1866-1951), for his AngloAmerican conservatism: Kallen broke with Ross by interpreting America as a work in progress rather than a nation in the grip of cultural decline. Whereas Ross regarded the United States as the province of an Anglo-American cultural majority, Kallen advanced an ideal of cultural diversity. Where Ross delineated a program for cultural renewal that combined immigration restriction with assimilation to Anglo-American norms, Kallen discarded the metaphor of America-as-melting-pot in favour of the symbol of orchestral harmony. (Hansen, Lost Promise 92) Kallen even addresses Ross in his essay “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” directly: “Hence, what troubles Mr. Ross and so many other Anglo-Saxon Americans is not really inequality; what troubles them is difference” (107). While the cultural pluralists Kallen and Bourne criticized the melting pot as assimilationist and homogenizing, conservative critics of the melting pot such as Ross found both pluralism and assimilation equally problematic and repulsive; their strict anti-immigration stance was motivated by a nationalist outlook based on the notions of white supremacy and racial purity, a position that denigrated all racial mixing as ‘mongrelization.’ Drawing on widespread xenophobic resentments, their message met with a lot of approval and became politically influential: After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the so-called Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 (severely restricting Chinese and Japanese immigration, respectively), the likewise overtly racist Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924 further restricted immigration, which reflects the then widespread acceptance of racist ideologies (cf. Gerstle, American Crucible). Among the proponents of ‘scientific’ racism was Harry H. Laughlin (1880- 1953), who as an “expert eugenics agent” delivered a report to Congress in 1922 in which he correlated so-called forms of social degeneracy (feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, epilepsy, tuberculosis, alcoholism, dependency) with “racial degeneracy;” Laughlin “purported to find much higher levels of degeneracy among the new immigrants than among the old, and this finding became a central weapon in the restrictionists’ arsenal” (ibid. 105). Laughlin’s conjoining of the racist ideology of white supremacy with eugenicist principles enjoyed strong support from politicians: Calvin Coolidge himself, US president from 1923 to 1929, contended that “Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races” (qtd. in Browder, Slippery Characters 146). It has been quite effectively erased from E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 279 public memory that there was a strong eugenics movement in the US which propagated what Daylanne English refers to as “a central national ideology” (Unnatural Selections 14). This movement, in which American scientists and intellectuals played a vanguard role, pushed for ‘perfecting’ the human ‘gene pool’ by controlling the process of reproduction (cf. ibid.). American biologists like Harry H. Laughlin and Charles B. Davenport claimed that most ‘ailments,’ including social problems such as poverty and criminality, were genetically programmed and thus hereditary in nature – therefore persons with a ‘good genetic makeup’ should be encouraged to have families, while ‘inferior’ people of allegedly poor genetic stock should be prevented from reproducing. Among those people regarded as inferior were epileptics, manic-depressives, prostitutes, alcoholics, the homeless, criminals, as well as non-white residents and immigrants. Under the eugenics laws, people who came to the negative attention of the social authorities could be branded as ‘feeble-minded’ by court order and were then forcibly sterilized. By the early 1930s, some 30 American states had adopted such eugenics laws. Most of them were modelled after the law which Laughlin had drafted for the state of Virginia in 1924, which also served Germany’s National Socialists as a model for their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, on the basis of which at least 400,000 men and women were forcibly sterilized. The University of Heidelberg was apparently so grateful to Laughlin that it awarded him an honorary doctorate for his ‘services on behalf of racial hygiene’ in 1936. The influence of American eugenics on Nazism goes even further: The notorious term ‘Untermensch,’ a core concept in Nazi ideology, is a translation from the English term ‘Underman,’ which, as unidiomatic as it may sound today, was coined by the American journalist and historian Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) in his 1922 study The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (Stoddard, who held a PhD from Harvard University, was extremely popular during the heyday of ‘Pop-Darwinism’ and the so-called ‘eugenics fad’ in the 1920s). The equally notorious term ‘aufnorden,’ which also relates to an integral concept of Nazi ideology, similarly is a translation of Madison Grant’s term ‘to nordicize,’ which he used in his 1916 The Passing of the Great Race. Obviously neither Laughlin nor Grant nor Stoddard found the melting pot idea appealing, as to them it signified the downfall of the American nation through the ‘degeneration’ of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race.’ Today Stoddard is very much forgotten, as are Grant and Laughlin; in canonical American literature however, we find a clue as to his enormous popularity in the 1920s: 280 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?” “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” (Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby 14) Henry Fairchild (1880-1956) is another influential figure who makes a case against what he calls “unrestricted immigration” in his influential study The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926), in which he argues that “the consequence of nonassimilation [to Anglo-Saxon conformity] is the destruction of nationality” (253). Fairchild refers to the melting pot as an illusion and as dangerous wishful thinking: “The figure was a clever one – picturesque, expressive, familiar, just the sort of thing to catch the popular fancy and lend itself to a thousand uses” (ibid. 10). Like many of his contemporaries with similar political views, he metaphorically equates the American nation with a tree, and immigrants with parasites, “foreign forces,” and “minute hostile organisms” that “sap the very vitality of their host” (ibid. 255): In so doing the immigrants may be merely following out their natural and defensible impulses without any hostility toward the receiving nation, any more than parasites upon a tree may be considered to have any hostility to the tree. […] The simple fact is that they are alien particles, not assimilated, and therefore wholly different from the foreign particles which the tree rakes in the form of blood, and transforms into cells of its own body. (ibid.) This kind of crude and simplistic organicist imagery together with racist rhetoric that draws on biology in general has lastingly influenced the discourse on immigration until today. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 281 Illustration 4: The Melting Pot, Inc. The Ford English School Graduation Ceremony of 1916 (The Henry Ford Collections). As has been shown, the melting pot myth became a prime target of criticism by intellectuals on the left and on the right for contradictory reasons: the pluralists argued that it was too repressive, while for the nativists, it was too inclusive. Still, the melting pot myth is a singular vision in the way that it de-emphasizes difference while holding the middle ground between total assimilation on the one hand and racist exclusion on the other. American journalist, novelist, and cultural critic Ernest Poole (1880-1950) describes the city of Chicago in 1910 as a “mixing-bowl for the nations” (Voice 554) and hails the urban melting pot as the “Tower of Babel’s drama reversed” (ibid. 555). Whereas the biblical story dramatizes the production of difference as tragic dispersal, the melting pot narrative promises unification through the creation of “a new race of men upon the earth” (ibid.). Socialist writer Michael Gold (1894-1967) argues in his essay “Towards Proletarian Art” that mass immigration could fuel a melting pot of new internationalist radicalism that he describes as a “cauldron of the Revolution” (62). Yet, as much as the melting pot myth could be used to critique white Anglo-Saxon social and political dominance, it was also used to enforce the conformity of immigrants entering the American workforce. Melting pot rituals performed for example at the Ford English School for immigrant automobile factory workers in Highland Park, Michigan reveal that the melting pot myth could also serve as an instrument of corporate self-fashioning and of Americanization in the corporate interest with a clearly anti-revolutionary impetus. More recently, Jeffrey Eugeni- 282 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA des’s novel Middlesex (2002) offers a literary re-telling of this kind of ritual (cf. 103-05). In the period between the 1880s and the 1920s, discussions of the melting pot as a societal model thus became increasingly polarized, and the concept lost much of its “original elasticity” (Wilson, Melting-Pot Modernism 15) and critical appeal. Yet reconstructing the melting pot myth of that time allows us to see how race and racial difference gained prominence in debates on national, social, and cultural cohesion, as Gary Gerstle writes: We do not usually think of the 1920s, the easygoing Jazz Age, as a time when the racialized character of the American nation intensified, reinforcing the barriers separating blacks and Asians from whites, eastern and southern Europeans from “Nordics,” and immigrants from natives. Yet these developments were central to the age. That the proponents of these changes frequently justified their aims in the name of science underscores the modern character of the racial regime they implemented. Indeed this regime, backed by an edifice of race law, would remain in place for forty years, persisting through the Great Depression, World War II, the affluent 1950s, and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 election. It must be seen for what it was: a defining feature of modern America. (American Crucible 114-15) The melting pot myth in its hegemonic version has often obscured the role of racism in American society by projecting a colorblind vision of social harmony and by obscuring ongoing inequality. For the longest time, the democratic potential of the melting pot has clearly not been realized in American society. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 283 5. MULTIPLE MELTING POTS AND MISCEGENATION When push came to shove, the color line between “the Negro” and everyone else mattered far more to patrician Americans than the markers within whiteness. MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL, THE COLOR OF RACE IN AMERICA There is a new race in America. I am a member of this new race. It is neither white nor black nor in-between. It is the American race, differing as much from white and black as white and black differ from each other. It is possible that there are Negro and Indian bloods in my descent along with English, Spanish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Dutch, and German. This is common in America; and it is from all these strains that the American race is being born. But the old divisions into white, black, brown, red, are outworn in this country. They have had their day. Now is the time of the birth of a new order, a new vision, a new ideal of man. I proclaim this new order. JEAN TOOMER, “A NEW RACE IN AMERICA” Long after its heyday in the early 20th century, the melting pot concept continued to shape public and academic debates. Ruby Kennedy’s research into patterns of intermarriage led her in 1952 to propose a triple rather than single melting pot theory, as she found that in American society, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish “pool[s]” (in other words, ‘pots’) functioned as “fundamental bulwarks” into which different nationalities and ethnicities ‘melted’ (“Single” 56). These findings were corroborated by Will Herberg’s study Protestant – Catholic – Jew (1955), in which religion also figures as a crucial sociological factor in processes of group identity formation in American society. George Stewart’s concept of the “transmuting pot” (American Ways 23) on the other hand is more conformist, as it assumes that “as the foreign elements, a little at a time, were added to the pot, they were not merely melted but were largely transmuted, and so did not affect the original material as strikingly as might be expected” (ibid.). Building on the research of Kennedy, Herberg, and Stewart, Milton Gordon in 1964 reviewed the divergent positions on assimilation promoting Anglo-Saxon conformity, the melting pot, and cultural pluralism, respectively, with the intent to establish an empirical approach to processes of assimilation that would not rely on a normative ideal, a political doctrine, or a vague metaphor. He dismissed the “single melting pot” as an idealistic “illusion” (Assimilation 129), which led him to develop it into a theory of multiple melting pots or “subsocieties” that are com- 284 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA prised not only of different religious identities (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish) but also for example (and somewhat surprisingly) of “intellectuals:” All these containers, as they bubble along in the fires of American life and experience are tending to produce, with somewhat differing speeds, products which are culturally very similar, while at the same time they remain structurally separate. The entire picture is one which, with the cultural qualifications already noted, may be called a “multiple melting pot.” And so we arrive at the “pluralism” which characterizes the contemporary American scene. (ibid. 131) As this quotation shows, Gordon focuses primarily on structural divisions in the composition of American society, and in that context also points out that “Negroes, Orientals, Mexican-Americans, and some Puerto Ricans are prevented by racial discrimination from participating meaningfully in either the white Protestant or the white Catholic communities” (ibid. 129). Gordon thus explicitly addresses the exclusion of African American communities from white society at a time when marriage between African Americans and whites was still legally prohibited in 22 (mostly Western and Southern) states (cf. ibid. 165) – these and other Jim Crow laws regulating racial segregation were only abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (it should be noted, however, that recently several state legislatures announced their intention to pass what would amount to neosegregationist laws after the Supreme Court decided in Shelby County v. Holder on June 25 2013 that important anti-discrimination measures provided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional). Yet, somewhat symptomatically, the categories ‘black’ and ‘negro’ are not further problematized in Milton’s study. Due to the one-drop rule in US cultural and legal history, an example of hypodescent that classifies as black individuals with any African ancestry, African American communities are racially mixed in unacknowledged ways, which led some scholars to state that the ‘black’ segment of the US population constitutes the only genuine melting pot in American society: The melting pot is hardly a suitable metaphor for a system characterized by an unstable pluralism. But – bitter irony – isn’t there a sense in which the melting pot notion is more applicable within the black American nation than within the white? There was great diversity in the African origins of American Negroes: regional, linguistic, and tribal differences, as well as in their prior condition of freedom. […] Despite this diversity, however, Africans were forcibly homogenized after several generations into a fairly singular AfroAmerican mold with common folkways. Thus, the only American melting pot has perhaps E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 285 been a black one, though in this case the putative pot has been reluctant to call the kettle black. (Kammen, People 82) It is ironic, if not outright cynical that the exclusion of those considered ‘black’ from the national melting pot has led to the creation of this social category of the ‘black’ melting pot. The horrendous violence that fuelled this particular melting pot and created this ‘new’ identity by eradicating all prior cultural markers from forcibly uprooted individuals makes one wonder whether the melting pot is not, after all, a metaphor of destruction. At the very least it appears as a symbol of “renouncing – often in clearly public ways – one’s subjectivity, who one literally was: in name, in culture, and, as far as possible, in color” (Goldberg, “Introduction” 5). Historically, African Americans thus were excluded from the melting pot; participants in the envisioned amalgamation process have mostly been European groups (e.g. in Zangwill’s The Melting Pot), and even as Crèvecoeur includes Native Americans in his account of racial and cultural mixing, Natives (as well as African Americans and Asian Americans) have been mostly absent from melting pot rhetoric. In a speech held in 1919, then-president Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) “appealed for the extension of the melting pot principle to all the nations of the world” (Saveth, American Historians 147) “even as he segregated government employees by race” (Browder, Slippery Characters 146). The policing and prohibition of racial mixing in America has amounted to what some scholars have termed “American Apartheid” (cf. Massey and Denton’s book of the same title) through Jim Crow legislation, segregation based on racial discrimination, and black ghettoization across the country – which is why subnational perspectives on the melting pot myth unsurprisingly have found it exclusive rather than inclusive. ‘Racial’ mixing (i.e., social/sexual relations between whites and blacks) was commonly referred to as miscegenation and as such was illegal in many parts of the US for most of its history. The term ‘miscegenation’ was first used in 1863 in a pamphlet titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (cf. Croly), which advocated the mixing of the races; supposedly published by the Republican Party, it turned out to have been an attempt by Democrats to discredit their political opponents. Before the term miscegenation was coined, the term ‘amalgamation’ was in common use, but whereas ‘amalgamation’ could also refer to the intermixing between non-racially defined groups (e.g. Irish Catholics and Protestants), ‘miscegenation’ has always referred specifically to black-white relations and can be considered to be part of a particular kind of American exceptionalism: 286 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA One theme that has been pervasive in US history and literature and that has been accompanied by a 300-year long tradition of legislation, jurisdiction, protest and defiance is the deep concern about, and the attempt to prohibit, contain, or deny, the presence of blackwhite sexual interracial relations, interracial marriage, interracial descent, and other family relations across the powerful black-white divide. Even the term “miscegenation” is an American invention. (Sollors, “Introduction” 3) Laws prohibiting racial mixing were passed in the colonies as early as 1664 in Maryland and 1691 in Virginia. In 1883, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws in Pace v. Alabama, a decision that was overturned only in McLaughlin v. Florida (1964) and Loving v. Virginia (1967). The latter case involved Richard and Mildred Loving, who in 1958 went to Washington, D.C. to get married because interracial marriages at that time were still illegal in their home state of Virginia, where they were prosecuted for and convicted of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation laws in 1959. Their sentence of one year in prison was suspended after they agreed to leave the state. Forced to leave their home and families, the Lovings decided to challenge the constitutionality of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statutes in court; after the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals affirmed the legality of the statutes, they were finally ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1967 (cf. Newbeck, Virginia). Barack Obama reflects on this history in his memoir, Dreams from My Father: Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like antebellum or octoroon, it evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames, dead magnolias and crumbling porticos. […] In 1960, the year that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother’s predicament into a back-alley abortion. […] Their very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the handful of softheaded liberals who supported a civil rights agenda. Sure – but would you let your daughter marry one? The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring puzzle to me. (11-12) In the history of these legal statutes, the melting pot myth becomes undone. Throughout American literature, interracial figures appear as ‘tragic mulatta/os,’ E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 287 i.e. stereotypical characters who decide to ‘pass’ as white in order to evade being subjected to an exclusionary and frequently violent racism; passing in American literature is variably interpreted as loss or treason and as a tragic metamorphosis that destabilizes one’s identity and oftentimes ends in death. Troping mixed-race individuals as tragic mulatta/os who do not fully belong to any group in American society went along with the notion that unions between blacks and whites should be prohibited, or in any case avoided. When the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) featured Hollywood’s first interracial kiss, it could only be shown in the mirror of a taxi, with the taxi driver gazing through the mirror at the couple in the backseat as the only (shocked and dismayed) eyewitness. Mary Dearborn has pointed out that the taboo on miscegenation furthermore has been coded in American cultural and literary history in a way that likens racial mixing to incest (cf. Pocahontas’s Daughters 158). Throughout American intellectual history, writers and activists have voiced opposition to segregationist laws and practices. 19th-century writer and activist Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) and 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) both advocated racial mixing as a means to overcome social and racial divisions in American society. Writing on the eve of the American Civil War, Child developed plots of miscegenation in which whites and non-whites could no longer be told apart, and racial conflicts were resolved through infinite racial mixing; she thus fictionally realized “a truly egalitarian society, one in which blacks and whites in all walks of life could mingle freely and easily” (Clifford, Crusader 280), even though her writings, like many abolitionist texts of the 19th century, clearly reflect a white middle class ideology (cf. Karcher, “Lydia Maria Child’s” 81). In the decades after the Civil War, it was particularly African American writers like Charles Chesnutt who took up the notion of a ‘new race’ and questioned constructions of the color line (cf. Chesnutt, “Future American” and “What Is a White Man?;” McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt). In her famous essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” published about one hundred years later, Hannah Arendt provocatively remarked that school desegregation could never bring about integration and social change as long as white and black adults were not allowed to marry each other, which at that time was still legally prohibited in 29 states by laws that Arendt considered “a much more flagrant breach of letter and spirit of the Constitution than segregation of schools” (231). Werner Sollors has reconstructed the uproar this essay caused among contemporary audiences for explicitly addressing a widely accepted taboo (cf. “Introduction”), and for criticizing 288 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA [t]he reluctance of American liberals to touch the issue of the marriage laws, their readiness to invoke practicality and shift the ground of the argument by insisting that the Negroes themselves have no interest in this matter, their embarrassment when they are reminded of what the whole world knows to be the most outrageous piece of legislation in the whole western hemisphere. (Arendt, “Reflections” 246) Both Child and Arendt each in her own way were advocates of a melting pot that included African Americans, yet their voices have been marginalized by sanctimonious segregationists who have been in denial about the realities of human relations – as the protagonist of Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998) bluntly asserts: “Everybody’s fuckin’ everybody else till you can’t tell the difference” (qtd. in Elam, Souls 9). Within the African American community, we can trace different reactions to the melting pot myth over time: accommodation with racial segregation and acceptance of restricted access to the American melting pot; harsh criticism of the melting pot ideology and its mechanisms of exclusion; a clear rejection of racial mixing with whites in an inverted discourse of racial supremacy (for instance in many publications of representatives of the Nation of Islam) based on racial pride; and, last but not least, an affirmation of a more inclusive melting pot that is explicitly multiracial and moves past the tormenting “double-consciousness” and its “two unreconciled strivings” which W.E.B. Du Bois has diagnosed for African Americans in the US (Souls 2). The first position – accommodation with segregation and African Americans’ exclusion from the melting pot after the Civil War – has often been associated with former slave and black intellectual Booker T. Washington (1856- 1915). In the so-called Atlanta Compromise Speech given by Washington on September 18, 1895, he stated in regard to black and white interaction and coexistence that “[i]n all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Up from 100). This analogy accepts and affirms the cultural logic of racial segregation and opts for a strategy of gradualism for which Washington was sharply criticized by some of his African American contemporaries, because they considered his position to be submissive to whites and accepting of racial discrimination. Melvin Steinfield similarly criticizes the hypocrisy of the melting pot myth in the context of the continued exclusion of African Americans from national models of cohesion and belonging in the mid-20th century by asserting that “[e]very instance of racism or discrimination was a vivid contradiction of the myth of the Melting Pot […],” or what he calls “cracks in the Melting Pot” in his E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 289 book of the same title (xvii, xx). In his well-known poem “The Melting Pot,” Dudley Randall (1914-2000) contrasts the experience of European immigrants to the US with the experience of African Americans: There is a magic melting pot where any girl or man can step in Czech or Greek or Scot, step out American. Johann and Jan and Jean and Juan, Giovanni and Ivan step in and then step out again all freshly christened John. Sam, watching, said, “Why, I was here even before they came,” and stepped in too, but was tossed out before he passed the brim. And every time Sam tried that pot they threw him out again. “Keep out. This is our private pot. We don’t want your black stain.” At last, thrown out a thousand times, Sam said, “I don’t give a damn. Shove your old pot. You can like it or not, but I’ll be just what I am.” (167, emphasis in the original) In Randall’s poem, the melting pot signifies assimilation to the dominant culture (as it commonly does in modern day usage) rather than a form of hybridity: all European immigrants regardless of their ethnic backgrounds become “Johns,” i.e., their Americanization amounts to Anglicization. The African American’s reaction to being rejected – “But I’ll be just what I am” – anticipates the development of modern Black nationalism, whose proponents responded to racial discrimination and exclusion by programmatically rejecting racial fusion with whites and thus by rejecting the melting pot logic on their own terms. African American intellectuals in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s 290 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA thus negated and ridiculed notions of racial and cultural mixing. Malcolm X for example used black coffee as a symbol for racial purity and integrity: It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep. (“Message” 16) In the last decades, in which American society has been labeled “post-racial” or “post-ethnic” by critics such as David Hollinger – who has also (half-seriously) suggested that American society may be described as a “quintuple melting pot” (Postethnic America 24) differentiated into Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, and Indigenous peoples (cf. ibid. 23) – more inclusive versions of the melting pot have been articulated that attempt to bridge the divide between blacks and whites (cf. Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies; Elam, Souls). Upon the founding of the Association of MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA) in 1988, activist Carlos Fernandez quipped: We who embody the melting pot […] stand up […] as intolerant participants against racism from whatever quarter it may come […]. We are the faces of the future. Against the travails of regressive interethnic division and strife, we can be a solid core of unity bonding peoples together in the common course of human progress. (qtd. in Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies 141) Currently, the AMEA is one of the most influential mixed race organizations; it prompted the reform that in 2000 allowed census respondents for the first time to check more than one box for racial self-identification. Activists campaigning for the recognition of multiraciality assert that they are the outcome of the ‘true melting pot:’ “This then is my claim: I am in all America. All America is in me” (Taylor Haizlip, Sweeter, epigraph). The oftentimes uncritical celebration of multi-raciality in the new mixed race literature prompts Michelle Elam to ask what the much-touted “New Amalgamationism” and the “Mulatto Millennium” (Senna qtd. in Elam, Souls 12) imply for black people in US society; the arrival of this new melting pot ‘in black and white’ to her is a hollow emblem of faux cultural and racial hybridity that invokes an ‘American multiracial democracy’ which seems to be serving various ideological interests: the ‘multiracial American’ appears to be vested with a precarious domestic exoticism more than slightly at odds with the identity politics of its representatives. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 291 Besides European immigrants and African Americans, whose ambivalent reactions toward the melting pot myth have so far been at the center of my discussion, other groups of course have also dealt with the topic: Native American, Asian American, and Mexican American critics and writers have articulated alternative models to the melting pot such as “mestizaje” (cf. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera) and “crossblood” (cf. Vizenor, Manifest Manners), which emphasize the hybridity, fluidity, and multidimensionality of American identities. Owing much to theories of cultural and racial difference that had been gaining ground since the 1960s, these more recent models have strongly influenced public debates around collective identity, especially in regard to American multiculturalism, which has been hotly debated in particular during the 1980s. 6. OUT OF MANY, MANY – AMERICAN MULTICULTURALISM The luck so far of the American experiment has been due in large part to the vision of the melting pot. ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA The point about the melting pot […] is that it did not happen. NATHAN GLAZER AND DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, BEYOND THE MELTING POT Hyphen: Nation MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON, ROOTS TOO It is in the 1960s that the (multi)cultural turn marks a shift in the perception of the melting pot myth that subsequently tends to be lumped together with models of assimilation of all kinds, in the process of which the melting pot loses all of its utopian appeal because it has since been primarily seen as a form of standardization implying the destruction of cultural variety, and has been falsely equated with assimilation. The advent of multiculturalism thus precluded any further discussion of the melting pot among the cultural left. When Gordon suggests that the multiple melting pots in American society point to cultural pluralism rather than to homogeneous Americanness (cf. Assimilation), he is articulating the zeitgeist of the 1960s, which celebrated pluralism under the banner of ‘multiculturalism.’ The “dawn of the new pluralism” (Feldstein and Costello, Ordeal 415) and the beginning of the new “age of pluralism in American public discussion” (Landsman and Katkin, “Introduction” 2) are often dated back to the publication 292 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s influential study Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963. Using the melting pot concept as a shortcut to refer to various processes of assimilation, its authors contend that there never was a melting pot in the history of the US, but only distinct and diverse groups and group identities. Focussing in their study on New York City’s socio-cultural composition, Glazer and Moynihan argue that even though New York City cannot be equated with the United States at large because of its “extreme” heterogeneity (Beyond the Melting Pot 9), it can nevertheless be regarded as the country’s cultural epicenter (cf. ibid. 6). The authors find that “the negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City” are all distinct ethnic groups with identifiable characteristics and life patterns; even though the melting pot may have been “an idea close to the heart of an American self-image” (ibid. 288), according to Glazer and Moynihan, it has neither been realized in New York City, nor elsewhere in the US: instead, it is the “pattern of ethnicity” (ibid. 310) that they consider to be at the heart of urban politics and institutions, which is why they suggest moving “beyond the melting pot” to account for the complexities of affiliation and loyalties in the ongoing formation of a US national identity. Glazer and Moynihan’s study clearly constituted a paradigm shift in the discussion of the melting pot and paved the way for the discourse of multiculturalism, i.e. the explication of the “multicultural condition” (Goldberg, “Introduction” 1) on the one hand, and the political debate on the cultural heterogeneity of the US on the other. Multiculturalism, in its programmatic version, is positioned in clear opposition to the melting pot myth: First, like cultural pluralism, multiculturalism as a political program recognizes and seeks to retain cultural difference within the US as valuable and characteristic of a collective/ national American identity; second, it considers “monoculturalism” (ibid. 3) and ethnocentrism as repressive and coercive; third, multiculturalism engages in identity politics and calls for the representation and recognition of individuals and groups formerly underrepresented; fourth, it formulates a clear political agenda in terms of citizenship and access to society’s resources (such as education) through, for instance, affirmative action programs. Multiculturalism calls for a pluralism based on an “ethic of toleration” (Landsman and Katkin, “Introduction” 4) and the primacy of “recognition” (cf. Gutmann, Multiculturalism). In the 1980s and beyond, discussions around multiculturalism were so polarized – especially in regard to canon debates and controversies around school curricula – that they have often been called veritable ‘culture wars.’ Rick Simonson and Scott Walker’s The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy (1988) for example explicitly sought to challenge E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), which the authors found “alarmingly E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 293 deficient in its male and European bias” (Simonson and Scott, Graywolf 191), as well as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which claimed that American education was in decline. Hirsch’s selection of what he thinks an American needs to know about – for instance, act of God, Adam and Eve, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, adultery, Adonis, and The Aeneid – is based on a very different (humanist/universalist) notion of cultural literacy than the multicultural literacy of Simonson and Walker, who think that an American should also be knowledgeable about, for instance, the Asian Exclusion Act, action painting, Agent Orange, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Chinua Achebe. Conservatives have denounced initiatives such as Simonson and Walker’s as an “attack on the common American identity” and as an “ethnic revolt against the melting pot” (Schlesinger, Disuniting 119, 133); they thought that multiculturalism was overcritical of the US and its history and bred a “culture of complaint” (cf. Hughes’s book of the same title) defined by intolerance and political correctness. Other critics in contrast suggested that “we are all multiculturalists now” (cf. Glazer’s book of the same title), since sensibilities do have changed, and quite ubiquitously, we find the rejection of the melting pot myth and assimilation policies in favor of a celebration of the diverse cultures of America’s many racial and ethnic groups (cf. Gerstle, American Crucible 348). As the debates around multiculturalism in American academia have ebbed, the term itself seems to have done its part: recent American studies glossaries frequently even fail to include an entry for the term multiculturalism. Moreover, a re-evaluation and critical assessment of multiculturalism has been offered by scholars such as those of the Chicago Cultural Studies Group, who critique what they call “the flattening effect typical of corporate multiculturalism” (“Critical Multiculturalism” 540); Terence Turner, who engages with “difference multiculturalism” as an impoverished version of multiculturalism (cf. “Anthropology”); Michelle Wallace, who views multiculturalism as a new institutional logic that preserves the status quo (cf. Invisibility Blues); Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, who argue for a “polycentric multiculturalism” that takes into account “all cultural history in relation to social power” (Unthinking 48); and Richard Sennett, who suggests that diversity may eventually discourage solidarity and in fact breed indifference rather than tolerance (cf. Conscience). Sennett reflects on this matter in his description of a walk through a New York City neighborhood; whereas Glazer and Moynihan described New York City as a space differentiated along ethnic lines, Sennett holds that the city should be a space of interaction, of civitas and engagement rather than what he perceives as “[a] city of differences and of fragments of life that do not connect” (ibid. 125). In Sennett’s story “of the races, who live segregated lives close together, and of 294 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA social classes, who mix but do not socialize” (ibid. 128), tolerance has turned into indifference, and multiculturalism into disengagement. Sennett’s account of his New York City neighborhood points to the potential problems of multiculturalism and critically re-interprets the meaning of living “in the presence of difference” (ibid. 121). The affirmation of ethnic, often hyphenated identities has also led to an ethnic revival among those groups in American society commonly categorized as ‘white’ or ‘non-ethnic.’ Thus, it almost seems as if the melting pot not only failed to ‘melt’ non-white ethnic groups, but also managed to ‘melt’ white immigrant groups only superficially, as their third or fourth generation descendants have been coming forward to identify themselves as ethnic Americans. Early on philosopher and journalist Michael Novak in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) anticipated a (re)turn to ethnicity among the lower-middle-class whites of Irish, Polish, Italian, etc. descent that had no longer been perceived as ethnic. Yet, this book about the ethnic revival among white (Catholic) Americans had – much to the discomfort of its author – a curious career: As Novak had written his book in 1972 “to divert attention from ‘blacks, women, and the poor’” (Novak, Rise xiii), he felt uneasy about the enlistment of his study by scholars and advocates of multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s – so uneasy, in fact, that he felt compelled to re-issue his book in 1996 with a new introduction in which he disclaimed any affiliation with the “multiculturalists,” listed what he called the “Nine Perversions of ‘Multiculturalism’” (e.g. “Anti-Americanism,” “Tactical Relativism,” “Censorship,” and “Double Standards”) (Novak, Rise xvi-xvii), and related his conversion from the cultural left to the cultural right and to a wholehearted embrace of capitalism. Novak’s unease notwithstanding, the discussion of those white ethnics who had only seemingly melted into American society continued in the context of multiculturalism and critical whiteness studies, which analyzed the power and the limits of white privilege. Sociologist Mary Waters points in her study Ethnic Options to the flexibility of the category of whiteness, which may accommodate Jewish Americans, Polish Americans, or Italian Americans (to name but a few groups), but may also lead them “to misconstrue the experience of their counterparts across the color line” (36; cf. also Jacobson, Roots) by over-emphasizing the voluntary character of ethnic identification. The latter also resonates in David Hollinger’s idealistic vision of a “post-ethnic America” that has at its basis the notion that “the identities people assume are acquired largely through affiliation, however prescribed or chosen” (Postethnic America 7, 12). The new popularity and acceptance of hyphenated identities in the context of multiculturalism encompass African American, Asian American, Hispanic Ame- E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 295 rican, Native American, as well as European American groups (e.g. Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Norwegian Americans). Matthew Jacobson relates an episode in which members of an anti-racism workshop, one by one, disown their status as white (“‘I’m not white; I’m Italian;’ ‘I’m not white; I’m Jewish,’” etc.), leaving the teacher to wonder: “‘What happened to all the white people who were here just a minute ago?’” (Roots 1-2). Whether in the context of immigrant genealogies or mixed race identities, at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, ethnicity is seen largely as a way of distinction and distinctiveness, as “a distinguishing from” rather than as a “merging with” (ibid. 36). However, subnational melting pot myth revisionism is somewhat polarized: For the multiculturalists on the left, the melting pot model is unattractive because it is perceived as “the cover for the domination of one [group]” over others (Appiah, “Limits” 52), whereas cultural critics on the right have ironically become its most outspoken defenders, and have celebrated it as a genuinely American invention. Yet, contemporary critics as well as defenders of the melting pot myth operate with a very simplistic notion that equates the melting pot with assimilation and Anglo-Saxon conformity rather than with a creative, continuous, and democratic process of hybridization – i.e., both strip the idea of its transformative power. On a somewhat different note, Richard Alba and Victor Nee have recently considered the “remaking [of] the American mainstream” through processes of migration and cultural change by applying the term “assimilation” to the mainstream rather than to minorities: Assimilation has reshaped the American mainstream in the past, and it will do so again, culturally, institutionally, and demographically. […] Through assimilation, the mainstream has become diverse in ethnic origins of those who participate in it; and the ethnic majority group, which dominates the mainstream population, has been reconstituted. (Remaking 282, 284) In their “new assimilation theory” Alba and Nee stress that the incorporation of immigrant groups in the long run always involves a transformation of the mainstream, which as a result becomes increasingly heterogeneous itself; thus, they come close to a re-interpretation of melting pot dynamics which presupposes that cultural contact leaves no one unchanged. 296 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 7. CONCLUSION No modern state has been constituted by a single, coherent cultural group; all have incorporated disparate and even hostile ethnicities, each with its special history, some with their own language. RICHARD SLOTKIN, “UNIT PRIDE” Even if Arthur M. Schlesinger in an attempt to identify the cornerstones of American exceptionalism has listed the melting pot among America’s ten great contributions to civilization (cf. Disuniting), the melting pot myth was not an American invention: Israel Zangwill, who popularized the concept in the US and abroad, was a British Jew whose play The Melting Pot entails a transnational vision that negotiates Jewish identity in the diaspora and the role of Judaism in America. In a scholarly context, a transnational perspective on the melting pot was articulated as early as 1911 in the writings of anthropologist Franz Boas, who did not question the American melting pot as such, yet doubted its exceptionality: It is often claimed that the phenomenon of mixture presented in the United States is unique; that a similar intermixture has never occurred before in the world’s history; and that our nation is destined to become what some writers choose to term a “mongrel” nation in a sense that has never been equalled anywhere. When we try to analyze the phenomenon in greater detail, and in the light of our knowledge of conditions in Europe as well as in other continents, this view does not seem to me tenable. (“Race Problems” 320) Boas points to historical evidence of intermixture as the rule rather than the exception in the European context, which could be traced as far back as the Migration Period (Völkerwanderung). In historical perspective, nation-building is quite a recent phenomenon, while intermarriage seems to be quite an old one. On a transnational, i.e. comparative note, again, we may conclude that whereas the melting pot myth has been central to American self-representations throughout the centuries and into the present, it is by no means a concept that can only be found in the US; melting pot rhetoric has for example also been used in Russian and in Israeli political culture in the context of current immigration debates (cf. Nahshon, Introductory Essay 211). In Israel, “Mizug Galuyot,” i.e. the integration of different communities of immigrants from the Jewish diaspora into Israeli society, can be considered to be the Israeli equivalent of the melting pot model, and the national policy of the “ingathering of exiles” has led to political and sociological discussions about cultural pluralism and ethnic separatism E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 297 in modern Israeli society with at times explicit reference to Zangwill’s work (cf. Krausz, Studies). Even if the melting pot already seemed to be “a closed story, an unfashionable concept, a version of repressive assimilation in the service of cultural homogenization” (Wilson, Melting-Pot Modernism 14), it has once again been revitalized in political and scholarly debates following 9/11. Reinventing the Melting Pot, an essay collection published in 2004, may serve as an example that relates the events of 9/11 directly to problems of American identity, society, politics, and culture; 9/11, according to the collection’s editor, triggered intensified “soul-searching” about “what it meant to be American” (Jacoby, “What It Means” 293). Critics such as Peter Salins refer to “the need [post 9/11] to reaffirm our commitment to the American concept of assimilation” (Assimilation 103) and call for “a more forthright discussion of what needs to be done to sustain e pluribus unum for the generations to come” (ibid. 107). In Jacoby’s strange collection, we also find the continued conflation of melting pot logic with assimilation to Americanism. Developments since 9/11 have clearly shown that US “racial nationalism” has not been laid to rest (cf. Gerstle, American Crucible 368-371) but has been merely reconfigured to create new patterns of exclusion (cf. Bakalian and Bozorgmehr, Backlash 9/11; Peek, Behind the Backlash). Post-9/11 racism and xenophobia clearly touch on the melting pot myth: In 2001, Gary Gerstle predicted that “tensions with […] Islamic fundamentalist groups abroad, could easily generate antagonism toward […] Muslim Americans living in the United States, thus aiding those seeking to sharpen the sense of American national identity” (American Crucible 371). A comment by rock musician and activist Ted Nugent titled “Multicultural Rot in the Melting Pot,” which was printed in the Washington Post on March 4, 2011, confirms Gerstle’s prediction, as Nugent claims that Islam seeks to dominate the West and warns that the “culture war is on, whether they [i.e. politicians] like it or not.” Nugent rehashes some of the arguments brought forward by Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations, a book which amounts to an antithetical configuration to the melting pot myth on a global scale. Huntington challenges and modifies the melting pot myth both for the US and for a transnational context as he declares the end, i.e. the failure of the melting pot with regard to Islam and Muslims in American society; Huntington’s ideas, which “more closely resemble nativist ravings than scholarly assessment” (Glenn, “Critics”), uncannily return us to the discussions around cultural, racial, and religious differences that had already accompanied immigration processes one hundred years prior to Huntington’s polemic. 298 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA The visions of the melting pot as a model for American society were radical at the time they were first articulated; as limited as they may have been in other ways, they put into question fixed and static notions of collective American identity as well as notions of Anglo-Saxon dominance and conformity. Presently, the critical potential of the melting pot needs to be reassessed as a model into which both subnational and transnational perspectives are inscribed. The melting pot is a myth that rejects narratives of purity and potentially also simplistic and onesided notions of assimilation. As I have pointed out, the melting pot has become “the standard metaphor for cultural hybridization” (Hansen, Lost Promise 98); in postcolonial studies (cf. e.g. Bhabha, Location), the preoccupation with hybridity can be seen as a return to melting pot theories under the arch of poststructuralism. Over all, as a somewhat skewed metaphor for processes of individual and collective identity formation that are understood as dynamic, provisional, and without closure or final result, the melting pot seems to echo less in theories of assimilation than in theories of hybridization and creolization in an increasingly globalized world (cf. Hannerz, Transnational Connections; Appadurai, Modernity; Pieterse, “Globalisation”). To end on a lighter note: Philip Gleason lists many culinary manifestations and replacements of the melting pot, like stew, soup, salad, and salad bowl (Speaking 14), as well as Karl E. Meyer’s “pressure cooker” (New America 119). The Melting Pot is now also a chain of franchised fondue restaurants which by picking that name literalized the metaphor and recharged the melting pot’s culinary dimension that it has had all along. The melting pot as a corporate brand projects its name as a euphemistic symbol of a shared culinary feast engaged in by those who can afford to consume in rather than be consumed by a globalized world. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 299 8. STUDY QUESTIONS 1. What are the key differences between the melting pot myth and foundational myths that focus on historical personae? Why should we consider the melting pot as a foundational myth of the US? 2. Describe different versions of the melting pot myth and contextualize them historically. Who is included and who is excluded when and why? 3. How does melting pot rhetoric describe the interaction between whites and indigenous populations in North America in the early republic, and how does it refer to the interaction between the American-born population and immigrants in the Progressive Era? Discuss similarities and differences. 4. Contrast the melting pot as a national model with notions of assimilation and ideas of cultural pluralism. 5. Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot uses a romance plot to overcome ‘old world’ histories and differences. Discuss the suitability of romantic discourse for the affirmation of the melting pot myth. 6. What role does religion play in melting pot rhetoric, past and present? 7. Discuss the notion of a ‘black’ melting pot in the US in light of the one-drop rule, notions of ‘passing,’ and mixed-race discourses. Check and discuss the following websites: Eurasiannation.com, Mixedfolks.com. 8. Discuss the metaphors of musicality that have been used to evoke the melting pot idea. What are the implications of music, singing, orchestra, and symphony for the way a new collective is imagined? Listen to Dvořák’s New World Symphony and reflect on its structure and instrumentation. Does it convey the idea of a ‘melting’ of differences? 9. How does the melting pot myth connect to postcolonial theories of hybridity with regard to its approach to difference? 10. Can you identify transnational dimensions of the melting pot myth and/or comparable concepts in other national and international contexts? Explore, for instance, the notion of “the cosmic race” envisioned by José Vasconcelos for the Americas in his “La Raza Cósmica” (1925). How can we relate it to the melting pot myth? 300 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 9. 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The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy. St. Paul: Graywolf, 1988. Slotkin, Richard. “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality.” American Literary History 13.3 (2001): 469-98. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. –. Ethnic Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. –, ed. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. –. “Introduction.” Sollors, Interracialism 3-16. Steinfield, Melvin. Cracks in the Melting Pot: Racism and Discrimination in American History. 2nd ed. Beverly Hills: Glencoe, 1974. Stewart, George R. American Ways of Life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954. Stoddard, Theodore Lothrop. The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man. New York: Scribner, 1922. Taylor Haizlip, Shirlee. The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White. New York: Touchstone, 1994. Toomer, Jean. “A New Race in America.” A Jean Toomer Reader. Ed. Frederik Rusch. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 105. Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” 1893. American Studies at the University of Virginia. http:// xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/turner/chapter1.html. 3 Oct. 2013. Turner, Terence. “Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What Is Anthropology That Multiculturalists Should Be Mindful of It?” Cultural Anthropology 8.4 (1993): 411-29. US Department of the Treasury. http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/ Coins/Pages/edu_faq_coins_portraits.aspx. 3 Oct. 2013. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition. Transl. and annot. Didier T. Jaén. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 28-40. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Wallace, Anthony. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1999. Wallace, Michelle. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. New York: Verso, 1990. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 307 Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. New York: Norton, 1996. Waters, Mary. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Nation.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. New York: New York UP, 2007. 164-69. Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself and Other Poems. Selected and introd. Robert Hass. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010. Wilson, Sarah. Melting-Pot Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010. X, Malcolm. “Message to the Grass Roots.” Detroit. 10 Nov. 1963. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Ed. George Breitman. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965. 3-17. Zangwill, Israel. The Melting Pot: A Drama in Four Acts. 1909. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Further Reading Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Appiah, K. Anthony, and Amy Gutmann. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Bender, Thomas. Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in NineteenthCentury America. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1975. Birkle, Carmen. Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. Boelhower, William, and Alfred Hornung, eds. Multiculturalism and the American Self. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. Buenker, John D., and Lorman A. Ratner, eds. Multiculturalism in the United States: A Comparative Guide to Acculturation and Ethnicity. New York: Greenwood, 1992. Dewey, John. “The Principle of Nationality.” 1917. The Middle Works. 1899- 1924. Vol. 10: 1916-1917. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980. 285-95. Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, 1995. Drachsler, Julius. Democracy and Assimilation. New York: Macmillan, 1920. 308 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Conservation of Race.” 1897. On Sociology and the Black Community. Ed. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 238-49. Eisenach, Eldon J. The Lost Promise of Progressivism. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1994. Gleason, Philip. “The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?” American Quarterly 16.1 (1964): 20-46. Harper, Richard Conant. The Course of the Melting Pot Idea to 1910. New York: Arno, 1980. Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Hirsch, E.D. The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. New York: Farrar, 1993. King, Desmond. The Color of Race in America: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Livingston, James. Pragmatism and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mann, Arthur. The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper, 1944. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Ravitch, Diane. “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures.” Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Issues and Debates. Ed. Stephen Steinberg. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 267-76. Riis, Jacob A. The Making of an American. 1901. New York: Macmillan, 1943. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Ross, Edward Alsworth. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. 1913. The Early Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Ed. Kenneth Thompson. London: Routledge, 2005. Sollors, Werner. “The Rebirth of All Americans in the Great American Melting Pot: Notes toward the Vindication of a Rejected Popular Symbol; or: An Ethnic Variety of a Religious Experience.” Prospects 5 (1980): 79-110. E PLURIBUS UNUM? THE MYTH OF THE MELTING POT | 309 –. Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996. Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Willett, Cynthia, ed. Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. Yuchtman-Yaar, Ephraim. “Continuity and Change in Israeli Society: The Test of the Melting Pot.” Israel Studies 10.2 (2005): 91-128. Zeidel, Robert F. Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Comission, 1900-1927. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2004. Chapter VI Agrarianism, Expansionism, and the Myth of the American West 1. WHY THE WEST? America only more so. NEIL CAMPBELL, THE RHIZOMATIC WEST [The] West is a country in the mind, and so eternal. ARCHIBALD MACLEISH Can the West be heard? WALTER PRESCOTT WEBB The American West has captured the imagination of Americans and Americanists alike. It has been foundational for multi-disciplinary American studies scholarship since Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 identified the frontier as the most decisive factor in shaping American political and social institutions and in creating a specifically American national character (cf. “Significance”). Shifting the focus away from America’s European heritage and divisions between the North and the South, Turner’s frontier thesis argued for studying America from an East/West perspective that inaugurated an exceptionalist discourse based on experiences of and with the land. At the time it was not entirely well received by his fellow historians and has been contested from various perspectives and by various groups throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, yet it has provided a host of resonant images for the American cultural imaginary, and has been highly influential in the study of American history, culture, and literature. It is thus no coincidence that one of the earliest classics of American studies scholarship, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, has 312 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA lent its name to the first generation of Americanists: the Myth and Symbol School (cf. the introduction to this book). The construction and affirmation of the West in Turner and Smith already conveys many of the aspects of the myth of the West to be considered in this chapter: first of all, the American West is often viewed not so much as a region or an area than as a space of transition that does not necessarily have a precise geographical location, but rather changes with Euro-American settlement expanding westward. Second, the West as a transformative space has often been considered as a pars pro toto for the nation and as a special place from which its future could be built, making “the discovery, conquest, and settlement of the West […] the dominant theme of American history” (Slotkin, “Unit Pride” 472). As part of a “homogenized national geography” (Lopez, “American Geographies” 136) and as a “nationalist West” (Dorman, Hell xii), it has been a locus, however vaguely defined, for developing epic cultural scripts of Americanness. Third, the West as a region – defined e.g. as the “17 coterminous states located on and westward of the 100th meridian” (ibid. xii) – is connected to visions of an agrarian ideal that for a long time has been seen as standing for authentic Americanness, but also, from a more critical perspective, for an “enduring provincial mentality” (Von Frank, Sacred Game 5). Pitting the rural West against the newly emerging urban centers in the East in the 19th century has shaped a whole range of dichotomies that are still at work today and that have been described as the country vs. the city (cf. Williams, Country) or the frontier vs. the metropolis (cf. Slotkin, Fatal Environment 35). Thus, the myth of the West also reflects a rural ideal that grows out of a conception of the United States as predominantly rural or as having a distinct rural past. Fourth, the attributes often given to the West reflect a number of implications regarding a particular way of life, which may be associated with notions of the pre- or anti-modern, traditionalism, folk culture, and specific cultural codes and idioms: “The West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area,” Hofstadter notes quoting Turner (“Thesis Disputed” 102). Lastly, the myth of the West includes a pastoral dimension; by adapting a much older European pastoral discourse to the US-American context, Leo Marx has theorized the pastoral as the middle ground between the city and the ‘wilderness’ and as a vehicle for social critique (cf. Machine). Even if the myth of the West is organized around certain recurring (stock) characters (farmers, cowboys, ‘Indians’), it is not focused on people, but on “[t]he land itself” (Fox, Void 130). AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 313 Illustration 1: The West as Symbol and Myth Ben Shahn, cover design for Virgin Land (1957; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Imaging Department). © President and Fellows of Harvard College The agrarian myth of the West and the myth of the frontier can be traced back to the beginning of European settlement in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, and connects to narratives of chosenness (cf. chapter 3) and the melting pot (cf. chapter 5). The frontier may well be considered “the longest-lived of American myths” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 15); its scholarly treatment by Turner followed the so-called second founding of the US during Reconstruction, when “the unitary American nation became a primary focus of ideology and power” (Slotkin, “Unit Pride” 472), and the US Census Bureau’s declaration in 1890 that there no longer was a frontier. The rise of the US to world power went along with the interpretation of westward expansion and settlement as an integral part of that process and as “a westward creation story” (Campbell, Rhizomatic West 2). As the hub of this national cosmology, the frontier myth has been the object of much critical attention – most notably from Richard Slotkin, who is the author of three singularly important critical monographs on the frontier myth (Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation). 314 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA My discussion of the American West will focus on agrarianism and expansionism as two basic tenets in cultural history and the cultural imaginary. For one thing, I will address the West as a space of residence and settlement that is often imagined as a kind of garden or even Edenic paradise symbolizing pastoral simplicity and economic independence based on subsistence farming. This semi- ‘civilized,’ “domesticated West” (Smith, Virgin Land 138) is imagined in popular culture, for instance, in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House on the Prairie and the television series of the same title that was adapted from it, and in the lyrics of contemporary country music. Second, the American West is constructed as a site of individual and collective quests for land and dominance. Violent conflict between settlers and Native Americans often is the focus of narratives that represent the West as a still ‘uncivilized’ space yet to be conquered and controlled, as is the case e.g. in classical Westerns. It is useful to distinguish between the two versions of the West as peaceful garden (agrarianism) and as conflicted frontier (expansionism), even if, of course, both versions overlap in most representations: a Western may e.g. tell the story of a farmer and his family (agrarian version of the West) but may for their protection enlist the masculinist, individualist, classical Western hero (expansionist version). The Western may also present the second as a precondition for the first, or use images of the agrarian West to legitimize the violence that is at the heart of expansionism. We may thus think of them as sequentially connected, yet not in any straightforward way. As David Wrobel has pointed out, “[t]he two sentiments, the hope for a postfrontier future in the West, followed later by a longing for the frontier past, have played an important part in the formation of western identities” (Promised Lands 1) – and of US national identity, one should add. It is the cultural work of the myth that apparently has neutralized these contradictions and paradoxes of the West. In this chapter, I will address both versions of the mythical West separately, but also show how they interconnect. The figure of the American farmer as ‘American Adam’ and the rural, agrarian myth as found in the canonical writings of Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur will serve as my point of departure. Second, I will focus on the concept of the frontier and notions of expansionism and manifest destiny. Revisionist approaches have contested the rather idyllic and often one-sided images in these two conceptualizations of the West, third, from a gender perspective, and fourth, from an ethnic (more specifically, Japanese American) perspective. Fifth, I will look at popular culture that has represented and affirmed the myth of the West by developing and using the formula of the Western. Sixth, using the war in Southeast Asia popularly known as the Vietnam War as an example, I will point to the role and symbolic power AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 315 of the frontier myth in political rhetoric and political culture. Last but not least, I will point to the West in discourses of transnationalism and globalization, as the American West has become a preeminent symbol of exceptionalist ‘Americanness’ around the world. 2. THE AGRARIAN WEST: THE AMERICAN FARMER AND THE GARDEN MYTH IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC AND BEYOND The United States was born in the country. RICHARD HOFSTADTER No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghenies without feeling that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and communal. RANDOLPH S. BOURNE, “A MIRROR OF THE MIDDLE WEST” One of the most canonical definitions of the agrarian myth can be found in Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform: The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins. Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen. (23) Hofstadter identifies this myth as an initially “elitist,” “literary notion” (expressed, for instance, in Walt Whitman’s “O Pioneers”) which later turned into a “mass creed” (ibid. 25, 28). We find manifestations of it in writings of the early republic and the 19th century, and increasingly nostalgic ones in 20th-century and contemporary literature and popular culture. Among the early proponents of this myth were a Virginian slaveholder and a French immigrant: Thomas Jefferson and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson envisions the United States as a republic of self-determined, autonomous, and virtuous farmer-citizens, who he juxtaposes as “the chosen people 316 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA of God” (135) with the tradesmen and merchants of mercantilist, predominantly urban Europe, which for Jefferson signifies corruption, alienation, and immorality. Crèvecoeur’s writings on the American farmer collectively are more ambivalent than Jefferson’s, yet in the passages that have been selectively canonized over the centuries, Crèvecoeur shows a similar enthusiasm for the farmer as a new North American type, and includes himself among this group of husbandmen: Some few towns excepted, we are tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense territory communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable […]. [T]hat of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. (Letters 40) Crèvecoeur’s description of European settlers in North America as “farmers” here figures as a democratic form of address (“appellation”) that signifies equality and the absence of rank and hierarchy among men in rural America, or what Perry Miller called “nature’s nation” (cf. his book of the same title). The logic of the interdependence of land ownership, equality, and republicanism that underlies both Jefferson’s as well as Crèvecoeur’s version of the agrarian myth is described by Christopher Curtis as follows: Grounding republican citizenship in the allodial freehold expressed a belief that the absolute ownership of a tangible piece of property would reconcile the indulgent characteristics of economic individualism with a vested social attachment to a particular local community and, accordingly, foster civic virtue through self-interest. (Jefferson’s Freeholders 8) Correlating self-interest, self-sufficiency, and the bond with and loyalty to a local collectivity appears to be rather idealistic of course, and glosses over the by no means inclusive dynamics at work within such communities. Contextualizing Jefferson and Crèvecoeur as proponents of the agrarian myth necessitates inspecting a number of aspects more closely. As Henry Nash Smith and, more recently, Christopher Curtis have pointed out, Jefferson and Crèvecoeur did not invent this agrarian myth, and were not even all that original in articulating it in late 18th-century America: for one thing, because this kind of rural, pastoral vision dates back to the work of Virgil (70-19 BC) and other AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 317 writers of antiquity, and had been part of the colonial imaginary of the ‘new world’ since the early 17th century (cf. Michael Drayton’s “To the Virginian Voyage”); and secondly, because many contemporaries of Jefferson and Crèvecoeur were sharing similar sentiments, as agrarianism was a dominant discourse in the foundational phase of the republic – Jefferson’s and Crèvecoeur’s texts at the time were by far not the only ones to imagine the US along those lines. Thirdly, with regard to the intended audiences of their writings, we can add that both clearly write in a promotional vein and seek to advertise the United States to a European readership: Their self-fashioning as inhabitants of a new Garden of Eden is part of efforts to legitimize the new republic and to entice more prospective settlers to cross the Atlantic. Jefferson addresses his Notes to François Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French legation to the United States; Crèvecoeur, whose letters were first published in London in 1782, more broadly addresses a wider European readership. In promoting America as the ‘Garden of the World,’ they thus gave a nationalistic, civil religious dimension to (much) older utopian visions of which they presented North America and more specifically the West as a concrete realization: The image of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society – a collective representation, a poetic idea […] that defined the promise of American life. (Smith, Virgin Land 138) Whereas in texts of the early republic, the agrarian myth is employed to envision America’s future as a rural democracy, later references turn increasingly nostalgic regarding a rural social order and way of life. As a fourth aspect, then, rurality in the Jefferson-Crèvecoeur tradition can be considered as increasingly turning into a cherished anachronism. Raymond Williams identifies a similar dynamic of increasing nostalgia for the “rural” as a form of community in Britain (cf. Country 102). “Oddly enough,” Hofstadter notes, “the agrarian myth came to be believed more widely and tenaciously as it became more fictional” (Age 30). In the US, the farmer has remained the emblem of an ethic of hard work, a lifestyle close to nature, and egalitarianism. However, fifthly, Jefferson and Crèvecoeur also reflect different versions of the myth of the West, which can be distinguished into a Northern and Southern version. The Southern imaginary of the West casts the farmer as a plantation owner, and for that reason alone is a far cry from egalitarian dreams; Smith has shown that the literature of the early republic “did not always readily embrace the democratic principles” on which the US was founded by pointing to, among other texts, James Kirke 318 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Paulding’s work and the “ingrained class feeling” of his protagonists (Virgin Land 160). In the Northern version of the myth on the other hand, the West is usually conceived of as free and as holding the promise of land ownership for everyone, which however does not necessarily mean that it was not exclusivist in regard to class, race, or gender. While Lincoln’s signing into law of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862 suggested that indeed “the dream of free land had become law” (Hine and Faragher, American West 334), the Homestead Act has also been read as nothing more than “a tribute to the high ideal of the yeoman farmer” in the context of a corrupt and inefficient system that facilitated land speculation rather than free settlement and small-scale land acquisition (Limerick, Legacy 62). The consequences of the Homestead Act, thus, were not democratic land ownership: A further analysis of the data reveals that only 3.653.000 farms in 1900 were operated, even in part, by their owners. But at the same time at least 21.000.000 farm people were tenants and wage laborers and their families on the total of 5.737.000 farms in the nation. These laborers were rarely any better off financially (often worse) than the toiling multitudes in the cities. (Shannon, “Not Even” 44) Yet, empirical findings can hardly ever successfully contest the validity of myth, as its foundational quality and emotional appeal tend to override minor and major contradictions. Despite the dire consequences that the Homestead Act had for many settlers, the myth of the West remained alive, even if it has not gone uncontested in rural vernacular culture and folklore, as the following folk song from Kansas shows: A chattel mortgage in the West Is like a cancer on your breast; It slowly takes your life away, And eats your vitals day by day. (qtd. in Hine and Faragher, American West 348) The song describes the mortgage system not as the promise but as the pathology of the West – a pathology whose effects are like that of a lethal disease for which there is no cure. Even though the American farm was in many ways not a locus of autonomy and self-sufficiency, as many scholars of the early republic and the 19th century have pointed out (cf. Appleby, Capitalism; Limerick, Legacy 68; Trachtenberg, Incorporation 22-23), the iconography of the farmer and of the farm in the West has been part of national mythmaking that embraces the West as a pastoral idyll, AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 319 a democratic space, and as a land of opportunity; to this day, we find notions of America as garden-like and of the American Adam as farmer in cultural productions ranging from historical novels to tobacco commercials. It is mostly the perspective of non-Westerners on the West, as regionalist scholars have noted, from which we perceive the West in terms of harmony, intact communities, and a simple way of life; in many such representations of the West, “we view the region from inside the window of a railroad car” – i.e., as “voyeurs” rather than as residents (Goldman, Continental Divides ix). Among others, Randolph Bourne (cf. this section’s second epigraph) also attests to the appropriation of the West as a region and as a specific locality and culture for a hegemonic discourse of wholesome Americanness. In the third decade of the 20th century, however, the agrarian myth of the West underwent an important crisis: in the context of the Great Depression, the American farm was turned into an icon of the rural population’s collective suffering in the social documentary photography sponsored by the Resettlement Administration and later the Farm Security Administration; artists such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein in their photographic representations pointedly critiqued the agrarian myth and pastoral projections on the rural West (cf. Lange, American Exodus). More recently, this sense of crisis has prevailed and coexists with discourses that continue to idealize farm life and heroize the farmer. Organizations and initiatives such as the American Farmland Trust, which was founded in 1980, and Farm Aid (inaugurated by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young), which since 1985 has raised funds for the preservation and support of family farms in the US through benefit concerts, indicate that the farmer still holds a prominent place in the cultural imaginary. Farm Aid’s political engagement also led to the passage by Congress of the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which was intended to help small farmers in financial distress. It should be noted, however, that organizations such as Farm Aid “sell authenticity as much as they sell sound land-use policies” (Cook, “Romance” 228), as the lyrics of many singers and bands show (cf. e.g. John Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow,” Shannon Brown’s “Corn Fed,” or Kenny Chesney’s “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”). 320 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Illustration 2: Against the Agrarian Myth Arthur Rothstein, Potato Pickers, Rio Grande County, Colorado (1939). In the history of the American West, settlement policies were certainly less invested in egalitarianism than popular representations of pioneers and homesteaders would have us believe, as agrarianism relied on the cheap labor of migrant workers from Asia, slaves and former slaves, poor immigrants from Europe, and, not least, on the expropriation of Native Americans. Thus, popular visions of farming and gardening in the early republic and the 19th century are not as ‘innocent’ as they may appear at first. For Jefferson, agrarianism and expansionism clearly went hand in hand, as his notion of an “empire of liberty” (cf. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire) was based on landownership. The purchase by the Jefferson administration of French Louisiana in 1803, which doubled the size of the US and in the logic of the Jeffersonians created new opportunities for yeoman farmers out West, must be seen in this context. Official rhetoric emphasized that the 1804-06 expedition of the (tellingly named) Corps of Discovery under Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838), which was sent to explore the newly acquired territory, was “destined” to extend the “discovery” of Christopher Columbus and to explore the Missouri River, and such principal stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean; whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct and practicable communication across the AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 321 continent for the purposes of commerce. (Cong. Rec. 22 Sept. 1998 to 26 Sept. 1998: 21532) This expedition provided mappings of and, more generally, data on the West through which its systematic conquest became possible. Most importantly, the members of the expedition employed an evocative literary language in their journals with lasting effect: [t]he importance of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay on the level of imagination: it was drama, it was the enactment of a myth that embodied the future. It gave tangible substance to what had been merely an idea, and established the image of a highway across the continent so firmly in the minds of Americans that repeated failures could not shake it. (Smith, Virgin Land 17) The expedition account was later even called “our national epic of exploration” (Coues qtd. in Lawlor, Recalling 29). Despite all the fanciful depictions, the winning of the West was above all a process of taking possession. Jeffersonian (and later Jacksonian) visions of the yeoman going west helped build not a “virtuous republic,” but a “violent empire,” as Carol Smith-Rosenberg puts it in her study of American national identity, in which many sections of American society (including academics) were complicit; for instance, the history of American geography and cartography not only has us think about Lewis and Clark and those ‘explorers’ who followed in their footsteps, e.g. Francis Parkman or John C. Frémont (cf. Parkman, Oregon Trail; Frémont, Report), but also reminds us of the “cartographic imperative” of the Jeffersonian grid system, which we still today connect to visions of the West as vast and monotonous: as “a direct corollary to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny […] the grid exercises authority over space by applying a ruler to it in all senses of the word,” as William Fox points out (Void 129). Similarly, cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson noted with regard to foundational American iconography that “it is the grid, not the eagle, not the stars and stripes, which is our true national emblem” (Sense 153). The grid, in that it overwrites prior meanings and symbolic structures of the land, is a massively effective instrument of colonization. We may relate this to the beginning of this section and argue that the cultural work of the garden myth is to camouflage this violence by glossing over conflicts and contradictions through its configuration of the American West as an American pastoral that is suggestive of an organic, smooth, and well-measured sense of the (growth of the) nation – in rectangular squares and green fields. 322 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 3. “CROSSING A CONTINENT” AND “WINNING A WILDERNESS” – 19TH-CENTURY EXPANSIONISM, THE FRONTIER, AND THE ‘WILD’ WEST Give me land, lots of land Under starry skies above, Don’t fence me in. Let me ride through the wide Open country that I love, Don’t fence me in. COLE PORTER/ROBERT FLETCHER, “DON’T FENCE ME IN” The ideology of US expansionism and empire was resonantly articulated by John L. O’Sullivan (1813-1895) in an article published in the Democratic Review in 1845 that advocated the annexation of Texas, which indeed came to pass later in the same year; in this editorial, O’Sullivan most notably coined the phrase “manifest destiny:” “The American claim is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federative self government entrusted to us” (“Annexation” 6). O’Sullivan was a journalist, lawyer, and a leading propagandist for the Democratic Party; he also was a key member of the so-called Young America Movement, a group of intellectuals and politicians “who concocted a new ideology of American expansion in the 1840s” (Hine and Faragher, American West 199; cf. Eyal, Young America Movement). In neo-Jeffersonian fashion, they saw in westward expansion the opportunity for an “agrarian counterrevolution” against industrialization and urbanization in Europe and the Eastern United States (Hietala, Manifest Design 105). O’Sullivan’s claim that US-Americans by right of their manifest destiny could and should spread over the whole American continent connected the myth of the West to notions of Puritan chosenness and “destinarian thought” (Stephanson, Manifest Destiny 55) by rhetorically linking west- and southward expansion to notions of the Promised Land (cf. chapter 3) and translatio imperii, and thus expressed an idea that “held currency long before it was sloganized” (Fresonke, West 7). Expansionism was a key issue in the presidential elections of 1844, which pitted expansionists such as Democratic candidate James K. Polk, who called for “the reoccupation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas at the earliest practical period” (insinuating the recovery of territories that had never been ‘occupied’ or had not even been part of the US in the first place), against anti-expansionists such as then-member of the Illinois General Assembly Abraham Lincoln, who was intent AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 323 on “keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden, improving the morals and education of the people” (qtd. in Hine and Faragher, American West 201). Polk won the election by a slim margin; yet, the above-quoted statements once again show how the West was used as a kind of empty signifier that could be variously ideologically charged as either a (foreign) space to be conquered or as a (domestic) space to be contained and protected as a (national) garden. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner turned O’Sullivan’s and many of his contemporaries’ claims into a scholarly argument by putting US territorial expansion in the West in the context of geographical determinism and building around it a genuine US-American evolutionary theory in his lecture on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a text that would firmly lodge the frontier concept in scholarly discourse and everyday speech. Arguing that “[t]he existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development,” Turner uses the frontier concept to write a Eurocentric history of settlement in North America that paradoxically tries to downplay America’s European roots: Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. (“Significance”) The West is conceived by Turner not as a specific region or place but as the dynamic space of the frontier, which according to Turner is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization;” he goes on to say that “[t]he most significant thing about it is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land” (ibid.). In that Turner’s definition of the frontier remains analytically underdetermined as well as imaginatively evocative, it serves as an “elastic” term (ibid.) describing the experience which Turner believed captures best the ambivalent and partially regressive process of Americanization: The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the 324 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little, he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. (ibid.) Turner held that the frontier as the prime locus of Americanization generated a “composite nationality” in its “crucible” (ibid.), which has been identified as a specifically American trope in the previous chapter on the melting pot myth. In Turner’s view, the frontier also promoted “individualism, democracy, and nationalism […]” (ibid.), which he thus connected to the westward expansion of the US, and served as a kind of safety valve for potential social unrest. His essay concludes with an affirmation of the frontier’s importance in shaping the American nation and character by linking it to well-known foundational figures and events such as Christopher Columbus and American independence: “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (ibid.). Discussions of Turner’s frontier thesis have been highly controversial and fill whole libraries. Initially, many scholars still favored Herbert Baxter Adams’s thesis about the Germanic origins of America, but Turner’s argument soon became widely accepted and by the 1920s had turned into the dominant scholarly opinion on American national history, rendering the American Historical Association, as one critic has it, “One Big Turner Verein” (Billington, “Introduction” 3). The persuasiveness of Turner’s argument had been amplified in the previous decades by semi- or pseudo-scholarly works such as Theodore Roosevelt’s multi-volume The Winning of the West (1889-96), which identifies “race expansion” and “Western conquest” as foundational for American nation-building and as a monumental and successful effort at “carv[ing] states out of the forest and the prairie” (Works Vol. 9, 527). Throughout the Great Depression and especially after Turner’s death in 1932, critical assessments of Turner’s work came to the fore in regard to the (a) speculative, (b) hyperbolic, and (c) entirely unempirical character of his argument, which to many no longer seemed convincing: AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 325 “How could a frontier environment, which persisted only briefly before the settlement process was completed exert such an enduring influence over […] the nation as a whole?” (Billington, “Introduction” 4). More fundamentally, the Great Depression led to a reconsideration of the frontier myth in general. For one thing, Turner’s safety valve argument was reversed in the sense that cities on the Eastern Seaboard rather than the rural West were attributed the function of containing and defusing social turmoil (cf. Shannon, “Not Even”). In a broader framework, George Pierson argued that Turner’s thesis had replaced “the God of the Puritans,” who had until then vouched for American superiority, with a seemingly “natural force” – the frontier – “as source and justification” of American exceptionalism (“Turner’s Views” 39). Rather than supporting this reformulation of exceptionalist designs, Pierson early on argues for a comparative perspective on US history and settlement (cf. ibid. 40). In the 1950s in the context of the ‘Cold War,’ the Turner Thesis once more was widely praised only to be yet again radically critiqued in the 1970s by revisionist scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, who have emphasized the violence of colonization and expansionism, the masculinist matrix of discourses about the West and empire-building, and the Eurocentric and ethnocentric biases involved in the frontier logic. Slotkin in particular has addressed the ways in which “the inanimate world of nature” is “humanized” in the appreciation and appropriation of the West, while the Native Americans at the same time are “dehumanized” (Fatal Environment 53). The Native American genocide can be considered the gaping absence in Turner’s thesis as well as in much of its early revisions; it has only been addressed more fully in the past decades in alternative histories of “how the West was lost,” not won by Native Americans (cf. Calloway, Our Hearts), of which Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) is perhaps the best-known example. In contemporary scholarship of the so-called New Western Historians, the frontier has become the “f-word,” as Patricia Limerick quips (“Adventures” 72). But even if many scholars have found Turner’s argument utterly problematic, if not ridiculous, it has not lost its powerful grip on the popular imagination. Both images of the American West as mythic rural Arcadia and as a site of historic conflict and conquest of mythic proportions remain entangled with each other and are central elements in discourses of nation-building and American exceptionalism in its crudest form, as both agrarians and expansionists ignore or dismiss the indigenous population as inhabitants of the land they seek to conquer and/or ‘cultivate:’ “The divisibility of the native and the land permitted the formulation of a myth and ideology of expansion in which racial warfare com- 326 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA plements the processes of agrarian development” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 53). We can see this complicity perhaps most clearly in writings of authors who are critical of the American empire yet at the same time remain attracted to its expansionist logic. Henry David Thoreau for example, one of the central figures in early American nature writing, wrote that “[t]he nation may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine” (qtd. in Fresonke, West 128), yet at the same time was fascinated by the West: “Eastward I go only by force; westward I go free” (Thoreau, “Walking” 268). Thoreau, it seems, wanted “a nation of Walden Ponds, just as Jefferson, equally at odds with his own political impetus, wanted a nation of yeoman Monticellos” (Fresonke, West 15). Both Thoreau and Jefferson thus are caught in – and perpetuate – the mythical, exceptionalist “frontier magic” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 40). 4. ENGENDERING THE AMERICAN WEST AND MANIFEST DOMESTICITY There is a region of America that I have come to call Hisland. In a magnificent western landscape, under perpetually cloudless western skies, a cast of heroic characters engage in dramatic combat, sometimes with nature, sometimes with each other. Occupationally, these heroes are diverse: they are mountain men, cowboys, Indians, soldiers, farmers, miners, and desperadoes, but they share one distinguishing characteristic – they are all men. It seems that all rational demography has ended at the Mississippi River; all the land west of it is occupied only by men. This mythical land is America’s most enduring contribution to folklore: the legendary Wild West. SUSAN ARMITAGE, “THROUGH WOMEN’S EYES” Susan Armitage, a feminist scholar of the West, in the above passage defines her field in terms of the absence of women in classical accounts of the West and the westering experience, and via reference to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian classic Herland; recuperating and ascertaining the presence of women in the West has been one crucial dimension of engendering (the study of) the West. One of the earliest attempts to document the lives of women in the West is certainly Elizabeth Ellet’s Pioneer Women of the West (1901), which is based on private sources and biographical material. Dee Brown in his 1958 study of women in the West titled The Gentle Tamers clearly relates notions of the ‘Wild West’ to the ‘civilizing’ female touch of the “petticoated pioneers” (297), yet refutes historian Emerson Hough’s “sunbonnet myth” (Passing 93), which implied that women’s presence in the West was merely passive and decorative. Even if AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 327 Brown documents the female experience in the West as varied by pointing to its oppressive as well as emancipatory dimensions, he still remains largely stuck in a pre-feminist rhetoric, and with the then-common racial bias refers to white women only. Brown’s study shows the very limited presence women were granted in the classical discourse on the West, in which two images prevail: on the one hand, the “weary and forlorn frontier wife, a sort of helpless heroine” who is generically derived from the captivity narrative and is often described as a ‘Prairie Madonna,’ and on the other hand, “the westering woman as sturdy helpmate and civilizer of the frontier” (Myres, Westering Women 2); additional stock characters include “the good woman, the schoolmarm, [and] the kindhearted prostitute” (Riley, Female Frontier 10). All of these characters have limited agency and are circumscribed by roles which mostly keep them indoors. Additionally, hardly any mention is made in these early studies of Native American, Mexican American, and other non-white women. An early and noteworthy instance of US memorial culture dedicated to the role of women in the history of the West is the Madonna of the Trail series of twelve statues, which commemorates the endurance of pioneer women in the US. Commissioned by The National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution and created by sculptor August Leimbach, the statues were dedicated in 1928 and 1929, and today are still placed in each of the twelve states along the National Old Trails Road, which led from Cumberland, Maryland, to Upland, California. In the Ohio dedication ceremony, Harry S. Truman stated that the women “were just as brave or braver than their men because, in many cases, they went with sad hearts and trembling bodies. They went, however, and endured every hardship that befalls a pioneer” (qtd. in Algeo, Harry Truman’s 50). The monuments are placed mostly in small towns in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Even if the monuments seek to remind us of the hardships undergone by women in the West, their representation of women as mother and nurturing presence in the West affirms traditional gender roles and once again asserts woman’s out-of-placeness in the West. Critical engagement with representations of the West in regard to race and gender and the reconstruction of ‘other,’ non-hegemonic voices in the West has been more prominently on the agenda of historians and other scholars in the past decades. Women’s diaries of their westward journeys have become a valuable source for writing a bottom-up social history of women in the West, to which many scholars have contributed important studies and anthologies such as Julie Roy Jeffrey’s Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840-1880 (1979); Lillian Schlissel’s Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (1982); Lillian 328 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Schlissel, Vicki Ruíz, and Janice Monk’s Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (1988); Glenda Riley’s studies Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825- 1915 (1984) and The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (1988); Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage’s Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (1997); and Susan Cummins Miller’s A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1922 (2000). All of these studies contributed to complicating our sense of women’s presences and roles in the American West, as a result of which also fictional representations of women in the West have changed over time, as can be seen, for instance, in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Ethan and Joel Coen’s True Grit (2010), or Logan Miller’s Sweetwater (2013). Illustration 3: The Frontier Woman as Madonna W.H.D. Koerner, The Madonna of the Prairie (1921). A second dimension of gender scholarship has been to investigate the particular logic of female absence in conventional accounts and representations of the West. In a Freudian spirit, Leslie Fiedler has defined the American West as symbolizing a male homosocial and at times interracial space “to which White male AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 329 Americans flee from their own women into the arms of Indian males, but which those White women, in their inexorable advance from coast to coast, destroy” (Return 50). In the context of westward expansion, women have been commonly portrayed as “obstacles to the male hero’s freedom” (Georgi-Findlay, Frontiers 6) in popular culture, which is why they are often left behind – in the East, in the domestic space of the house or the log cabin, or in the garden. Yet, processes of gendering do not only relate to women but work in a dialectical dynamic that co-constructs femininity and masculinity, as Annette Kolodny’s work on the American West shows. Kolodny points out in The Lay of the Land (1975) that women were absented and excluded from conventional accounts of settlement and westward expansion, whereas the land itself was coded in overtly feminine terms in what is probably America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine – that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification – enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction. (4) It is the symbolic capital of the feminine, so to speak, that is appropriated to signify metaphorically on the male experience of settlement in a patriarchal fantasy of ‘exploring’ the ‘virgin land.’ This particular form of engendering the American West is not only evident in the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century primary sources which Kolodny analyzes, but also in earlier Americanist scholarship such as Smith’s Virgin Land, whose guiding metaphor of a feminized landscape by implication affirms the male figure as colonist, settler, and cultivator. Kolodny’s account of this gendered discourse is nuanced and quite explicit: by taking the metaphors of discovery, expansion, and possession literally and seriously in a reading that is both feminist and ecocritical, she views the conquest of the West as “rape” (Lay 4). Among the newly canonized writings on the West by women, we find European women’s travel accounts, for example by Frances Trollope, Ida Pfeiffer, and Frederika Bremer, as well as white American writers’ fictional and often semi-autobiographical representations of life in the West, for example Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), Eliza Farnham’s Life in Prairie Land (1846), Catherine Stewart’s New Homes in the West (1843), or, much later, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and O Pioneers! (1913). I will exemplarily single out for closer analysis Caroline Kirkland’s text, which after once having been dismissed by Henry Nash Smith as 330 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA “extremely simple” (Virgin Land 263) has seen a feminist reappraisal over the last decades. Published under the pseudonym “Mrs. Mary Clavers, An Actual Settler,” Kirkland in this novel wrote back to male-authored works (by James Fenimore Cooper or John Filson, for instance) that prominently featured romanticized representations of the West by describing the very ordinary scenes, manners and customs of Western Life. No wild adventure, – no blood curdling hazards, – no romantic incidents, – could occur within my limited and sober sphere. No new lights have appeared above my narrow horizon. Commonplace all, yet I must tell it. (New Home 10) The irony of Kirkland’s “pioneer realism” and early local color writing (Zagarell, Introduction xiv) is often quite biting; by resorting to the conventional topos of modesty often used by female authors, she presents as mere “gossip” (Kirkland, New Home 3) what clearly constitutes a critique of patriarchal norms and especially of Jacksonian ideals of manhood. The text unfolds in satirical sketches that depict the settlement of the protagonist in Western Michigan in 1837 and often ridicules male efforts at empire-building, the ‘frontier democracy,’ and the garden myth (cf. Georgi-Findlay, Frontiers 28; Gebhardt, “Comic Displacement” 157). Kirkland also “exposes pastoral conventions as inadequate for writing a western narrative, especially from a woman’s viewpoint” (GeorgiFindlay, Frontiers 31); her female characters are often isolated, lonely, and dependent on husbands who are abusive alcoholics, utterly inept farmers, or both. At the same time, Kirkland articulates a classist, ‘civilized’ ideal that connects femininity, domesticity, material culture, and consumerism to a rural setting that quite obviously still lacks proper refinement (cf. Merish, “Hand”). The ideology of domesticity by Kirkland and other 19th-century women writers has also been critically examined with regard to the dominant discourses of expansionism and empire; a third aspect to be addressed in relation to the gendering of the West in terms of space and agency thus concerns the ways in which white women were not only the objects and victims of patriarchal expansionism, but were also complicit in affirming the ideologies of manifest destiny and exceptionalism. Moving beyond a simplistic and binary feminist critique of the frontier myth, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay has shown that women’s writing reveals that “the cultural domestication of an eccentric West” does not simply present a female countervision to male fantasies of conquest and possession, but is in fact complementary to them: the ideal of domesticity, read in a context of empire building, also AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 331 functions as an instrument for imposing cultural and social control and order upon the “disorderly” classes of the West. (Frontiers 29-30) Amy Kaplan’s concept of “manifest domesticity” similarly describes the “spatial and political interdependence of home and empire” (Anarchy 25) as a kind of “imperial domesticity” (ibid. 29) that can be found in white women’s writing of the time: “‘Manifest Domesticity’ turns an imperial nation into a home by producing and colonizing spectres of the foreign that lurk inside and outside its ever-shifting borders” (ibid. 50). (White) women in the West or moving to the West thus sided with white patriarchy in affirming the civilizing project and its accompanying violence instead of critiquing it. If, as Kathleen Neils Conzen has suggested, the West is “a family story” negotiating the “insistent themes of family, kinship, and community” (“Saga” 315), the family in the West also figures as national allegory. As Richard Slotkin and others have argued, the ideology of US domestic expansion (particularly after the Louisiana Purchase) has always obscured processes of empire-building and conquest that were anything but a domestic affair by presenting them as family matters, so to speak. On the whole, 19th-century white female perspectives both affirmed and appropriated the myth of the West and its “moral authority” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 126), as recasting the West as a domestic space only reinforced the ostensibly intra-national quality of expansion. In conclusion of this section, I would like to briefly discuss Nebraskan writer Willa Cather as an outstanding figure of a generation of women writers who addressed the West in the early 20th century. According to critics of her time, Cather’s depictions of the West in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia are regionalist without being provincial, and nostalgic yet modern (cf. Reynolds, “Willa Cather’s”). Cather shows her protagonists to share a deep mythic connection to the land that evolves from the ultimately redemptive and rewarding hardships of farm life; narrator Jim Burden for example muses on the transformations of the Nebraska of his childhood in My Ántonia: “[A]ll the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea” (97). Jim projects the “heartland’s vitality” and seemingly organic growth (another aspect of the geographic determinism we are already familiar with from Turner’s works) onto Àntonia, who thus “embodies the ideological fantasy […] of national development” (Matthews, “What Was” 294) along the lines of a much older – and deeply problematic – agrarian vision. 332 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 5. A VIEW FROM THE WEST: JAPANESE AMERICANS AND THE WEST AS A LANDSCAPE OF CONFINEMENT The barbed fence protected us from wildly twisted sagebrush. MITSUYE YAMADA, “BLOCK 4 BARRACK 4 ‘APT’ C” The critique of Turner’s Eurocentrism has led to correcting a tacit assumption that underlies many representations of the West, namely, that one arrives there from the east – arguably, North America was settled from west to east as well. The history of Asian immigration to America provides a view from the West on the West as East, so to speak, and thus the basis for a forceful rebuttal of the mythical West. Asian immigration to the US and to the ‘West’ was restricted by a series of exclusionary acts (e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917; the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924; and the TydingsMcDuffie Act of 1934) until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which marked the end of the National Origins quota system. Lisa Lowe and Mae Ngai, among others, have traced the way in which “Asian immigrants” have been defined in legal, racial, economic, and cultural terms in opposition and contradistinction to “American citizens” (Lowe, Immigrant Acts 4). The Asian American experience of the West is marked by “legal exclusions, political disenfranchisement, labor exploitation, and internment” (ibid. 9), which time and again affirmed Asian Americans’ status as ‘other’ and as ‘alien’ (cf. Ngai, Impossible Subjects). Against the backdrop of this history, the American West is, not surprisingly, often portrayed by Asian Americans as a space of restriction and confinement rather than of freedom. I cannot provide a detailed history of Asians’ experience of the West here (for example as laborers in the mines and on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century), but I would like to single out the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II as one of many examples that is at odds with and thoroughly challenges the hegemonic discourse of the West on the West. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese American population of about 120,000 – of whom about 80,000 were American citizens – came to be seen as a threat to national security by the US government, and was forcibly relocated from the Pacific coast to inland internment camps, or ‘War Relocation Centers’ (Gila River and Poston, Arizona; Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas; Manzanar and Tule Lake, California; Amache, Colorado; Minidoka, AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 333 Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain, Wyoming). The ‘westering’ experience of Japanese immigrants (Issei) as well as second and third generation Japanese Americans (Nisei and Sansei) thus stood in stark contrast to the mythologized one that was propagated by Hollywood and American popular culture at large on an unprecedented scale in the 1940s (close to 100 Western movies were produced in 1942 alone). Yet, Japanese American internment was couched by the US government in terms of exploration, individualism, and mobility: “[T]he language of America’s frontier myth […] frame[d] the relocation program. In their information material, government agencies referred to the Japanese Americans as ‘pioneers’ and to the camps as their ‘frontier’” (Streamas, “Frontier Mythology” 175). Alternatively, Japanese Americans were described as “colonists,” and the camps as “colonies” (ibid.). In a 1942 pamphlet titled The War Relocation Work Corps, a relocation center is defined as a “pioneer community with basic housing and protective services provided by the Federal Government, for occupancy by evacuees for the duration of the war” (qtd. in ibid.). In uncanny ways, this euphemistic rhetoric whitewashes the forced displacement and incarceration of the Japanese American population by “forcing concentration camps into the frontier myth” (ibid. 183). It is perhaps somewhat surprising that texts by Japanese Americans about the internment experience also use the rhetoric of the frontier, albeit not without irony. In her autobiography Nisei Daughter (1953), Monica Sone relates that she was born in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, the very site of the city’s founding, from where she was relocated at age 22 with her family to Camp Harmony in Idaho. When permitted to leave the camp, Sone has to go east, as the internees were at first not allowed to return to the West Coast. The narrator inverts and appropriates slogans like ‘Westward, Ho’ and ‘Go West, Young Man’ in chapter titles such as “Eastward, Nisei” (216) and “Deeper into the Land” (226). Throughout her narrative, Sone appropriates American myths in order to describe her experiences, and thereby connects the internment of Japanese Americans to the racist and imperialist logic that underlies the ideology of manifest destiny (cf. Paul, Mapping 98); yet, the actual trauma of internment in her text remains an “articulate silence” (cf. Cheung’s book on Asian American and Asian Canadian women’s writing). Whereas the desert is addressed in a variety of texts about internment (c.f. e.g. Yoshiko Uchida’s memoir Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family and Mitsuye Yamada’s poems and stories in Desert Run), there is also a strong focus on gardens and gardening in camp memoirs that documents a particular reaction to the arid landscape which has been read by Patricia Nelson Limerick as a form of resistance to internment, as the (traditional Japanese) 334 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA gardens that the internees were cultivating in the camps under adverse circumstances added a new dimension to the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and to the garden myth of the American West (cf. Something 209) – gardening for the internees thus may have been more than a way to improve their bleak living conditions. Illustration 4: The West as Prison Anselm Adams, Manzanar Relocation Center from Tower (1943). Not only in the context of internment have Japanese American writers addressed the West as a place of confinement. Hisaye Yamamoto’s short fiction (most famously “Seventeen Syllables”), or the plays by Wakako Yamauchi (cf. Songs) and Velina Hasu Houston for example often deal with the alienation, loneliness, and melancholia of Japanese American women in the post-World War II rural West. Houston’s play Tea for instance, which references Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), focuses on Japanese women who live as “war brides” in Kansas in the 1950s and 1960s; these women’s “feeling of lingering exile is a far cry from the sense of boundless opportunity so often associated with immigration to the American West in our national mythology” (Berson, “Fighting” 266). The AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 335 counter-image of the West as a traumatic and “grief-haunted place” (Proulx, “Dangerous Ground” 15) that is here articulated in subtle, culturally specific ways is also addressed in many other revisionist and more recent fictional and non-fictional texts and images which comprise what has been identified as “frontier gothic” (cf. Mogen, Sanders and Karpinski’s book of the same title). 6. COWBOYS (AND ‘INDIANS’): THE AMERICAN WEST IN POPULAR CULTURE People from all levels of society read Westerns: presidents, truck drivers, librarians, soldiers, college students, businessmen, homeless people. They are read by women as well as men, rich and poor, young and old. In one way or another, Westerns – novels and films – have touched the lives of virtually everyone who lived during the first three-quarters of this century. The archimages of the genre – the gunfight, the fistfight, the chase on horseback, the figure of the mounted horseman outlined against the sky, the saloon girl, the lonely landscape itself, are culturally pervasive and overpowering. JANE TOMPKINS, WEST OF EVERYTHING Violence in the hegemonic discourse on the ‘Wild’ West has been largely imagined as regenerative and cathartic (cf. Slotkin, Regeneration); the various elements of the frontier myth “center on the conception of American history as a heroic-scale Indian war, pitting race against race” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 32). This fantasy of the West as a site of necessary quasi-mythical violence can be found in print media, performance culture, film, and television, which I will exemplarily address in my discussion of the West in popular culture (and the West’s popular culture) in order to uncover the ideological manoeuvres that have contained and controlled violence in the West along with Native American presences and absences and that have belittled or even completely disavowed the Native American genocide. For an analysis of print culture’s role in the making of heroes and villains of the West in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we can turn to pioneer Daniel Boone’s (1734-1820) elevation to the status of national hero in John Filson’s pamphlet The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784) and to the heroes of James Fenimore Cooper’s historical romances. Both authors popularized the binary stereotypes of the noble and the ignoble savage, whose most prominent exemplars are perhaps the heroic and ‘noble’ Chingachgook and Uncas, and the villainous, ‘ignoble’ Magua in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826); whereas the former correspond to the 336 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA image of the ‘vanishing Indian’ and support Euro-American westward expansion as they conveniently seem to anticipate their own extinction, the latter is representative of depictions of Natives as barbaric and primitive peoples who need to be vanquished in order for the West to be ‘won,’ settled, and ‘civilized.’ Cooper’s dichotomous stereotypes have been extremely influential and to this day inform the majority of representations of the West and its indigenous inhabitants. In the logic of Cooper’s Native presences, the very existence of the noble savage justifies the racist depiction of Natives in that it ostensibly counterbalances (but actually reinforces) their otherwise more overtly negative characterization. Even more widely read than Cooper’s highly successful novels were the dime novel Westerns, which became an unprecedented phenomenon in publishing and consumer culture in the second half of the 19th century (cf. Bill Brown, “Introduction” 6). Sold at very cheap prices (five to twenty-five cents), these pocketsize ‘novels’ were put out in series that ensured the recognizability of their title heroes (such as Deadwood Dick or Seth Jones), and prominently included dramatic scenes of violence as a major part of their attraction (cf. ibid. 2). Somewhat paradoxically, these texts projected rugged individualism and outstanding heroism in a format that relied to a large extent on standardization, serialization, and mass consumption: If we suppose that the mass-produced myth effected some degree of national cohesion, then we should also suppose that both cohesion and alienation lay in the shared reading practice, the shared relation to consumer culture, and the newly shared pace and privacy of reading as an act of consumption. The material facts of the dime novel’s production and distribution help us to appreciate the Western as a rationalization of the West that synchronized the realm of leisure in the rhythms of work and industry. (ibid. 30) Picking up Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of mass culture in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Brown points to the anachronism at the heart of the popularity of the Western: while the success of dime novel Westerns hinged on mass production and thus on the industrialization of the US, the texts depicted pre-industrial frontier life. With the so-called Indian Wars still going on, the dime Westerns time and again staged and re-staged conflicts with the Native population as wars against ‘savages’ to which there was no alternative. Borrowing selectively from the racist “Cooperian mythology” (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 106), these Westerns focused on the ignoble savage and indulged in and legitimized white violence against the indigenous population of the American West (it is only after it had been drastically reduced due to warfare and ‘removal’ policies that they began to stage conflicts between white men). A AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 337 closer look at Edward S. Ellis’s Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860), one of the most successful early dime novel Westerns – we could sample randomly from many others to find similar constellations, though – reveals how Native Americans are demonized in stereotypical descriptions such as the following one: Behind were a half-dozen savages, their gleaming visages distorted with the passions of exultation, vengeance, and doubt, their garments flying in the wind, and their strength pressed to its utmost bounds. They were scattered at different distances from each other, and were spreading over the prairie, so as to cut off the fugitive’s escape in every direction. (197) The Natives’ dehumanizing representation as evil, animalistic, and dangerous puts them into stark opposition to the white characters, whose sense of entitlement to land and power is unquestioned and whose extreme brutality is condoned and legitimated by the narrative. White violence is described almost gleefully and in disturbing graphic detail, and is obviously supposed to be pleasurable for the (white) audience. The text continues with Seth Jones beginning to take revenge for the capture of whites by the Natives: So sudden, so unexpected, so astonishing was the crash of Seth’s tomahawk through the head of the doomed savage, that, for a moment after, not an Indian moved or spoke. The head was nearly cleft in twain (for an arm fired by consuming passion had driven it), and the brains were spattered over numbers of those seated around. Seth himself stood a second to satisfy himself the work was complete, and when he turned, walked to his seat, sat down, coolly folded his arms and commenced whistling. (212, emphasis in the original) The slaughtering of the Native in this passage is described in hyperbolic yet at the same time realist fashion; whereas many other cultural productions (including Cooper’s) would disavow or at least camouflage violence against Native Americans, in scenes such as this one – which abound in dime novel Westerns, and qualify in some instances as a precursor to what in contemporary jargon is labelled ‘torture porn’ – even the most ‘savage’ white violence is represented as acceptable and legitimate in an unequivocal assertion of white superiority. The dime novel Westerns do not claim national allegorical status, which is perhaps why their implication in the construction and affirmation of white supremacy is more overt than in other, more subtle cultural productions. The fact that these mass-produced and mass-consumed fantasies do not hide or feel the need to explain the white violence that they describe points us to the tacit dimension of 338 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA the myth of the West in hegemonic discourse: “This is how the Western produces what we might call its ‘mythology effect’ – with the presumption that the West already exists as shared knowledge, with an absence of detail that insists on familiarity” (Bill Brown, “Introduction” 33). This “familiarity” is grounded in the unquestioned acceptance and successful naturalization of the fundamental ideological premises of frontier discourse, which above all include the assumption that white people’s usurpatory presence in North America is justified at all. Illustration 5: Popular Stereotypes of the West Cover of Seth Jones: Or, the Captives of the Frontier by Edward S. Ellis (New York: Beadle, 1860). None of these dime novel Westerns have been canonized; in fact, they have often been overlooked despite having constituted a large-scale phenomenon that connects to the earlier texts by James Fenimore Cooper as well as to later writers such as Owen Wister, whose novel The Virginian (1902) is often considered the first literary Western. This neglect has perhaps been motivated more by political rather than by aesthetic considerations in that their explicit descriptions of raw AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 339 violence in contrast to other texts’ more sanitized representations of westward expansion inconveniently point to – rather than obscure or rationalize – the brutality of the ‘Indian Wars.’ That the Western is to a large degree “a matter of geography and costume” (Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique 35) is also in evidence in my second example of how the West figures in popular culture: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a national as well as international phenomenon that evolved out of the 19th-century print culture on the West. This Wild West Show was founded in Nebraska in 1883 by William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), a veteran of the Civil War and former bison hunter who created Buffalo Bill as his alter ego. For roughly 30 years (1883-1916), this show was one of the largest and most popular entertainment businesses in the world; it toured in the US and throughout Europe, and in addition to Buffalo Bill featured other prominent western figures such as James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane. Cody a.k.a. Buffalo Bill became a “national icon” – Larry McMurtry suggests that in his day he was probably “the most recognizable celebrity on earth” (Colonel 5) – and a figure that embodied and continued the tradition of earlier well-known fictional and semi-fictional figures of the West such as Natty Bumppo a.k.a. Leatherstocking/Hawkeye, and Daniel Boone; Buffalo Bill carried on the legacy of an ethnically white man who had partially ‘gone native’ and incorporated aspects of both the white and the Native world yet for the same reason was also an outstanding ‘Indian fighter’ and buffalo hunter, and was never in doubt about his cultural loyalties and allegiances: the gist of many of Cody’s Buffalo Bill sketches is that the white man, time and again, outperforms the Native by using the latter’s techniques. The persuasiveness of these shows can be glimpsed in the following eyewitness account by Dan Muller, who lived and worked with Cody: The show started. The band played a lively opening number. The Grand Entry was on. A group of riders appeared in the swinging spotlight at the scenic entrance. They loped around the arena and pulled up at the far end. […] A spotlight now picked up a single rider loping toward the head of the assembled group of riding battalions. “LADEEZ AND GENTLEMEN,” shouted the announcer. “ALLOW ME TO PRE-SENT THE GREATEST SCOUT OF THE OLD WEST: BUF-FA-LO B-I-I-I-L-L-L.” The trumpets of the band burst into a loud blare of sound. By now Uncle Bill had brought his prancing horse to a theatrical stop that set him up on his hind feet. The crowd roared approval. […] The program was action-packed from the first announcement to the grand closing. […] There was a buffalo chase, and Uncle Bill, riding a horse at the buffalo’s flank, blazed away with a rifle. […] There were trick ropers the climax of whose act was dropping a loop over four 340 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA running horses. […] But the one I liked best was the stagecoach chase. In this act the stagecoach, drawn by six wildly galloping horses, its top crowded with men with rifles and with riflemen poking their weapons through the windows, tore around the arena with Indians mounted bareback in chase. And all the while the stagecoach blazed with the fire of the rifles and the Indians fired back. It sure was exciting. (My Life 113-17) Illustration 6: Buffalo Bill Stamp US Postal Service, Buffalo Bill Cody 15¢ (1988). Native Americans figured prominently in Cody’s shows; for one thing, because they included re-enactments of ‘Custer’s Last Stand,’ i.e. the defeat of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 by a coalition of Native tribes. This battle re-enactment was performed with Sitting Bull, military leader of the Lakota, who actually led the fateful attack against Custer. Knowing that the Natives’ military success had only been temporary, white audiences apparently did not feel threatened by this performance; at the same time, it provided a great deal of spectacle. The collaboration between Cody and Native American leaders has been considered quite remarkable and somewhat puzzling: “Over the years Buffalo Bill managed to engage such figures as Sitting Bull and Geronimo as performers, and a great number of Indians who had fought against the cavalry less than a year before, as well as the services of regular units of the US Cavalry to perform opposite them” (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 68). Besides Native celebrities, Cody also needed Native actors for the ‘typical scenes’ and tableaux vivants his troupe staged. The ambivalence of their appearance can be grasped when weighing the worldwide reception and (apparently equal) pay they received during the tours against the fact that it helped freeze the image of Natives – by way of the show’s content – into that of stereo- AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 341 typical, archaic warriors whose resistance to a superior Euro-American civilization had to be overcome, and indeed was by and large overcome by the time the performances took place. At the height of the show’s success in the 1890s, Cody’s troupe included one hundred Native men, women, and children among a total staff of 500. Bringing the ‘Wild West’ to Americans throughout the US and to Europe required a logistical effort that was impressive: “In 1899, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West covered over 11.000 miles in 200 days giving 341 performances in 132 cities and towns across the United States” (Fees, “Wild West Shows”). Buffalo Bill’s Wild West became an international trademark whose successful branding of the American West many performers sought to emulate. The show produced, enhanced, and affirmed the myth of the West and of the frontier for national and international audiences. The decline of the show coincides with the rise of another medium that would become dedicated to representing and mythologizing the West: film. Toward the end of his life and career, Buffalo Bill’s show no longer convinced audiences, who sometimes even considered his enactments of the ‘Wild West’ laughable (cf. Muller, My Life 256). In the 20th century, the Western can be considered the American film genre par excellence; it has been an important object of scholarship in American popular culture studies, and will be my third and final example of cultural productions on the West in this section. From Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) onwards, the Western’s negotiation of questions of individualism and community, masculinity, alterity, and violence as well as national and racial supremacy has codified the West as a formative space of US national identity. Visually, it is a genre that can easily be identified: “[W]hen we see a couple of characters dressed in ten-gallon hats and riding horses, we know we are in a Western” (Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique 34). The so-called Golden Age of the Western is often dated from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), with the latter already operating at quite a distance from the classical Western; Neo-Westerns that have partially absorbed revisionist historiography include Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). The Western’s long-time popularity, once more, corroborates Robert Dorman’s argument that the frontier is “the prime commodity of the Old West culture industry” (Hell 11). John Cawelti – whose work is closely related to that of Leslie Fiedler and Richard Slotkin – has identified a particular formula of the Western: its setting is the West, i.e a locale that existed in a very brief period of time which is turned into the central “epic moment” (Six-Gun Mystique 39); its 342 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA cast of characters usually includes settlers and outlaws (who are sometimes Native Americans but, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, more often are white); its hero, who has a horse and a gun, intervenes on behalf of the “agents of civilization” (ibid. 46) while sometimes taking recourse to the same methods as the outlaws in order to win over them, and thus remains ambivalently ‘in the middle’ as he is at the same ‘advancing’ and escaping from ‘civilization’ (cf. ibid. 52); its plots usually revolve around capture, flight, and pursuit (cf. ibid. 67). Cawelti’s typology links the Western to the archetypal narrative structure and patterns of the hero myth; the Western thus dramatizes a “foundation ritual” (ibid. 73) in the sense that it presents for our renewed contemplation that epic moment when the frontier passed from the old way of life into social and cultural forms directly connected with the present. By dramatising this moment, and associating it with the hero’s agency, the Western affirms the act of foundation. In this sense, the Western is like a Fourth of July ceremony. (ibid.) Cawelti’s relevance for discussing the West as a foundational myth is obvious, as in his view the function of the Western is to ritualistically affirm the hero’s integrity and innocence despite his acts of violence against what hegemonic discourse represents as ‘savages’ or ‘outlaws;’ while some Westerns explore the moral dilemma of innocence and aggression in more ambiguous terms, Westerns by and large still are “fantasies of legitimated violence” and “moralistic aggression” (ibid. 85). In many ways the Western films seem to transform the ‘virgin land’ of Henry Nash Smith into a ‘crowded prairie’ (cf. Coyne’s book of the same title) from which, however, one part of the North American population is increasingly and symptomatically absent: In reconstructing the history of the Western, Jane Tompkins observes how Native Americans appear to disappear from a genre for which they actually were foundational (cf. West); the topos of the “vanishing race” (Fiedler, Return) and the “romance of disappearing” (Lawlor, Recalling 41) have been widely noted. In Frank Gruber’s typology of basic Western plots, Native Americans appear only in one out of seven: “Custer’s Land Stand, or the Cavalry and Indian Story” (qtd. in Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique 35). In line with the pernicious notion of the ‘Vanishing Indian,’ the West in the Western becomes a stage for white (male) fantasies: “Westerns marginalized the Indian because they were only marginally about the Indian” (Coyne, Crowded Prairie 5). The white hero’s ‘just’ fight against his enemies instead has a redemptive function in that it provides “regeneration through violence” (cf. Slotkin’s book of the same title); the hero’s rite de passage takes center stage and pushes the AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 343 Native genocide to the sidelines, or leaves it completely out of the picture. Roy Harvey Pearce has suggested that in the 19th century, the stereotype of the Native as either evil or noble savage slowly gave way to a white view on Natives as an inferior ‘race’ that belonged to an earlier (and thus doomed) stage of civilization (cf. Savagism). When looking at more contemporary productions, we may wonder if the Neo-Western has managed to challenge or alter the classical Western formula all that much in regard to its deeply problematical ideological underpinnings. 7. THE FRONTIER MYTH AND POLITICAL RHETORIC: THE CASE OF THE ‘VIETNAM WAR’ Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along. MICHAEL HERR, DISPATCHES We use the term “Indian country” to describe Vietnam. AIRBORNE RANGER INFANTRY VETERAN ROBERT B. JOHNSON All I remember is that I was with Custer’s Seventh Cavalry riding toward the Little Big Horn and we were struck by the Indians. After we crossed the Rosebud, we made it to Ridge Red Boy and then we were hit. No. I must have my wars confused. That was another time, another place. Other Indians. WILLIAM EASTLAKE, THE BAMBOO BED As a public myth and “structure of feeling” (cf. Williams’s text of the same title), the West has not only been expressed in mass culture but has also been used in political culture; presidents, presidential candidates, and others seeking or holding office have often fashioned themselves as farmers, cowboys, or pioneers, and employed the rhetoric of the frontier myth. The first ‘cowboy president’ was probably Andrew Jackson (cf. Lepore, Story), a former US Army general who embodied a heady mix of frontierism, militarism, and expansionism. In the context of the 20th and 21st centuries, we may think for example of Lyndon B. Johnson, who wore a Stetson and rode on horseback in his 1964 presidential campaign; Richard Nixon, who exploited his friendship with John Wayne and James Stewart for political gain (cf. Coyne, Crowded Prairie 1); Ronald Reagan, who made political use of the cowboy image even if among his 54 films only six were Westerns (cf. ibid.; Rogin, Ronald Reagan; Jeffords, Hard Bodies); or George W. Bush, who liked to pose on his Texas ranch dressed 344 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA in a cowboy outfit. All of them used these references to the West in order to convey a sense of rugged masculinity and strong leadership. By the 20th century, the frontier myth had become engrained in political discourse and campaign rhetoric through a set of tacit references that were understood by all Americans. One of the best-known examples of an appropriation of the American West in political rhetoric by way of the frontier myth is certainly John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. While Kennedy did not fashion himself as a cowboy during his candidacy and later as president but rather displayed the habitus of an East Coast urbanite, he did use the myth of the West in this so-called “New Frontier” speech, and invested it with new meanings: I stand here tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind us, the pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort, and sometimes their lives to build our new West. […] [T]he problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier – the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats. […] I’m asking each of you to be pioneers towards that new frontier. […] For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand at this frontier at a turning point of history. Kennedy’s ‘new frontier’ rhetoric, which helped him win the presidential election, was fuelled by a ‘Cold War’ logic that would also provide the rationale for the US military involvement in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The latter’s descriptions in official rhetoric, fiction, film, and memoirs likewise often reference the frontier and the ‘Indian Wars,’ and draw analogies between Native Americans and the Vietnamese (cf. Bates, Wars 10): The invocation of the Indian war and Custer’s Last Stand as models for the Vietnam war was a mythological way of answering the question, Why are we in Vietnam? The answer implicit in the myth is, “We are there because our ancestors were heroes who fought the Indians, and died (rightly or wrongly) as sacrifices for the nation.” There is no logic to the connection, only the powerful force of tradition and habits of feeling and thought. (Slotkin, Fatal Environment 19) These attempts at making the war in Southeast Asia intelligible and comprehensible through the familiar language of the frontier myth cannot be considered a simple, successful transference; they also challenged American self-perceptions AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 345 in new and unprecedented ways, and tested the myth’s elasticity and, more profoundly, its validity: Vietnam is an experience that severely called into question American myth. Americans entered Vietnam with certain expectations that a story, a distinctly American story, would unfold. When the story of America in Vietnam turned into something unexpected, the true nature of the larger story of America itself became the subject of intense cultural dispute. On the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future. (Hellmann, American Myth x) The interdependency of the myth of the West and the interpretation of the war in Southeast Asia as well as the “Vietnamization” of the West (Coyne, Crowded Prairie 120) can be identified on several levels; we can for instance analyze how representations of the ‘Vietnam War’ use the Western formula in order to describe individual and collective war experiences. The convergence of the West and the East is most clearly evident in the Pentagon-sponsored The Green Berets (1968), which was one of the first Vietnam War films; based on Robin Moore’s bestselling novel of the same title which had been published three years earlier, it starred and was co-directed by John Wayne, the prototypical Western hero. Hoping to “make the old magic work” (Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam 38), this film is quite overtly anti-communist propaganda cloaked in Western imagery: the film’s depiction of a base camp in Vietnam is very similar to that of cavalry forts in Westerns, and its demonization of the Vietcong also strongly resembles that of Native Americans in earlier films and other media. The film heroized the Green Berets – i.e., the US Army Special Forces, whose guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics were endorsed by the Kennedy administration – by representing them as “a fused image of sophisticated contemporary professional and rough Indian fighters” that embodied the “paradox of the genteel killer” and “the deathdealing innocent” on the new frontier in Asia (Hellmann, American Myth 46/47). John Wayne’s son Michael, who produced the film, would later note in an interview: “Maybe we shouldn’t have destroyed all those Indians, but when you are making a picture, the Indians are the bad guys” (qtd. in Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam 35). Thus, from a New Historicist perspective, The Green Berets can be read as a film that makes sense of the ‘Vietnam War’ by employing the Western’s mode of representing the ‘Indian Wars.’ Other Vietnam War films also transpose the myth of the West, and in particular the myth of the frontier, to Vietnam: Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) references James Fenimore Cooper’s historical frontier romance The Deerslayer (1841); First Blood (1982) places its pro- 346 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA tagonist Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), a former Green Beret and traumatized war veteran, on the outskirts of a small American town in a quasi wilderness, thus rendering him an inverted Natty Bumppo; its sequel Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), a latter-day American captivity narrative, once again stages Rambo as a prototypical ‘Indian fighter’ who this time is on a mission to liberate American soldiers from Vietnamese POW camps; Apocalypse Now (1979) by contrast uses the hardboiled detective genre – which can be considered to have transposed the ‘Wild West’ into an urban context – to more radically depict “Vietnam as a nightmare extension of American society” (Hellmann, American Myth 201), and further undermines “the idealistic self-concept embodied in the American hero” (ibid. 203) through its references to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899). Let me add in passing that we can also examine how the war in Southeast Asia changed the American Western proper; as a case in point we may consider Little Big Man (1970), an early revisionist Western based on Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel of the same title that “portrayed the settling of the frontier as a succession of My Lai’s” (Hellmann, American Myth 95). As John Clark Pratt points out in a similar context, we can observe that “the literature of the Vietnam War is filled with American characters who enter Vietnam as traditional frontier huntsmen, then become men trying merely to survive in a wilderness they do not understand” (“Lost Frontier” 238). In many ways, Vietnam brought the American foundational mythic formula to a crisis, because the myth failed to successfully work the war into a coherent narrative; as many have noted, the war could not be easily contained in the language of the frontier myth, and moreover brought to the surface the ‘origins’ of the myth – the collectively dis- or misremembered ‘Indian Wars’ – which thus became the object of reinterpretation. “The war did what almost nothing else could have: it forced a major breach in consciousness” (Charles Reich qtd. in Hellmann, American Myth 76). Hellmann also suggests – in language echoing that of earlier Americanists – that Vietnam became “a landscape in the American consciousness that would have to be journeyed through many times over, self-consciously experienced through narrative art as myth and symbol” (ibid. 95). We may thus consider the war in Southeast Asia as an event that unsettled the heroic myth of the West in that it brought to the fore the violence inscribed into it as well as the utter ‘ugliness’ of US military engagement in Asia and elsewhere (cf. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s 1958 political novel The Ugly American). However, official efforts at (re-)mythologizing Vietnam continue to this day, as president Obama’s 2012 proclamation in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the war show: AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 347 [W]e reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away from everything they knew and everyone they loved. From Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. (Presidential Proclamation) The doubts about individual and collective American identities triggered by the war were articulated in many forms; representatives of the American counterculture and the peace movement argued that Vietnam revealed the pathological nature of the American empire, or, less radically, that it signified a loss of values. Activists and writers who visited North Vietnam, among them Susan Sontag, regarded Vietnam as “the America that no longer exists” (Hellmann, American Myth 85); the innocence yet also the ‘primitiveness’ and ‘backwardness’ Sontag perceives are evident in many instances of her travel report Trip to Hanoi (1968), in which she pastoralizes Vietnam and describes its inhabitants as “children – beautiful, patient, heroic, martyred, stubborn children” (15). Whereas the ‘Indians’ of Vietnam are demonized in productions such as The Green Berets, they are infantilized by Sontag and other countercultural voices, which constitutes a form of othering that is hardly less problematical. Thus, we can see that the Vietnamese are still described within the bounds of the myth of the West – as evil or noble ‘savages.’ Lastly, there is yet another aspect to the connection between Vietnam and the American Indian Wars which centers on Native American agency rather than on the objectification of ‘natives.’ In the midst of the ‘Cold War,’ ‘Indian country’ migrated back from Vietnam to the American heartland when Native American activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, from February 27 to May 8, 1973. The protest of the American Indian Movement (AIM) at Wounded Knee focused on what many considered as America’s racist imperialism at home (cf. Rosier, Serving 264) and was joined by a number of Native American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. The protest in South Dakota soon appeared as a (semi-staged) re-creation of Vietnam which indicated that for the US, the ‘Cold War’ had both an international as well as a domestic side to it (ibid. 269). Woody Kipp, a member of the Blackfeet Nation and a US Marine Corps veteran who fought in Vietnam, would in his memoirs titled Viet Cong at Wounded Knee: The Trail of a Blackfeet Activist (2004) refer to this connection as the “pervasive issues of race and dominance [...] that have shaped and formed this country since its earliest days” (141). 348 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Illustration 7: The Anti-Mad Cowboy Photograph by Gail Williams (2005). Clearly, and in spite of the most radical protest at the time of the war in Southeast Asia, the frontier myth was not entirely debunked and much less destroyed, but perhaps it was expanded to the extent that post-Vietnam, it could include failure as well as triumph and victory. Beyond Vietnam, the US national security apparatus has continued to conflate ‘Indians’ with those it felt the need to frame as enemies, and to use the semantics of the frontier myth in acts of epistemic violence; the Old West revenge tale, for instance, has figured prominently in the political rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’ (‘dead or alive’), and it led protesters against the War in Iraq to chant “it’s the Middle East, not the Wild West” (Kollin, “Introduction” x). A connection between the ‘Indian Wars’ and US foreign policy was established once again in May 2011 when ‘Geronimo,’ the name of an Apache leader, was used as a code word in the CIA-led operation that presumably resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 349 8. CONCLUSION: THE TRANSNATIONAL WEST The west is everywhere. KRIS FRESONKE, WEST OF EMERSON There’s a bit of the West in all of us. WRANGLER ADVERTISING SLOGAN In his study The Rhizomatic West, Neil Campbell seeks to define “westness” (41) beyond a national paradigm and considers the West as a “travelling” and “mobile discourse” (ibid. 1) and, with James Clifford, as a “travelling concept” (Routes 4). Paul Giles has asked us to view “native [American] landscapes refracted or inverted in a foreign mirror” in order “to appreciate the assumptions framing these narratives and the ways they are intertwined with the construction and reproduction of national mythologies” (Virtual Americas 2). Similarly, the approach of critical regionalism – a term popularized by Kenneth Frampton (cf. “Towards”) – allows us to focus on the West in its local and global dimensions simultaneously, and to look at the connections between both. A transnational view would thus, first, privilege the cultural mobility and non-American appropriations of the American West: in Europe, the myth of the West has been affirmed in appropriations of the Western genre for instance by the German author Karl May and the Belgian cartoonist Maurice de Bevere (a.k.a. Morris), whose characters Winnetou and Lucky Luke have become iconic figures. Their re-articulation of the myth of the West is relevant in various cultural and temporal contexts; May’s Winnetou stories are still staged yearly at the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg, and are parodied in Der Schuh des Manitu (2001), which to date is the greatest commercial success in German film history, while murals depicting scenes from the Lucky Luke comics series decorate houses in Brussels. Whereas Karl May’s fictional West has been quite thoroughly studied (cf. Schmidt, Sitara; Sammons, Ideology), little cultural studies scholarship so far exists on Morris’s work. From a different vantage point we may also consider the Western not only as the prototypical US-American film genre but also as, in fact, a transnational genre, as classic Westerns have inspired eastern remakes, and vice versa. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), which is indebted to Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929), in turn is the ‘original’ to Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (1964), which invested the genre with a new sense of irony and cynicism. 350 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Kurosawa’s films have served as models for American Western films time and again: His Seven Samurai (1954) served as the template for John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), and Yojimbo was adapted once again by Walter Hill as Last Man Standing (1996). At the same time, the so-called ‘Eastern’ has emerged as a global, commercially successful hybrid that fuses the formula of the Western with that of the martial arts film. In looking at these cultural productions, we may ask ourselves how we can conceive of such a mythic fusion critically in terms of orientalist as well as ‘western’ discourses, and how the myth of the West – either in its agrarian/pastoralist or in its expansionist version – can be transposed and translated into other (sub)cultural and (trans)national contexts; another question would be whether we should consider these translations and appropriations as affirmative or subversive in regard to canonical accounts of the myth of the West. A transnational view, second, necessitates looking more closely at economic factors and the neoliberal logic that shapes the identity of regions and their international reception/consumption in a globalized world: Critical regionalist scholars have their eyes on processes of globalization that also ‘produce’ regions as marketable commodities, and the West – as (part of) a “corporate geography” (Cheryl Herr, Critical Regionalism 3) – has been such a commodity for a long time. Global enterprises attest to that, for instance the online shopping center New West Mall (newwestmall.com), or Disney, whose theme parks in Anaheim, Bay Lake, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong include a so-called Frontierland made up of generic cowboys, pioneers, saloons, and other stereotypical ‘Wild West’ features. No explicit mention is made of Native Americans in the parks located in the US, where the so-called Indian Village that had previously been part of Frontierland has been removed. The biggest Frontierland is that in Disneyland Park (Paris), which also includes the so-called Pocahontas Indian Village. In Tokyo Disneyland, it is called Westernland, as ‘frontier’ does not adequately translate into Japanese; ironically, both theme parks in Asia focus on the history of mining in the West – a history that includes the large-scale exploitation of Asian immigrants who were being used as forced labor on the so-called mining frontier – which in the parks however is transfigured and symbolically and economically exploited once more. A critique of local/global capitalism would have to go back to US expansionism in the West and to agrarianism, which have always been connected by commercial interests that upon closer inspection also demystify the myth of the garden and of manifest destiny, as Thorstein Veblen has noted: AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 351 The country town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its beginning it is located and “developed” as an enterprise of speculation in land values; that is to say it is a businesslike endeavour to get something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto) loses this character of realestate speculation. This affords a common bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic pride, and the like. (Imperial Germany 334) The ideology of manifest destiny is certainly an important part of the patriotic spirit Veblen describes. A number of cultural productions, among them the television series Deadwood (2004-2006), have recently addressed the capitalist logic of early settlement, which established still existing structures of economic exploitation in the West and at times outside the borders of the US. Deadwood has been applauded for its postwestern, critical representation of “life within a world ordered entirely around the marketplace” (Worden, “Neo-liberalism” 221), which points to the capitalist logic underlying Euro-American settlement in North America, and from which the standard heroism and nostalgia that continues to be an important dimension of the myth of the West is largely absent. With Daniel Worden, we can interpret the West as a national allegory that connects past, present, and future and that also reveals the violence at work in economic transformations within the larger “incorporation of America” (cf. Trachtenberg’s book of the same title), an incorporation that does not stop at national borders. A transnational critical regionalist framework, third, also pays new attention to comparative frameworks of analysis. The West and its myth(s) are analyzed from such angles, for instance, by The Comparative Wests Project at Stanford University, which researches “the common histories and shared contemporary issues among Indigenous populations and settler colonialists in Australia, New Zealand, Western South America, the Western United States, Canada, and the Pacific Islands” (comparativewests.stanford.edu). The American Midwest and Ireland have also been analyzed as two regions whose histories have been connected to and shaped each other over a long period of time (cf. Cheryl Herr, Critical Regionalism). Comparative border studies (cf. Sadowski-Smith, “Introduction”) touch upon constructions of the American West and its borders with other regions, particularly those to the south. Russell Ward has probed Turner’s thesis with regard to Australian history and the construction of an Australian frontier narrative in his study The Australian Legend (1958), which may well be seen as the search for an Australian Adam in analogy to R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam, published only a few years earlier. From a historical 352 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA perspective, Edward Watts urges us to study the West (in particular the Midwest) not only as an American region in an intranational context but also as a colony – or “hypercolony” – “within the context of the global European diaspora of the nineteenth century,” as it shares certain features with other Dominions of the British Empire at the time (“Midwest” 166, 169, 174); Watts holds that it turns more on the scholarly redefinition of what a colony is (and what its relationship to its metropolis is) than on whether the Midwest was ever a colony to the East the same way Massachusetts was a colony of the British Empire in 1776. A colony in the eighteenth century was one thing; in the nineteenth, another. And the Midwest can and should be studied alongside not just the other regions with whom it shares a nation, but also alongside the other colonies with whom it shared a century. (ibid. 187) Critical regionalism thus calls for an internationalization of the study of regions in the US and for connecting the West as region, fantasy, and brand to concepts of (neo)colonialism and globalization. AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 353 9. STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Identify and discuss the different meanings of the American West. How can they be contrasted, and what do they have in common? 2. Why may mapping the West in geographical terms be difficult? What kind of maps can you think of that capture the (myth of the) American West? 3. Give a brief definition of what Frederick Jackson Turner refers to as “the significance of the frontier in American history.” 4. Interpret Frances Flora Bond Palmer’s Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way” (1868). How does it represent the West and westward expansion? Illustration 8: Westward Expansion Frances Flora Bond Palmer, Across the Continent: “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” (1868). (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Kathy and Ted Fernberger, 2009). 5. Read Stephen Crane’s short stories “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and discuss how Crane’s representations of the West undermine prevailing stereotypes of his (and our) time. 6. Watch and discuss commercials that use the myth of the West. A good place to start would be the “So God Made a Farmer” Ram Trucks commercial from Super Bowl 2013 with Paul Harvey, which is available on the internet. 354 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 7. Choose a Western movie and discuss its representation of the West and the frontier. 8. Discuss the implications of the myth of the West with regard to different ethnic groups in the US (Native Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans). 9. Give reasons for the success of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Europe. 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Sam Peckinpah. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1969. Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House on the Prairie. 1935. New York: Harper, 1981. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. –. “Stuctures of Feeling.” Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 128-35. Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. 1902. Introd. by Robert B. Parker. Afterword by Max Evans. New York: Penguin/Signet, 2010. Worden, Daniel. “Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory.” Canadian Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 221-46. Wrobel, David M. Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2002. Yamada, Mitsuye. “Block 4 Barrack 4 ‘Apt’ C.” Camp Notes and Other Poems. Latham: Kitchen Table, 1976. 19. –. Desert Run: Poems and Stories. Latham: Kitchen Table, 1988. Yamamoto, Hisaye. “Seventeen Syllables.” Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Latham: Kitchen Table, 1988. 8-19. Yamauchi, Wakako. Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoirs. New York: Feminist, 1994. Yojimbo. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Toho, 1961. Zagarell, Sandra A. Introduction. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life. By Caroline Kirkland. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. xixliii. Further Reading Armor, John, and Peter Wright. Manzanar. New York: Times, 1988. Babcock, C. Merton. The American Frontier: A Social and Literary Record. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Billington, Ray Allen. Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1981. –. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Campbell, Neil. “Critical Regionalism, Third Space, and John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s Western Cultural Landscapes.” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. Ed. Susan Kollin. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. 59-81. 364 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA –. The Cultures of the American New West. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. Clark, Thomas D. Frontier America: The Story of the Westward Movement. New York: Scribner’s, 1959. Cody, Louisa Frederici. Memories of Buffalo Bill by His Wife. New York: Appleton, 1919. Coues, Elliott. History of the Expedition under the Command of Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri River. 1893. Rpt. 3 vols. New York: Dover, 1964. Durham, Philip, and Everett L. Jones, eds. The Frontier in American Literature. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Ellis, David M. The Frontier in American Development: Essays in Honor of Paul Wallace Gates. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969. Fabian, Ann. “The West.” A Companion to American Cultural History. Ed. Karen Halttunen. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. 125-38. Fender, Stephen. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Fussell, Edwin. Frontier: American Literature and the American West. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965. Gersdorf, Catrin. The Poetics and Politics of the Desert. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Graulich, Melody. “‘Cameras and Photographs Were Not Permitted in the Camps:’ Photographic Documentation and Distortion in Japanese American Internment Narratives.” True West. Ed. William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. 222-56. Hawgood, John A. America’s Western Frontiers: The Exploration and Settlement of the Trans-Mississippi West. New York: Knopf, 1967. Hazard, Lucy Lockwood. The Frontier in American Literature. New York: Unger, 1927. Hofstadter, Richard, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier. New York: Basic, 1968. Hollon, W. Eugene. Frontier Violence: Another Look. London: Oxford UP, 1974. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. –. Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. Ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Kaufman, Polly Welts. Women Teachers on the Frontier. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. AGRARIANISM, EXPANSIONISM, AND THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST | 365 LeMenager, Stephanie. Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. Lewis, Marvin, ed. The Mining Frontier: Contemporary Accounts from the American West in the Nineteenth Century. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1967. A Literary History of the American West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP and the Western Literature Association, 1987. Moore, Arthur K. The Frontier Mind. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1957. Paxson, Frederic L. History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893. Boston: Houghton, 1924. Reich, Charles A. The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution Is Trying to Make America Livable. New York: Random, 1970. Riegel, Robert E. America Moves West. New York: Holt, 1930. Russell, Don. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960. Shepard, Sam. True West. London: Faber, 1981. Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier. New York: Simon, 1981. Sullivan, Tom R. Cowboys and Caudillos: Frontier Ideology of the Americas. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1990. Turner, Frederick Jackson. America’s Great Frontiers and Sections: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Unpublished Essays. Introd. Wilbur R. Jacobs. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. –. The Frontier in American History. Foreword by Ray Allen Billington. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Chapter VII Expressive Individualism and the Myth of the Self-Made Man 1. WHY THE SELF-MADE MAN? The legendary hero of America is the self-made man. IRVIN G. WYLLIE, THE SELF-MADE MAN IN AMERICA It is strange to see with what feverish ardour the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA Besides notions of religious predestination, political liberty, and social harmony, the imagined economic promises of the ‘new world’ constitute another important dimension of American exceptionalism and US foundational mythology. The popular phrase ‘rags to riches’ describes social mobility in analogy to geographical mobility in the discourse of westward expansion, the difference being that the latter refers to horizontal and the former to vertical mobility. Historically, the notion that upward mobility in US society is unlimited regardless of inherited social and financial status has been used to contrast the US to European societies with rigidly stratified social hierarchies, and to support the claim that the American economic system leads to a higher standard of living in general as well as to a higher degree of individual agency and economic opportunity; Myth and Symbol scholar David Potter, for example, described Americans within this framework of economic exceptionalism as a “people of plenty” and defined “economic abundance” as a decisive “force in US history” (People 75). In the 19th century, European visitors to the US, among them Alexis de Tocqueville (cf. Democracy), Joanna Trollope (cf. Domestic Manners), Harriet Martineau (cf. Society), and James Bryce (cf. American Commonwealth) have remarked on the hectic commercial activities of Americans and considered their peculiar pursuit of 368 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA material gain as an aspect of the American national character. In the 20th century, Theodor W. Adorno, who was more critical than many visitors before him, identified a culturally specific “barbarian success religion” in American society (“Tugendspiegel” 354). In its hegemonic version, the myth of the self-made man refers, first of all, to expressive individualism and individual success and describes a cultural type that is often seen as an “American invention” and a “unique national product” (Cawelti, Apostles 1). Second, based on the assumption of competitive equality, the self-made man has often been connected to utopian visions of a classless society, or at least to a society that allows considerable social mobility. Upon closer examination, the mirage of classlessness is often connected to the belief that most Americans belong to the middle class, into which most Americans will group themselves even in the face of contradictory empirical evidence: very few “will willingly say that they are in any other class” (Robertson, American Myth 259; cf. Mead, And Keep 54). The illusive conceptualization of the middle class as “homogenous and proximate” (Robertson, American Myth 260) entails not only notions of classlessness but also of democracy, freedom, and equality. This phenomenon has been dissected by Barbara Ehrenreich and others as a kind of ‘false consciousness’ which impedes social change (cf. Ehrenreich, Fear) and may also explain the relative absence of class as a concept and object of analysis throughout much of US social and intellectual history. Thirdly, the culturally specific figure and formula of the self-made man thrives according to all empirical evidence on the illusion that the exception is the rule (cf. Koch-Linde, Amerikanische Tagträume 9) and thus follows and time and again re-inscribes a social Darwinist logic based on the quasi-natural selection of those fit to compete and succeed in a modern “post-stratificatory society” (cf. Helmstetter, “Viel Erfolg” 709). According to this logic, there is little collective responsibility for the well-being of individual citizens. The illusion of equality – or rather of the equality of opportunity – is at the core of hegemonic discourses that describe social and political hierarchies in American society as temporary rather than as structural (cf. Fluck and Werner, “Einführung” 9). The national type of the self-made man and the creed of American mobility imply “parity in competition” (Potter, People 92), and, in fact, “an endless race open to all” (Thernstrom, Poverty 63) despite the fact that not all start out even or compete on an equal footing, and have been used to bolster the assumption that there are no permanent classes in US society. In “the doctrine of the open race” (ibid.), the providential success of the self-made man was identified with the success of the national project, and expressive individualism was thus regarded not only as the basis for individual but also for collective success. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 369 In many ways, the notion that individuals can determine their own future and change their lives for the better is a modern idea and presupposes modern notions of culture, society, and the individual along the lines of Immanuel Kant’s enlightenment dictum that man will be ‘what he makes of himself’ (Anthropologie 29), which later, in Sartre’s reformulation, becomes “[m]an is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Existentialism 10). This notion is the result of large-scale and complex processes of secularization that are quite at odds with Christian ethics, as it often flaunts competition, self-help, and ambition as its driving forces: “The competitive society out of which the success myth and the self-made man have grown may accept the Christian virtues in principle but can hardly observe them in practice” (Hofstadter, “Abraham Lincoln” 94). This connection – or rather disjunction – of ethics, ambition, and success plays out in culturally specific ways. In the present context, the idea of personal success is closely linked to processes of nation-building. The “pursuit of happiness” (as famously formulated in the Declaration of Independence) and the “promise of American life” (cf. Croly’s book of the same title) in their early exceptionalist logic transfer notions of happiness from the afterlife to one’s earthly existence, i.e. to the present moment or at least the near future. Coupled with the Calvinist work ethic, the pursuit of happiness constructs the modern individual’s path to happiness as the pursuit of property and allows for self-realization in new ways. This notion has already been at the center of 18th-century ‘new world’ promotional literature, which touted America as an earthly paradise. The self-made man as a foundational mythical figure personifies this promotional discourse, and has been used to allegorize the ‘new world’ social order since the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. Of course, this perspective is highly biased: the eighteenth-century enlightenment subject was conceptualized as white and male, and thus the myth of the self-made man historically applies to white men only; however, in this chapter we will also look at the ways in which this perspective has been revised or amended by other individuals and groups who have appropriated this myth. The coinage of the term “self-made man” is commonly credited to Henry Clay, who wrote in 1832: “In Kentucky, almost every manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising self-made men, who have whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor” (“Defence” 39). The term can thus be considered as yet another neologism of the early republic that speaks to specifically US-American cultural and economic patterns and is deeply intertwined with various aspects of American exceptionalism. There are contradictory forces at work in this notion, as it includes both aspects of self-denial (education, hard work, and discipline) and self-realization based on an ethic of self-interest that 370 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA aims at the sheer accumulation of property, recognition, prestige, and personal gain without any concern for others. This contradiction is explored repeatedly in scholarly as well as literary texts and in popular culture as the basic conundrum of a myth that defines self-interest as the basis of the common good rather than as an immersion “in the icy water of egotistical calculation” (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto). In this chapter, I will discuss, first, the history of the myth of the self-made man in the late 18th century and the foundational phase of the nation by reference to Benjamin Franklin’s writings and self-fashioning, and second, the popularization of success stories (such as those by Horatio Alger) in the 19th century; I will, third, analyze numerous rise-and-fall narratives and narratives of failure that mark the transition from romantic to realist and modernist representations and that fictionalize and criticize hegemonic ideological manoeuvers in the context of industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and consumer culture; I will analyze, fourth, immigrant fiction, which is often similarly ambivalent, fifth, African American constructions of the self-made man, and sixth, the feminization of this prototypically male formula with respect to the self-made woman; I will, seventh, conclude with some remarks on the myth of the self-made man in the age of globalization. 2. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, AMERICAN PARVENU The root of the matter is a peculiar sense of the self, at once buoyant and practical, visionary and manipulative. To make a self – such is the audacious undertaking that brings one into a world of masks and roles and shapeshifters, that requires one to manipulate beliefs and impressions, that elevates technical facility and gives one the heady sense of playing a game. The central document of such self making is Franklin’s Autobiography. GARY LINDBERG, THE CONFIDENCE MAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Get what you can, and what you get, hold; ‘Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) not only figures prominently in the myth of the Founding Fathers (cf. chapter 4) but has also typified the self-made man in American culture. As an autodidact who became one of the most respected Americans of his time (and beyond), he has often been considered the homo EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 371 americanus par excellence, and has been called “a model representative of the American Dream” (Huang and Mulford, “Benjamin Franklin” 147) and “a liberal capitalist hero” (Newman, “Benjamin Franklin” 173). His writings have been extraordinarily popular, especially his Poor Richard’s Almanack, of which 10.000 copies were printed each year from 1732 to 1758 and which by 1850 had been printed more than eighty times (cf. Huang and Mulford, “Benjamin Franklin” 150), and his Autobiography, which was published posthumously in English in 1793; both texts immediately turned into bestsellers, household names, and canonical material, and can be considered advice literature providing guidance on how to rise from “Obscurity” to “some Degree of Reputation in the World” (Franklin, Autobiography 1). Ever since the publication of Franklin’s memoirs, “autobiography has been the authoritative mode within which to imagine the self-made man” (Decker, Made in xxvii). Structured in four parts, they were composed by the author at different times in his life but never finished. Part one covers the first 21 years of his life in Boston and Philadelphia and narrates his childhood in poverty, his apprenticeship as a printer, his first journey to London, his marriage to Deborah Read, and his first professional success as a printer in Philadelphia. Part two is short and consists mostly of a self-improvement scheme that Franklin purportedly practiced on a daily basis; this “famous system of moral book keeping” (Cawelti, Apostles 20) has been quoted and emulated many times and reveals the didacticism of the text. In part three, Franklin says much about his achievements, among them the publication of his almanac, his study of foreign languages, and his initiatives in public affairs; this part ends with another journey to London on behalf of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. Part four is again brief and recounts his affairs in London; overall, Franklin’s text thus is a relatively disparate genre-mix. As a success story which recounts the life of a printer’s apprentice who becomes an internationally recognized statesman due to his “industry” and “frugality” (Autobiography 67), it displays the author’s modest origins as a dimension of his virtue rather than seeking to hide them, and thus also recodes ‘old-world’ resentments against social upstarts and ‘parvenus’ into evidence and manifestations of greater liberty, equality, and social justice in America (cf. Weber, Protestant Ethic 57). Even if some of the advice doled out by Franklin is tongue-in-cheek, he certainly represents an optimistic version of the American Dream of upward social mobility. His Autobiography has been received much in the vein of a success manual; the American frontiersman Davy Crockett apparently consulted it during the Battle of the Alamo (cf. Parini, Promised Land 79), and banker Thomas Mellon also speaks of having read the autobiography at a young and impressionable age and declares this experience “the turning point of my life” 372 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA (qtd. in Wyllie, Self-Made Man 15). In the 20th century, it has been referenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby (1925) as well as by Dale Carnegie in his 1936 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. In addition, “Franklin was a self-made man in far more than a literal sense: how he constructed and presented himself, and the ways in which such performances succeeded and failed, reveal a great deal about life and society in eighteenthcentury British North America” (Newman, “Benjamin Franklin” 162). Franklin’s self-fashioning celebrates individualism and free will against a deterministic social order, but it also affirms that everyone is responsible for their own fate and success in life: self-improvement and self-perfectability loom large in his texts, which were and still are part of US school curricula. Franklin’s audiences past and present read his ideas about the synergetic fusion of a paling Protestant religiosity (Franklin was a deist) and a Calvinist work ethic as enabling and fuelling a capitalist economy that promises individual and collective gain and well-being – the defense of capitalism is, time and again, the tacit subtext of the narratives of self-made men. It is this blend of religious ideas and economic aspects that the German sociologist Max Weber discusses prominently in his description of what he calls the Protestant Ethic in his book of the same title. According to Weber, Franklin embodies the new type of the homo americanus that has been molded in and advances the “spirit of capitalism” (cf. ibid.). This spirit – which Weber identifies in the North American colonies as early as 1632 (cf. ibid. 46) – is brought forth by Puritanism as well as by the economic development of the colonies, which together turned people into economic subjects (“Wirtschaftssubjekte”) on the basis of an increasingly secularized logic of work-discipline, which, however, still took material wealth as a sign of God’s blessing. Over time, though, success was less and less defined in religious terms, and instead became a kind of ‘sublime’ of the social world, a way of distinguishing one’s self (cf. Helmstetter, “Viel Erfolg” 706). Self-improvement, in Franklin’s and in Weber’s argument, involves competition as well as processes of selection, but whereas Franklin sees “the necessity of a self-selecting and selfdisciplining elite” (Cawelti, Apostles 14) and trusts the cultural and economic elite to work for the greater public good, Weber’s retrospective reconstruction of the capitalist ‘type’ is much more skeptical. Even as Franklin’s writings are often seen as embodying the era and zeitgeist of the early republic, it becomes clear upon closer inspection that they also gloss over serious developments which ensued during Franklin’s lifetime: During his [Franklin’s] lifetime wealth inequality rose in American towns and cities, and the economic security of craftsmen and unskilled labourers diminished. By the late eigh- EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 373 teenth century the traditional route to competency and independence that many working men had dreamed of, and which Franklin and some others had travelled, had become increasingly difficult. (Newman, “Benjamin Franklin” 167) Thus, Franklin’s success can in and of itself be considered an exception to the rule; whereas he personified the self-made man in no uncertain terms, his reception is often strongly decontextualized and smoothes out many contradictions that mark his historical persona, his time, and his idealism. Defining individual gain in terms of the greater common good clearly ignores the tension between two very different kinds of interest. 3. HORATIO ALGER AND THE POPULARIZATION OF THE SUCCESS NARRATIVE Only fools laugh at Horatio Alger, and his poor boys who make good. The wiser man who thinks twice about that sterling author will realize that Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks. NATHANAEL WEST/BORIS INGSTER, “A COOL MILLION” I felt that my foot was upon the ladder and that I was bound to climb. ANDREW CARNEGIE By the mid-19th century, the “ideology of mobility” was firmly entrenched in American society; it was the theme of “[e]ditorials, news stories, political speeches, commencement addresses, sermons, [and] popular fiction” (Thernstrom, Poverty 57-58). Representations of the self-made man in popular fiction are particularly prominent in this period in the oeuvre of Horatio Alger (1832- 1899), who was not only a prolific writer but also worked as an editor, teacher, and pastor. The American Heritage Dictionary defines Horatio Alger as the author of popular fiction about “impoverished boys who through hard work and virtue achieve great wealth and respect” (43); often living with a single mother who depends on him for support, Alger’s typical protagonist usually has a chance encounter with a gentleman, who becomes his mentor as the young protagonist shows his moral integrity, works hard, and thus appears to be deserving of help. At the end of the story, he ends up comfortably ensconced in middleclass America and “is established in a secure white-collar position, either as a clerk with the promise of a junior partnership or as a junior member of a successful mercantile establishment” (Cawelti, Apostles 109). Alger’s novels 374 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA pursue a thinly veiled didactic aim while they also cater to sensationalism, sentimentalism, and voyeurism. In the 19th century, the virtual “cult of the selfmade man” (Wyllie, Self-Made Man 13) was certainly propelled and reinforced by “Algerism,” as the popularity of the Horatio Alger stories came to be described, and even if his texts are hardly read anymore, Alger is still a household name today. Addressing a young, male audience, Alger’s 135 books, among them the well-known Ragged Dick series which comprises six novels (1868- 1870), have sold more than 300.000.000 copies. They “have structured national discourse as a narrative of personal initiative, enterprise, financial responsibility, thrift, equal opportunity, hard-work ethic, education and self-education, and other similar values of Puritan-Calvinist and liberal extraction” (Moraru, Rewriting 57) in seeming opposition to – yet ultimately in conjunction with – the so-called “bad boy-books” by Mark Twain and others that focused on a nostalgic “figurative escape into the pastoral, imaginative life of a premodern, anticapitalist world, while also embodying the enterprising and unsentimental agency of the capitalist himself” (Salazar, Bodies 75). In the 19th century, Alger’s books functioned as national allegories, since their adolescent protagonists’ rites of passage could be paralleled with the young republic’s struggle for independence (cf. Nackenoff, Fictional Republic 34, 38). Alger’s success as a writer diminished towards the end of his life, when his books became the object of criticism by an ‘anti-Alger movement’ which rallied to have his books removed from public libraries because they were deemed too trivial, “harmful,” and “bad,” and to cause a “softening [of] the brain” (ibid. 256; cf. Hendler, Public Sentiments 87-91). Alger’s stories became truly iconic in the first half of the 20th century, when the sales of his books, which were then used to identify the ‘American way of life’ in contrast to the ‘un-American’ notions of socialism and communism, rose sharply; ‘Cold War’ ideology thus enlisted Alger as “a patriotic defender of the social and political status quo and erstwhile advocate of laissez-faire capitalism” (Scharnhorst and Bales, Lost Life 152). It is during these decades that Algerism had its heyday. As Algerism came to signify “Americanism,” in many crucial ways “[t]he word of Alger excluded the word of Marx” (Hartz, Liberal Tradition 248). EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 375 Illustration 1: Rags to Riches Cover of Sink or Swim by H. Alger (Boston: Loring, 1870). Referring to the Horatio Alger stories as rags-to-riches narratives, however, may be an oversimplification, as John Cawelti has pointed out: First, because their protagonists never achieve success on their own but crucially rely on helper figures, a circumstance which somewhat mitigates the self-help impetus of Alger’s writings – Alger’s typical protagonist has “an astounding propensity for chance encounters with benevolent and useful friends, and his success is largely due to their patronage and assistance” (Cawelti, Apostles 109); this reliance on “magical outside assistance” (Trachtenberg, Incorporation 81) has led scholars to describe Alger’s famous hero Ragged Dick as a “male Cinderella-character in a postbellum America” (Moraru, Rewriting 56; cf. Nackenoff, Fictional Republic 275). Second, the protagonists of Alger’s tales never become spectacularly rich or successful – they rise from poverty to a comfortable middle-class status but never beyond that, and thus do not follow the get-rich-quick formula; in fact, we 376 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA may consider the rather nostalgic hankering after a “return to the age of innocence” (Salmi, “Success” 601) that can be discerned in Alger’s texts as indicative of his critical attitude toward “the greed of the Gilded Age” (Cawelti, Apostles 120), the large-scale “incorporation of America” (cf. Trachtenberg’s book of the same title), and the new mythology of “corporate individualism” (Robertson, American Myth 176). Yet, there are a number of issues that Horatio Alger stories evade, and these evasions carry ideological weight: Alger’s virtuous and deserving heroes never experience bad luck and are never threatened by downward mobility – they never become homeless tramps or drifters, or inhabit any other seriously stigmatized and disadvantaged social space (cf. Nackenoff, Fictional Republic 76); as they also typically strive for white-collar employment, the factory and the “factory system” as a locus of labor is effaced altogether (ibid. 88), and their success in the corporate world seems to be based solely on personal virtue and ambition: “Serve your employer well, learn business as rapidly as possible, don’t fall into bad habits, and you’ll get on” (Alger qtd. in ibid. 91); yet, this corporate world is at times also cast in a negative light: “The popular image of the business world held unresolved tensions; on the one hand, it seemed the field of just rewards, on the other, a realm of questionable motives and unbridled appetites” (Trachtenberg, Incorporation 80-81); thus Alger’s stories point to a fundamental conflict in the American experience which is vicariously solved in these narratives even if they hardly ever address it directly. Alger’s stories moreover pay no attention to how class distinctions can be maintained more subtly through manners and habitus (cf. Veblen, Theory) and how the lack of a particular habitus can prevent upward mobility; instead, they offer “a potentially seductive message” produced by an “amalgamation of moral and cultural elitism with egalitarianism” (Nackenoff, Fictional Republic 179) that optimistically suggests the complete permeability of social boundaries and thus mostly negate class differences proper. Satirical reworkings of the Horatio Alger story, whose theme of social mobility is heavily imbued with social Darwinist thinking, can be found, for instance, in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934) and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), whose protagonist, a fictionalized version of Richard Nixon, is reminiscent of Alger’s Ragged Dick. Alger’s long-term influence can also be detected in many other texts, genres, and stock characters in popular fiction, but he did not invent the success story formula and self-help-ethic that he helped popularize; a few success stories of the Alger kind had been published prior to the Civil War, among them Paddy O’Flarrity’s A Spur to Youth; or, Davy Crockett Beaten (1834), Charles F. Barnard’s The Life of Collin Reynolds, the Orphan Boy and Young Merchant (1835), and J.H. Ingraham’s Jemmy Daily, or, The Little News EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 377 Vender (1843), and it is in the 1850s that newsboys and bootblacks become common figures in popular literature (cf. Cawelti, Apostles 107). Yet, it is Alger among all self-help propagandists who lastingly shaped the cultural imaginary of Americans by adding to Franklin’s advice register a new success formula with sentimental, affective appeal which celebrated “the pleasures of property” (Hendler, Public Sentiments 101) even more thoroughly. Both Franklin’s and Alger’s formulas echo in many later representations of success in American culture, and have time and again been used as models for narrating success in the biographical and autobiographical vein. The self-made man as cultural script has been employed in order to describe individuals as different as Andrew Jackson (often referred to as the first self-made man in the White House), Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Carnegie, who also used the formula in their own self-fashioning. Thus, for instance, Abraham Lincoln, who has often been viewed as the quintessential self-made man, “himself nurtured this tradition of humble origins to accentuate his own rise from obscurity to distinction” and fashioned himself as a ‘common man’ for political purposes, and many of his biographers have followed this lead (Winkle, “Abraham Lincoln”). Richard Hofstadter in this vein sees Lincoln as a “pre-eminent example of that self-help which Americans have always so admired” (“Abraham Lincoln” 92), and quotes from Lincoln’s Address to the 166th Ohio Regiment: “I happen, temporarily, to occupy this White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child had” (ibid.). Lincoln’s rhetoric to some extent shares in the “glorification of poverty in the success cult’s ideology” (Wyllie, Self-Made Man 24), yet “the most publicized actors during the late nineteenth century were not politicians but a dynamic breed of entrepreneurs, such as Astor, Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller” (Decker, Made in xxvii). One of those entrepreneurs, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, published an article in 1889 titled “Wealth” (commonly referred to as “The Gospel of Wealth”), in which he programmatically (and somewhat hypocritically) reconnects wealth to social responsibility in a Franklinesque manner. In addition, Carnegie feels justified in advising the readers of his autobiography (published in 1920) about self-reliance and morality by repeatedly interspersing his account of how he spectacularly rose from poverty to become one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs with truisms such as “It is a great mistake not to seize the opportunity” (Autobiography 38) or “No kind action is ever lost” (ibid. 78), while failing to elaborate on certain less illustrious events in his life like his dubious role in the suppression of the 1892 Homestead Strike, which occurred at a steel works belonging to the Carnegie Steel Company. In order to evade and 378 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA counteract the question of how extremely wealthy people like him, despite “having everything they wanted, […] manage[d] to keep on wanting” (Michaels, “Corporate Fiction” 193), Carnegie turned to charity and welfare. His text is prefaced by his editor as follows: Nothing stranger ever came out of the Arabian Nights than the story of this poor Scotch boy who came to America and step by step, through many trials and triumphs, became the great steel master, built up a colossal industry, amassed an enormous fortune, and then deliberately and systematically gave away the whole of it for the enlightenment and betterment of mankind. (Van Dyke, Editor’s Note 5) ‘Giving away’ one’s wealth, of course, retrospectively affirms once more that one had earned and owned it legitimately. Charity thus seeks to close the gap between self-interest and the common good by ‘returning’ to the general public what had previously been extracted from it through often exploitative practices. In similar fashion to Carnegie, the Rockefeller family is linked to both ruthless business practices and philanthropy (e.g. through the Rockefeller Foundation). Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s corrupt business practices (such as the large-scale blackmailing of competitors) have been minutely chronicled in the voluminous History of the Standard Oil Company (1905), whose author, journalist and historian Ida Tarbell, regretted that despite the exposure of his unlawful monopolization of the oil industry public opinion did not turn against him. Although the court proceedings against him did lead to Progressivist antitrust legislation, as by that time “tensions between the business community and the rest of American society seemed to preoccupy the minds of many” (Kammen, People 266), Americans seem to admire Rockefeller as an impressive specimen of the self-made man even today. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 379 Illustration 2: Self-Made Monopolist C.J. Taylor, King of the World (n.d). The myth of the self-made man – with a story based on trust in the incentives of the capitalist market, adherence to the Protestant work ethic, and luck – may be the prototypical modern American fairy tale. Decker points out how “stories of entrepreneurial success confer ‘moral luck’ – a secular version of divine grace – on their upwardly mobile protagonists” (Made in xxviii). Success stories thus can easily be considered American fairy tales with a providential twist, and as such they echo in and are invoked by many cultural productions from 19th -century popular fiction to 20th- and 21st-century Hollywood films. Their protagonist, the self-made man, personifies the American dream as wishful thinking and wish-fulfillment at the same time: “[T]he assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and dreams” (Mead, And Keep 68). As part dream, part fantasy, and part prophecy, the foundational myth of the self-made man seems to be powerful enough to defy the overwhelming evidence of its own baselessness. 380 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 4. CRISES OF SELF-MADE MANHOOD IN AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE THE 19TH CENTURY The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word “success” – is our national disease. WILLIAM JAMES I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. JAY GATSBY IN THE GREAT GATSBY Success narratives and the ‘new world’ social order they project of course have not gone unchallenged. In this section, I will exemplarily discuss literary texts – short stories, novels, essays, and poetry – which from the beginning have provided critical perspectives on the success myth. My first example will be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832); written and published more than 40 years after Franklin’s death, it offers a quite skeptical view on the transitional process at the end of which the self-made man emerged as a new cultural type in North America. An initiation story set in the pre-revolutionary period, the text revolves around Robin, a young man who goes to Boston, where his uncle, a high-ranking official in the colonial government – titular character Major Molineux – is supposed to act on his behalf and help him to settle in. Throughout the story, Robin is in search of his uncle and invokes him as a paternal authority figure and benefactor, but when he finally meets him at the story’s traumatic climax, the Major has been tarred and feathered and is paraded through the town by an angry revolutionary mob. Seeing that his uncle has lost his position of authority, Robin does not even consider attempting to establish himself in the city without the Major’s support and wishes to return to his home, yet a fatherly friend advises him to stay and try to “rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux” (19). The short story plays off the notions of European social hierarchy and ‘new world’ equality against each other and “takes part in the cultural process that constructs self-made manhood” (Walter, “Doing” 21) as it narrates the shift from “the social habits of deferential hierarchy” (ibid. 23) to self-made manhood and democracy by having Robin display the former throughout much of the story until in the end, he is rudely confronted with the advent of the latter. Hawthorne’s ambivalence regarding revolutionary upheaval has often been noted and is evident in the unflattering depiction of the mob (cf. Bercovitch, Office); “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” can thus also be read as a critique of the self-made man (cf. Leverenz, Manhood EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 381 235), as the story points to the violence that accompanies his emergence. While Franklin’s projection of upward mobility seems rather enthusiastic and embraces the full spectrum of economic success, social respectability, and participation in public life for the greater common good, other writers of the early republic, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Kirke Paulding, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, were more ambivalent toward the abolition of established social hierarchies and less eager to celebrate the new national ideal of ‘equality.’ Self-made manhood is accentuated in yet another way by Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who connect it to an inner-directed way of life rather than to notions of material success and social permeability. Both writers thus critically comment on Franklin’s success credo by providing a decidedly anti-materialistic and spiritual perspective on selfculture and “self-reliance” (cf. Emerson’s famous essay of the same title). In his late poem “Success,” Emerson contrasts success based on “the exact laws of reciprocity” and the “sentiment of love and heroism” with success that rests on “a system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving, but of taking advantage” (232); for Emerson, the focus on outward success in hegemonic conceptualizations of the self-made man produce and conceal self-estrangement and alienation. Henry David Thoreau picks up on this theme in Walden (1854) when he states that “[t]he mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (8). In Walden, which recounts how Thoreau lived for two years in solitude in a hut at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, the author seems to mock Franklin when he elaborates in the first lengthy chapter titled “Economy” on how he has to live frugally due to his limited financial means, and even offers the statistics he used to calculate his living expenses. Thoreau’s concept of selfmaking can be considered anti-Franklinesque in that it rejects the rags-to-riches scheme by following a reverse trajectory that seemingly moves from ‘riches’ to ‘rags’ (cf. Parini, Promised Land 115-17). The 19th-century Transcendentalist tradition, of which Emerson and Thoreau are two of the most famous representatives, will in the following continue to critically flank more positive (and popular) representations of the self-made man in the American history of ideas and culture. Another prominent and highly complex (if not enigmatic) 19th-century text that provides a critique of the widely celebrated culture of self-help, optimism, success, and the self-made man certainly is Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story from Wall Street” (1853), which revolves around a young man who is hired by a successful elderly Wall Street lawyer (the story’s narrator) as a copyist. This young man – the story’s title character – refuses to function in a rationalized capitalist economy; when asked to perform certain tasks by his 382 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA employer, he answers “I would prefer not to” (10). Bartleby’s repetition of this speech act appears, as critics have pointed out, to bear some self-referential quality (cf. Deleuze, Bartleby 19); his regressive development, which is an unmaking rather than self-making, contrasts with the career path of his employer, who qualifies as a self-made man and whose worldview thus prevents him from making sense of Bartleby and his actions. Upon first meeting him, he comments: “I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically” (10). The themes of isolation and alienation have repeatedly been pointed out by critics such as Leo Marx, who has read the story as a critique of capitalism (cf. “Melville’s Parable” 605), and Louise Barnett, who has called Bartleby an “alienated worker” in the “numbing world of capitalist profit and alienated labor” (“Bartleby” 385); and yet, Bartleby’s self-assertion is neither compliance nor refusal in that it preserves a balance between affirmation and negation, as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out (cf. Bartleby 38). Michael Rogin calls attention to Bartleby’s “passive resistance” (Subversive Genealogies 195), which is explicitly acknowledged in the story by his employer: “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance” (13); Rogin thus considers the story in terms of its political message: Bartleby protests, with “passive resistance,” against his condition. In refusing to copy, he is copying Thoreau. “I simply wish to refuse allegiance,” announced Thoreau, “to withdraw.” Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” is an echo of “Civil Disobedience.” (Subversive Genealogies 195) The connection between Melville’s character Bartleby and Thoreau’s writings has also been established by other critics: “Bartleby represents the only real, if ultimately ineffective, threat to society; his experience gives some support to Henry Thoreau’s view that one lone intransigent man can shake the foundations of our institutions” (Marx, “Melville’s Parable” 621). Whereas Dan McCall considers an exclusively economic interpretation of Melville’s “Bartleby” as perhaps too narrow in view of the existential angst that this story confronts us with (cf. Silence), such an interpretation is certainly correct in pointing out that the story has the hegemonic discourse of the self-made man appear as profoundly lacking in the “humanity” that its narrator in the end proclaims upon the death of his former employee. In the last decades of the 19th century – a period that in reference to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel of the same title has been called the Gilded Age – and in the early 20th century, class and class difference were explored by realist/naturalist writers such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 383 Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser, in whose works the US does not at all appear as an egalitarian but instead as a highly stratified society with finelytuned mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. These mechanisms are often examined by these authors with the aid of characters representing the businessman as the prototype of the self-made man in the emerging corporate America; one example of such a businessman is Silas Lapham, the title character of William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), a so-called nouveau riche who, having made a fortune in the mineral paint business, seeks to increase his social status by building a mansion in a fashionable Boston neighborhood and by having one of his daughters marry Tom Corey, the son of a genteel family that has less economic but far more social and cultural capital than the Laphams; for the Coreys however, the fact that Lapham is a self-made millionaire does not compensate for his lack of etiquette and his proud and boastful manner. When Lapham finally makes a decision that is ethically right but costs him much of his fortune, the Laphams move back to their family home in the countryside and accept their financial decline that returns them to middle-class status, which in the logic of the novel is a return to moral integrity (cf. Fluck, Inszenierte Wirklichkeit 226). By construing capitalism and the “superabundance” connected to the self-made man as “a violation of the old ways and of the family itself” (Michaels, Gold Standard 39) and Lapham’s bankruptcy as leading to his redemption (cf. ibid. 40), the novel reflects on the psychological costs of self-made manhood and suggests a chiastic relation between material success and moral self-realization, as upward mobility in economic terms comes at the cost of alienation and moral decline, whereas financial ruin leads to true self-discovery. Thus, the ending may be considered positive, if not happy (cf. Boesenberg, Money 137). Howell’s novel can be described as an “inverted success story” (Fluck, Inszenierte Wirklichkeit 281) that reflects on changes in American culture; according to Donald Pease, the novel provided a representative account of the conflict, following the transition from a predominantly agrarian to an industrialized nation, between the restraint of self-made men and the unrestrained self-interest of laissez-faire individualists. […] In this transition, the selfmade man was replaced by the competitive personality, who depended less on his faith in character and more on the power of his drives to get whatever he wanted. (“Introduction” 15-16) The figure of the self-made man is used in Howells’s novel to critique a historical turning point after which economic success was increasingly achieved through speculation rather than work; that Silas Lapham remains bound to a tra- 384 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ditional work ethic eventually makes him lose his self-made status under the conditions of a changing economic system. Stephen Crane’s late short story “A Self-Made Man” (1899) is lighter in tone and offers an ironic perspective on the subject of upward mobility; in this “little parody” (Solomon, Stephen Crane 60), Tom, a young man without means, becomes successful after helping an illiterate old man he happens to meet on the street regain his property by posing as his lawyer; even if Tom realizes that “he had not succeeded sooner because he did not know a man who knew another man” (129) – adding connections, or social capital, to chance and deceit as reasons for his success – the narrator ironically remarks near the end of the story that Tom’s “fame has spread through the land as a man who carved his way to fortune with no help but his undaunted pluck, his tireless energy, and his sterling integrity” (ibid.). That Crane satirizes the Horatio Alger formula as well as the genre of self-help and advice literature becomes even more obvious from the subtitle of the story – “An Example of Success That Any One Can Follow” – and from its ending, where its protagonist, who developed from “Tom” into “Thomas G. Somebody” (ibid.), “gives the best possible advice as to how to become wealthy” to “struggling young men” in newspaper articles (ibid.). The (preliminary) endpoint of the self-made man’s development from a rural to an industrial and finally to a market-oriented and corporate figure seems to have been reached with The Great Gatsby (1925), whose titular character in Lionel Trilling’s view is an allegorical figure that “comes inevitably to stand for America itself” (Liberal Imagination 251). Much of the scholarship on Fitzgerald’s novel has focused on the American dream, or rather “the withering of the American dream” (Tyson, Critical Theory 69). However, it is noteworthy to point out that ‘American dream’ as a catchword became popular only with the publication of James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America (1931); thus, Fitzgerald’s novel, by using interconnected characters of different backgrounds – Gatsby, a self-made man who has acquired his status and wealth by using dubious means, narrator Nick Carraway, an ambitious young man, the upper-class Buchanans, and the working-class Wilsons – deconstructs an implicit exceptionalist understanding of success in US society years before it was explicated in Adams’s book. Self-made manhood in the context of corporate and consumer culture has also been paradigmatically embodied by the figure of the salesman. Whereas salesmen “were heralded as the self-made men of the new century” (Kimmel, Manhood 71), they were also used as allegorical figures in texts that critiqued success ideology; a prominent example of the latter is Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), which revolves around protagonist Willy Loman’s EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 385 futile attempts at self-making in a culture characterized by affluence, mass-production, and an economic rationale that ultimately considers human beings just as expendable as the (mass) goods they produce and sell. Loman’s materialistic worldview renders him a paradigmatic specimen of what David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney refer to as “outer-directed” individuals in their sociological study of character in corporate America, The Lonely Crowd (1950). Beside Miller’s play, there have been numerous literary texts (as well as other cultural productions) that have more or less critically dealt with corporate culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, among them for example Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit (1922), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974), and, more recently, the television series Mad Men (2007-). The works I discussed in this section exemplarily show that the self-made man has not only been a figure of consensus but also one of controversy and criticism. By expressing anxieties about the overthrow of established social hierarchies, offering spiritual conceptualizations of self-making, critiquing capitalism and corporatism, or warning of the fleeting nature of material wealth, all of these texts point to the precariousness of dominant white, masculinist, and individualist notions of self-made manhood in the US. 5. “LAND OF OPPORTUNITY”? IMMIGRANT STORIES OF SELF-MAKING The American dream, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the impact of mass immigration came to understand it, was neither the dream of the American Revolution – the foundation of freedom – nor the dream of the French Revolution – the liberation of man; it was, unhappily, the dream of a “promised land” where milk and honey flow. And the fact that the development of modern technology was so soon able to realize this dream beyond anyone’s wildest expectation quite naturally had the effect of confirming for the dreamers that they really had come to live in the best of all possible worlds. HANNAH ARENDT, ON REVOLUTION The notions of upward social mobility and the pursuit of the American dream have often been connected to the immigrant experience. Despite the fact that stories in the Horatio Alger vein at times displayed a nativist streak, immigrant authors too used the narrative formula popularized by Alger to frame the topics of immigration and Americanization in the context of individual success and 386 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA self-making. Beginning a new life in the US in these texts is represented as a process of (predominantly cultural) change and transformation, and is rendered in the same civil religious diction that also shapes many discussions of the melting pot (cf. chapter 5). However, even if immigrants often comment on the fact that the standard of living in the US is higher than in their countries of origin, they have no illusions as to the hierarchies that structure US society, even if these hierarchies may be relatively permeable. For the sake of a systematic approach, I would like to identify four different patterns that underlie representations of the immigrant experience in American literature and popular culture from the mid-19th century to the present and that articulate different degrees of affirmation and critique of the myth of the selfmade man. The first consists of success narratives that mostly conclude with a happy ending and feature successful and well-adjusted (i.e. assimilated) protagonists that take pride in their own achievements in a society which is usually described as rewarding hard work, discipline, and stamina. Success may come in different forms and need not be limited to financial success – often, it is connected to gaining an education, overcoming particular obstacles in life, or to achieving public recognition (sometimes even fame). Among this first type of self-made narratives, I group Scottish American Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography; early immigrant tales such as Jewish American Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land (1912) and Arab American Abraham Mitrie Rihbany’s memoir A Far Journey (1914); and more contemporary texts such as Richard Rodriguez’s assimilationist autobiography Hunger of Memory (1982) and Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989), which features a female immigrant protagonist. Selfmade success can also be achieved through physical self-discipline, as Italian American Rocky Balboa’s boxing pursuits in Rocky (1976) show. The career of Austrian American Arnold Schwarzenegger, who quite recently published his celebrity memoir Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story (2012), points to yet other arenas of self-making; his remark that “[i]f there is one thing in this world that I despise, it’s losers!” (Schwarzenegger qtd. in Halberstam, Queer Art 5) is symptomatic of a cult(ure) of self-made manhood that glorifies the success of individuals and denigrates those who are unsuccessful. Historically, immigrants used a number of metaphors to frame their experience of the ‘new world;’ Chinese Americans for example referred to Western North America as the ‘Gold Mountain,’ whereas arrivals from the East referred to Ellis Island as the “golden door” (cf. Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem “The New Colossus,” which is engraved on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty), even if there was little to idealize about the experience of internment, inspection, and admission immigrants had to en- EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 387 dure there. Today, the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island hosts the Bob Hope Memorial Library in honor of the English-born entertainer who after arriving at Ellis Island in 1908 went on to become one of America’s most famous and successful self-made celebrities – and one of the most patriotic ones too (cf. Zoglin, “Bob Hope”). To summarize, immigrant voices and stories of the type outlined above articulate the hegemonic version of the myth of the self-made man and affirm exceptionalist notions of the US as a society in which anyone can achieve success through individual talent, hard work, and discipline. The second type of immigrant tales in contrast is less unequivocally committed to the American success mythology, and consists of narratives of upward mobility that end on not quite so happy a note or consider the downside of success – in fact, outward success may even be paired with a sense of failure, loss, and alienation. This discrepancy becomes evident, for instance, in Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), in which the titular character and first-person narrator has to realize that money and success do not provide happiness (525-26); echoing the work of Cahan’s mentor Howells, the novel constructs a chiastic relation between feelings of loss and economic gain, and offers an ironic commentary on the mythology of success and self-making. Similarly, Paule Marshall’s novels about the Caribbean-American immigrant experience reveal the discrepancy between material aspirations and non-material longings, for instance in Brown Girl, Brownstones (1957), where we encounter a profound generation gap between the first-generation immigrant Silla, who pursues material success at any cost, and her daughter Selina, who dreams of less tangible things like falling in love and becoming a dancer. Self-making is addressed in a somewhat ironic as well as magical realist fashion in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), where the house referenced in the title, while superficially representing material gain and upward mobility, at closer inspection turns out to be a metaphor for belonging and shelter against male abuse. All of these texts thus represent immigrant perspectives from which notions of self-making and upward mobility appear problematic. In contrast to those who can be (with all due modifications) considered as self-made personae, there is a third variant: stories that address the ‘other’ side of winning and self-making, a perspective that even more strongly articulates counter-hegemonic aspects. Scholars have pointed out that many of those immigrant narratives critical of the success myth were written in languages other than English even as they were printed in the US. Werner Sollors (cf. Multilingual America), Orm Øverland (cf. Immigrant Minds), and others have pointed to the connection between multilingualism and non-conformity in American literature, and Karen Majewski’s reading of Polish-language immigrant writings 388 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA by Alfons Chrostowski (e.g. “The Polish Slave”), Bronislaw Wrotnowski, and Helena Stas (e.g. “In the Human Market: A Polish-American Sketch”) also points to this connection (cf. Majewski, “Crossings”). Often written in a naturalist mode, these narratives, of which some were recorded and fictionalized by Progressivist reformers, naturalist writers, and so-called muckraking journalists, are part of a discourse of failure that is situated at a distance from notions of American civil religion, patriotism, and exceptionalism. The slums of New York City, where much of the immigrant population lived at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, have been famously captured by Danish American journalist and photographer Jacob Riis in his book How the Other Half Lives (1890). Similarly, Stephan Thernstrom chronicles the lives of those who are at the bottom of society in his The Other Bostonians (1973). Many American critics of the selfmade myth in and around what Daniel Bell has described as “the ‘golden age’ of American socialism” (Marxian Socialism 55) – the years from 1902 to 1912 – had other ideas than laissez-faire capitalism for realizing a truly egalitarian society; “Chicago Will Be Ours!” is the socialist prophecy at the end of Upton Sinclair’s naturalist novel The Jungle (1906), which provides another bleak vision of the immigrant experience in American society by describing the merciless exploitation and destruction of a Lithuanian family who works in the Chicago meat packing industry. The family, once full of enthusiasm for America, realizes that immigrant life is “no fairy tale” (143), as their attempts at improving their lot – and even at survival – are defeated: “They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside” (144). Narratives of immigrant failure thus are obviously at odds with the hegemonic version of the self-made man and expose the underside of the myth. They also reveal the myth’s often unacknowledged social Darwinist underpinnings, as the myth’s hegemonic version shrugs off the fact that it is not success and self-making but sheer survival that is at stake for many immigrants in a society that is characterized by gross class inequities. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 389 Illustration 3: Muckraking Photography Photograph from How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890). Lastly, a fourth kind of formula explores alternative modes of self-making and success that often transgress the bounds of legality, and thus also do not follow the dominant version of the success myth. These narratives acknowledge the difficulties of immigrant life in the US that arise from nativist resentments and other forms of discrimination against immigrants that often make assimilation impossible or undesirable, and thus locate success not within the American mainstream but in family- or ethnically-based criminal organizations and in plots revolving around a central gangster figure (cf. Dickstein, Dancing 313). A prominent example of this kind of tale is the Godfather saga (cf. Mario Puzo’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s film of the same title, as well as the sequels they spawned), which exemplifies an immigrant success formula based on maneuvering at the limits of (and beyond) legality and in socio-economic niches. In fact, as John Cawelti already argued in the 1970s, we find “a new mythology of crime” that reveals a fascination with power and corruption (“New Mythology” 335); this fascination, however, may be explained not only by the allure of glamorized depictions of organized crime but also by the fact that organized crime in many ways reflects rather than contrasts with what often hardly deserves to be 390 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA called ‘honest’ business in the US: Daniel Bell argues that “organized crime resembles the kind of ruthless business enterprise which successful Americans have always carried on” (qtd. in ibid. 347); thus, “[t]he drama of the criminal gang has become a kind of allegory of the corporation and the corporate society” which conveys “the dark message that America is a society of criminals” (ibid. 353, 355). Seen in this light, immigrant gangs and robber barons may be more closely connected than is immediately evident. More recently, the Godfather formula was taken up in the television series The Sopranos (1999-2007) as well as by a host of other series who focus on the self-making of characters conventionally thought of as ‘criminals.’ Beside Italian American mafia dynasties, Irish Americans also figure prominently in this alternative success myth, for example in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), which dramatizes nativist and Irish gang life against the backdrop of the New York Draft Riots of 1863 and other contemporaneous historical events. The four different ‘success’ patterns that we can detect in representations of the immigrant experience thus cover a broad spectrum of responses to the myth of the self-made man: affirmative ones that tend to mimic older rags-to-riches narratives; mildly affirmative ones that often substitute material gain with nonmaterial notions of success; highly critical ones that mostly focus on failure (caused by adverse circumstances and discrimination) rather than success; and mildly critical ones that sidestep the legal framework of the success myth but champion material success nonetheless. In all of these versions, the self-made man (or woman) appears as a more or less contested prototype of American entrepreneurship, whereas social stratification and systemic inequality are more systematically addressed only selectively by writers and critics who are invested in a socialist agenda that often does not stop at national borders and thus more fundamentally critiques the myth of the self-made man along with notions of American exceptionalism. 6. THE MYTH OF SELF-MADE MEN (AND WOMEN) AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN IMAGINATION To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. W.E.B. DUBOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK Conventional versions of the figure of the self-made man as white (and male) have excluded many groups and minorities, among them African Americans. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 391 Yet, as the self-made man has been such a prominent figure of empowerment, emancipation, self-reliance, and autonomy in the American cultural imagination, it is perhaps not surprising that African American writers and intellectuals took up the image as well as its cultural scripts of success and appropriated them for their own ends. In this section, I will thus trace the critical as well as affirmative responses to the powerful cultural prototype of the self-made man that can be found in African American cultural criticism, literature, and popular culture from Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama. Scholars of slavery have argued for viewing the early African American literary form of the slave narrative as a modification of the success myth: When using a broad definition of the self-made man, we may consider the author/ narrator of the slave narrative as a subject that has refigured himself (or herself) as a free person. This kind of interpretation prioritizes notions of freedom and emancipation over ideas of upward mobility and economic abundance, and turns the African American freedman or runaway slave into a paradigmatic exemplum of the self-made man who triumphs over adversity due to his own strength and perseverance and infuses a strong moral sense into the discourse of the self-made man. Frederick Douglass (1817/18-1895) for instance documents in his autobiography his own process of emancipation in a way that strongly resonates with the myth of the self-made man. Douglass, who certainly had read Franklin (he quotes Franklin’s aphorisms every once in a while in his own writings), and admired him, among other things, for being the President of the first Abolition Society in America, has often been called “a sort of Negro edition of Ben Franklin” (Alain Locke qtd. in Zafar, “Franklinian Douglass” 99). In his writings, Douglass himself reacted ambivalently to being called a self-made man: I have sometimes been credited with having been the architect of my own fortune, and have pretty generally received the title of a “self-made man;” and while I cannot altogether disclaim this title, when I look back over the facts of my life, and consider the helpful influences exerted upon me, by friends more fortunately born and educated than myself, I am compelled to give them at least an equal measure of credit, with myself, for the success which has attended my labours in life. (Life 900) Rather than identifying with notions of the self-made man, Douglass reacts to this appellation with modesty, and seeks to give credit for his success to a collective agency of helpers and supporters of the abolitionist cause. Focusing on the assistance and support needed to become a self-made man, Douglass thus modifies the myth of the self-made man to suggest that there is a collective of helpers 392 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA surrounding self-made men that should not be ignored for the purpose of elevating the individual in an undue manner. Apart from referring to the self-made myth in his autobiographical writings, Douglass also wrote a talk titled “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men,” which he delivered in slightly different versions on more than 50 occasions in the US, Canada, and Great Britain between 1859 and 1893, and which has been referred to as his “most familiar lecture” (McFeely, Frederick Douglass 298). Even if “Douglass’ standard speech on ‘Self-Made Men’ accentuated the morality of success rather than its economics” (Martin, “Images” 275), it has a slightly chauvinistic ring to it that stands in contrast to many other descriptions he offers about antebellum and postbellum American society. In fact, it is astounding that he writes the following lines in the pre-Civil War version of the talk: I seldom find anything either in the ideas or institutions of that country, whereof to glory. […] But pushing aside this black and clotted covering which mantles all our land, as with the shadow of death, I recognize one feature at least of special and peculiar excellence, and that is the relation of America to self-made men. America is, most unquestionably and pre-eminently, the home and special patron of self-made men. In no country in the world are the conditions more favourable to the production and sustenation of such men than in America. (“Trials” 297) In the version of this lecture that is included in John Blassingame’s edition of Frederick Douglass’s collected writings, we find the self-made man positioned at the heart of a work ethic that Douglass formulates in often proverbial and metaphorical language which frequently refers to labor, exertion, necessity, selfreliance, good work habits, industry, and uplift (ibid. 294, 298). That Douglass shares in the exceptionalist discourse of the self-made man to such an extent is perhaps somewhat surprising, and it seems awkward, if not outright cynical, that he would sweep aside his criticism of slavery that can be found elsewhere in his writings in the process; as to how it was possible for an ex-slave and abolitionist intellectual to embrace the hegemonic version of the success myth remains open to speculation. After Douglass’s awkward affirmation of the self-made man despite the institution of slavery and rampant racism in US society, other African American intellectuals also referred to and appropriated the white success mythology. The title of Booker T. Washington’s (1856-1915) Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901) for example clearly borrows from the notion of upward mobility, which in the book is connected to educational achievement and economic success. Like Franklin, Washington conceives of the public good and of republican EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 393 virtue as compatible with economic self-interest and material gain, and many contemporaneous reviewers of his book – e.g. in the Nation (April 4, 1901), the New York Times (June 15, 1901), and Atlantic Monthly (June 1901) – pointed out exactly this parallel (cf. Kafka, Great White 9). Phillipa Kafka similarly holds that “Booker T. Washington was the mediator for African Americans of the European American success mythology as personified by Benjamin Franklin” (ibid. 3). She considers Up from Slavery as the narrative of a self-made man seeking to expand white success mythologies, as the text begins with the statement that “[m]y life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings” (Up from 15) and ends with Washington’s account of being awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1896 (he is also invited to dine at the White House by US president Theodore Roosevelt in 1901). In statements such as “I believe that any man’s life will be filled with constant, unexpected encouragements of this kind if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day of his life” (Up from 133), Washington’s wording echoes Franklin’s aphorisms. In contrast to more critical assessments of Washington’s accommodationist views, Houston Baker sees him as providing a “how-to manual, setting forth strategies of address (ways of talking black and back) designed for Afro-American empowerment” (Modernism 32) based on a realistic assessment of the options of African Americans in the Southern US at the time. Even if Douglass and Washington, two of the most prominent figures who contributed to the discourse of black self-making, exemplify the tendency in the African American history of ideas to conceive of self-made success figures as male (just as in its hegemonic white counterpart), we find female embodiments as well, for example in Ann Petry’s naturalistic novel The Street (1946), whose protagonist, Lutie Johnson, a self-supporting, single mother, tries to emulate the ideal of self-making. At one point, having just found new employment, she imagines herself in Benjamin Franklin’s footsteps – almost: She walked slowly, avoiding the moment when she must enter the apartment and start fixing dinner. She shifted the packages into a more comfortable position and feeling the hard roundness of the rolls through the paper bag, she thought immediately of Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread. And grinned thinking, You and Ben Franklin. You ought to take one out and start eating it as you walk along 116th Street. Only you ought to remember while you eat that you’re in Harlem and he was in Philadelphia a pretty long number of years ago. Yet she couldn’t get rid of the feeling of self-confidence and she went on thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she. […] 394 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA You better get your dinner started, Ben Franklin, she said to herself and walked past the children who were jumping rope. (64) As a Black woman, the novel suggests, the odds are against her, however hard she may try to make a living for herself and her son, and she begins to completely lose her sense of agency as she realizes that despite all her efforts at selfimprovement she will forever be kept down by the structural forces of racism and classism: All those years, going to grammar school, going to high school, getting married, having a baby, going to work for the Chandlers, leaving Jim because he got himself another woman – all those years she’d been heading straight as an arrow for that street or some other street just like it. (426) Petry, who was associated with the Communist Party, as Alan Wald points out (cf. American Night 88), addresses “the postwar crisis of the vision of the 1930s in relation to Black America” (ibid. 155). Failure, rather than success, is explored in her oeuvre, and this is also true for many other texts by African American women writers such as Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayle Jones. Somewhat in contrast to Petry’s account of a failed self-made woman stands Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982), which narrates the story of two sisters, Celie and Nettie; even if their lives are characterized by acts of the most brutal patriarchal violence, abuse, and oppression, the novel ends fairly happy, with Celie becoming a self-made woman who supports herself as a tailor and owns her own house. The novel has been criticized for both its explicit depiction of violence and sexual abuse (according to the American Library Association, it is one of the most frequently challenged books) and for its somewhat implausible, (pseudo-)emancipatory happy ending. Hollywood films constitute another arena in which we find many representations of black social mobility and immobility. It is noteworthy that even quite recent productions often depict African American characters as being content with holding subordinate social positions, even if they are the protagonists of the films in question. In Driving Miss Daisy (1989) for example, the African American Hoke (Morgan Freeman) is happy to be employed as a chauffeur by the elderly Miss Daisy (Jessica Tandy), and even though the film acknowledges racism and anti-Semitism, it also affirms a racially stratified social order. The controversially discussed adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 bestseller The Help (2011), which again portrays African American characters in a position of servitude, arguably similarly downplays past and present racial discrimination EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 395 and black subordination by way of a sentimental politics of representation. Another puzzling example that calls for a thorough critique of black representation is The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) starring Will Smith as Chris Gardner, a homeless African American salesman and single parent who against all odds lands an unpaid internship at a brokerage firm, is then taken on as a paid employee, and finally goes on to become a millionaire. Instead of using its premise – unemployment, social insecurity, and poverty in an increasingly finance-driven economy – to formulate a critique of the financial sector in particular and of US society at large, the film thus turns out to be yet another celebration of individualism and self-reliance. Gardner tells his son: “Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t do something. […] You got a dream, you gotta protect it. […] If you want something, go get it. Period.” This American Dream narrative may well be described as postracial, if only for the very fact that it does not acknowledge the blackness of its protagonist: as Gardner is never interpellated as black and racism is never explicitly addressed in the film (cf. Gerund and Koetzing, “This Part” 203), The Pursuit of Happyness seems to deny race as a factor that co-determines social (im)mobility by once more celebrating the exception as the rule. Self-making as a cultural script has been used to fashion African Americans as heroes and heroines not only in the realm of business and enterprise but also in many other areas such as the entertainment industry, sports, and – less often – politics. Media personality Oprah Winfrey for instance, who grew up in rural poverty, went on to become one of the richest self-made women in the US, and can easily be considered to be the most prominent icon of black female success. In her talks, she affirms notions of expressive individualism and the myth of self-making by once more reiterating the claims that hard work, moral integrity, and discipline lead to material success and that experiences of crisis and failure – rather than being indicative of larger social, political, and economic problems – constitute chances for self-improvement. In this sense, her philanthropy and the laudatory discourse within and by which her philanthropic and charitable activities are framed and promoted (not least by herself) function as complementing and enhancing her own success myth: philanthropy and charity become part of an entrepreneurial scheme that – not unlike Rockefeller’s and Carnegie’s approach – attempts to forestall and defuse any critique of structural injustice and inequality. Again, because Oprah Winfrey has her own autobiographical narrative of success and conversion to offer and to share, she can speak with the authority of experience about the business of self-making, adding positive thinking and pop psychology in “a trademark combination of pathos and uplift” 396 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA (Watts, Self-Help Messiah 495) as enabling forces to the myth while figuring as a living exemplum herself. Barack Obama – whose rise to the highest political office in the US has often been rendered according to the standard narrative formula of the success myth – has also himself appropriated the myth of the self-made man in many instances, for example in the following passage from the speech he gave in Berlin on July 24, 2008: I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father – my grandfather – was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. (“World”) Whereas Obama here appropriates the cultural script of the white success mythology to frame his own family’s story (from domestic servant to US president in the course of two generations) and more generally contributes to the mythic discourse of the land of opportunity in his book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), he has also somewhat inconsistently and provocatively issued criticism of the myth of the self-made man, for instance in a speech he held in the course of his re-election campaign on July 13, 2012 in Roanoke, Virginia: [L]ook, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. You [wealthy people] moved your goods on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for. (“Remarks”) Even if phrases such as “this unbelievable American system” reinforce longstanding assumptions about America’s exceptionality, they at the same time also emphasize the public sector and communal efforts as prerequisites for individual EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 397 success, and thus counter the hegemonic version of the myth of the self-made man. Obama’s speech has been denounced as a call for “massive redistribution” (Goodman, “Obama”) and as “contradict[ing] the belief in American exceptionalism, that is: Laissez faire economics, equality of opportunity, individualism, and popular but limited self-government” (Stepman, “Obama’s Philosophy”); these responses reveal that remarks that challenge the ideology of individual success, whose function it is after all to provide a justification for the social order, will be immediately perceived as a threat to the economic status quo by conservatives like the above-quoted critics, who thus attempt to bolster the myth of self-making by evading and intentionally blurring the question as to whether wealth is actually distributed fairly in a capitalist system. In sum, we can thus identify different aims for which the myth of the selfmade man has been used in African American intellectual history, culture, and individual (self)-representations, for example, to construct a positive image of black masculinity and to claim recognition for African American individual and collective achievement, but also to point to the limits of the model of expressive individualism in US society. 398 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 7. AMERICAN CINDERELLAS? THE CASE OF THE SELF-MADE WOMAN Workin’ 9 to 5 What a way to make a livin’ Barely gettin’ by It’s all takin’ And no givin’ They just use your mind And they never give you credit It’s enough to drive you Crazy if you let it. […] It’s a rich man’s game No matter what they call it And you spend your life Puttin’ money in his wallet. DOLLY PARTON, “9 TO 5” They can beg and they can plead, but they can’t see the light, cuz the boy with the cold, hard cash is always Mr. Right! Cuz we are living in a material world, and I am a material girl. MADONNA, “MATERIAL GIRL” The myth of the self-made man can also be related to women, as has already become clear by the (more or less successful) self-made women we have already encountered in this chapter. Still, there seem to be crucial points in which the female success myth departs from the hegemonic male one, to which it appears to be connected asymmetrically and in complementary fashion. For one thing, self-made women are not part of the foundational narrative of self-making, and even more recent female exemplars often follow a skewed logic that tends to define female success not in terms of work as productivity, but more often in terms of the kind of work that goes into maintaining and improving one’s physical attractiveness. Thus, we may well speak of the prototype of the self-made woman as being shaped somewhat paradoxically by a process of ‘othering.’ Ann Douglas has diagnosed a “feminization of American Culture” as having accompanied the shift to an increasingly consumption-oriented economy in the 19th century that lastingly gendered the relations of production and consumption: The “sentimentalization” of culture “was an inevitable part of the self-evasion of a society both committed to laissez-faire industrial expansion and disturbed by its EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 399 consequences. […] [S]entimentalism provided the inevitable rationalization of the economic order” (Feminization 12). In that sense, women were both the stewards and prisoners of sentimental culture; theoretically reduced to affect and relegated to domestic space, women oversaw the cultural role of their own social and ontological captivity, which provided the moral rationale for an increasingly economically competitive society. (Gould, “Revisiting” ii) Being interpellated not as producers/workers but as “consuming angels” (cf. Lori Anne Loeb’s book of the same title) by the discourse of economic wealth and social mobility which propped up the newly emergent consumer economy, women entered it as customers and as male status symbols – i.e. as passive subjects or rather objectified non-subjects – or not at all. Women’s upward mobility thus depended on their relations to men: The boy in the Alger story who becomes the protégé of an older benefactor is replaced by a young, attractive girl/woman who is similarly elevated through male assistance according to a patriarchal logic in which women’s function is precisely not to become independently successful but to further highlight male success by yielding to men’s efforts at changing women according to their ideals. American cultural productions also often use an Americanized version of the Cinderella tale to circumscribe female success, for example Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1901), in which the titular character, a country girl who goes on to become a successful actress, however ultimately leaves both male mentor figures with whom she has relations in the course of the novel; Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), which ends with protagonist Lorelei Lee, another provincial girl, marrying into high society; or Garry Marshall’s Hollywood romance Pretty Woman (1990), which tells the love story between Vivian Ward, a prostitute, and a rich businessman. Whether Carrie Meeber, Lorelei Lee, and Vivian Ward would more aptly be called self-made women, businesswomen, or “sexual entrepreneurs” (Harvey and Gill, “Spicing” 52) is a question that cannot easily be answered. As female success often seems circumscribed by and limited to marriage as an arena in which the exchange/ circulation of social capital, economic capital, and libidinal energies is only thinly veiled by the ideology of romantic love, it is no wonder that we also encounter more critical treatments of marriage in American literature and culture, for example in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), which ends with the tragic death of protagonist Lily Bart, a young woman who refuses marriage and fails to live up to the (double) moral standards of New York high society. With regard to Wharton’s novel, Lauren Berlant notes that “the linkage between conventional gendering and failure feels both melodramatic and mundane,” and wonders, 400 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA “what are the consequences if you try to ‘quote’ the normal practices identified with your gender and you fail […]?” (Desire/Love 61). In the context of a newly emerging women’s movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women themselves critiqued white middle-class women for partaking in relationships based on what Olive Schreiner for instance has called “sex parasitism” (Woman 78); after all, these women could be considered to be complicit in maintaining their own socio-economic dependency, which Charlotte Perkins Gilman described as follows: We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation. With us an entire sex lives in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the economic relation is combined with the sex-relation. The economic status of the human female is relative to the sex-relation. (Women 5) From a gender-specific perspective, the Cinderella story as the (inverted) correlate of the male success myth thus defines the capital and opportunities of women differently from the capital and opportunities of men. Whereas we do find straightforward narratives of upward mobility, more often we encounter narratives of self-making that are concerned with women’s outward appearance and with the work that needs to be invested in order to conform to socially defined beauty standards. Beauty contests constitute a notorious example of socially accepted cultural practices and forms of female self-making aiming at recognition, fame, and economic gain, of which the Miss America pageant is especially prominent. Invented as a marketing strategy by Atlantic City hotel owners to extend the holiday season beyond the Labor Day weekend, it took place for the first time in 1921 and, in spite of several interruptions, is still an extremely profitable venture. Ironically, 1921 was also the year women were allowed to vote in national elections for the first time, as Susan Faludi notes (cf. Backlash 50), which shows that emancipatory efforts conflicted and overlapped with discourses and practices that objectified and commodified women and their bodies. More broadly, Lois Banner suggests that [t]he history of beauty contests tells us much about American attitudes toward physical appearance and women’s expected roles. Rituals following set procedures, beauty contests have long existed to legitimize the Cinderella mythology for women, to make it seem that beauty is all a woman needs for success and, as a corollary, that beauty ought to be a major pursuit of all women. (American Beauty 249) EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 401 Banner goes on to say that “the Miss America pageant is a striking example both of the breakdown of Victorian prudery in the early twentieth century and the strength of Victorianism in a specific setting” (ibid.). In order to ameliorate the overtly sexist, objectifying implications of the beauty contest, which to this day is considered the most important part of the competition, the winner of the pageant is now awarded a college scholarship. Overall, female self-making runs counter to the conventional American work ethic. Rita Freedman comments on the Disney television film Cinderella (1997): “Hard at work in her clogs, Cinderella was ignored. Transformed by her satins and slippers, she conquered the world” (Beauty Bound 68). Thus, we may even speak of a somewhat perverted work ethic that encourages women to spend all their material resources and time on the exhaustive and narcissistic task of selfmanaging and self-disciplining their bodies (cf. Gill and Scharff, “Introduction” 7). The fact that more and more women undergo surgical treatment before entering the Miss America contest (cf. Wolf, Beauty Myth 266-67) has given rise to renewed criticism of the competition. Illustration 4: Margaret Gorman, the First Miss America (1922) © Bettmann/CORBIS In a more recent postfeminist discourse, female self-making more radically (and quite literally) refers to self-transformations achieved through cosmetic surgery. 402 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Thus, Elizabeth Atwood Gailey discusses as “self-made” the women who undergo cosmetic surgery on reality television series such as The Swan, Extreme Makeover, and Dr. 90210 for “the promise of status elevation and enhanced economic opportunity” (“Self-Made Women” 109). Here, as Gailey points out, “[w]omen are either portrayed as material objects – little more than a collection of (often almost cartoonishly) formulaic body parts – or, equally limiting and pathological – as self-exploitative, entrepreneurial agents who are more than willing to use their bodies to ‘get ahead’” (ibid. 110) or to have signs of aging or pregnancy and childbirth removed in a spirit of “responsible self-management and care” (ibid.). This sort of female self-making constitutes “a liberation requiring utter submission to social authority” and complete conformity to normative gender ideals: Performing perhaps the ultimate act of the “self-made” subject, women who undergo cosmetic surgery on these shows not only personify the exercise of political power through women’s bodies, they reveal themselves as paragons of the neo-liberal doctrines of selfhelp and self-sufficiency. They are, in every way, then, “self-made women,” products of the hegemonic alliance of patriarchy and global capitalism. (ibid. 118) Speaking to individualist, neo-liberal notions of empowerment, emancipation, and agency, this kind of self-making in the spirit of a “postfeminist sensibility” (Gill, “Postfeminist” 147) at the same time can also be considered as a practice which enforces conformity rather than individuality and deprives women not only of their agency, but possibly even of their lives, as made-over women, by being surgically remade again and again, ultimately may literally come undone. Another cultural script about female self-making addresses women conventionally as wives and assigns them a supporting role in their husbands’ self-making and rising in the world. In How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead in His Social and Business Life (1953), a book adhering to the prototypical “conformist sensibility of the 1950s” (Watts, Self-Help Messiah 485), Dorothy Carnegie, who tellingly refers to herself rather as Mrs. Dale Carnegie, counsels wives on how to increase their husbands’ success by making them comfortable at home, boosting their egos, and – most importantly – by not pursuing careers of their own, while she herself de facto took over her ailing husband’s business around the time of her book’s publication. Beside patriarchal conceptualizations of female/wifely success as coextensive with the success of their husbands, there are also other – quite ambivalent – images of the self-made woman for example in cinema, in which career women are often represented negatively as deficient single females. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 403 Doris Day in many films played businesswomen who give up their careers for the sake of a man, and in the 1980s, successful female professionals are also often confined to narrow stereotypes, for example in Fatal Attraction (1987), in which Alex (Glenn Close), the successful editor of a publishing company, starts terrorizing Dan (Michael Douglas) and his family after he refuses to continue their affair; Susan Faludi compellingly reads Alex’s deterioration as signifying the pathologization of the businesswoman in American culture (cf. Backlash 112-13, 122-23): Self-making and professional emancipation in the film’s logic lead to the character’s psycho-social disintegration because her career cannot compensate for her lack of a husband and family. The romantic comedy Working Girl (1988), in which we follow Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith’s) rise from secretary to successful businesswoman, represents female professional ambition and success rather positively; however, the character of Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), Tess’s boss, does reinforce the stereotype of the scheming and callous career woman, and as she is also Tess’s major antagonist furthermore disavows any notion of female solidarity (cf. Faludi, Backlash 128-29). Whereas “Hollywood representation is characterised by an insistent equation between working women, women’s work, and some form of sexual(ised) performance” (Tasker, Working Girls 3), in Working Girl, this performance is ultimately relegated to the sidelines, as the protagonist in the end earns her deserved recognition, which is symbolized by her moving into an office of her own in the final scene. It should be noted though that this largely positive representation of female professional success must be considered as more of an exception than the rule in Hollywood films as well as American popular culture in general. Investigating self-made women in relation to self-made men obviously operates within a binary opposition; J. Halberstam has noted that “success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (Queer Art 2). Beyond the reproductive paradigm, Lauren Berlant is asking us in her book of the same title to consider the “cruel optimism” that underlies the American dream of success and prosperity, which is as alluring as it is out of reach for most people: “The fantasies that are fraying include, particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” (3). In fact, focusing on the avenues of self-making heralded by hegemonic versions of the success myth may just accustom one to a sense of permanent anxiety, or what Berlant calls “crisis ordinary” (ibid. 9). Rather than to adjust and succumb to this sense of crisis, J. Halberstam suggests reading failure “as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profIn the 1950s, a watershed moment for gender conservatism, movie stars like 404 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA it, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing” (Queer Art 12). A feminist and/or queer studies perspective on self-making can contribute to such a critical reading by asking us not merely to include women into the dominant logic of self-making, but to question the premises of growth, reproduction, success, and gain that connect the success myth to capitalism and to normative conceptualizations of social structures and institutions such as the family. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 405 8. CONCLUSION But what I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich. That’s the thing that we have and that must be preserved. RONALD REAGAN Of course we need the rich. We always have: to ogle and envy and imitate. They are our spectacle and our joy because in the head of every American lies the thought That could be me. The rich constitute our mythos, after all, our fairy tale, our hymn to success. SIRI HUSTVEDT, THE BLAZING WORLD Why is it that the wealthiest nation in the world finds it so hard to keep its promise and faith with its weakest citizens? BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN Throughout this chapter it has become evident that the myth of the self-made man strongly affirms an ideology of expressive individualism as well as individual achievement and success that conceptualizes the “pursuit of happiness” (cf. the Declaration of Independence) as the pursuit of property. By claiming that self-making also contributes to the greater common good, hegemonic versions of this powerful myth – or fairy tale – of social mobility still very successfully obscure its role in legitimizing and perpetuating immense structural social inequalities. In the age of global capitalism and the new social media, corporate success on a grand scale has once more become concretized and personalized in ‘selfmade’ individuals such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg (again, self-made men), who are turned into celebrities and high priests of the American civil religion of success, albeit with a new global dimension. In The Road Ahead (1995), Bill Gates fashions himself as such a high priest of the new age by using the semantics of a “peaceful revolution” to describe the effects of the computer and the internet on US society (and the world at large) and by affirming his company’s supposedly democratic commitment to making it affordable for people to have “a computer on every desk and in every home” (4) – which, of course, is only in the corporate interest and need not necessarily be a blessing for humanity. Based on the success formula of the self-made man, Gates’ develops a notion of “friction-free capitalism” (ibid. 180): 406 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Capitalism, demonstrably the greatest of the constructed economic systems, has in the past decade clearly proved its advantages over the alternative systems. As the internet evolves into a broadband, global, interactive network, those advantages will be magnified. […] I think Adam Smith would be pleased. (207) It is telling that Gates invokes Adam Smith, whose The Wealth of Nations is a key text of laissez-faire capitalism, rather than Thomas Jefferson and The Declaration of Independence, which constitutes a key text of a very different kind even if both were published only a few months apart, in March and July of 1776, respectively. Gates’s reference to Smith attests to his own global neoliberal capitalist vision (exceeding the nation state and the national market) in which there are supposedly only winners, as everybody profits from the new ‘democratizing’ technologies and the workings of Smith’s proverbial invisible hand. Gates thus romanticizes the conditions of consumption and the role of consumers and entrepreneurs while obscuring the conditions of production and the economic vulnerability of those involved in it. In Steve Jobs: Life Changing Lessons! Steve Jobs on How to Achieve Massive Success, Develop Powerful Leadership Skills and Unleash Your Wildest Creativity (2014), William Wyatt similarly taps into the tradition of idolizing self-made men in a quite narrow ideological framework and regardless of Apple’s numerous manufacturing and tax scandals and its dubious labor policies abroad (condoning for example deplorable working conditions at its suppliers in China). In spite of somewhat critical representations of his personality and entrepreneurial strategies for example in The Social Network (2010), Mark Zuckerberg’s achievement also has been much applauded in biographies and advice literature such as George Beahm’s Billionaire Boy: Mark Zuckerberg in His Own Words (2013) and Lev Grossman’s The Connector: How Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Rewired Our World and Changed the Way We Live (2010). These more recent embodiments of the self-made man indicate that the myth has weathered the storms of capitalism’s periodic crises and may have in fact even been instrumental in providing the ideological glue which maintains the quasi civil religious belief that upward mobility can be achieved by all. In turn, in the logic of this myth, financial and economic crises are not considered as part and parcel of a dynamic that is built into the increasingly globalized capitalist US economic system, but as somehow random and contingent or caused by outside economic influences. Nancy Fraser has called this false attribution of responsibility for structural inequalities “misframing” (“Post-Polanyische Reflektionen” 103); according to her argument, the intrinsic problems of a market economy are often credited to adverse outside factors allegedly skewed against EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 407 the self-made man as object and agent of American exceptionalism. In view of a transnational perspective, scholars have also pointed out that many other societies are much more permissive and less socially deterministic than the US, which however has not lastingly affected specifically American notions of the self-made man and competitive equality. Even more fundamentally, sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin has asserted that an “unstratified society with real equality of its members is a myth which has never been realized in the history of mankind. […] The forms and proportions of stratification may vary, but its essence is permanent” (qtd. in Potter, People 99). Like so many aspects of American exceptionalism, the myth of the self-made man is as unrealistic as it is powerful. As we have seen in this as well as the preceding chapters, the foundational mythology of the US – Margaret Mead describes it as “our compensatory mythology” (And Keep 50) – creates a usable past and a hopeful future by bypassing the manifold discrepancies between mythic text and lived reality. Closing this gap is the ideological function of myth and the ongoing cultural work it performs. 408 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 9. STUDY QUESTIONS 1. Define the cultural type of the self-made man, and explain its ideological function. 2. Give a definition of Algerism, and discuss and contextualize the statement “Horatio Alger must die” from Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? (2003). 3. Discuss how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and its 1974 and 2013 film adaptations represent class in American society. 4. How does the meaning of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” change when we focus on the notion of “pursuit” instead of “happiness”? 5. In the context of the Great Depression many texts about the experience of migrants offer a profound counter-narrative to that of expressive individualism and success. Studs Terkel writes: “Failure was as unforgivable then as it is now. Perhaps that’s why so many of the young were never told about the depression; were, as one indignant girl put it, ‘denied our history’” (American Dreams xxiv). Discuss the 1930s and the Great Depression in light of the myth of the self-made man. 6. Analyze the particular ways in which Bobbie Carlyle’s sculpture Self-Made Man visualizes the myth. You may also refer to the artist’s website: http:// selfmademan.bobbiecarlylesculpture.com/. Illustration 5: Self-Creation Bobbie Carlyle, Self-Made Man (1988). EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 409 7. What distinguishes self-made women (in the dominant cultural logic) from self-made men? Give examples and discuss Little Miss Sunshine (2006) as a film about and a comment on beauty pageants. 8. How do self-help books connect to the ideology of self-making and to the myth of the self-made man? Discuss the self-help genre with regard to social, cultural, and economic aspects, and analyze How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) by Dale Carnegie, who has been considered as having created a new and attractive blend of “success ideology, charismatic personality and self-fulfillment, positive thought, human relations, and therapeutic well-being” (Watts, Self-Help Messiah 7). 9. How are success and failure represented in advertising? Compare, for instance, Nike’s “Failure” commercial with Michael Jordan and Citibank-City “Moments of Success” commercial (both to be found on the web). 10. Discuss how the rules, options, and gratifications of the board game Monopoly connect to American ideas of self-making, classlessness, and success. 410 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 10. 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Zafar, Rafia. “Franklinian Douglass: The Afro-American as Representative Man.” Sundquist, Frederick Douglass 99-117. Zoglin, Richard. “Bob Hope: America’s Most Famous Immigrant.” Time 13 Oct. 2010. http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2025095,00.html. 2 Feb. 2014. Further Reading Banta, Martha. Failure and Success in America: A Literary Debate. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. Baraka, Amiri. “The Death of Horatio Alger.” The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2000. 159-64. Benziman, Galia. “Success, Law, and the Law of Success: Reevaluating Death of a Salesman’s Treatment of the American Dream.” South Atlantic Review 70.2 (2005): 20-40. Carter, Everett. The American Idea: The Literary Response to American Optimism. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1977. Catano, James V. Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the SelfMade Man. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Dolby, Sandra K. Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005. EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN | 419 Fahey, William A. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1973. Fluck, Winfried. “Was ist eigentlich so schlecht daran, reich zu sein? Zur Darstellung des Reichtums in der amerikanischen Kultur.” Wieviel Ungleichheit verträgt die Demokratie? Armut und Reichtum in den USA. Ed. Winfried Fluck and Welf Werner. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2003. 267-303. Haltunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader. New York: Oxford UP, 1972. Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing Up the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Kenworthy, Lane. Social Democratic America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Lawson, Andrew. Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell. Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1929. –. Middletown in Transition. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937. Melville, Herman. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Ed. Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1971. Michaels, Walter Benn. “Romance and Real Estate.” The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. 156-82. Mieder, Wolfgang. “‘Paddle Your Own Canoe:’ Frederick Douglass’s Proverbial Message in His ‘Self-Made Men’ Speech.” Midwestern Folklore 27 (2001): 21-40. Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Rubin, Gretchen. The Happiness Project. New York: Harper, 2009. Smith, Hedrick. Who Stole the American Dream? New York: Random, 2012. Voorhees, Matthew. “Imitating Franklin: Booker T. Washington’s Gospel of Wealth.” Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper. SSRN. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1581025. 2 Feb. 2014. Wall, Wendy. Inventing the “American Way.” New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Watson, Elwood, and Darcy Martin. “The Miss America Pageant: Pluralism, Femininity, and Cinderella All in One.” Journal of Popular Culture 34.1 (2000): 105-26. 420 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Wysong, Earl, Robert Perrucci, and David Wright. The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? 4th ed. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. By Way of Conclusion Twenty-Five More Study Questions 1. Beside those American foundational myths that I have discussed in this book, many other US myths about individuals, groups, documents, buildings, and historical events could be identified. Give examples for each of those five categories, and describe their national, subnational, and/or transnational dimensions. 2. American sociologist Robert Bellah writes in The Broken Covenant (1975): “[W]hen we look closely at the beginning time of the American republic we find not a simple unitary myth of origin but a complex and richly textured mythical structure with many inner tensions” (4). Discuss this statement especially with regard to the “inner tensions” that Bellah refers to. 3. Identify the civil religious dimension of the myths discussed in this book, and relate it to the notions of a ‘national spirituality.’ 4. American foundational mythology provides a meaningful past as well as future for the US nation. Compare the ways in which the myths discussed in this book conceptualize national pasts and/or futures. 5. Historian and geographer David Lowenthal reminds us in his book of the same title that “the past is a foreign country” to which we have only limited access. Discuss how the myths addressed in this book attempt to presentify this “foreign country,” and in how far these attempts succeed (or fail). 6. Contextualize and interpret the quotations by Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, and Studs Terkel with which this book opens, and relate them to the book’s overall analysis of foundational mythology. 7. In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams describes “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” forms of culture. Use these concepts to analyze the making, remaking and unmaking of US foundational mythology in general as well as one specific myth of your choosing in particular. 422 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA 8. Discuss the following paragraph from Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture in the context of foundational mythological constructions of the US as both democracy and empire. A key paradox informs the ideology of American exceptionalism: it defines America’s radical difference from other nations as something that goes beyond the separateness and uniqueness of its own particular heritage and culture. Rather, its exceptional nature lies in its exemplary status as the apotheosis of the nation-form itself and as a model for the rest of the world. American exceptionalism is in part an argument for boundless expansion, where national particularism and international universalism converge. […] If the fantasy of American imperialism aspires to a borderless world where it finds its own reflection everywhere, then the fruition of this dream shatters the coherence of national identity, as the boundaries that distinguish it from the outside world promise to collapse. (16) 9. In an editorial published in the February 17, 1941 issue of Life, Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce called the 20th century the “American Century.” Contextualize this claim and discuss its implications. Also discuss 1898 and 2001 as possibly marking the beginning and the end of the ‘American Century’ in light of foundational American myths. 10. Relate the following definition of the American dream from James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America (1931) to notions of American exceptionalism and to the foundational myths discussed in this book. The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, also too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (317) 11. Many writers and critics have employed the metaphor of the American nightmare to counter the ideology of the American dream. Discuss for instance Henry Miller’s essay collection The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), the first chapter of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965, which is titled “Nightmare”), Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (1965), or Adam Simon’s film American Nightmare (2000). What kinds of grievances are articulated in these texts, and what exactly is it that they deem nightmarish about the US? BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: TWENTY-FIVE MORE STUDY QUESTIONS | 423 12. One of the most iconic manifestations of American exceptionalism is the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. For all its national symbolic capital, it is, in fact, a transnational symbol. Research its history, and analyze the following description in light of the statue’s iconicity: She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under folds of her wide garments – constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall. (Johnson, Autobiography 65) 13. In this book, I have repeatedly discussed the foundational quality of artistic representations in and around the US Capitol. Among the rotunda paintings I have not discussed are William Powell’s Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto and John Trumbull’s paintings of the Surrender of General Burgoyne as well as the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis. How do these three paintings fit (or do not fit) into the framework of a foundational mythology? Along similar lines, discuss the Frieze of American History (which is also to be found in the United States Capitol rotunda). What kind of mythic and “usable” past do the frieze’s 19 scenes convey? Which scenes do you find conventional and expectable, which surprising? 14. At the age of 87, Robert Frost read his poem “The Gift Outright” (1942) at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. For the occasion, it was requested that Frost change the “would” in the last line of his poem to “will” in order for it to end on a more optimistic note. Analyze the poem with regard to its references to US mythology, and research and discuss its performance at the presidential inauguration. The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, 424 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. 15. Memorial culture plays a major role in the foundational mythology of the US. Research and analyze one of the memorials on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in light of the ‘myths that made America.’ 16. Early Americanist scholars have been described collectively as the American studies movement (Wise, “‘Paradigm Dramas’” 294). What does this appellation imply? Characterize the differences between a movement and a discipline and relate them to the development of the field of American studies in the United States. 17. Browse the official website of the American Studies Association (ASA) and discuss the description of American studies as well as of the organization itself that are provided there (www.theasa.net). Also look at the list of past ASA presidents (www.theasa.net/about/page/past_presidents) and research the titles of their presidential addresses. How do they reflect the history and development of the field of American studies? 18. How can the notions of repetition and seriality be related to the processes through which the myths discussed in this book have been appropriated and re-appropriated time and again? 19. Discuss the connection between myth and narrative (or myth as narrative), and relate your discussion to the following excerpt from Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977): I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, All we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. (2) 20. Outline how a counter-hegemonic, women-centered foundational US mythology would possibly look like. 21. Michael Novak famously referred to the American president as “priest,” “prophet,” and “king” (cf. Choosing). Discuss the role of the president in the American political system and in political culture as well as popular rep- BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: TWENTY-FIVE MORE STUDY QUESTIONS | 425 resentations of the presidency (e.g. in Hollywood films and television series) in light of Novak’s assessment. 22. In Frames of War, Judith Butler analyzes the means and the results of the socalled “War on Terror” after 9/11 with regard to its media portrayal. How can this “War” (as it manifests itself in names such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib) be related to US-foundational mythology on the whole and/or to individual myths in particular? 23. From architectural styles in the early republic (as evidenced by buildings and monuments on the National Mall) to contemporary mass cultural poductions (Gladiator [2005], Troy [2004], Rome [2005-07]), US culture has appropriated classicist forms and themes and retold classicist (mythic) narratives. How do the references to ancient Greece and Rome time and again play out with regard to US foundational mythology? 24. In the context of the so-called transnational American Studies, various perspectives have been introduced. Research and discuss the following: Hemispheric American Studies, Planetary American Studies, and Cosmic American Studies. 25. How can we approach US foundational mythology from an intercultural and comparative perspective? Identify non-American national myths that are comparable to those of the US, and describe their (structural) similarities as well as (culturally specific) differences. How can we envision a foundational mythology or mythic repertoire with regard to other than national entities? Identify and discuss European myths. 426 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA WORKS CITED Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. New York: Little, 1931. The American Nightmare. Dir. Adam Simon. Minerva, 2000. Bellah, Robert. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Frost, Robert. “The Gift Outright.” Complete Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, 1949. 467. Gladiator. Dir Ridley Scott. DreamWorks/Universal, 2000. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Penguin, 1990. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Luce, Henry. “The American Century.” Life Magazine 17 Feb. 1941. 61-65. Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. New York: Dial, 1965. Miller, Henry. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions, 1945. Novak, Michael. Choosing Our King: Powerful Symbols in Presidential Politics. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Rome. BBC/HBO/Rai Fiction, 2005-07. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977. Troy. Dir Wolfgang Petersen. Warner Bros., 2004. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Routledge, 1977. Wise, Gene. “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 31.3 (1979): 293-337. X, Malcolm, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove, 1965. Index Index note: page references in italics indicate a bibliographical entry A Adair, Gilbert, 345, 355 Adams, Abigail, 203, 222-23, 226, 234, 244 Adams, Anselm, 334 Adams, Henry, 111, 203 Adams, Henry Baxter, 324 Adams, James Truslow, 177-78, 188, 384, 410, 422, 426 Adams, John, 244 and Abigail Adams, 222-23 and founders chic, 233 as Founding Father, 199, 201, 203, 206 Adams, John Quincy, 203, 239, 293 Adams, Samuel, 225 Addams, Jane, 275-77, 300, 307 Adorno, Theodor, 26, 34, 336, 355, 368, 410 African Americans, 13 and American beginnings, 181, 183 and Columbus myth, 54, 70 and/as Founding Fathers, 200, 213-21 and/as Founding Mothers 227 and the melting pot, 260, 262, 267, 283-85 and multiculturalism, 290-91, 294, 370 and the myth of the Promised Land, 140, 166-72 as self-made men, 390-97 Agamben, Giorgio, 382, 410 Ager, Waldemar, 273, 300 agrarianism, 19, 311-320 Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, 319 Alba, Richard, 295, 300 Algeo, Matthew, 327, 355 Alger, Horatio, 370, 373-77, 384, 385, 410 Allen, Paula Gunn, 116-18, 128, 134 alterity, 27, 48, 92, 141, 341 American Adam, The (Lewis), 19, 20, 351 American civil religion (Bellah), 16- 17, 27-28, 58, 160, 198, 200, 202, 209, 230-31, 238, 240, 259, 271, 317, 386, 388, 405, 406 American Civil War, see War American Creed (Chesterton), 17 American dream, 16, 371, 379, 384- 85, 395-96, 403, 420 American exceptionalism, 13-18, 21, 23, 24, 31, 63, 137, 177, 181, 219, 267, 271, 285, 296, 325, 330, 367, 369, 388, 390, 397, 407 428 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Americans as chosen people, 15, 157-58, 172-73, 181, 186, 313, 315-16 America as redeemer nation, 15 American Indian Movement, 75, 230, 347 American jeremiad, 30, 157 American mythology, 11-14, 17-31, 43, 311, 313, 314, 319, 333, 334, 377 and American beginnings, 11, 19, 20, 24, 31, 43, 52, 61, 90, 107, 117, 137, 139, 140, 143, 146, 149, 158, 161, 163, 180- 84, 210-12, 233, 258 appropriation of, 13, 28, 106, 113, 115, 168, 175, 273, 319, 325, 344 empowerment through, 13, 60, 105, 112, 168, 174, 218, 224, 391, 393, 402 ideology critique, 13, 27 national perspective, 13 postcolonial perspective, 13, 23, 49, 117, 119, 120, 183, 227, 260, 298 transnational perspective, 13, 18, 23-25, 77-78, 125, 172, 186, 241-42, 296-98, 349-51, 407 American presidency, 201, 220, 221, 236 American Progress (Gast), 63, 64, 277 American Renaissance, 24, 35, 176- 77, 191 American Revolution, see War American studies, 14-15, 18-25 American Studies Association (ASA), 24 as cultural studies, 26 interdisciplinarity, 25 American West, 11, 18, 19, 36, 39, 61, 84, 311-52 agrarianism, 19, 311, 313-17, 319 expansionism, 57, 71, 311-14, 322-26 329, 331, 336, 339 the frontier in political rhetoric, 343-48 Japanese Americans and, 332-35 Jeffersonian grid system, 321 Native American stereotypes, 325-26, 335-39, 340-41 Southern version of, 317-18 in popular culture, 314, 328, 335- 43, 345-46, 349-51 transnational perspectives, 349- 52 Turner’s frontier, 19, 311-13, 315, 322-26, 330, 333, 335, 344, 346 women in the West, 326-31 Americanization, 58, 241, 267, 272, 274-75, 281, 289, 323-24, 385 Amira, Dan, 239, 244 Anaya, Rudolfo, 69 Anderson, Benedict, 12, 26, 33, 37, 259, 300 Anderson, Wanni Wibulswasdi, 37 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 141, 188 Anthony, Susan B., 170, 227, 231 anti-Semitism, 66-67, 270, 394 anti-war movement, 20, 346-47 Antin, Mary, 67, 80, 173, 175, 188, 386, 410 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 37, 300 Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 346 Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Cawelti), 38 Appadurai, Arjun, 298, 300 Appiah, Anthony Kwame, 295, 300, 307 Appleby, Joyce, 244, 252, 318, 355 291, INDEX | 429 Aptheker, Herbert, 212, 216, 244 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 24, 33 Arbella, 138, 140, 152 Archambeau, Robert, 265, 300 Arendt, Hannah, 198, 205, 244, 287- 88, 300, 385, 410 Argall, Samuel, 90, 100, 110 Armitage, Susan, 326, 328, 355, 358 Articles of Confederation, 199, 203, 204 Asian Americans, 25, 260, 262, 267, 285, 290, 291, 294, 332-35 Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, 332 Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, 332 assimilation, 90, 94, 102, 104, 117, 174-75, 258-60, 263, 267, 271- 76, 278, 281, 283, 289, 291-95, 297-98, 389 Assmann, Jan, 30, 33, 37, 39 Audacity of Hope, The (Obama), 396 Avatar (Cameron), 124 Ayrton, Edith, 268 B Babbit (Lewis), 385 Bachmann, Michele, 239, 244 Backlash (Faludi), 403 Bacon, Francis, 141, 188 Bailis, Stanley, 20, 33 Bakalian, Anny, 297, 300 Baker, Houston, 393, 410 Baldwin, James, 170, 188 Baldwin, Samuel Davies, 163, 188 Bambara, Toni Cade, 394 Bancroft, George, 58, 80, 104, 128, 145, 165, 188, 234 Bank, Dennis, 230 Banner, Lois, 400, 410 Barbour, Philip, 99-100, 128 Baringer, Sandra, 98, 128 Barker, James Nelson, 104, 128 Barlow, Joel, 55-57, 60, 80 Barnard, Charles, 376, 410 Barnes, Charlotte, 106, 112, 128 Barnett, Louise, 382, 410 Barth, John, 120, 128 Barthes, Roland, 27-28, 30, 33 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), 381-82 Bates, Milton, 344, 355 Baym, Nina, 52, 80, 188 Beahm, George, 406, 410 Beard, Charles, 212, 244 Beatty, Warren, 288, 301 Beauty Myth, The (Klein), 401 Beck, Glenn, 239, 250 Bedard, Irene, 120 Beecher, Lyman, 165, 188 Beissel, Johann Conrad, 142 Belknap, Jeremy, 53, 57, 80, 104, 128 Bell, Daniel, 388, 390, 410 Bellah, Robert, 16-17, 27, 33, 421, 426 Bender, Thomas, 23-25, 33, 241-42, 244, 307 Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, 371 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 19, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38, 153, 154, 157, 177, 180- 81, 188, 194, 380, 410 Berger, Thomas, 346, 355 Bergman, Teresa, 228, 230, 231, 244 Berkin, Carol, 232, 244, 253 Berlant, Lauren, 26, 28, 33, 237-38, 244, 399-400, 403, 410 Bernstein, Richard, 199-200, 203, 211, 244, 253 Berry, Steve, 67, 80 Berson, Misha, 334, 355 Bevere, Maurice de, 349 430 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan), 260, 292 Bhabha, Homi, 226, 298, 300 Biale, David, 272, 300 Bieder, Robert, 263-64, 300 Bigsby, Christopher, 159, 188 Bill of Rights, 199, 203 Billington, Ray Allen, 165, 188, 324- 25, 355, 363 Birkle, Carmen, 134, 307 Black Hills, 228-30 Black Power movement, 289-90 Blair, Carole, 228-29, 244 Blassingame, John, 169, 188, 392 Bloom, Allan, 293, 300 Bloom, Harold, 33 Blumenberg, Hans, 26-27, 33 Boas, Franz, 278, 296, 300 Bodnar, John, 85, 208, 244 Boesenberg, Eva, 383, 410 Boime, Alfred, 228, 244 Bondanella, Peter, 66, 80 “Book of Negroes,” 214 Boone, Daniel, 71, 335, 339 Borglum, Gutzon, 228-29, 231 Bourne, Randolph, 274-77, 301, 315, 319, 355 Bozorgmehr, Mehdi, 297, 300 Brackenridge, Henry, 54 Bradford, Sarah, 170, 188 Bradford, William, 15, 138, 143-49, 150, 171, 173, 189 Bradstreet, Anne, 117, 128 Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, 301 Brands, H.W., 201, 233, 245 Breen, Timothy, 137, 189, 194 Breinig, Helmbrecht, 57, 80 Bremer, Francis, 153 Brody, David, 241, 245 Brokeback Mountain (Lee), 341 Brooks, Van Wyck, 12, 33, 179, 182, 189 Brougham, John, 106, 128 Browder, Laura, 268, 270, 271, 278, 285, 301 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall), 387 Brown, Bill, 336-39, 355 Brown, Dee, 325, 326, 355 Brown, Richard, 199, 245 Brown, Shannon, 319 Brown, William Wells, 215, 245 Bruchac, Joseph, 71, 80, 128 Brumm, Ursula, 158-59, 189 Bry, Theodor de, 46 Bryce, James, 266-67, 301, 367, 410 Buffalo Bill, 339-41 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 339-41 Burdick, Eugene, 346, 359 Burkert, Walter, 28, 33 Burr, Aaron, 204 Bush, George W., 343 Bushman, Claudia, 43-44, 52-60, 80, 93, 128 C Cahan, Abraham, 387, 410 Calamity Jane, 339 Caldwell, Charles, 263 Caldwell, Patricia, 155, 189 Calloway, Colin, 325, 355 Cambodia, 344 Cameron, James, 124, 128 Campanella, Tommaso, 141, 189 Campbell, Neil, 12, 33, 76, 80, 271, 301, 313, 349, 356, 363 “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” (Smith), 20 Canclini, Néstor García, 38 cannibalism, 92 INDEX | 431 Capellano, Antonio, 108 capitalism, 77-78, 123, 294, 350-51, 370-79, 381-85, 388, 402-407 Carnegie, Andrew, 17, 33, 377, 386, 410, 417 Carnegie, Dale, 372, 402, 410 Carnegie, Dorothy, 402, 411 Cassirer, Ernst, 26-28, 33, 38 Castronovo, Russ, 24, 33 Cather, Willa, 329-31, 356 Cawelti, John, 21-22, 34, 38, 121-22, 129, 339, 341-42, 356, 368, 371- 77, 389-90, 411 Chapman, John, 108-109 Cherokee, 118, 263, 324 Chesnutt, Charles, 287, 301 Chesterton, Gilbert K., 17, 34 Cheung, Kink-Kok, 333, 356 Chicago Cultural Studies Group, 293, 301 Child, Lydia Maria, 287 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 278, 332 Choate, Rufus, 163 Christadler, Martin, 208, 245 Christy, Howard Chandler, 206 Chrostowski, Alfons, 388 Cimino, Michael, 345, 356 Cinderella (Iscove), 401 Cisneros, Sandra, 387, 411 “City upon a Hill” (Winthrop), 15, 152 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 284 Clark Smith, Barbara, 97, 130 Claviez, Thomas, 20, 25-26, 29, 34 Clay, Henry, 369, 411 Cliff, Michelle, 119-20, 129 Clifford, Deborah, 287, 301 Clifford, James, 38, 147, 189, 349, 356 Clift, Eleanor, 226-27, 245 Clinton, Bill, 234 Clinton, Rossiter, 198, 255 Cody, William, see Buffalo Bill Coen, Ethan and Joel, 328, 362 Cogliano, Francis, 233, 241-42, 245 ‘Cold War,’ 17-18, 20, 30, 325, 344, 347, 374 Collins, Gail, 222, 245 Colón, Fernando, 50, 80 Color Purple, The (Walker), 394 Columbus, 11, 12, 16, 30, 43, 78 as American hero, 44, 52-60 Americanization of, 58 Before Columbus Foundation, 69 and Bradford, 147, 242 as Catholic, 61-62, 67-68 Columbia as poetic name for the US, 53-54, 63, 64 Columbus Day as holiday, 44, 53, 66, 70, 73-75, 81, 85 as conqueror, 46 as ethnic hero, 61-68 and the Founding Fathers, 258 and the ‘frontier,’ 324 immigrant perspectives, 63, 66 Italian Americans, 65, 66 Jewish American perspectives, 67 Knights of Columbus, 67-68, 82 and Lewis and Clark, 320-21 Native American perspectives, 44, 68-75, 77-78 and Pocahontas, 89, 90, 104, 115, 117 practice of naming, 47 and Spanish colonialism, 45-47, 51, 70 translatio imperii, 44, 56, 322 transnational perspectives, 77-78 World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, 63 432 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Columbus Didn’t Discover Us (Leppzer), 71-72 Columbus on Trial (Portillo), 71 Commager, Henry Steele, 12, 29, 34, 52, 81, 103 Common Sense (Paine), 15 Comparative Wests Project, 351, 356 Conrad, Joseph, 346, 356 Conrads, Carl, 204 Constitution, 113, 167, 198-99, 201, 203, 206, 209, 213, 220, 222, 230, 287, 324 Conzen, Kathleen Neils, 331, 356 Cook, Nancy, 356 Coolidge, Calvin, 229, 278 Cooper, Helen, 206, 208, 245 Cooper, James Fenimore, 104, 129, 330, 335-38, 345, 356, 381 Coover, Robert, 376, 411 Copley, John Singleton, 225 Coppola, Francis Ford, 346, 355, 389, 412 Cortés, Hernán, 51, 55, 56, 71, 125 Costello, Lawrence, 291, 302 Costner, Kevin, 341, 356 Cotton, John, 150, 158 Coues, Elliott, 321, 364 Coyne, Michael, 342, 343-45, 356 Crane, Hart, 115, 129 Crane, Nathalia, 113, 129 Crane, Stephen, 353, 356, 384, 411 Craughwell, Thomas, 235, 245 Crazy Horse Memorial, 231, 245 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 16, 34, 98, 129, 261-65, 267, 285, 301, 314, 315-17, 356 Critical Myth and Symbol School, 20-23, 25, 182 canon debates, 22, 233, 292-93 counter-hegemonic scholarship, 21 multiculturalism, 22, 291-93 critical regionalism, 349 Crockett, Davy, 371 Croly, David, 285, 301 Croly, Herbert, 17, 34, 369, 411 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 69 cultural pluralism, 260, 274-8 283, 291-93, 296-97 Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan and Pease), 23 Curtis, Christopher, 316, 356 Custer’s Last Stand, 340, 342, 344 Custis, George Washington, 105-106, 129, 215, 245 D Dale, Thomas, 109-10 Dances with Wolves (Costner), 341 Danforth, Samuel, 150, 156-59, 189 Davenport, Charles, 279 Davenport, John, 154 David Walker’s Appeal (Walker), 217-18 Davis, John, 102-104, 129 Dawson, Jan, 182, 189 Day, Doris, 403 de Ville Jacques, 211, 246 Dead Man (Jarmusch), 341 Deadwood (TV series), 351 Deane, Charles, 111 Dearborn, Mary, 113, 129, 287, 301 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 384-85 Decker, Jeffrey Louis, 371, 377, 379, 411 Declaration of Independence, 17, 160, 197-99, 202, 203, 206-12, 213, 218, 226, 232, 237, 239, 245, 369, 405-406, 411 Declaration of Sentiments, 226, 245 Deer Hunter, The (Cimino), 345 INDEX | 433 Deetz, James, 185 Delbanco, Andrew, 143, 149, 153, 155, 182, 189, 194 Deleuze, Gilles, 382, 411 Deloria, Philip, 105, 129 Deloria, Vine, 118, 129 democracy, 14, 140, 145, 163, 166, 178, 198, 202, 208, 212, 219, 228, 230, 237, 274-75, 278, 290, 317, 324, 330, 368, 380 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 14, 18, 138 Den Dulk, Kevin, 186, 189 Denney, Reuel, 385, 415 Dennis, Matthew, 59, 61, 63, 68, 74, 81, 185-86, 189 Denton, Nancy, 260, 285, 304 Derrida, Jacques, 210-12, 245 Desmond, Jane, 24, 34 Dewey, John, 275, 277, 307 DeWitt, Dave, 235-37, 245 Dickstein, Morris, 389, 411 Dippie, Brian, 263, 301 “Discovery” (Freneau), 54-55 Django Unchained (Tarantino), 341 Domínguez, Virginia, 24, 34 Donnell, Susan, 122-23, 129 Dorman, Robert, 312, 341, 357 Dorris, Michael, 43, 48, 69, 81 Douglas, Ann, 307, 398, 411 Douglass, Frederick, 168-9, 190, 218-19, 246, 391-93, 411 Dowling Taylor, Elizabeth, 214, 246 Drayton, Michael, 317, 357 Dreiser, Theodore, 383, 399, 411 Driving Miss Daisy (Beresford), 394 Du Bois, W.E.B., 288, 301, 308, 390, 411 Duplessis, Joseph Siffred, 201 Durham, Jimmie, 70-71, 81 E Eastlake, William, 357 Eastwood, Clint, 341, 362 Edgerton, Gary, 120, 123, 129 Edwards, Brian, 24, 34 Edwards, Leigh, 123-24, 129 Edwards, Sherman, 232, 251 Eggan, Fred, 263, 301 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 368, 411 Elam, Michelle, 288, 290, 301 Ellet, Elizabeth, 225, 246, 326, 357 Elliott, Emory, 38, 57-58, 81 Ellis Island, 386-87 Ellis, Edward, 337-38, 357 Ellis, Joseph, 202, 233, 246 Emancipation Proclamation, 219 Embarkation of the Pilgrims (Weir), 164 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 176, 264, 265, 301, 304, 381, 411 Engels, Friedrich, 414 English, Daylanne, 279, 302 epistemic violence, 12, 54-55, 348 Erdrich, Louise, 69, 81 errand into the wilderness, 19, 156-59 ethnic studies, 21 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 281-82, 302 Evans, Walker, 319 Eyal, Yonatan, 322, 357 F Faery, Rebecca Blevins, 100, 129 Fairchild, Henry, 280, 302 Faludi, Susan, 403, 411 Faragher, John Mack, 318, 322-23, 358 Farm Aid, 319 Farm Security Administration, 319 Farnham, Eliza, 329, 357 434 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Fatal Attraction (Lyne), 403 Faulkner, Barry, 206 Fees, Paul, 341, 357 Feldstein, Stanley, 291, 302 feminism, 20-21, 226-28 Abigail Adams, 203, 222-23, 226, 234 Pocahontas, 112-13, 118, 124 postfeminism, 401-404 Seneca Falls convention, 226 Ferguson, Robert, 203, 205, 246 Ferling, John, 198, 246 Fernandez, Carlos, 290 Fiedler, Leslie, 22, 38, 111, 115, 120, 124, 129, 328, 341, 342, 357 “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” (poster), 74 Filson, John, 330, 335, 357 Finkelman, Paul, 213, 246 First Blood (Kotcheff), 345 Fisher, Philip, 181, 190 Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley, 24, 34 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 279-80, 302, 372, 384, 411 ‘Five Civilized Tribes,’ 230 Fleming, Annette, 246 Fleming, E. McClung, 93, 130 Fleming, Thomas, 234, 246 Flood, Christopher, 28, 34 Floyd, Troy, 50, 81 Fluck, Winfried, 16, 25, 34, 38, 194, 247, 368, 383, 412, 419 Foner, Eric, 213, 246 Foster, Stephen, 154, 190, 194 Founding Fathers, 11, 12, 30, 61, 197-242, 258, 370 ‘Black’ Founding Fathers, 212, 214, 220 as Christians, 240-41 founders chic, 200, 232-38, 239, 240 Founding Mothers, 200, 212, 221-27 Lincoln and ‘Second Founding’, 219-21 Lincoln and Obama, 220-21 memorial culture, 200, 206-209, 227-32 question of legitimacy, 209-12 and slavery, 213-19 transnational perspectives, 241- 42 Fourth of July, 198, 218, 342 Fox, William, 312, 321, 357 Frampton, Kenneth, 349, 357 Frank, Waldo, 177, 190 Franklin, Benjamin, 15, 199, 201, 205, 206, 233, 236, 241, 246, 370-73, 393, 412 Franklin, Deborah Read, 226, 371 Fraser, Nancy, 406, 412 Freedman, Rita, 401, 412 Frémont, John, 321, 357 Freneau, Philip, 54-57, 60, 81 Fresonke, Kris, 322, 326, 357 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 34 Friedman, Drew, 220 frontier, 19 frontier melting pot, 267 internment as ‘frontier’ experience, 332-35 New England frontier, 158 “New Frontier” speech (Kennedy), 344 in popular culture, 335-43 Vietnam as, 344-47 Western frontier, 311-15, 322- 326 women on the, 327-31 Fudge, Erica, 110, 130 Fugitive Slave Act, 170 INDEX | 435 Fusco, Coco, 71, 81 G Gailey, Elizabeth Atwood, 402, 412 Galle, Theodor, 92-93 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 24, 34 Garnett, David, 98, 130 Garrity, Patrick, 198, 251 Garvey, Marcus, 171 Gast, John, 63-64 Gates, Bill, 405, 412 Gates, Henry Louis, 22, 34, 168, 190 Gebhardt, Caroline, 330, 357 Gelles, Edith, 223, 234, 246, 253 Generall Historie of Virginia, The (Smith), 96, 98-100 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Loos), 399 Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte, 329-30, 357 Geronimo, 74, 340, 348 Gerstle, Gary, 278, 282, 293, 297, 302 Gerund, Katharina, 395, 412 Gewecke, Frauke, 49, 81 Gilded Age, The, 376, 382, 417 Giles, Paul, 39, 349, 357 Gill, Crispin, 182, 190 Gill, Rosalind, 399, 401, 412, 413 Gillman, Susan, 24, 33 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 326, 400, 412 Giroux, Henry, 238, 247 Gish, Lillian, 178 Glaspell, Susan, 334, 358 Glazer, Nathan, 260, 291-93, 302, 385, 415 Gleason, Philip, 259, 268, 298, 302, 308 Godfather, The (Puzo), 66, 389-90 Gold, Michael, 67, 81, 281, 302 Goldberg, David Theo, 285, 292 Goldman, Anne, 319, 358 Goldsmith, Arnold, 67, 81 Goldstein, Eric, 268, 272, 302 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 11, 34, 71, 81 Gooch, G.P., 178, 190 Goodman, John, 397, 412 Goodrich, Aaron, 62-63, 82 Gordon, Milton, 283-84, 302 Gordon-Reed, Annette, 215, 247 Gospel of Wealth, The (A. Carnegie), 17, 377 Grant, Madison, 274, 279, 302 Gray, Thomas, 169, 190 Great Depression, 282, 319-20, 324- 25 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 280, 372, 384 Great Train Robbery, The (Porter), 341 Green Berets, The (Wayne et al.), 345, 347 Greenberg, Stanley, 241, 247 Greenblatt, Stephen, 47, 82 Greene, Jack, 141, 190 Greenough, Horatio, 202 Greven, Thomas, 240, 247 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 171, 190 Grinde, Donald, 230, 247 Groseclose, Barbara, 54, 57, 59-60, 82 Grossman, Lev, 406, 413 Ground Zero, 239 Gruber, Frank, 342 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Kramer), 287 Guterl, Matthew Pratt, 283, 302 Gutmann, Amy, 292, 302, 307 31, Furstenberg, François, 202, 246 436 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA H Haitian Revolution, 216, 242 Halaby, Laila, 175, 190 Halberstam, Jack, 403, 413 Hall, David, 139, 159, 166, 177, 190 Hall, Stuart, 26, 34 Hamell, George, 230, 251 Hamilton, Alexander, 199, 201, 203, 204, 207, 236, 240, 247 Hammett, Dashiell, 349, 358 Hamor, Ralph, 95, 130 Hancock, John, 206, 207 Hannerz, Ulf, 39, 298, 302 Hansen, Jonathan, 275, 278, 298, 303 Harding, Warren, 199-200, 247 Hartman, Saidiya, 215, 247 Hartog, François, 48, 82 Hartz, Louis, 374, 413 Haselstein, Ulla, 104, 130 Haskins, R.W., 263, 303 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 176-78, 190, 380-81, 413 Hays, Mary, 112, 130 Hebel, Udo, 39, 162, 190, 194 Heimert, Alan, 153, 156, 159, 189, 190 Helburn, Suzanne Wiggins, 241, 251 Heller, Joseph, 385, 413 Hellmann, John, 345-47, 358 Helmstetter, Rudolf, 368, 372, 413 Help, The (Stockett), 394-95 Hemings, James, 214, 235-36 Hemings, Sally, 214-16, 227 Hemingway, Ernest, 115, 130 Hemispheric American Studies, 24 Hendler, Glenn, 38, 374, 377, 413 Henige, David, 62, 82 Herberg, Will, 283, 303 Herget, Winfried, 53, 57, 82, 159, 190 Herr, Cheryl, 350, 351, 358 Herr, Michael, 343, 358 Hess, Karen, 236 Hibbins, Anne, 222 Hietala, Thomas, 39, 322, 358 Higham, John, 61, 82 Hill, Christopher, 194 Hill, Walter, 350, 359 Hine, Robert, 318, 322-23, 358 Hirsch, E.D., 292-93, 303, 308 Hitchcock, Alfred, 232, 249 Hobsbawm, Eric, 12, 34 Hobson, Geary, 71, 82 Hoffert, Sylvia, 226, 247 Hofstadter, Richard, 198, 254, 312, 315, 317, 358, 364, 369, 377, 413 Hollinger, David, 39, 290, 294, 303 Holloway, Mark, 142, 190 Holton, Woody, 212, 230, 247 Homestead Act of 1862, 318 Honour, Hugh, 91-92, 130 Hooker, Isabella, 227 Hooker, Thomas, 150, 153-54 Hope, Bob, 387 Horkheimer, Max, 26, 34, 336, 355 Hornung, Alfred, 307 Houdon, Jean Antoine, 202 Hough, Emerson, 326, 358 House of Mirth (Wharton), 399 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros), 387 Houston, Velina Hasu, 334, 358 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 388- 89 How to Win Friends and Influence People (D. Carnegie), 372 Howard, Hugh, 234, 247 Howells, William Dean, 382-84, 413 Huang, Nian-Sheng, 371, 413 Hubbard, William, 154 Hughes, Robert, 293, 303 INDEX | 437 Hull House, 275 Hulme, Peter, 90-91, 96-97, 98, 99- 101, 106, 109, 115, 130 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez), 386 Huntington, Samuel, 297, 303 Hustvedt, Siri, 405, 413 Hutchinson, Anne, 154 Hutchinson, Elizabeth, 115, 130 I ideology, 13 American exceptionalism as, 14- 17, 21-22 Columbus and, 57-60, 71-75 of domesticity, 330-331 of Founding Fathers, 205 melting pot and, 270-72, 275-79 and myth, 27-28, 31 Pocahontas and, 103-10, 111-20 Puritan, 155, 181 and racism, 287-88 and religion, 240 of upward mobility/success, 373- 74, 377, 384, 397, 399, 405 of westward expansion, 322, 325, 351 imagined community (Anderson), 12, 26-27, 259 immigration, 260, 262, 264, 272-74, 370, 385 Immigration Act of 1924, 62 Independence Day, see Fourth of July Indian massacre of 1622, 96 Indian Wars, see War indigenization, 13 going native in Jamestown, 98 in Avatar, 124-25 white captives in literature, 104 individualism, 16, 367-68, 395, 397, 405 Ingraham, J.H., 376, 413 Irish Americans, 67, 295, 390 Iroquois, 230, 324 Irving, Washington, 58-59, 60, 82, 104, 202, 247, 381 Italian Americans, 64-66, 74, 76, 294-95, 386, 390 J Jackson, Andrew, 343, 377 Jackson, Jesse, 220 Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, 321, 358, 364 Jacobson, Matthew, 61, 63, 82, 263- 64, 266-67, 294-95, 303 Jacoby, Tamar, 297, 303 Jaffe, Irma, 206-208, 247 James, Henry, 111, 203, 382 Jameson, Fredric, 29, 35 Jameson, John Franklin, 212, 247 Jamestown, 89, 90, 91, 96, 97, 103, 104, 109, 114, 123, 124, 137, 143, 151, 167, 183 Japanese Americans, 332-35 Jarmusch, Jim, 341 Jaroff, Rebecca, 105-106, 130 Jasmine (Mukherjee), 386 Jay Treaty, 204 Jay, John, 199, 201, 203-204, 207, 236, 247 Jefferson, Thomas, 15 and Adam Smith, 406 and the agrarian myth, 314-15, 358 and founders chic, 233, 235-236 as Founding Father, 199, 201- 203, 206 and the melting pot, 263, 303 Monticello, 215, 238, 247 Mount Rushmore, 228 438 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA and Native Americans, 101 and the Promised Land, 160 as slaveowner, 213, 216-17 transnational perspective, 241, 245, 247 Jeffords, Susan, 343, 358 Jen, Gish, 175, 190 Jennings, Francis, 71 Jennings, Paul, 214-15, 246 Jewish American, 66-67, 84, 174, 175, 294, 386 Jim Crow laws, 284-85 Johansen, Bruce, 230, 247, 248 Johnson, Lyndon B., 343 Jones, Gayle, 394 Jordan, Winthrop, 168 Josephy, Alvin, 71, 82 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 388 K Kallen, Horace, 274-78, 303 Kammen, Michael, 40, 86, 195, 254, 285, 303, 378, 413 Kant, Immanuel, 369, 413 Kantrowitz, Stephen, 219, 248 Kaplan, Amy, 23, 35, 40, 331, 358, 419, 422, 426 Karcher, Carolyn, 105, 130, 287, 303 Katkin, Wendy, 291-92, 304 Kauffman, Christopher, 67-68, 82 Kaufman, Polly Welts, 364 Kean, Alasdair, 12, 33, 76, 80, 271, 301 Keane, Glen, 124 Keillor, Garrison, 76, 82 Kelpius, Johannes, 142 Kennedy, John F., 282, 344, 359 Kennedy, Randall, 290, 304 Kennedy, Ruby, 283, 304 Kerber, Linda, 40, 212, 224-25, 248 Kettell, Samuel, 57, 82 Kimmel, Michael, 384, 413 King Philip’s War, see War King, Martin Luther, 171-72, 191, 220 Kipp, Woody, 347, 359 Kirkland, Caroline, 329-30, 359 Knights of Columbus, 67-68 Knott, Stephen, 204, 248 Koch-Linde, Brigitta, 368, 413 Koerner, W.H.D., 328 Koetzing, Stephen, 395, 412 Kolchin, Peter, 217, 248 Kollin, Susan, 348, 359 Kolodny, Annette, 21, 22, 35, 40, 325, 329, 359 Krausz, Ernest, 297, 304 Kubal, Timothy, 75, 83 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 92, 131, 134 Kurosawa, Akira, 349-50, 361, 363 L LaHaye, Tim, 197, 240, 248 Lakota, 229-31, 340 Landsman, Ned, 291-92, 304 Lange, Dorothea, 319, 359 Laos, 344 Larkins, Sharon, 90, 131 las Casas, Bartolomé de, 45, 50-51 Last Man Standing (Hill), 350 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 335 Laughlin, Harry, 278-79 Lauter, Paul, 22, 35, 45, 83 Lawlor, Mary, 321, 342, 359 Lay of the Land, The (Kolodny), 21, 329 Lazarus, Emma, 66-67, 83, 386-87, 414 INDEX | 439 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 265-66 Lederer, William, 346, 359 Lee, Ang, 341, 355 Lee, Ann, Mother, 142 Lemay, Leo, 94, 111, 131 Lenz, Guenter, 40 Lepore, Jill, 214-15, 239-40, 248, 254, 343, 359 Levander, Caroline, 40 Leverenz, David, 380, 414 Levine, Robert, 40, 205, 217-18, 248 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 40 Lewis and Clark expedition, 320 Lewis, R.W.B., 19, 35, 351, 359 Lewis, Sinclair, 385, 414 Liberty Tower (Ground Zero), 239 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 68-69 Limerick, Patricia, 318, 325, 333-34, 359 Lincoln, Abraham, 148, 165 and expansionism, 322-23 as Founding Father, 200, 204, 219 Homestead Act, 318 Mount Rushmore, 228 and Obama, 220-21 as self-made man, 377 Lindsay, Vachel, 114, 131 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 15, 35, 40, 254 Little Big Man (Penn), 346 Little House on the Prairie (Ingalls), 314 Livingston, Robert, 206-207 Loeb, Lori Anne, 399, 414 Loeffelholz, Mary, 106, 131 Loewen, James, 75, 83 Loewenberg, Bert James, 45, 51, 83 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman et al.), 385 Loock, Kathleen, 86 Loos, Anita, 399, 414 Loose Canons (Gates), 22 Louisiana Purchase, 228, 331 Loving v. Virginia, 286 Lowe, Lisa, 25, 35, 40, 332, 359 Luedtke, Luther, 265, 304 M Machine in the Garden, The, 312 Mackenthun, Gesa, 96-100, 131 Mad Men (TV series), 385 Madison, James and founders chic, 236 as Founding Father, 198, 199, 201, 203, 207 and religion, 240 as slaveholder, 214, 219 Madonna of the Prairie, The (Koerner), 328 Madsen, Deborah, 15-16, 19, 35 Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather), 158 Magnificent Seven, The (Sturges), 350 Maier, Pauline, 209-10, 219-20, 248, 254 Main Currents in American Thought (Parrington), 18, 177 Majewski, Karen, 387-88, 414 Malick, Terrence, 124, 133 Malinche, 125 manifest destiny, 43, 314, 322-23, 326, 330, 333, 350, 351 manifest domesticity, 326, 330-31 Mann, Charles, 72, 83 Marcus, Greil, 40, 248 Mares, Bill, 234, 248 Marks, Barry, 41 Marling, Karal Ann, 202, 249 Mars Attacks! (Burton), 232 440 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Marshall, Paule, 387, 414 Martin, Darcy, 419 Martin, Terence, 53, 83 Martin, Waldo, 392, 414 Martineau, Harriet, 367, 414 Marx Brothers, 67 Marx, Karl, 370, 374, 414 Marx, Leo, 19, 35, 41, 312, 360, 382, 414 Mason, George, 210-11, 240 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 138-39, 150, 152-54, 178, 180 Massasoit, 146-48 Mather, Cotton, 150, 158-59, 191 Mather, Increase, 150, 158 Matthiessen, Francis Otto, 176, 191 May, Karl, 349, 361 Mayer, Jeremy, 186, 191 Mayflower, 68, 138-40, 143-45, 162- 63, 172-75, 182, 184 Mayflower Compact, 145, 163, 184, 198 McCall, Dan, 382, 414 McCarthy, William, 110, 131 McCullough, David, 233-34, 249 McHale, Brian, 69, 83 McLaughlin v. Florida, 286 McMurtry, Larry, 339, 360 Mead, Margaret, 368, 379, 407, 414 Meek’s Cutoff (Reichardt), 328 melting pot, 11, 12, 16, 30, 257-98 313, 324, 386 Crèvecoeur’s Letters, 261-62, 264-65, 285 and cultural pluralism, 260, 274- 78, 283, 291-95, 296 E Pluribus Unum, 257-58, 264 Emerson’s melting pot, 264-65 and eugenics, 274, 278-80 Forefather’s Day, 162-63 frontier melting pot, 267 hybridity, 260-61, 289-91, 298 Jefferson’s view, 263-64, 265 models of amalgamation, 101, 262-68, 274, 285, 291 multiculturalism, 291-95 multiple melting pots, 283-84, 291 and the one-drop rule, 284 and racial mixing, 101 260, 262- 68, 283-91 and religious difference, 283-84 rituals, 281 transnational perspective, 296-98 Zangwill’s play, 265, 268-74, 275, 285, 296 Melting Pot, The (Zangwill), 260, 268-74, 275, 285, 296 Melville, Herman, 105, 131, 176, 381-82, 414, 419 Merish, Lori, 330, 360 mestizaje, 291 Metacomet (a.k.a. ‘King Philip’), 147, 158 Mexican Americans, 291, 327 Michaels, Walter Benn, 24, 35, 308, 377-78, 383, 414, 419 Miller, Arthur, 384, 415 Miller, Logan, 328, 362 Miller, Perry, 19, 35, 41, 151-52, 180-81, 191, 195, 316, 360 miscegenation, 101, 102, 115, 123, 260, 263, 283-87 anti-miscegenation laws, 101, 286 Miss America pageant, 400-401 “Model of Christian Charity, A” (Winthrop), 152-53, 159 Momaday, N. Scott, 71 Monceaux, R.L. Morgan, 118-19 Moore, Robin, 345, 360 Moraru, Christian, 374-75, 415 INDEX | 441 Moravians, 142 More, Thomas, 141, 191 Morgan, Edmund, 89, 131, 150, 152, 154, 191, 195, 201, 211, 213-14, 233, 249, 254 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 263 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 67, 83, 180- 81, 191 Morris, Richard, 199, 249, 254 Morris, Robert, 240 Morrison, Toni, 166-67, 171, 191 Morton, Thomas, 153 Mother Ann Lee, 142 Mott, Lucretia, 227 Mount Rushmore National Memorial, 200, 227-32 Mourning Dove, 113 Moynihan, Patrick Daniel, 260, 292, 302 muckraking journalism, 388 Mukherjee, Bharati, 386, 415 Muller, Dan, 339-41, 360 multiculturalism, 22-23, 69, 123-24, 175, 233, 260, 291-94 mundus novus letter (Vespucci), 53 Münkler, Herfried, 28, 35 Murray, Judith Sargent, 224-26, 249 My Ántonia (Cather), 329, 331 “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (Hawthorne), 381-82 Myrdal, Gunnar, 17, 35, 308 myth as falsehood, 26 foundational myth (Assmann), 30 iconicity of, 12 and ideology, 28 intersubjective dimension of, 27 Jungian archetypes (Slotkin), 29 as make-believe, 29-30, 77, 209 political (Flood and Münkler), 28 as political demagogy, 26 as popular belief system, 27 as semiotic system, 27 self-effacing character of, 29 tacit dimension, 17, 29, 31, 332, 337, 344, 372 Myth and Symbol School, 18-21, 25, 31, 181-83 myth of ‘discovery’, see Columbus N Nackenoff, Carol, 374-76, 415 Nahshon, Edna, 268, 296, 304 Nash, Gary, 131, 212, 216, 249 Nation among Nations, A (Bender), 23, 241-42 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, 117 Native American studies, 21, 118 Native Americans (see also individual tribes), 13 and Columbus, 68-75 and Mount Rushmore, 230-31 and the melting pot, 260, 262-63, 265, 267 and the myth of the West, 314, 320, 325, 335-39, 340, 342, 344, 345, 347 Pocahontas as 89-91, 97, 102, 105-106, 115-20 Puritan encounter with, 146, 147, 154, 158, 179, 181, 184-85 Naylor, Gloria, 394 Nee, Victor, 295, 300 Nelson, Willie, 319 New Americanists, 23-25, 140 “New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), 66- 67 New Home, Who’ll Follow, A? (Kirkland), 329-30, 359 442 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA ‘new world,’ 11-12, 43-45, 91-94, 141-42, 275, 321, 380 New World, The (Malick), 124 Ngai, Mae, 332, 360 9/11, 30-31, 73, 234, 239, 241, 297 Nisei Daughter (Sone), 333 Nixon, Richard, 343, 376 Nobles, Gregory, 233, 234, 249 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 232 northSun, nila, 118, 131 Norton, Anne, 112, 131 Norton, Mary Beth, 222, 224, 249 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 202, 217, 315-16 Novak, Michael, 294, 304 Nugent, Ted, 297 O Obama, Barack, 167, 168, 220-21, 286, 305, 346-47, 360, 391, 396- 97, 415 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford), 143-49, 173 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 167 Omi, Michael, 267, 305 Onuf, Peter, 263, 305, 320, 360 Opechancanough, 97 Opfermann, Susanne, 57, 80, 104, 131 Oprah, Winfrey, 391, 395-96 Seth Jones, 337-38 Osama bin Laden, 348 Ostendorf, Berndt, 12, 35, 41 Øverland, Orm, 273, 305, 387, 415 P Pace v. Alabama, 286 Paine, Thomas, 15, 35, 199 Palfrey, John Gorham, 163, 192 Palin, Sarah, 239 Parini, Jay, 143, 192, 371, 381, 415 Park, Robert, 277 Parkman, Francis, 266, 305, 321, 360 Parrington, Vernon, 18, 35, 177, 192 Paul, Heike, 333, 360 Paulding, James Kirke, 112, 131, 381 Peale, Charles Willson, 59, 202, 204 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 56-57, 83, 343, 360 Pearl Harbor, 332 Pease, Donald, 12, 17-18, 19, 23-24, 29-31, 35, 38, 41, 383, 415, 419 Penn, William, 142 Pequot War, see War Per un pugno di dollari (Leone), 349 Peterson, Merrill, 202, 250 Petry, Ann, 393-94, 415 “Pictures of Columbus, The” (Freneau), 54-55 Pierson, George, 325, 361 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 298, 305 Pilgrims and Puritans, 11, 12, 19, 30, 137-86, 198, 242, 258 African American appropriations, 166-72 and American studies, 180-83 church membership and half-way covenant, 154, 156, 159 and exceptionalism, 152 Exodus-theme, 137-38, 145-46, 170, 173 immigrant perspectives, 172-76 modernist revisionism, 176-80 and memorial culture, 160-66 Native American protest, 184-85 New England and the West, 165 New England Way, 159, 165, 179, 181 opposition to slavery, 165 INDEX | 443 Plymouth Rock, 68, 149, 161-62, 166, 172, 184 Promised Land, see Promised Land as Protestant myth, 165-66 Thanksgiving (holiday), 148, 162, 165, 184-87 transnational dimension, 186 Pizarro, Francisco, 51, 55, 71 ‘playing Indian,’ 105, 230 Plymouth Colony, 15, 139, 143, 145- 49, 162, 164 Pocahontas, 11, 12, 16, 30, 89-126, 138, 163-64, 183, 242, 258, 350 adoption ritual, 99-100 baptism of, 108-10 and captivity, 90 and conversion, 90, 100, 110 and de-indigenization, 110, 125 as feminist, 112-13 in film, 123-25 as founding mother, 109, 111, 114, 117-18 as Indian princess, 90-94, 104- 105, 112, 118, 120, 126 Indian-white intermarriage, 97 and Kocoum, 100, 123 as Lady Rebecca, 90-91, 108 marriage to John Rolfe, 90-91, 109 as Mato(w)aka, 91, 107, 119 Native American perspectives, 115-20 and Native removal, 102, 105 as noble savage, 91 and 19th century Indian plays, 104-106 Pocahontas’s child, 104 role of Indian massacre of 1622, 96 romantic ‘new world’ love story, 89, 90-91, 102-03, 122-23 and the so-called rescue scene, 90-91, 95-96, 98-99, 100, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110-11, 118, 122-24 as southern myth, 111-12, 163 visual representations of, 107- 110, 119 Pocahontas (Gabriel and Goldberg), 122-23 Polish Americans, 294, 387-88 political unconscious, 29, 31 Polk, James K., 322-23 Poole, Ernest, 281, 305 popular culture studies, 21, 341 postcolonial studies, 23, 49, 119, 183, 260, 298 Potter, David, 41, 367-68, 407, 415 Pourier, Walt, 73 Powell, John Wesley, 263 Powell, Rose Arnold, 231 Powhatan, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 112, 123 Pretty Woman (Marshall), 399 Progressivism, 212, 260, 274, 305, 308, 378, 388 Promised Land 15, 137-40, 142, 143- 44, 145 and African Americans, 168-69, 170-72 Bradford and the Pilgrims, 148- 49 Canada as Canaan, 170 Danforth, 156-58 and the immigrant experience, 173-74, 175 Jefferson, 160 Mather, 158-59 Webster 163, 165 444 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Winthrop and the Puritans, 152- 54 Zangwill, 271 Promised Land, The (Antin), 67, 172- 74, 386 Proulx, Annie, 335, 361 public feeling, 27 Purchas, Samuel, 95, 132 Puritan Origins of the American Self (Bercovitch), 19, 153, 181 pursuit of happiness, 369, 404 Pursuit of Happyness, The (Muccino), 395 Puzo, Mario, 66, 389, 415 Q Quarles, Benjamin, 216, 250 Queen Elizabeth, 92 Quigley, David, 219, 250 Quincy, George, 132 R Racial Integrity Act of 1662, 101 racism, 21 against African Americans, 167, 172, 217 and eugenics 278, 282 and nativism, 61 post 9/11, 297 and segregation, 287, 288 and social mobility, 394-95 Radway, Janice, 24, 36 Ragged Dick series (Alger), 374-76 Raleigh, Walter, 92 Rambo: First Blood Part II (Cosmatos), 346 Randall, Dudley, 289, 305 Randolph, Mary, 236, 250 Reagan, Ronald, 343 Reed, Ishmael, 69, 84 Regeneration through Violence (Slotkin), 313, 342 Reichardt, Kelly, 328 Reinitz, Richard, 182, 192 Republican Motherhood (Kerber), 224-227 Revard, Carter, 69-70, 83 Riesman, David, 385, 415 Rihbany, Abraham Mitrie, 386, 415 Riis, Jacob, 308, 388-89, 416 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan), 387 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 383-84 “Rising Glory of America, The” (Freneau), 54-55 Roanoke, the ‘lost colony’, 92 Roberts, Cokie, 221, 223-24, 226, 250 Robertson, James Oliver, 368, 376, 416 Robertson, William, 52 83 Rockefeller, John, 377-79, 395 Rocky (Avildsen), 386 Rodriguez, Richard, 386, 416 Rogin, Michael, 308, 343, 361, 382, 416 Rolfe, John, 90, 97, 100-101, 104- 105, 109-110, 116-17 Roosevelt, Franklin, 230 Roosevelt, Theodore, 228, 268, 324, 361, 393 Rosenmeiner, Jesper, 149, 192 Rosier, Paul, 347, 361 Ross, Betsy, 226 Ross, E.A., 278, 308 Roth, Henry, 273, 305 Roth, Philip, 67, 83 Rothstein, Arthur, 319-20 Rotunda of the United States Capitol INDEX | 445 Baptism of Pocahontas, 108-109 Embarkation of the Pilgrims, 163-64 Declaration of Independence, 207-209 Landing of Columbus, 59-60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16 Rowe, John Carlos, 13, 23-24, 36, 38, 41, 265, 305 Rowlandson, Mary, 100 Runte, Alfred, 228, 250 S Sadowski-Smith, 351, 361 Sale, Kirkpatrick, 47, 50, 60, 63, 65- 66, 83 Salem witch trials, 158, 179 Salins, Peter, 260, 297, 305 Sammons, Jeffrey, 349, 361 Santángel, Luis de, 45 Santayana, George, 177-78, 192 Sartre, Jean Paul, 369, 416 Saveth, Edward, 266, 285, 305 Saya, Tom, 228, 250 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 176- 78 Schachner, Nathan, 198, 250 Schama, Simon, 214, 228, 231, 250 Schlesinger, Arthur, 216, 250, 293, 296, 305 Schmidt, Arno, 349, 361 Schreiner, Olive, 400, 416 Schudson, Michael, 211, 250 Schueller, Malini Johar, 24, 36, 183, 192 Schülting, Sabine, 92-93, 132 Schultz, Eric, 158, 192 Schuman, Howard, 13, 36 Schwartz, Barry, 13, 36 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 386, 416 Scobell, Sara, 224-25, 250 Scott, Ridley, 71, 81 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 104, 131 Seelye, John, 148, 161, 192 myth of the self-made man, 11, 12, 16, 30, 61, 258, 367-407 African American perspectives, 390-97 Algerism, 374 Benjamin Franklin, 370-73 classless society, 368 Horatio Alger, 370, 373-377, 385 Horatio Alger stories, 374-76 immigrant stories and success myth, 385-90 literary representations of (white) self-made men, 380-85 and self-made women, 398-404 social mobility in America, 16, 367, 405, 407 “Self-Made Man, A” (Crane), 384 Seneca Falls Convention, 226 Sennett, Richard, 293, 305 Sensational Designs (Tompkins), 22 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), 350 Shafer, Byron, 14, 36 Shannon, Fred, 325, 361 Shelby County v. Holder, 284 Shell, Marc, 24, 36 Shepard, Thomas, 150 Sherman, Roger, 206, 207, 240 Shohat, Ella, 71, 74-75, 84, 90, 117, 132, 293, 306 Shreve, Jack, 44, 58, 84 Shumsky, Neil, 271, 306 “Significance of the Frontier in American History, The” (Turner), 267, 306, 311, 323-25 Simms, William Gilmore, 109-110, 132 Simonson, Rick, 292-93, 306 446 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Sinclair, Upton, 388, 416 Sinking Columbus (Summerhill and Williams), 72 Sioux, 230, 248 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 399 Sitting Bull, 340 slavery, 21 anti-slavery New England, 163, 165 Columbus and ‘new world’ slavery, 50-51, 62, 69 and the exodus narrative, 139, 166-72 Founding Fathers and, 200, 201- 203, 213-20, 237 and self-making (Douglass and Washington), 391-93 and Tea Party activism 239-40 Slotkin, Richard, 21-22, 29, 36, 42, 155-56, 182, 192, 306, 312-13, 325-26, 331, 335-36, 340-44, 361 Smardz-Frost, Kathryn, 170, 192 Smith, Adam, 406, 416 Smith, Andrew, 236, 251 Smith, Henry Nash, 18, 20, 21, 22, 36, 57, 84, 311-12, 314, 316-17, 321, 329, 342, 362 Smith, John, 89-91, 94-100, 102-111, 118, 122-23, 132, 143 Smitherman, Geneva, 168, 192 Smith-Rosenberg, Carol, 321, 362 Social Network, The (Fincher), 406 Sollors, Werner, 24, 36, 40, 67, 84, 94, 105-106, 133, 174-75, 193, 248, 261-62, 272-74, 286-87, 306, 308, 387, 416 Solomon, Eric, 384, 416 Something Happened (Heller), 385 Sone, Monica, 333, 362 Sontag, Susan, 347, 362 Sopranos, The (TV series), 66, 390 Sorokin, Pitirim, 407 Spalding, Matthew, 198, 251 Sperling, John, 241, 251 Spivak, Gayatri, 49, 84 Squanto, 146-47 Srodes, James, 201, 251 Stagecoach (Ford), 341 Stahr, John, 203-204, 251 Stam, Robert, 71, 74-75, 84, 90, 117, 132, 293, 306 Stanfield, Jack, 199, 251 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 227 Starna, William, 230, 251 Stas Helena, 388 “state fantasy” (Pease), 29-31 Statue of Freedom (US Capitol), 258 Statue of Liberty, 66, 228, 271, 386 Stavans, Ilan, 44, 84 Steinfield, Melvin, 288, 306 Stephanson, Anders, 42, 322, 362 Stewart, Catherine, 329, 362 Stewart, George, 283, 306 Stewart, James, 343 Stewart, Kathleen, 27, 36 Stith, William, 104, 133 Stockett, Kathryn, 394, 416 Stoddard, Theodore Lothrop, 274, 279, 306 Stone, Peter, 232, 251 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 165, 168, 193, 195 Strachey, William, 95, 100, 133 Streamas, John, 333, 362 Street, The (Petry), 393 “structure of feeling” (R. Williams), 27, 343 Stuart, Gilbert, 202, 223, 225 Styron, William, 169, 193 Summerhill, Stephen, 72, 84 Surviving Columbus (Reyna), 71 Sweetwater (Logan), 328 INDEX | 447 T tacit knowledge, 29 Tally, Robert, 23, 37 Tarantino, Quentin, 341, 356 Tarbell, Ida, 378, 417 Tasker, Yvonne, 403, 417 Taylor Haizlip, Shirlee, 290, 306 Taylor, Alan, 202, 211, 251 Team America: World Police (Parker), 232 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 102, 133 Thanksgiving, see Pilgrims and Puritans Thernstrom, Stephan, 368, 373, 388, 417 Theweleit, Klaus, 124-25, 133 Thomas, Evan, 233, 251 “Thoughts on Government” (Adams), 203 Thoreau, Henry David, 326, 362, 381, 417 Tillam, Thomas, 153, 193 Tillotson, Kristin, 124, 133 Tilton, Robert, 102, 104, 106, 112, 133 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14, 15, 18, 37, 137-38, 161-62, 193, 198, 257, 367, 417 Todorov, Tzvetan, 47-48, 84 Tompkins, Jane, 22, 37, 342, 362 Toomer, Jean, 283, 306 Total Recall (Schwarzenegger, book), 386 Tougias, Michael, 158, 192 Trachtenberg, Alan, 22, 42, 318-19, 351, 362, 375-76, 417 Trail of Tears, 102, 110, 263, 343 “Trans-National America” (Bourne), 276-77 transnational American studies, 24 hemispheric American studies, 24 multilingualism, 24, 387-88 Pacific Rim Studies, 24 transatlantic American studies, 24 Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, 230 “Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men, The” (Douglass), 392 Trilling, Lionel, 384, 417 Trollope, Joanna, 329, 367, 417 True Grit (Coen and Coen), 328 True Relation of the State of Virginia, A (Rolfe), 101, 132 Trueblood, Kathryn, 23, 36 Truman, Harry S., 327 Trumbull, John, 204, 206, 207, 208, 219, 245, 247 Truth, Sojourner, 227, 251 Tubman, Harriet, 170 Tumin, Melvin, 174, 193 Turner Strong, Pauline, 123, 133 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 267, 306, 311, 323-24, 3, 362, 365 Turner, Terence, 293, 306 Twain, Mark, 374, 382, 417 Twelbeck, Kirsten, 219, 251 Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, 332 Tyson, Lois, 384, 417 U Uchida, Yoshiko, 333, 362 Uhry Abrams, Ann, 89, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 133, 138, 144, 162, 164, 166, 167, 179, 182, 183, 193 Ullmann, Margaret, 113, 133 Unforgiven (Eastwood), 341 Unger, Harlow Giles, 199, 251 Up from Slavery (Washington), 392, 393 448 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA US Department of the Treasury, 257, 258, 306 “usable past” (Commager), 12, 29, 52, 66, 103, 179-80, 258, 407 V van de Passe, Simon, 92, 107 Vanderlyn, John, 59-60 Veblen, Thorsten, 350-51, 362, 376, 417 Vespucci, Amerigo, 53, 62, 76, 92-93 Veyne, Paul, 13, 37 Vidal, Gore, 199, 204, 242, 251 Vietnam War, see War Vignaud, Henry, 67, 84 Virgin Land (Smith), 18-19, 21, 31, 57, 311, 313, 318, 329-30, 342 Virginia Declaration of Rights, 211 Vizenor, Gerald, 69, 84, 115, 117, 133, 291, 306 Von Frank, Albert, 312, 362 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 284 W Wald, Alan, 394, 417 Walden (Thoreau), 326, 381 Waldman, Steven, 255 Waldseemüller, Martin, 53 Walker, Alice, 394, 417 Walker, Clarence, 216, 251 Walker, David, 217-18, 252 Walker, Scott, 292, 306 Wallace, Anthony, 263, 306 Wallace, Michelle, 293, 306 Wallace, Robert, 27, 29, 37 War American Revolution, 52, 54, 59, 102, 167, 197-242, 385 Civil War, 111, 140, 162-64, 167, 287 Indian Wars, 335, 344 King Philip’s War, 100, 147, 158 Pequot War, 154 Vietnam War, 314, 343-47 War in Iraq, 348 War of 1812, 203 War on Terror, 348 Ward, Jerry, 22, 36 Ward, Russell, 351, 362 Warner, Dudley Charles, 382, 417 Warren, Charles, 255 Warren, Mercy Otis, 224-26, 252 Washington, Booker T., 288, 307, 392-93, 417 Washington, George and Columbus as national heroes, 54, 59 and founders chic, 234-36 as Founding Father, 198-99, 201- 203, 206-207 in immigrant literature, 176 at Mount Rushmore, 228-29 at Mount Vernon, 236, 238 as slaveholder, 213-15 and the Tea Party movement, 239 Washington, Henry/Harry, 214 Washington, Hercules, 214-15, 236 Washington, Martha, 232 Waters, Mary, 294, 307 Watts, Edwards, 24, 36, 183, 192, 352, 362 Watts, Steven, 396, 402, 417 Wayne, John, 343, 345, 358 Weatherston, Rosemary, 124, 133 Weber, Max, 371-72, 417 Webster, Daniel, 162-63, 165, 193, 214 Webster, Noah, 102, 133 Weems, Mason Locke, 202, 252 INDEX | 449 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 260, 307 Weir, Robert, 164 West, see American West West, Cornel, 166, 193 West, Nathanael, 376, 418 Western Canon, The (H. Bloom), 22 Wexler, Laura, 226, 252 Wharton, Edith, 383, 399-400, 418 Wheatley, Phillis, 54, 85 Whelpley, Samuel, 53 Whitaker, Alexander, 109-110 White, Hayden, 76 Whitman, Walt, 85, 265-6, 307, 315, 363 Wiegman, Robyn, 23, 41 Wiencek, Henry, 216, 252 Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah), 341 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 314, 363 Wilentz, Sean, 233, 252 Williams, John Alexander, 72, 84 Williams, Raymond, 27, 37, 312, 317, 363 Williams, Roger, 154, 163, 193 Williams, William Carlos, 179, 193 Wills, Garry, 202, 252 Wilson, Flip, 70, 85 Wilson, Sarah, 261, 275, 282, 297, 307 Wilson, Sloan, 385, 418 Wilson, Woodrow, 285 Winant, Howard, 267, 305 Winkle, Kenneth, 377, 418 Winks, Robin, 170 Winslow, Edward, 148 Winsor, Justin, 62-63, 85 Winthrop, John, 15, 138, 150-54, 159, 163, 178, 181, 183, 193 Wise, Gene, 19-20, 37 Wister, Owen, 338, 363 Wolf, Naomi, 401, 418 women, see also feminism, 13, 20-22 absence of women at Mount Rushmore, 231-32 African American women and self-making, 394-95 Japanese American women in the West, 333-35 Pocahontas as woman and feminist, 112-13, 117-20 Republican motherhood, 221-27 representations of self-made women, 398-404 white women in the West, 326-31 Wood, Gordon, 241, 252 Woodward, Grace Steele, 97, 133 Worden, Daniel, 351, 363 work ethic, 369, 372, 374, 379, 384, 392, 401 Working Girl (Nichols), 403 Wounded Knee, 325, 347 Wright, Jeremiah, 168, 193 Wrobel, David, 314, 363 Wyllie, Irvin, 371-72, 374, 377, 418 X X, Malcolm, 290, 307 Y Yamada, Mitsuye, 333, 363 Yamamoto, Hitsuye, 334, 356, 363 Yamauchi, Wakako, 334, 363 yeoman farmer, 314, 315-20 Yezierska, Anzia, 174, 193 Yojimbo (Kurosawa), 349-50 Young, Neil, 121, 319 Young, Philip, 102, 111, 125-26, 134 450 | THE MYTHS THAT MADE AMERICA Z Zangwill, Israel, 260, 268-74, 296, 307 Zinsser, William, 227-28, 232, 252 Žižek, Slavoj, 29, 37 Zuckerberg, Mark, 405-406 American Culture in the 1950s Martin Halliwell Edinburgh University Press For Mum and Dad © Martin Halliwell, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 pt Stempel Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 1884 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 1885 9 (paperback) The right of Martin Halliwell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. Introduction The Intellectual Context At a Variety magazine conference at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2004, film producer Lawrence Bender responded dramatically to a question about media censorship in the United States. Censorship had increased suddenly in February 2004 after the inopportune exposure of singer Janet Jackson’s breast at the live televised Superbowl from Houston, Texas, and Bender’s response was biting: ‘I feel like I’m going back to the fifties here . . . the conservatives are taking over the country’.1 This unease about censorship was shared by many directors, writers and producers in Cannes 2004, with the rise of the Right on American network television and talk radio, and the threat of the Federal Communications Commission imposing large fines on networks, making it increasingly difficult to debate issues freely or to offer oppositional views to George W. Bush’s Republican administration. Given the widespread dissent from the film industry to Bush’s presidency, it was not surprising that in the last year of Bush’s first term the satirist and filmmaker Michael Moore won the Palme d’Or for Fahrenheit 9/11, his documentary attempt to topple the Republicans. The film received rapturous applause at its Cannes premiere, was seen by over 20 million people in 2004, and was the most discussed film of the year. Fahrenheit 9/11 argued polemically for the existence of a global conspiracy in which the US government and big corporations did little to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. It makes the claim that the government had hoodwinked the American public into believing that the preemptive strikes on Iraq represented a just war when the underlying motives were economic ones. Moore champions ordinary people – grieving mothers, reluctant young soldiers, and peace-loving citizens – against the greed of power groups, in his attempt to loosen what liberals see as the corporate stranglehold over the American media. Bender’s reference to the 1950s as a conservative age in this context evokes a decade half a century earlier in which no one asked too many questions of the government. Although the deeply ingrained deception that Moore was keen to expose is in part the legacy of conspiracy theories that emerged following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the ideological warfare that Fahrenheit 9/11 documents, between ‘freedom-loving Americans’ (to use Bush’s phrase) and hateful Middle East terrorists, is the direct legacy of the early cold war years, with the target now projected onto a different enemy. The fear that the Soviet Union had the capability and the inclination to launch attacks on the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s led not only to the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs in the West, but also to the fear that communists were working to disintegrate American society from within. That physicist Klaus Fuchs and State Department official Alger Hiss were routed out of government circles for being Soviet spies (Hiss was exposed in the famous trial of 1949, Fuchs in 1950) and that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 on conspiracy charges (without full substantiation) are indications of the political paranoia that grew steadily after 1946. The looming presence of the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous list of fifty-seven ‘card-carrying Communists’ that he claimed in February 1950 to be working within the Department of State (a number scaled down two days before from 205) inflamed the anticommunist hysteria that burnt strongly for eight years. Cold war ideology is central to understanding 1950s culture but it was also a period in which the economic prosperity that began during World War II started to have tangible effects on middle-class life. ExFirst Lady and New York Senator Hillary Clinton recalled this aspect in her memoir Living History (2003). Reflecting on her sheltered midwestern childhood in the 1950s, she remembered ‘middle-class America was flush with emerging prosperity and all that comes with it – new houses, fine schools, neighborhood parks and safe communities’.2 For Clinton it was a decade of rising expectations, the emergence of youth culture, and the unprecedented availability of cultural products. But prospects in the 1950s came at a price: rather than questioning political decisions that contributed to the nation’s rise to global eminence, the growth of mass media encouraged consumers to simply enjoy the material comforts that international prestige brought. Historian Lizabeth Cohen shared a similar upbringing to Hillary Clinton as children of ‘the Consumers’ Republic’, which Cohen 2 American Culture in the 1950s describes as defining ‘many more dimensions of life than most of us recognized at the time’.3 Although liberal and conservative currents blurred in the anticommunist climate of the early 1950s, as Lawrence Bender emphasizes, the decade is remembered for its conservatism. This is evident in the case of Hillary Clinton. Although a moderate liberal in her adult life, Clinton adopted the conservatism of her father in the 1950s, was an active Young Republican and supported the rightwing Senator Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s, and did not find her liberal voice until the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s when she was a student at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Clinton’s story of political re-education is by no means an isolated case, reflecting the transition from inward-looking conservatism of the 1950s to the political activism of the mid-1960s. Decades, of course, rarely add up to consistent wholes. The 1920s is much more complex than ‘the Jazz Age’ suggests and the 1930s more culturally varied than its ‘Depression Era’ tag. The 1950s is one decade that looks flat and uncomplicated, dominated by Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist accusations in the early decade and the benign face of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the mid- to late 1950s. For left-liberals the decade is often written off as a low point for oppositional politics, whereas for conservatives, especially since the 1980s, it is a decade of consensus worthy of celebration. Whatever political perspective is adopted it is difficult to evade the shadow of the cold war. But, while it is tempting to read the cold war into all cultural products of the 1950s, this can be a reductive exercise. Art critic Fred Orton claims that ‘the Cold War is a constraining notion, a closure, which conditions us not to probe deeper the real determinations of foreign and domestic policy’ and he urges us to ask harder questions about the relationship between art and politics.4 Although books such as Douglas Field’s collection American Cold War Culture (2005) continue to frame the 1950s in terms of the cold war, on closer inspection the decade reveals a number of political, social and cultural currents that cannot easily be expressed as ‘cold war culture’. In popular memory the decade gave rise to Elvis, high-school romances, Tupperware, the Peanuts comic strip, Hollywood blondes, 3-D cinema, and black baseball star Jackie Robinson helping the Brooklyn Dodgers to six World Series finals. No overarching or static notion of culture can do justice to these parallel emergences, a realization that has led recent cultural historians to focus on 1950s culture as a site of dualities, tensions and contradictions. This book develops the idea of American culture in the 1950s in this broader sense, where The Intellectual Context 3 a notion of national culture – with ‘One nation under God’ added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 – jostles with a range of other cultural expressions and practices. Periodizing the 1950s One of the earliest periodizing accounts by the historian Eric Goldman takes 1945 to 1955 as ‘the crucial decade’, whereas philosopher Hannah Arendt characterized the postwar period as one caught ‘between past and future’.5 More recently, in 1986, J. Ronald Oakley described the 1950s as ‘a period of puzzling paradoxes’: it was ‘an age of great optimism along with the gnawing fear of doomsday bombs, of great poverty in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, and of flowery rhetoric about equality along with the practice of rampant racism and sexism’.6 And, writing in 2004, historian Richard Fried suggests that at first it seems ‘a unique era that we think we know and often recall fondly’, but it was, in fact, ‘a fidgety mix of anxiety and relaxation, sloth and achievement, complacency and self-criticism’.7 Looking beyond memories, myths and nostalgia helps to unearth historical tensions that cannot easily be slotted into a unified narrative. The 1950s – or what is often confused with a half-remembered and half-mythical period called ‘the fifties’ – is no exception. It was the decade of popular and avant-garde music; of abstract and commercial art; of eggheads and dumb blondes; of gray flannel suits and loafer jackets; of ballet and westerns; of bus boycotts and B-52 bombers; and of the growth of big corporations and increased membership of workers’ unions. The decade was vilified in the 1960s for its conservatism, particularly by those who saw themselves as its victims: the young, black, female and gay all found collective voices to denounce a decade that promised so much, but delivered little to those on the margins. However, many have claimed that the 1950s was necessary for the social revolution of the next decade to happen; and, while it is important to resist the temptation to read history as teleological (in which everything is a potential foreshadowing of future events), more recent trends suggest that the decade was one of the defining periods of the twentieth century, prefiguring the materialism of the 1980s, the media control of the 1990s, and the ascendancy of the Right in the early twenty-first century. My intention here is to recover the diversity of cultural forms from the ingrained view that cold war culture is monolithic and onedimensional, and also to distinguish the historical resonances of the 4 American Culture in the 1950s 1950s from the popular memory of ‘the fifties’. The theoretical problem, of course, is that any attempt to discuss a period only succeeds in rewriting it in another form – and sometimes with a hidden ideological slant. My agenda here is to examine, as well as look beyond, the ‘cold war culture’ label to explore the historical, ideological and aesthetic contours of the decade. The purpose of this book, then, is to offer a more nuanced notion of cultural production than suggested by the recycled myths of the decade. There are various strategies for seeing beyond the mythology of ‘the fifties’. One strategy is to focus on ‘the facts’ as established in historical texts, government documents, economic data and demographic statistics. This is where the 1982 volume Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945–1960 begins: the US population increased 30 per cent from 139.9 million in 1945 to 180.6 million in 1960; the rural population decreased from 17.5 per cent of the whole in 1945 to 8.7 per cent in 1960 (shifting from 24.4 million to 15.6 million); 31 per cent of children were under 14 in 1960 compared to 24 per cent in 1945; and the non-white population increased by 41 per cent in these fifteen years, from 14.6 million to 20.6 million.8 Given that suburban development, juvenile delinquency and racial conflict were three hot social issues of the decade (alongside communism), these statistics go some way to characterize its salient features. A timeline is another indicator of historical trajectory, particularly as the decade began with a new war in Korea and ended with a potent symbol of political détente when Vice-President Richard Nixon travelled to Moscow to engage in a televised ‘kitchen debate’ with the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, in which the battleground had shifted from bombs to domestic appliances, from the Soviet satellite Sputnik to ‘Split-nik’ as the model American kitchen was called. There are dangers in pursuing these approaches in isolation, though. The first strategy privileges quantifiable statistics and underplays emerging trends that may not be measurable; and the second strategy often resorts to a top-down version of history in which all cultural expressions are taken under the umbrella of national politics.9 Another way of analyzing the decade is to identify hotspots or turning points, the hottest spot being the explosion of the H-bomb in the Pacific on 1 November 1952, generating nine times more heat than the sun. Hannah Arendt claimed that the Soviet launch of the first earth satellite Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957 was another hotspot, an event like no other that heralded the economic slump of 1958 and the advent of the space race which preoccupied the cold war adversaries The Intellectual Context 5 for the next fifteen years. Sometimes turning points do not focus on historic events but on personalities; the deaths of actor James Dean in September 1955 and painter Jackson Pollock in August 1956 – both through car crashes – are often cited as dramatic moments that altered the direction of film and art culture in the second half of the decade. In terms of vital moments in the decade it is significant that two historians – Lisle Rose and Robert Ellwood – both choose 1950 as the year in which ‘the cold war [came] to main street’ and the ‘crossroad of American religious life’ (to quote the subtitles of their two books). Rose focuses primarily on foreign policy and Ellwood on religion, but both accounts identify 1950 as a crucial year – the penultimate year of Truman’s Democratic administration which saw the start of two years of conflict in Korea with strong prospects of another world war. Sandwiched between World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War is often overlooked as a fairly short skirmish without a strong war narrative to hold it together. But in many ways the conflict was key to understanding national fears in the 1950s; whereas World War II was an honourable war the reasons for Korea were not as clear cut, with soldiers ‘dumbly follow[ing] / leaders whose careers / hung on victory’, in the words of poet William Childress.10 The Korean War began with the invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea, a potent symbol to the West of the ideological menace that was creeping through East Asia. The US had committed itself to supporting non-communist forces in Asia in 1949, as well as advancing its own national interests on the Asian subcontinent. The promise was of swift military action under the command of the dependable face of World War II: General Douglas MacArthur. But the reality was a war in an unknown land, where geography, language and a new enemy quickly eroded the triumphalism of 1945. Much of the war revolved around the 39th Parallel which separated North from South Korea, without any major long-term gains by either side. Although the Korean War film One Minute to Zero (1952) claimed that ‘the American Army does not make our foreign policy it only backs it up’, the politics of the war were actually very complex. MacArthur seemed to be making key decisions, but the offensive against the North Koreans was actually directed from Washington by the liberal Secretary of State Dean Acheson; MacArthur blamed the stalemate in Korea on Truman for not letting him take full command; and Truman dismissed MacArthur in April 1951 for his arrogant and bullish military tactics. William Childress’s bitter poem ‘The Long March’ attacks ‘the General’ for stealing victory from the soldiers, but 6 American Culture in the 1950s two-thirds of the public actually took MacArthur’s side in the dispute with Truman. This sway of public opinion and the attacks by Joseph McCarthy on the Democratic administration (he famously called the President a ‘son of a bitch’) were major reasons why, at the end of Truman’s second term in 1952, the guardianship of the country was entrusted to a Republican: the World War II veteran Dwight Eisenhower who had commanded the Normandy invasion of 1944 and accepted German surrender in 1945. Ike and his fashion-conscious wife Mamie were iconic faces of the decade, and Eisenhower’s 1953 inauguration was a major media event, only to be upstaged by the birth of television star Lucille Ball’s baby. Eisenhower was not just a golf-loving president and fiscal conservative, but also the benign patriarch that Sylvia Plath satirized in her novel The Bell Jar (1963) for having features that were reflected in the face of all the ‘Eisenhower-faced babies’ born in mid-decade.11 But, despite Plath’s view, early-decade worries receded during Eisenhower’s presidency. The temporary waning of cold war fears has led some critics to focus on 1954 to 1958 as a defining period of the consumer boom. In 1954 Life magazine proclaimed that never before had the nation achieved so much social abundance and 1955 was described as ‘the most frantic year of car buying America had yet experienced’.12 Nixon and Khrushchev’s live ‘kitchen debate’ at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in June 1959 signalled a possible end to the cold war, which did not fully re-ignite until the Cuban Missile crisis of autumn 1962. There were key moments in the mid-1950s when cold war fears reemerged: in 1956 when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary after the Hungarian withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and in 1957 when the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 was launched into space. Even though the anticommunist presence of J. Edgar Hoover continued to loom in American public life through the 1950s and 1960s, with the public demise of McCarthy in 1954 following his hubristic attempt to indict the Army, the paranoia and Red-baiting of the early decade ebbed. Three years later McCarthy was prematurely dead from alcohol poisoning and the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate depicted him as a crazed careerist, echoing the New York Post’s description of him as a ‘buffoon assassin’. This transition has led critic Alice Jardine to divide the decade at its midpoint (the ‘First American Fifties’ covering 1945 to 1955; the ‘Second Fifties’ spanning 1955 to 1965), while Mark Hamilton Lytle has argued that the historical phase after 1955 is actually part of the ‘uncivil wars’ of the long 1960s.13 The Intellectual Context 7 But how could a decade be at once ‘secure and hopeful’, as Hillary Clinton describes it, and also be plagued by such profound ideological and atomic fears? Historian Lisle Rose brings together two such contradictory images in the title of his book, The Cold War Comes to Main Street (1999), as two shifting lenses that critics must look through to view the decade clearly. It was at once a period of optimism and high expectations but also the beginning of half a century of ‘profound, embittered malaise’ that has taught us that we cannot trust ‘our neighbors, our workplace colleagues, our sources of information, or our institutions and leadership’.14 Main Street was the symbol of wholesome Middle America and the central thoroughfare of Walt Disney’s new adventure park Disneyland when it opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955. But Main Street was a symbol of a previous era: Disney’s was a nostalgic Main Street, circa 1900, and it had been usurped in popular imagination by the threatening alleys of film noir, the suburban drives of Levittown, and the interstate highways that were snaking across the land by the late 1950s. While Rose’s account is engaging he largely ignores the decade’s cultural dynamics; only the parallax view of politics and culture – cold war and Main Street – can hope to do justice to its complexities. Rose focuses on 1950 as a watershed year in Truman’s last term, but a broader perspective of ‘containment’ is often adopted to explore the contradictions of the decade. Deployed by statesman George F. Kennan, head of Truman’s Policy Planning Unit in 1947, as part of his recommendation that the nation should try to stem the communist threat in East Europe and South East Asia, the term ‘containment’ has since been used more widely to characterize the general climate of the 1950s.15 Rather than dealing with it in the precise way that Kennan and the cold war policymakers had intended, cultural historians Stephen Whitfield, Lary May, Margot Henrikson, Alan Nadel and Mary Dudziak all treat containment as a general metaphor of social restriction in cold war America. It was central to Kennan’s philosophy of political realism in the late 1940s and his warning that the nation must be watchful and vigilant against security threats, particularly from an ambitious Soviet Union. But postwar containment also had negative connotations, suggesting that classified information was being withheld or that citizens were being duped into believing the official line from Washington. The rise of the secret service and the CIA was important for garnering intelligence but also fed fears that a culture of secrecy was developing and that the destiny of the country was controlled by a power elite. To contain external communist 8 American Culture in the 1950s threats was seen by many as a Herculean task (the journalist Walter Lippmann warned that it might well turn into a wild-goose chase across the globe), but to eliminate threats from within was virtually impossible: everyone was potentially a suspect within a global communist conspiracy. Focusing on political history and foreign policy offers one account of the decade, but the danger is that critics either ignore the broad sweep of American culture to focus on government (as Rose does) or read all cultural forms through the filter of international relations. This top-down reading has its benefits in revealing a subtext to cold war culture, but the danger is that everything becomes an allegory of political events or an embodiment of the Manichean struggle in which the forces of American democracy are pitted against the godless tyranny of communism. This reading has validity when approaching some cultural texts: for example, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) draws parallels between McCarthyite America and the seventeenthcentury Salem witch trials, and the first Twentieth Century-Fox film to use the new widescreen format of CinemaScope, The Robe (1953), depicts the clash between Christian and Roman values, in which allegories of McCarthyism (some characters are betrayed and others asked to name names) are juxtaposed with the liberal belief in the possibility of alliances between races, with Rome depicted as the prototype of the modern superpower. The Robe was part of the cycle of biblical epics that began with Quo Vadis in 1951; director Cecil B. DeMille even appeared in person for the prologue of The Ten Commandments (1956) to make explicit parallels to the contemporary climate in which he contrasts the ‘freedom of man under God’ to the man-made tyranny of the state. It is also possible to mount an argument to suggest that the ‘soft power’ of cold war culture fulfilled the job of promoting values of democracy and freedom of expression abroad in such organizations as the International Congress for Cultural Freedom, where the ‘hard power’ of politics, coercion and warfare might have had the opposite effect. It is the legacy of the 1960s to search for conspiracies and subtexts where they may not exist; from this perspective containment is evident in almost every aspect of domestic, political and cultural life in the 1950s. In contrast, the ideological battle-lines of cold war America were laid out clearly by President Truman’s proclamation in March 1947 that ‘at the present moment nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life’, and Eisenhower echoed this in his Inaugural Address of January 1953 by claiming that ‘we sense with all The Intellectual Context 9 our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history’.16 As Allen Hunter detects, it was very difficult in the 1950s ‘to secure standpoints outside its paradigm of neatly aligned binary oppositions: United States/Soviet Union, West/East, capitalism/communism, freedom/tyranny, good/evil’.17 However, these presidential statements do not lead the critic to the realm of facts but towards a set of mythic statements and rhetorical half-truths that only add to the sense that historical realities are not as simple as they seem. Were the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock or the colour abstractions of Mark Rothko in the late 1940s an embodiment of free expression or did they hide subversive messages? In the science- fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) does the spaceman Klaatu’s long closing speech reassert US defence policy or suggest the communist way is ideologically superior to a weak democratic system? Did the religious revival of the early 1950s suggest that the nation was moving towards spiritual enlightenment or to a selfrighteousness that was blind to the need to forge international alliances? Was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (the bestselling book of 1954 behind the Bible) a genuine attempt to help individuals achieve autonomy or was it a form of cheap commercialism with Peale the master salesman? Of course, none of these questions has a straight answer. But, taking a cue from the popular cold war television series I Led Three Lives (1953–6), it seemed that in the 1950s all univocal statements were open to subversion – a reading that strains against the ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’ logic of Truman’s and Eisenhower’s statements. One of the strongest themes of the decade was that of authenticity, the difficulty of preserving genuine experience in the face of commercial and ideological pressures. The hard economic experiences of the Depression and close-range combat of World War II soldiers fighting for a just cause were favourably contrasted to shallow suburban lifestyles, television quiz shows and the easy musical sentiments of the Billboard charts. The image of the ‘phoney’ runs through 1950s literature: from Holden Caulfield’s concerns about the lack of authenticity in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Norman Mailer’s exposure of shallow Hollywood culture in The Deer Park (1955), to the hidden identity of the carefree socialite Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and the lack of authentic religion in the South as portrayed by Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952). Other texts such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Robert Frank’s photographic study The Americans (1958) attempted to rediscover the 10 American Culture in the 1950s possibility of genuine experience in a decade where everything was open to salesman’s spin and Madison Avenue repackaging. And it was this search for authentic experience that led Beat writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti to began his iconic poem ‘I Am Waiting’ (1958) with the lines: ‘I am waiting for my case to come up / and I am waiting / for a rebirth of wonder / and I am waiting for someone / to really discover America / and wail’. ‘Experience’ has never been a simple concept in American cultural life. At times it has been associated with corruption against the simplicities of an innocent life; at others it has represented the rugged frontier sensibility of the West in contrast to the enclosed patrician communities of the East; and at others has been associated with bitter encounters with economic hardship. Quite what happened to experience in the 1950s is one of the concerns of this book, when the expansion of culture to include commercial television, a popular music industry and the dramatic increase of consumables complicated any idea of ‘raw’ or ‘unmediated’ experience. The hankering in Ferlinghetti’s poem for a lost America is also a waiting for a rejuvenating experience that would give him a ‘rebirth of wonder’. Following a Romantic precedent, Ferlinghetti places experience outside the cultural domain in a realm of spiritual vitality as something pure yet elusive. Ferlinghetti’s vision was shared by many writers and artists, and foreshadows the spirit of the New Left and the counterculture of the mid-1960s. But, although thinkers such as Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills and Erich Fromm were arguing that courage was needed to break through the constraints of conventionality and the ‘slow mechanical determinations of society’ (as Mailer called them in 1961), it is perhaps more valid to claim that experience in the 1950s could only be found within the cultural sphere.18 The rhetorical power of Ferlinghetti’s poem should not be underestimated, but perhaps one reason he had to wait for a rebirth of wonder is that he is looking in the wrong places for what experience was, or could be, in the 1950s. In order to explore the theme of experience in and of the 1950s, this introduction will revolve around four primary frames of reference – culture, ideas, spaces and identities – which are discussed in turn and then resurface in the following chapters. Discussion of these reference points help to demonstrate the ways in which American culture, ideas, spaces and identities were all contested in the 1950s, with the view that the decade is best characterized as a struggle between conflicting forces. From a Marxist perspective this conflict is true of all historical periods, but the pull of opposing forces – economic, ideological, The Intellectual Context 11 political, cultural and experiential – intensified after World War II and in the Consumers’ Republic transformations and contradictions arose at every turn. In the following discussion, each of the four frames of reference is accompanied by a focused case study which exemplifies key points and gives shape to the broader outlines. The inclusion of case studies is consistent through the five chapters across a range of cultural forms. Their purpose is to demonstrate the diversity of American culture in the 1950s, and to balance broad commentary with detailed analysis of some of the decade’s most important texts. Culture The concept of culture in 1950s America was not very clearly defined. There was a much sharper sense of what culture meant in Britain, where traditionally it was linked to class identity and the shaping influence of economics. This British tradition goes back at least as far as the Victorian encounter with the forces of industrialization. Although the US Labor Movement had grown apace since the late nineteenth century, and had made real steps forward in achieving workers’ rights during the 1930s, it had never shaped the direction of culture to the extent of in Britain. American culture at mid-century was seen variously as everything that people do, but also a special sphere of creative activity for artists, writers, musicians and performers. Culture in the widest sense fed into some of most potent myths about American collective identity. The popular myth of the American Dream, for example, suggested that fame could be achieved in the arts, and the movie industry was particularly keen to exploit this in the studio ‘dream factories’ of the 1930s. But the American Dream was only a slightly different version of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories in the 1890s which ultimately emphasized social recognition and wealth. On this view, artistic excellence and cultural achievement are only stepping stones in the search for social status. The word ‘culture’ figured frequently in postwar writings, but was a slippery term, which can be approached from at least four different perspectives. Firstly, it was often used as a marker of national identity. This view was consolidated by the first wave of scholars that helped form American Studies as an academic discipline after the war: the socalled ‘Myth and Symbol School’. Enquiries into the American ‘character’ and ‘mind’ in an attempt to identify dominant national traits began before the war with Perry Miller’s The New England Mind 12 American Culture in the 1950s (1939) and F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance (1941), and continued afterwards with exceptionalist accounts of American national origins such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) and R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955). This school of critics did not disregard historical complexity, but rarely commented on the contemporary moment. Instead of discerning a turbulent past feeding into a complex present, these critics created a mythic framework within which concepts of ‘the virgin land’, ‘the errand in the wilderness’, and ‘the American Dream’ were affirmed as founding myths. A second view of culture was an experience that ennobles individuals by providing values, skills and social accomplishments. The historian Henry May in The End of American Innocence (1959) looked back to the early twentieth century as a time when culture, rightly conceived, showed people how to behave, teaching them ‘polite manners, respect for traditional learning, appreciation of the arts, and above all an informed and devoted love of standard [usually British] literature’.19 On May’s model innocent nineteenth-century traditions fell away in the turbulent 1910s with the experience of war and a loss of old confidences. The linking of culture to high art forms re-emerged periodically, particularly in the late 1920s with the revival of interest in the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold’s distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’, and was often linked to ideas of social betterment. The ‘new humanists’ Irving Babbit and Paul Elmer More were keen to affirm Arnold’s high cultural standards to rescue America from what they perceived as moral bankruptcy, particularly with the wave of East European immigrants coming to the US in the mid-1910s. Vestiges of this position were still evident in the 1950s: the emergence of ‘mass culture’ after the war stimulated some critics to affirm high art as a means for educating readers and securing social order, while for others it helped to ward off foreign threats, expressed most dramatically by J. Edgar Hoover’s claim in 1958 that communist culture was spreading through the country ‘as an indoctrinal spray seeking to control every part of the member’s heart, mind, and soul’.20 A third view of culture in the 1950s was a privileged realm of activity at a remove from everyday life. This view locates culture as a specialist activity in which the talented few engage: Jack Kerouac lost in his spontaneous ‘typewriter jazz’ or Jackson Pollock surrendering his artistic intentions to his semi-autonomous drip paintings. But many of the debates in the 1950s revolved around different levels of culture, with the term ‘mass culture’ suggesting that ‘consumption’ had replaced ‘activity’ as the dominant mode of cultural behaviour. ‘Films, The Intellectual Context 13 radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part’ German émigré thinkers Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer claimed as early as 1944, and they worried about the tendency of American culture to sink to the lowest level in turning out standardized products to consumers: ‘under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through’.21 On this model, mass culture is the product of the ‘entertainment business’, which grew dramatically with the development of television, popular music, and paperback book industries. In essence, Adorno and Horkheimer wanted to resuscitate high culture with all its complexities as an antidote to the bland uniformity of mass culture. The fourth perspective on culture was reflected in the work of the historian David Potter, particularly in his book People of Plenty (1954). Potter was unhappy with received notions of ‘national character’ that tended to be riddled with generalizations, folding many different elements into a harmonious whole: We [are] told in the same breath that Americans are optimistic (a trait of temperament), that they attach great value to productive activity (a trait of character), that they are fond of jazz music (a cultural trait), and that they are remarkably prone to join organized groups (a behavioural trait which may provide overt evidence of some underlying trait of character).22 For Potter, not only do critics often overlook the meaning of ‘character’, ‘nation’, ‘group’ and ‘tradition’, but they also underestimate the economic, historical and environmental forces that underpin them. Reacting against vulgar materialist notions of culture in which the economic base determines everything else, Potter adopted a flexible view of culture: at times it represents personal expression, at others an interface between individuals and society, and at others an integrative force that enables individuals to communicate, to reach a consensus, or to cohere around symbols of national unity or group loyalty. This is a very different perspective to Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism, suggesting that consensus and assent are linked closely to ‘abundance’ as the overriding trait of 1950s American culture. Potter’s particular concern was to identify the complexion of America’s culture of abundance, and in People of Plenty he discusses equality, democracy and the national mission to emphasize the 14 American Culture in the 1950s historical nature of these themes. He returns at the end of the book to the relationship between abundance and identity in light of the growth of national advertising. Potter called postwar advertising the new ‘institution of social control’, which Lizabeth Cohen has more recently argued was instrumental in reinforcing the ‘postwar ideal of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulfilled personal desire and civic obligation in consuming’.23 Although People of Plenty can be read as an exceptionalist view of an abundant nation, Potter was one of the first critics to understand the power of advertising, which had surpassed the government, school and church after the war as a major social force, particularly through its new powerful outlet of television. Charting the development of the advertising industry, Potter estimated that the amount spent on print advertising alone grew six-fold between 1929 and 1951. This statistic suggests not only that supply consistently outstripped demand, but also that individuals had been transformed into consumers; in Cohen’s words ‘the good purchaser devoted to “more, newer and better” was the good citizen’.24 Fifty years before Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic, Potter concluded People of Plenty by claiming the economics of advertising are less interesting than the way that it shapes values, serving ‘to enforce already existing attitudes, to diminish the range and variety of choices, and, in terms of abundance, to exalt the materialistic virtues of consumption’.25 Potter’s focus on advertising as a medium of social control is not quite as bleak as Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of a production-line culture industry, but it does suggest that individuals are ill-equipped to challenge the power of advertising to shape choices and values. It was possible to go against the grain of cultural expectations – a businessman choosing to go the bowling alley when the golf club is his cultural metier, for example – but these cross-class activities were rare, particularly in a decade when advertising encouraged the working class to aspire to middle-class values. We shall see in this book that culture in the 1950s was sometimes used agonistically as a tool to challenge authority, but with the lure of advertising it was difficult for many to resist the pleasures of consumption. It is important not to underestimate the growth of advertising after World War II for instructing the public in their cultural tastes and aspirations. Potter sketched in the outlines for understanding culture at mid-century, but it was the sociologist Vance Packard who helped more than any other thinker to refine a theory of advertising and assess its impact on American life in the 1950s. The Intellectual Context 15 16 American Culture in the 1950s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) The Pennsylvania-born journalist Vance Packard is often dismissed as a ‘pop sociologist’, but in The Hidden Persuaders (1957) Packard wrote one of the first sustained studies of the psychological techniques used by advertisers, and the ways in which ‘many of us are being influenced and manipulated – far more than we realize – in the patterns of our everyday lives’.26 The growth of mass culture after the war, the surplus in disposable income (five times as much in 1955 as 1940) and the fact that by the mid- 1950s many families owned basic domestic appliances and at least one car meant that advertising strategies had to become more subtle to convince consumers to replace products on a regular basis. With increased standardization of products, rather than concentrating on durability or sustainability, marketing in the 1950s tried to tap into consumers’ desires about prestige, style and the desire to be contemporary. Taking the lead from the postwar boom in fashion, in which the vogue for particular styles of clothing changed much more rapidly than in previous decades (for example, Dior’s New Look range from the late 1940s), domestic appliances such as cookers, televisions, showers and refrigerators had begun to be similarly marketed. The popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1950s and investment in ‘motivation research’ led firms to invest money in consulting advertising agencies and employing what Packard calls ‘symbol manipulators’ and ‘probers’ to feel out ‘our hidden weaknesses and frailties in the hope that they can more efficiently influence our behaviour’.27 A far cry from the depressed and doomed salesman Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesmen (1949), these jobs seemed in tune with an upwardly mobile mid-1950s, in which the threat of over-productivity encouraged companies to invest heavily in advertising and market research ($53 was spent on targeting each individual in 1955). Although Packard saw something amusing about some research carried out in the name of effective advertising (such as a psychiatric study of menstrual cycles to increase the appeal of certain food items to women), he also believed the trend to have ‘seriously antihumanistic implications’ putting the consumer at the mercy of invisible manipulative forces.28 One of the most significant discoveries for companies was that many of the reasons for consuming products are often irrational – such as buying products in a particular colour of packaging – and they realized that only depthadvertising could discover the appropriate psychological hook to tap into these deeper impulses. In adopting a version of the Freudian model of the mind, advertising linked itself closely to psychological profiling and behavioural research in an attempt to appeal to deeper levels of consciousness. The major points of vulnerability, as Packard described them, were commonly identified as ‘the drive to conformity, need for oral stimulation, [and] yearning for security’, but ego-gratification and love objects also The Intellectual Context 17 awakened deep emotional reflexes.29 Because the desire for social status often works in tension with these vulnerabilities, advertising strategies had to be varied and subtle to appeal to a range of consumers, so as not to draw attention to the fact that many products were actually superfluous to requirement. It is worth comparing a 1948 advertisement for the new Hudson automobile, described as ‘A Sensation Coast to Coast’, with that for the 1953 Roadmaster from Buick, the ‘Star of the Silky Way’, to see how depthpsychology affected advertising.30 In the 1948 advertisement, a monochrome drawing of a large black Hudson with a driver and five passengers passes by a large house and well-manicured lawn, presumably on a weekend drive. The copy reads: ‘There’s something really new in the motorcar world – a daringly designed, gorgeously finished Hudson . . . a new kind of car that fires interest wherever it’s seen’. Focusing on the late-1940s vogue for low-framed cars that ‘you step down into’ and ‘a rugged, boxsteel foundation frame’ that ‘gives you a sensation of snug safety and serene smooth going’, its appeal to comfort and security is obvious. But compared to the advert for the ‘custom built’ 1953 Buick Roadmaster with its large colour image of a sleek, aerodynamic and space-age vehicle (gleaming chrome bodywork and bright red upholstery) driven through the milky way by a handsome tuxedoed driver, the 1948 Hudson looks like a bulky funeral car. Promoting the golden anniversary of the Roadmaster, Buick mention their reputation in manufacturing, but the advert focuses centrally on the power, acceleration, ‘velvety luxury’ and ‘the great and gorgeous going of the swiftest, the smoothest, the silkiest, the most silent automobile’ they had yet produced. Attention is directed to the starry image of the car, the promise of luxury, and the possibilities of the future (Buick’s logo is accompanied by the tagline ‘Then – Now – Tomorrow’), rather than the everyday pleasures associated with the Hudson.31 Packard argues that these desires are linked not only to childhood memories and fantasies, but also to the search for status in the 1950s. Taking his lead from sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s study of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in the late nineteenth century, Packard considered in The Status Seekers (1959) the reasons why consumers ‘constantly striv[e] to surround themselves with visible evidence of the superior rank they are claiming’.32 There are a number of criticisms that can be made of Packard’s analysis, most notably that women, particularly housewives, were among the most vulnerable consumers and easily duped by manipulative advertising. But the fact that some household products became very popular in the early 1950s, such as toasters and time-saving devices, give some, if inadequate, weight to his argument.33 Packard goes too far in claiming that all advertising is brainwashing, and he rarely credits individuals with the capacity to resist the lure of marketing campaigns. However, Packard was not alone in his position, with critics like C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956) warning against the invisible channels of power in postwar America and Theodor Adorno blaming ‘organized culture’ for cutting off ‘people’s Ideas If the 1950s was a decade of new American experiences, then at first glance it also seems to be a decade lacking in any major ideas – certainly in comparison to the more radical politics of the 1960s. While the group of New York Intellectuals from the late 1940s (among them Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald and Philip Rahv) continued to find outlets for their ideas in mainstream publications and émigrés connected with the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Paul Tillich and Erich Fromm) found North America a much safer placer to live than Central Europe, there was nevertheless a widespread suspicion of the intellectual’s social role. There was a general mistrust of ideas in the 1950s and a reluctance to speak out on controversial issues. CBS broadcaster Edward Murrow worried that television entertainment would erode public debate: as he claimed in October 1958 in a speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association, ‘just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information’.35 This mistrust was, in large part, stimulated by Joseph McCarthy’s accusations that the enemy had already infiltrated deeply into public institutions, and right-wing publications such as Red Channels emerged with the intention of naming subversives within the broadcasting industry. One contributor to the liberal magazine The Nation noted that in 1952 ‘the fear of speaking out is the most ominous fact of life in America today. The virus of McCarthyism chills the heart and stills the tongue . . . and destroys its victims’ resistance’.36 Writing as late as 1967, Michael Paul Rogin noted the ongoing effect of McCarthyism on the intellectual community. Rogin argued that it is feasible to claim either that McCarthyism ‘symbolized the death of radical protest in America’, or that it was itself a manifestation of the radical Right, with the knock-on effect of making intellectuals in the 1950s and early 1960s wary of any form of radicalism.37 It is also possible, as Rogin notes (although it is not his opinion), to argue that McCarthyism was a brand of populism that pitted ‘a democratic revolt of dispossessed groups against the educated, eastern elite’ of intellectuals and academics.38 The cold war consensus, as it is often 18 American Culture in the 1950s last possibility of experiencing themselves’.34 Some commentators have called Packard a conspiracy theorist in his deep suspicion of advertising, but certain aspects of his work, such as adverts targeting children, political campaigning and subliminal advertising, predate the interest in the growth of corporate control of the media in the 1980s and 1990s. termed, brought together liberals, moderates and conservatives in an alliance against the excesses of communism on the one hand and the reckless accusations of McCarthy on the other. To affirm the socially cohesive qualities of American culture, or its ‘vital center’ as the liberal intellectual Arthur Schlesinger Jr called it in his 1949 book, was a way of offsetting forces that undermined the vitality of culture. But the danger was that, as C. Wright Mills detected in 1954, there was no viable opposition to the consensus of the centre: disappointed radicals, tired liberals ‘living off the worn-out rubble of [their] rhetoric’ and conservatives who had ‘no connection with the fountainhead of modern conservative thought’ all seemed to accept the status quo, while ‘political decisions’ were being made ‘without the benefit of political ideas’.39 Rogin’s study The Intellectuals and McCarthy suggests that, whether or not McCarthyism was itself a ‘radical specter’ (as Rogin’s subtitle calls it), McCarthy tapped into widespread ‘feelings of uneasiness over a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, urban, industrial society’ by appealing across the political spectrum.40 Until he was discredited in The Intellectual Context 19 Figure I.1 Senator Joseph McCarthy on CBS Television in 1954. the live broadcast of the Army hearings in spring 1954, McCarthy was approved by between 30 and 40 per cent of the population, suggesting a widening gulf between the public and intellectuals. To be an intellectual in the 1950s was usually to be part of the eastern patrician world that McCarthy’s midwestern populism attacked. McCarthy’s aim was to purge institutions of those deemed to be holding subversive ideas, but it was his ability to manipulate anticommunist sentiments, particularly during the Korean War, which explains his widespread appeal in the early decade. While many liberals were afraid to oppose McCarthy for fear of being recast as radicals, the newspapers helped to inflame matters by reporting unfounded claims as facts. Straight intellectual discussion could not compete with the dramatic assertions of Tail Gunner Joe and public polemic against him was in danger of being seen as un-American. Although television quiz shows in the 1950s revealed a widespread desire for factual knowledge (see Chapter 4), another aspect of the bad press that intellectuals received was the sense that there were, it seemed, few connections between academic life and mainstream culture. The mass media helped to widen the perceived gulf between the two arenas, often pushing intellectuals like Trilling and Adorno into defending high culture in strong moralistic tones. In 1953 art critic Clement Greenberg revised his early opposition between ‘avantgarde’ and ‘kitsch’ from 1939, claiming that middlebrow culture (including fiction, concerts and museums) provides a bridge between the elites and the masses to reveal a more variegated culture than suggested by the ‘high culture v. mass culture’ model. But others such as Dwight Macdonald disagreed, arguing that ‘Midcult’ was little better than mass culture in preventing consumers from thinking clearly about the reasons behind their chosen pursuits; indeed ‘Midcult’ offered a ‘special threat’ to Macdonald in exploiting ‘the discoveries of the avant-garde’ and in degrading modernist culture.41 The intellectual community’s distrust of the masses was mirrored by unease among the general public concerning intellectuals. Even thinkers who made links between different spheres of American life were either ignored or treated with scepticism. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, religious thinker Reinhold Niebuhr and physicist Albert Einstein were among other public figures that stepped out of the academy to address pressing social issues, but in moving outside their specialist fields they aroused the suspicion of those that guarded those specialisms. Public intellectuals were often unfavourably contrasted to experts – particularly technical experts – working within the fields of 20 American Culture in the 1950s science, law or business, and the culture of technical expertise and big business was particularly worrisome for them. Primarily due to this anti-intellectual climate, one of the major reasons that the Democrat candidate Adlai Stevenson lost twice to Eisenhower in the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns is that he came across as too cerebral and serious. Where Stevenson received support from voters in 1952 for his intellectual acuity, in 1956 Eisenhower had greater popular appeal across the political divide as head of state and successful military leader in World War II. One journalist, John Alsop, described Stevenson in the first election clash as having a ‘large oval head, smooth, faceless, unemotional, but a little bit haughty and condescending’; he coined the word ‘egghead’ to describe Stevenson and his supporters: ‘all the eggheads are for Stevenson’, Alsop commented, ‘but how many eggheads are there?’ 42 In 1952 the anticommunist film My Son John did nothing to challenge this distrust of intellectuals, suggesting that too much education is responsible for leading John Jefferson (Robert Walker), the son of honest churchgoing parents, into an un-American world of atheism, espionage and treason. In this climate it was no surprise that Eisenhower won the election that year, leading Arthur Schlesinger to declare that the intellectual ‘is on the run today in American society’.43 The flipside was a wariness of ‘Madison Avenue packaging’, as Stevenson called it, and the popularization of ideas at the expense of rigorous debate. Popular books of criticism had been published before the war. For example, Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942) examined the phenomenon of ‘momism’ by applying psychoanalytic ideas to a perceived malaise in family life. Wylie’s book was selected in 1950 as The American Library Association’s nomination for one of the major works of non-fiction in the first half of the century, and was re-released in paperback in 1955. Wylie saw his jeremiad as perfectly suited to 1955, ‘a year more threatening to American freedom, American security and even to American existence than the year 1942’ in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.44 But, while some of Wylie’s ideas are unfounded and others unpalatable (such as his claim that ‘mom’ is ‘cinderella . . . the shininghaired, the starry-eyed, the ruby-lipped virgo aeternis’), Generation of Vipers is actually anti-Madison Avenue in the respect that it is a noisy book lacking the polish of many cultural products in the mid-1950s.45 Advertising culture and the bright surfaces of 1950s commodities were, for most, more attractive than thoughtful discussion about labour value, overproduction and regulating markets. Ideas seemed much more appealing when given the Madison Avenue treatment, The Intellectual Context 21 particularly religious ideas at a time when church-going had risen dramatically. Norman Vincent Peale’s spiritual improvement manual The Power of Positive Thinking was one of the bestsellers of the decade, and the Catholic priest Fulton Sheen was a regular on television to hand out spiritual advice.46 Lone voices such as Reinhold Niebuhr spoke out against Peale’s evangelism as a product of the Eisenhower era with its ‘techniques of modern salesmanship’, and he dismissed popular preachers like Billy Graham for ignoring pressing economic and racial issues, with Graham trying to convert his audience into good Christians through oratory.47 Perhaps it was unfair (and much too easy) to blame the popularization of ideas on advertising, as even Eisenhower was accused of selling out to Madison Avenue and key members of his administration John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon were criticized for indulging in ‘double-talk and word-magic’.48 In an attempt to dispel the myths of advertising, Martin Mayer provided an insider’s view of the industry in Madison Avenue U.S.A. (1958), noting that many workers are faced with ‘brutal hours’ and dogged by ‘psychological insecurity’.49 But Mayer’s description of the advertising industry is telling: he compares it to a complex game of chess with the ad man ‘a cog in a little wheel that runs by faith inside a big wheel that runs by the grace of God’.50 These metaphors actually help to reinforce the theory that advertising quickly became a culture of deception where no one really knew the rules of the game except executive elites. It was this point that really worried critics: the postwar promise of self-determination often degenerated into subservience to a technocratic society run by a power elite intent on hoodwinking consumers. In one of the defining postwar studies, The Affluent Society (1958), the economist John Kenneth Galbraith characterized the decade as representing a high point for free enterprise and a widespread faith that all ‘social ills can be cured by more production’.51 It could be argued that the emphasis on productivity was itself a potent idea, but Galbraith argued that this emphasis goes back to John Maynard Keynes immediately after World War I and had only recently become ‘the summum bonum of liberal economic policy’.52 It was the passive absorption of these ideas that worried Galbraith, leading him to write a chapter of The Affluent Society on ‘conventional wisdom’ and the general acceptance of the belief that increased productivity was the marker of social achievement. Whereas in the communist world doctrine and dogma were regulated by the state, Galbraith noted an informal – but nevertheless endemic – enforcement of American social 22 American Culture in the 1950s values through the promulgation of ‘conventional wisdom’. In Marxist terms, whereas the economic base was readily discernible in the Soviet Union (at least up to Stalin’s death in 1953) or in Red China (following Mao Tse-tung’s overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949), the complex superstructure of postwar US society often hid economic realities behind the veil of entertainment. Galbraith thought that ideas were often at odds with ingrained values, claiming that to have currency, ideas ‘need to be tested by their ability, in combination with events, to overcome inertia and resistance’.53 More radical critics of 1950s America, such as Norman Mailer and C. Wright Mills, would have agreed with Galbraith that there was too much coming ‘to good terms with life’ in postwar America, and not enough questioning of what is at stake when the vast majority of citizens concur with conventional wisdom. It may seem that Galbraith was intent simply on combating conventional wisdom, but he was, in fact, suspicious of ideas as a whole, perhaps because they were too easily co-opted for ideological ends. While Robert Oppenheimer was arguing in 1955 that ‘the integrity of communication’ and free exchange of ideas across national boundaries was vital to ensure the health of the country, four years later Richard Nixon in his kitchen debate with Khrushchev came very close to downgrading international communication to the gimmickry of colour television.54 Galbraith, though, believed that ideas are only powerful ‘in a world that does not change’, and he had a suspicion that the opposite of ideas is not conventional wisdom at all, but ‘the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend’; if the mantra of the 1950s was the pursuit of happiness, it was not an exact idea but more ‘a profound instinctive union with the stream of life’.55 Galbraith was worried by the instinctual acceptance of ‘the social good’ in times of prosperity, particularly when accompanied by only a vague sense of the rules of the game. For this reason, The Affluent Society ends with an urgent call for ‘resources of ability, intelligence, and education’ to overcome the passive acceptance of conventional wisdom and the ‘grandiose generalizations’ of the day.56 Galbraith’s study touches on two of the central nerves of 1950s America: first, the mistrust of intellectuals and, second, the idea of consensus bound up with the myth that the whole nation was moving in the same direction ‘in union with the stream of life’. Public scepticism for ideas runs through the decade: from the ridiculing of Adlai Stevenson as an egghead, to the shift from Abstract Expressionism to an aesthetic interest in manufactured goods in the mid-1950s, to a film The Intellectual Context 23 like MGM’s The Band Wagon (1953) in which Fred Astaire’s songand-dance routine is portrayed as more authentic than a theatrical revival of Faust. One argument would be that the democratization of culture facilitated a shift from highbrow to middlebrow and increased the accessibility of cultural products. But there was still a mistrust of intellectuals, which the historian Richard Hofstadter formalized in 1962 with the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book AntiIntellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter contended that the 1950s was one of the peaks of American anti-intellectualism, in which ‘men of culture’ and ‘intellectual accomplishment’ were treated unfavourably as the Stevenson versus Eisenhower election contests demonstrated. Hofstadter argued passionately that to preserve the critic’s ‘freely speculative and critical function’ intellectuals must separate themselves from government, business and science. However, the danger in operating outside institutions was a ‘state of powerlessness’, leaving the running of the country to businessmen such as Charles Wilson, Chairman of General Motors and Eisenhower’s Defense Secretary from 1953.57 Critical distance is vital for illuminating matters to which business leaders and government advisors are blind, but it can also lead to a failure to tap into channels of power or to be heard in the cultural mainstream. Whichever perspective is adopted, the intellectual posture was all but excluded by the centripetal pull of the postwar consensus. Hofstadter’s claim that ‘the critical mind was at a ruinous discount’ in the early 1950s mirrored Philip Wylie’s assertion in his 1955 introduction to Generation of Vipers that ‘the critical attitude . . . is mistrusted in America’ because it is ‘thought by millions to border on subversion especially when it becomes criticism . . . of popular American attitudes’.58 Wylie believed that advertising, business and censorship were responsible for a narrow consensus of acceptable views that had replaced a critical stance: ‘“Boost, don’t knock,” has replaced the Golden Rule as the allegedly proper means to the American Way of Life’.59 Underlying Wylie’s rhetoric is the suspicion that consensus is less about informed agreement and more about fears that differing views would arouse censure or punishment. Even critics who applauded the pluralism of American society against the narrow materialism of communist countries only tolerated diversity within a fixed range; as Michael Rogin argues, pluralists championed individualism over group pressure but also feared ‘the unattached individual’ and the potential disruption of social order that radical behaviour brings.60 It was for this reason that communism, juvenile delinquency and race 24 American Culture in the 1950s relations were the hotly debated topics of the decade. We will come back to these fears in the next section, but it is first worth dwelling on one of the defining documents of the early 1950s consensus. The Intellectual Context 25 ‘Our Country and Our Culture’ (1952) A handful of liberal and left-wing intellectuals in the early 1950s continued to position themselves as critics of modernity. The architect and social critic Lewis Mumford, for example, bemoaned the shift towards consumption, arguing that individuals were becoming imbalanced and increasingly mechanised in their habits. ‘Like a drunken locomotive engineer on a streamlined train, plunging through the darkness at a hundred miles an hour’, Mumford suggested in 1952, ‘we have been going past the danger signals without realizing that our speed, which springs from our mechanical facility, only increases our danger and will make more fatal the crash’.61 But Mumford differed from the widespread opinion that US culture in the 1950s was much more affirmative than it had been before World War II. The key document that signalled this trend was the symposium ‘Our Country and Our Culture’ published over four issues of Partisan Review in 1952. Partisan Review was closely connected with the Communist Party when it was founded in 1933, but it was re-launched in 1937 under the editorship of Philip Rahv and William Phillips, shifting away from communism whilst keeping its leftist agenda into the 1940s. In 1946 literary critic Lionel Trilling was claiming that the purpose of Partisan Review was ‘to organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination’, and by the late 1940s the journal was publishing social commentary alongside fiction and reviews and was more moderate in its politics.62 Partisan Review had its most influential phase from 1946 to 1955, moving from quarterly publication to bimonthly, and briefly to monthly in 1948–50. The editors sensed that ‘the ideal reader’ believed that ‘what happens in literature and the arts has a direct effect on the quality of his own life’.63 Although it remained opposed to ‘all varieties of know-nothingism’ and Mumford’s critique was echoed by other contributors, many in the ‘Our Country and Our Culture’ symposium agreed that the adversarial stance of the modernists had given way to a general affirmation of national culture.64 Perhaps because the country had become a haven for European émigré intellectuals in the face of political hostility in Europe, most of the twenty-five contributors felt more at ease with American culture than they would have done thirty years earlier. But it is misleading to think that the contributors were entirely uncritical. They argued that the intellectual has a crucial role for ensuring national balance and contributing to the country’s international prestige. Some contributors shared Trilling’s view that the national situation had vastly improved over thirty years and that American culture was no longer inferior to Europe: not since before the Depression, Trilling claimed, has the public thinker had ‘a whole skin, a full stomach, 26 American Culture in the 1950s and the right to wag his tongue as he pleases’.65 Other critics such as David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger and Leslie Fiedler offered more modulated responses. Fiedler claimed that the separation of affirmative and oppositional currents was actually a false distinction: Americans have always held these two views at the same time. Despite the general consensus, there were some outright rejections of the editors’ premise, with some arguing that the critic’s role is always to oppose the cultural establishment. Irving Howe, Norman Mailer and C. Wright Mills (all three to become important figures in the New Left in the early 1960s) stood firm as nonconformists suspicious of the lures of American culture, believing that to give up a critical stance would be to surrender to the reckless course of postwar capitalism. All three writers discussed what Mills termed ‘social drift’ and the barely visible changes that most citizens could not detect, and Irving Howe followed up his critique with another Partisan Review article in 1954, arguing that intellectuals had been tamed by returning to ‘the bosom of the nation’.66 While these dissenting critics were far outweighed by accepting voices, there were others such as the poet Delmore Schwartz and religious thinker Reinhold Niebuhr who occupied the middle ground that Leslie Fiedler had identified. For example, Niebuhr disliked mass culture and the marriage of business and technology, but he argued that as a young nation the United States could not hope to possess the spiritual treasures of much older ones. Instead, he discerned that the country had cultured ‘qualities of robustness’ and he was proud of the way in which American social criticism had developed without becoming weighed down by dogma. However, Niebuhr worried about whether this kind of criticism was actually helpful for the nation in its new role as global leader, claiming that the ‘ruthless and intransigent foe’ of communism forces ‘even the most critical and sophisticated patriot’ in an ‘uncritical’ stance towards America.67 Niebuhr thought that the stand-off with the Soviet Union had closed down intellectual possibilities – it was now a matter of deciding whose side you were on rather than exploring the complex political and cultural terrain between opposing worldviews. While he claimed patriotism was right and necessary, Niebuhr went on to warn against flag-waving, arguing that the ‘foes within America’ (including McCarthy) offer greater danger than ‘the foe without’, adding that one must be vigilant against ‘hysteria, hatred, mistrust, and pride’. The nation’s cultural legacy, for Niebuhr, was no defence against the potential ‘destruction of the spirit of democratic liberty’ in the face of communist hysteria or foreign policies ‘frozen into inflexible rigidity’.68 The title of the 1952 symposium ‘Our Culture and Our Country’ suggests inclusivity – what Norman Podhoretz has described as ‘a radical declaration’ and ‘a major turning point in American intellectual life’.69 However, while the symposium presented a mixture of Jewish and Christian opinion, the contributors were mainly white men; only two women (poet Louise Bogan and anthropologist Margaret Mead) and no black critics were involved. It is clear that the ‘our’ of the title was intended to suggest a generosity of spirit, but the group of contributors reveals that intellectual Spaces By the end of the decade the spatial configuration of the United States altered when the forty-ninth and fiftieth states Alaska and Hawaii joined in 1959 after a long struggle for statehood. Although it had been an official territory since 1912, the strategic addition of Alaska, the ‘great northern and western citadel’, during the cold war brought the nation closer geographically to the other global superpower and the nation’s most feared postwar neighbour: the Soviet Union. The narrow Bering Straits was all that separated the USA from the USSR, with the frozen lands of Alaska virtually a continuation of the wastes of Siberia. CBS broadcaster Edward Murrow tried to start a public debate on the issue of statehood, given that there were strategic reasons to either include or omit Alaksa and Hawaii from the Union, with some claiming that they should be excluded because they were noncontiguous states and the inhabitants had ‘no direct knowledge of life in the United States’.70 Both Alaska and Hawaii were strategic military bases after Pearl Harbor, but one theory for the delay in granting statehood was that Eisenhower, in 1954, feared that Alaska would vote Democrat in the next presidential election despite its huge military contingent. The outcome was a joint statehood bill: Alaska entered the Union on 3 January 1959 and Hawaii followed on 21 August. Racial prejudice also played a part in arguments against the statehood bill, as segregationists in the South were fearful of the mixture of races and nationalities in both states. On the positive side, in May 1959 the popular magazine Look ran a feature on racial mixing in Hawaii, with one nineteenyear-old Hawaiian claiming ‘I’m Filipino, Chinese, Hawaiian, North American Indian, English and Spanish. I’m all mixed up’ and the The Intellectual Context 27 culture in 1952 was far from inclusive, with black and female public thinkers a rarity into the late decade. Partisan Review organized a fifty-year conference in 2002 to assess the historical impact and the theoretical limitations of the original symposium, with speakers noting that the 1952 contributors were unsure about what to do with mass culture and that their liberal politics and cultural conservatism did not sit easily. But the prominence of right-wing voices in the early 1950s, epitomized by William F. Buckley’s argument in God and Man at Yale (1951) that Ivy League alumni should determine university syllabi to ward against dissent being taught in the classroom, was a major reason why ‘Our Country and Our Culture’ was so important as a public document promoting intellectual freedom and the open discussion of ideas. Governor of Hawaii promoting the island as a microcosm of democracy: ‘the Hawaiian is the man of the Pacific, bearing the seeds and fruits of the cultures of East and West. In the age of the H-bomb, the East and West must live in peace’.71 Whatever the underlying reasons for delay and eventual admission, these debates concerning American territory are crucial for understanding social and political developments in the postwar years. The mid-1940s had seen an almost complete reversal of the alliances of World War II: the Germans and Japanese were no longer the sworn enemy, even though West Coast Japanese Americans had been interned and relocated en masse in the late 1940s, causing widespread resentment. Now Red China and the Soviet Union were perceived as grave threats with a combined land mass that dwarfed the US. When George Kennan and the State Department called for the containment of communism in 1947, it was born out of the fear that other countries in Asia and East Europe would succumb to communism and that, in time, the world’s democracies would be outnumbered. While some feared that Kennan’s recommendation to hold back the spread of communism would be a wild-goose chase, containment policy informed many of the political decisions in the late 1940s: the Marshall Plan to bring aid to war-torn Europe; the formation of NATO in 1949; and the decision in 1950 to help the South Koreans push back the advancing armies of North Korea and China, leading to over two years of skirmishing on the 39th Parallel. Fears of an attack close to home did not come to a head until the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, but the sense that spies and informers had already secreted themselves into influential institutions fed anticommunist fears through the first half of the decade. For this reason, spaces and international travel were policed vigilantly, even if it meant the denial of civil liberties. The black singer Paul Robeson had his passport confiscated in 1950 for being a Russophile, warning that blacks would not fight for the United States against the Soviet Union, and during the previous summer in Paris speaking favourably about the absence of discrimination in the Soviet Union; the passport of activist W. E. B. DuBois was cancelled in 1952; the Caribbean intellectual C. L. R. James was deported in 1953; and the ‘father of the atom bomb’ physicist Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in 1954 for casting doubts over the wisdom of developing the Hbomb. There were others as well, such as left-liberal playwright Arthur Miller who, although never a communist, was refused a visa in 1954 that prevented him from seeing a performance of his own 28 American Culture in the 1950s play The Crucible in Brussels. Paradoxically Europe was much closer for many Americans with the development of air travel and the extension of the GI Bill for veterans wanting to study abroad, but it was also further away for perceived subversives like Miller, whose marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 conveniently shifted the media spotlight away from his politics. Paris had been a haven for a generation of writers and artists in the 1920s and after World War II became a strategic American entry point into Europe and the most important site for the transfer of artistic ideas to and from the US. France was vigorously promoted in tourist brochures in the early 1950s, and the favourable exchange rate encouraged many Americans to sojourn in Europe. The iron curtain that the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill detected was moving steadily west across Europe was blocked by the divided city of Berlin, but also halted by the spread of American culture across the Atlantic. There was European opposition though. Anti-American sentiments and French cultural superiority were rife. The French writer and statesman André Malraux claimed that there was no such thing as ‘American culture’; a Sorbonne literature professor René Etiemble claimed that France was being corrupted by American exports and by the bastardised language ‘franglais’; and many agreed with President Charles de Gaulle that France should embody a third way between the political alternatives of the two superpowers.72 Nevertheless, many Americans saw Paris as their point of connection to Europe, both geographically and culturally. It is significant that the reason why ex-GI and wannabe painter Jerry Mulligan, played by Gene Kelly in An American in Paris (1951), is befriended by Parisian boys is that he brings bubble-gum and optimism to the war-torn city. Other musicals such as April in Paris, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Funny Face use a Parisian setting to emphasize romance and glamour, but the city was also used for more strategic reasons as the gateway for American culture into Europe. For example, Paris was not merely the setting but also a strategic site in the MGM musical Silk Stockings (1957), the retelling of Ernst Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka (1939), in which the carefree optimism of the American producer Steve Canfield (Fred Astaire) is thrown into conflict with the iron discipline of the Russian emissary Nina Yoshenka (Cyd Charisse). Sent to Paris to bring back three commissars and a deserting pianist who has sold out to Western decadence, Nina Yoshenka embodies the will of the Party, only to find her discipline slowly eroded by a metropolis combining American free enterprise with French elegance. The Intellectual Context 29 Paris was also one of the strategic sites for the International Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which worked against censorship to promote cultural expression across the globe, epitomized by a festival of arts held in Paris in May 1952. Leading American thinkers were allied to the US branch of the Congress, including Lionel Trilling and Reinhold Niebuhr who spoke out when the Russian writer Boris Pasternak was barred from receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 and condemned the discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union in autumn 1960. One of the directives of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was to promote American values in Europe, but that did not mean that the American Committee saw eye to eye with the international organization. In 1951 the secretary of the CCF Nicolas Nabokov was worried that the American branch was out of touch with the central international principles; he realized that a lot of work needed to be done to prevent Europeans from simply thinking CocaCola and Hollywood when they thought of Americans.73 The political complexities of the CCF and the fact that the CIA later turned out to 30 American Culture in the 1950s Figure I.2 Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse act out the cold war in Silk Stockings (MGM 1957). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. be a hidden benefactor of the Committee have been well documented. However, while Richard Pells argues that during the 1950s members of CCF ‘believed they were engaged in a project that was politically necessary, morally ennobling, and entirely theirs to superintend’, more recent critics like David Caute and Penny von Eschen argue that culture did not always behave in the way that its political advocates wanted it to.74 For example, von Eschen claims that while the jazz tours of the mid- to late 1950s in Europe, the Middle East and Asia were encouraged by the government for promoting Americanness, ‘jazz musicians didn’t simply accept the way they were deployed by the State Department’; rather, ‘they slipped into the breaks and looked around, intervening in official narratives and playing their own changes on Cold War perspectives’.75 If Paris and Moscow provide important international sites for viewing American culture from afar, back at home the development of cities was heavily influenced by the International Style of modernist architecture. This was widely in evidence through the building of highrise office blocks and epitomized by the German émigré Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s thirty-eight-storey Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York City. The Seagram Building followed the twenty-fourstorey Lever House (completed in 1952) in making use of new zoning laws in the city that permitted high-rises to no longer be set back (as had been the previous law), provided that the building did not cover more than a quarter of the lot. Completed in 1958 the Seagram Building was a classic example of all-glass office high-rise with simple clean lines and a plaza front. Some critics (including the editor of the magazine House Beautiful in 1953) were concerned that the International Style was linked to communist ideology, but the Seagram Building was widely copied as the template of corporate modernism and a symbol of a well-ordered nation. There were variations on corporate architecture such as the futuristic Alcoa Building, Pittsburgh, with its aluminium skin (completed in 1953) and the multi-cellular Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (1956). Price Tower was architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper, using glass and copper – Wright’s attempt to bring back organicism to the postwar built environment (even though the tower’s small cells were not very practical). Some grand building projects never came to fruition like the planned new headquarters for the World Trade Center on the waterfront in San Francisco, which had a projected cost of $750 million.76 But other completed buildings, such as the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (for which Eisenhower The Intellectual Context 31 broke the ground in May 1959), were seen as architectural symbols of an upwardly-mobile and culturally vibrant nation, in this case helping to regenerate a slum area around Columbus Circle in Manhattan. 32 American Culture in the 1950s Figure I.3 Lever House, 390 Park Avenue (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1952). While some public spaces in the 1950s, particularly in the segregated Deep South, were slow to change even after the Brown v. the Board of Education ruling of 1954 (see the following section), the new geography of the decade is best viewed by focusing on the built environment in the Northeast. A changing demography was linked closely The Intellectual Context 33 Figure I.4 Seagram Building, 375 Park Avenue (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1958). to shifts in living spaces in the 1950s, with many Puerto Ricans and African Americans migrating to northern cities in search of work (over 5 million blacks migrated to the urban North and West between 1950 and 1965), at the same time that many white middle-class city dwellers were moving out to the suburbs. The Federal Housing Administration Program (FHA) was established in the mid-1930s, but after World War II it went into overdrive to re-house families and returning veterans, concentrating on the growth of the suburbs in the second half of the 1940s to prevent city centres becoming overcrowded. The lure of newly created suburbs such as Park Forest, Illinois, and the three Levittowns in Long Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey (named after planner William Levitt) was particularly strong for parents wanting to bring up children in a clean and safe environment. The safety of surburbia was promoted by property investors and glossy ads, stressing that new Levitt houses were ‘out of the radiation zone’ beyond the reach of atom bombs.77 Low prices and favourable interest rates enticed many lower middle-class families to purchase homes rather than rent, but moving to the suburbs meant almost total reliance on a car because public transport links were poor and general services often a drive away from housing areas. The zoning of suburban areas tended to push economic groups closer together, with the middle class moving to medium- and low-density housing and the working class to high-density dwellings. This created homogenized environments marked by identikit houses and similar lifestyles, with television drawing the family into the home where a diet of sitcoms provided ‘how-to lessons’ for ‘organizing marriage and child raising’.78 In many ways the homogeneity of Levittown’s population was planned, with African Americans barred from renting or buying property in certain areas up to (and even after) the Brown v. the Board of Education ruling. Before this, integrated neighbourhoods did exist, but they were rare in the early 1950s and many banks resisted making large loans to finance integrated housing. Although Levittown was often described as the largest all-white community in the country, Look magazine ran an article in August 1958 of the first black couple, William and Daisy Myers, to move into Dogwood Hollow (a section of Levittown, Pennsylvania); they were subject to vandalism, physical threats, a flaming cross on the lawn, and ‘KKK’ painted on their friendly neighbour’s house before state authorities could intervene.79 The FHA actually encouraged the zoning of neighbourhoods along class and race lines, arguing that ‘if a neighbourhood is to retain sta- 34 American Culture in the 1950s bility . . . it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes’.80 Urban problems in inner cities and grey-belt areas were masked by firms wishing to encourage young couples to suburbs like Levittown, such as in magazines like Redbook that focused on the need to balance the responsibilities of home and work. In 1957 Redbook produced a short promotional film In the Suburbs dealing with the pleasures of a suburban lifestyle and its suitability for starting new families.81 Because around 2.5 million new families were involved in this social trend it was not surprising that there were initially few negative voices about the downside of suburbia, which Lizabeth Cohen argues ‘became the distinctive residential landscape of the Consumers’ Republic’.82 Civic pride in city centres was also high in the mid-decade, with Look running a long feature in February 1958 on New York as a city of ‘incredible contrasts’, although behind the façade of Manhattan were slums and segregation that ran ‘the length of the island’.83 Several concerned reports on city centres were published in 1959, followed by the critical study Anatomy of a Metropolis in 1960 and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, and a scandal arose when the city developer Robert Moses turned over many Manhattan tenement areas to private developers, forcing poor families to live in derelict buildings.84 A watchful eye was also turned on suburbs: the critic John Keats satirized the lifestyles of John and Mary Drone in The Crack in the Picture Window (1956); in The SplitLevel Trap (1960) Richard Gordon renamed the suburbs ‘Disturbia’; and Richard Yates offered a harsh critique of a typical Connecticut suburb in his satirical novel Revolutionary Road (1961). There were some alternatives to suburbia such as modernist designer Joseph Eichler’s designs for innovative homes for the Californian middle class, but the options were more limited in the Northeast. Lewis Mumford was particularly scathing of suburban developments, coining the phrase ‘anti-city’ to describe areas of suburbanization. Back in the 1920s Mumford had looked upon the suburb favourably for renewing the natural environment that the modern city had swallowed up, but his early dream of an organic regional community (or garden city) conflicted with the homogenized topographies after World War II. Mumford was horrified that suburban dwellers were heavily reliant on car transport to commute to cities, making suburbia into a ‘bedroom community’ that lacked any kind of organic coherence.85 In his major work The City in History (1961) Mumford described contemporary suburbia as: The Intellectual Context 35 A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every inward and outward respect to a common mould, manufactured in the central metropolis.86 It was not the growth of suburbia that worried Mumford, but the lowgrade unimaginative lifestyles that it encouraged, with the promise of freedom (‘the open basket-work texture of the suburb’) being replaced by a contained environment (‘the solid stone container of late neolithic culture’).87 Rather than finding a mixed culture in suburbia, Mumford discerned only an ‘over-specialized community’ where ‘compulsive play’ became the natural analogue of ‘compulsive work’, reinforcing ‘a standardized and denatured environment’ bereft of self-sustaining resources.88 Sociologist Herbert Gans argued in The Levittowners (1967) that Mumford’s reading of suburbia was too critical, reducing all postwar developments to an abstract model that contrasts unfavourably with his ideal of a garden city, whereas Keats’ The Crack in the Picture Mirror and Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road were too cynical in suggesting that there can be no escape from the low-grade life of suburbia. It is, of course, the exact opposite of the happy and optimistic images of the Redbook promotional film In the Suburbs, but provides another example of the ways in which popular culture and intellectuals (with a streak of urban snobbery) were going their separate ways. If culture was on the move in the mid-1950s, it was moving against the direction that many intellectuals wished to see. It was, in fact, a triumph for popular culture that commerce and imagination came together to give rise to the decade’s most distinctive new geography on the West Coast: Disneyland. 36 American Culture in the 1950s Disneyland 1955 The most iconic manufactured space in the 1950s was Disneyland, built in 160 acres of orange grove in Anaheim, California. The creator of the new theme park was Walt Disney, the animator and self-styled uncle of all young Americans. Disney had designs for a theme park before World War II and originally planned to use an eight-acre site adjacent to Burbank The Intellectual Context 37 Studios which he initially intended to call Fantasia after his 1941 musical animation and then, later, Mickey Mouse Park. Disney was disappointed with other amusement parks and wanted to create ‘a place that’s as clean as anything could ever be’ that would appeal to both children and adults.89 This emphasis on the cleanliness of the park is itself significant given that Eisenhower and Nixon used the image of the ‘clean house’ in their presidential campaign of 1952 (to eradicate suspected subversion in the government), but the specific idea that Disney could transform the dreamlike worlds of his animation into spatial forms was almost unthinkable. But the war halted his initial plans and it was not until August 1953 that the Anaheim site was found, twenty-seven miles from Los Angeles. Much of the finance for the theme park (which exceeded $17 million) came from the ABC network, and was given in exchange for Disney’s commitment to the eight-year television show Disneyland. He made good promotional use of the ABC show, premiering with ‘The Disneyland Story’ (17 October 1954) which pulled in over 30 million viewers, and he followed this with regular bulletins as the site developed. Disney’s passion was to bring to life characters and experiences that existed only in the imagination. Although Disneyland is often seen as the epitome of mass culture, as a 2006 exhibition on Walt Disney at the Grand Palais in Paris suggests, Disney can be seen as a pioneering figure in breaking down the boundaries between fact and fiction and between high and low culture (he even collaborated with Salvador Dali in 1946). In his first television show Disney expressed his hope that Disneyland would be ‘unlike anything else on this earth: a fair, an amusement park, an exhibition, a city from Arabian Nights, a metropolis from the future . . . of hopes and dreams, facts and fancy, all in one’.90 Even though he had relied for many years on his co-animator and onetime partner Ub Iwerks for the success of his animations, Disney prided himself on ‘gathering pollen’ and stimulating everybody to work towards the same goals. One National Geographic writer recalled Disney’s admission that ‘I certainly don’t consider myself a businessman, and I never did believe I was worth anything as an artist’.91 Nor was Disney an architect or planner, but he had an ear for folklore and a cinematic vision of his theme park split into four realms that radiated like ‘cardinal points of the compass’ from a main access route, Main Street, USA. Main Street was deliberately nostalgic in recreating a typical Midwestern main street circa 1900 that Disney hoped would bring back ‘happy memories’ for those that had lived through the innocent years (as historian Henry May called them), and for children it would be ‘an adventure in turning back the calendar to the days of grandfather’s youth’. When Disneyland opened on 17 July 1955, Main Street was filled with recreated buildings five-eighths full size, a fire wagon and horse-drawn streetcars; it housed a city hall, kinetoscope, shooting gallery, and fire station; and connected up to the old-style Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad. Radiating from Main Street were four lands with their own identity. Each land was familiar to viewers of the television show – with Disney careful to 38 American Culture in the 1950s theme his shows from the start. Frontierland took visitors back to pioneering America complete with wagons, a stagecoach, an Indian village and the Mark Twain riverboat; Adventureland was ‘nature’s own realm’ in which was to be found a jungle cruise and (in the early 1960s) the pioneering animatronics of the exotic birds in the Tiki Room; in Fantasyland were recreations of Disney’s animations: Casey Jr’s Circus Train, Dumbo’s Flying Elephants, Alice’s Mad Tea Party and Mr Toad’s Wild Ride; and Tomorrowland brought to life the science of the future in Autopia, Rocket to the Moon, Space Station X-1 and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which tied in with Disney’s Cinemascope live-action film of that year. The four lands promised adventures into the past (Frontierland), to elsewhere (Adventureland), into dreams (Fantasyland), and into space (Tomorrowland), all within ‘160 acres of fantasy’.92 Eighteen rides were showcased to nearly 30,000 visitors on the opening day, virtually half of whom had been sold counterfeit tickets at $15 each. The ninety-minute ABC show of the opening celebrations, ‘Dateline Disneyland’, projected the dreamlike space of the park into the homes of 90 million viewers. The excited hosts Bob Cummings, Art Linkletter and a young Ronald Reagan mingled with the invited celebrities – Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Debbie Reynolds, Eve Arden, Kirk Douglas – and with Disney himself, who introduced some of the attractions. But the reality of the opening is hard to gauge by watching the show, which is slightly chaotic but portrays a day of jubilation. In reality Tomorrowland was incomplete; Fantasyland had to be shut down after a gas leak; some rides did not work; cafés ran out of food; high-heeled shoes stuck in the newly-laid asphalt; paint was still wet; trees were still being planted; and water fountains did not work, which was especially disastrous given that temperatures had risen to 110°F. Disney was not aware of all this at the time, but he later referred to the opening day as ‘Black Sunday’. Disney was very careful in the first six months to ensure that the problems of the opening day did not recur, and he was rewarded by the public’s unprecedented excitement for Disneyland: it took only seven weeks to receive its millionth guest and less than two-and-a-half years to reach ten million visitors. To many the park epitomized everything good about the nation: it demonstrated Disney’s resourcefulness and vision; it rewarded ABC’s sound investment, virtually rescuing the network from bankruptcy; it provided a clean and wholesome place for children to pursue their imaginations; and mixed entertainment with education in its exploration of past and future. Disney’s major features Cinderella (1950), 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1955), Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) all had box office success, The Mickey Mouse Club and the Davy Crockett television shows were very popular, and the Disneyland project developed swiftly. Some critics have looked to Disneyland with a much more jaundiced eye, though: one critic in 1977 called it a ‘degenerate utopia’; for years Uncle Walt had been at odds with his workforce, demanding rigid and consistent performances from his Disneyland workers; and Disney’s anti- The Intellectual Context 39 Figure I.5 The Sleeping Beauty Castle, Disneyland, Anaheim CA. © David Halliwell, 1974. communist sentiments seep into the moral polarities of his postwar animations.93 While Disneyland offered a space for new experiences – one could move between Davy Crockett’s frontier and a rocket launch within half an hour – visitors and critics offered polar views of the magic kingdom, with the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard arguing in the 1980s that Disneyland only offers simulated experiences that throw into doubt the whole notion of ‘reality’ in America.94 Karal Ann Marling sums up this double vision of Disneyland: ‘the tension between perfection and reality, between the real and more or less real, was the primary source of the visitor’s delight’ whereas critics saw ‘only plastics and profits in a society hopelessly corrupted by TV, suburbia, tail fins, and too few distinctions of caste and class’.95 Identities Just as corporate architecture and suburban developments dominated the built environment in the 1950s, so have standardized versions of gender and class come to epitomize the decade. This standardization has not been helped by satirical portraits of middle-class lives: the long commute to work in the city for the ‘organization man’ and a day perfecting the home for housewives ‘smiling at they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor’, as Betty Friedan mocked in The Feminine Mystique. 96 Rigorous advertising campaigns promoted this suburban ideal and it was not until late in the decade that rigid gender roles were widely questioned. As the following chapters will explore in more depth, there was some unrest in the mid-1950s as can be gauged by uneasy representations of gender roles in film and fiction: in Jack Arnold’s film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) domesticity becomes an oppressive prison for the shrinking white-collar protagonist Scott Carey, while in Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) the organization man, Tom Rath, feels uncomfortably caught between the demands of work and the home; he cannot ever fully settle down to suburban life, with memories of active combat and a wartime affair dragging him back into the past. The figure of the returning war veteran feeling uncomfortable in his new ‘gray flannel’ life became a stock character. The general sense at the time was that too much domesticity would make returning soldiers soft and erode their masculinity. This is a thesis that Steven Cohan develops in his book Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (1997), in which he argues that threats to masculinity reached its apogee in the 1959 poster of Alfred Hitchcock’s film North By Northwest. Cohan interprets the image of Cary Grant falling helplessly through space as a prime symbol of emasculation during a period of loss of national confidence late in the decade.97 Despite the popularity of Mickey Spillane’s cycle of crime novels featuring the tough, fast-living and, at times, brutish detective Mike Hammer, from the mid-1950s onwards the American male was seen to become increasingly complex. Following articles such as ‘Uncertain Hero: The Paradox of the American Male’ in a November 1956 issue of the Woman’s Home Companion, in which the gray flannel male is pictured leading a beleaguered life of ‘quiet desperation’, Look magazine published a series in 1958 on new pressures facing American men.98 One contributor claimed that the nation was in danger of 40 American Culture in the 1950s becoming ‘too soft, too complacent and too home-oriented to meet the challenge of dynamic nations like China and the Soviet Union’.99 Cohan argues that these fears of ‘going soft’ in peace-time suburbia were linked to cultural fantasies of remasculinization, particularly evident in the cycle of film epics which displayed the manliness of Moses and Rameses (Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner) in The Ten Commandments and made spectacles of the broad chests of William Holden and Rock Hudson. Despite the boom in television westerns in 1957–8, that masculine identity was in crisis late in the decade, or was not all that it purported to be, is given weight by the fact that Rock Hudson, the epitome of strong masculinity, was confirmed as gay following his AIDS-related death in 1985; that James Dean and Marlon Brando had homosexual inclinations; that the moralistic J. Edgar Hoover later turned out to be a cross-dresser; and that the gay subject matter of Robert Anderson’s play Tea and Sympathy (1953) was drastically toned done in Vincente Minnelli’s MGM film version of 1956.100 If masculinity was contained in the early 1950s, then American women suffered even more from gender standardization, with most of the important sociological texts – The Lonely Crowd, White Collar and The Organization Man – largely ignoring women’s experiences. The likes of anthropologist Margaret Mead, writer Mary McCarthy, and civil rights activist Jo Ann Gibson Robinson were busy in the public sphere, but the fact that the phrase ‘public woman’ in the 1950s was more likely to be associated with prostitution than intellect is one marker that the home became the naturalized habitat for many women.101 Recent historians have challenged the theory that women were simply victims of the decade, but widespread college engagements and falling marriage ages were sure signs that motherhood and housework had become sanctified.102 Standardization was not linked only to the domestic sphere but also to class, region and ethnicity; advertisers focused almost exclusively on the white middle-class ideal: the housewife in the suburban Northeast and the ‘golden-haired girl of plantation mythology’ in the South.103 While many magazines were portraying the domestic housewife as stylish and glamorous, issues of sexuality were often implicit in discourses on women. This was underlined by the outcry on the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which claimed that sexual relationships outside marriage were much more frequent than was commonly thought. Kinsey’s report on male sexuality in 1948 had led to many negative responses, but the female volume outraged those that associated femininity with The Intellectual Context 41 moral purity and thought sex was the exclusive domain of marital relationships. But, although the Church was particularly outraged by Kinsey’s findings, other sectors of American culture seemed to change around 1953 following Kinsey’s ‘atom bomb’ publication. Sex was everywhere. Hollywood blondes Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield and the growth of male magazines Playboy and Esquire offered a model of ostentatious sexuality, epitomized by New Yorkbased Bettie Page, ‘the pin-up queen of the universe’, whose explicit pictures led to the anti-pornographic hearings of 1955.104 This double image of women – the devoted housewife and glamorous diva – is less a paradox than a duality in the 1950s. Media interest in body shape found its way into films such as the neo-noir Niagara (1953) in which Monroe’s dangerous and hyper-sexualised character is contrasted to the modest and sensible Polly Cutler (Jean Peters), and Vertigo (1957) in which the homely Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) survives while the shape-shifting femme fatale Madeleine (Kim Novak) eventually perishes. The film industry realized that displays of female sexuality gave Technicolor movies an edge over small-scale television, but many films concluded with a reassertion of traditional feminine modesty against glamorous and superficial figures. The MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952), for example, harks back to the beginning of sound film in the late 1920s and ends with the swanky movie star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) exposed as a fraudster while the demure and faithful Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) is revealed as the true musical talent. Hollywood was keen to exploit female sexuality but was also worried by it and repeatedly drawn to plots in which dangerous sexualities led to death or dissolution, such as the beauty-obsessed fading movie star played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Monroe’s sexualised image was contrasted to the more wholesome Doris Day whose comedies with Rock Hudson pictured a world of girl-next-door romances, notwithstanding the fact that bedrooms often came into play in films such as Pillow Talk (1959). Even Monroe’s roles after Niagara moved away from threatening sexuality to the more ‘innocent’ dumb blonde characters of The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). But when it came to lifting the veil off gender roles, it was down to the first-time writer Grace Metalious in the notorious bestseller Peyton Place (1956) to suggest that what went on behind closed doors revealed female sexuality to be more complex than many thought. While critics dubbed the book sordid and filthy, and Canada banned its exportation into Commonwealth countries, sales were phenomenal 42 Американская культура 1950-х годов многие читатели отмечают, что вымышленное Пейтон-плейс было просто как их родной город. В Пейтон Плейс Металиусу удается превратить мифологии Новой Англии в историю о "женском сексуальном агентстве", лицемерие, социальное неравенство и классовые привилегии », которые многие консерваторы не мог принять как правдивый.105 Но, несмотря на нападение романа на предполагаемая моральная чистота женственности, только в 1963 году "Женская мистика" Фридана и романы Мэри Маккарти. The Bell Jar группы и Сильвии Плат полностью исследовали послевоенное время. опыт женщин. Это не означает, что историческая реальность женщин в 1950-е можно свести к показу фильмов, но это сложнее актерские роли на рубеже 1960-х раскрывают женскую идентичность менялось в течение десятилетия, когда он выглядел инертным. Пол идентичность изменяется по-разному, когда она связана с проблемами класса и раса: как утверждает Джоанн Мейеровиц, женщины были не просто матери или артисты, но также работники и активисты, пока не состоите в браке матери, аборты и лесбиянки предлагали разные женские впечатления несмотря на то, что многие из них были лишены гражданских прав. Эти «Бесконтрольные женщины» предполагают наличие разнообразных субкультур «за пределами женская загадка », которыми часто пренебрегают, когда сосредотачиваются на белом идентичность среднего класса. Вини Брейнс утверждает, что эти «другие» женщины были беспокойными и иногда диссидент, вдохновленный битами Джека Керуака, но осознают, что женщин часто исключают из богемного образа жизни как они взяты из книги Керуака «На дороге» (1957) или из радикальных исследований молодежная культура, такая как книга Пола Гудмана Growing Up Absurd (1960) .106 Возможно, неудивительно, что в 1955 году героиня Дж. Д. Сэлинджера Фрэнни Гласс комментирует, что «если вы станете богемным или чем-то безумным вот так, вы подчиняетесь так же, как и все остальные, только другим способом », поскольку все больше женщин искали изощренные способы преодолевать или разрушать ограничения класса и этнической принадлежности, чтобы найти творческий выходов.107 К тому времени гендерная идентичность широко подвергалась сомнению. Художник Эд Кинхольц использовал окровавленные кукольные головы, чтобы высмеивать мужчин и женские американские архетипы в его сборках John Doe (1959) и Джейн Доу (1960). Если женская идентичность была «проблемой, у которой не было имени», как Бетти Фридан назвал это в 1963 году, тогда еще и формулировкой классовой идентичности. исчез с национальных радаров. Трудовые споры в Голливуде в середине 1940-х были распространены антипрофсоюзным законом Тафта-Хартли 1947 г., в котором пикетирование, забастовки сочувствия и бойкоты были объявлены вне закона. растущий страх, что вся профсоюзная деятельность была щитом для коммунистических Интеллектуальный контекст 43 заговор. Основная инициатива заключалась в слиянии двух основных профсоюзов. организаций, Американской федерации труда (AFL) и Конгресс промышленных организаций (CIO) в декабре 1955 г. сформировать AFL-CIO, который в то время насчитывал 16 миллионов членов, примерно 30% всех сотрудников (хотя в 1957 г. свидетельство профсоюзной коррупции). AFL-CIO произвела множество общественные фильмы, особенно через недавно сформированный Комитет по политическому образованию (COPE), который поощрял рабочий класс проголосовали и призвали к пожертвованию 1 доллара от всех членов для финансирования помощи школы, здравоохранение и пенсии. В самом начале десятилетия также были показаны рабочие фильмы в кинотеатры, такие как левый «С этими руками» (1950), в котором профсоюзная деятельность с 1910-х годов и «Соль Земли» (1954 г.) на основе забастовка горняков в Нью-Мексико и привлечение участников из черного списка. Но современный представления об активизме были редкими, с двумя учебными фильмы для школ, Рабочее движение (1959) и Восстание Labor (1968), заканчивая свои повествования в 1914 и 1932 годах соответственно: 1914 год ознаменовался появлением профсоюзов компаний, которые предотвратили незаконные монополии и ограничений против рабочих, и в 1935 г. закон Вагнера во время первого президентского срока Рузвельта, который предоставил право создавать профсоюзы и вступать в них.108 Укороченные рассказы эти документальные фильмы - два признака того, что 1950-е годы были неприятными десятилетие рабочего класса. «Исчезновение» идентичности рабочего класса было частично связано с строгая рекламная кампания, чтобы побудить работников стремиться к такой же потребительский образ жизни, как у американцев среднего класса, с традиционными сознание рабочего класса подорвано законом Тафта-Хартли. Семьи рабочего класса в телевизионных ситкомах, таких как The Goldbergs ( еврейская семья иммигрантов, которая переезжает из Нью-Йорка в Нью-Йорк. Пригороды Джерси) и The Honeymooners (с Джеки Глисоном, играющим водитель автобуса из рабочего класса Нью-Йорка) оба иллюстрируют эту тенденцию статусное стремление. Но Лизабет Коэн утверждает, что в то время как масса СМИ (и сам Эйзенхауэр) продвигали преимущества среднего класса образ жизни, другое законодательство усиливает «классовую самобытность», в том числе законы о зонировании для нового жилья, трудности войны рабочего класса ветераны, получающие от закона о военнослужащих те же льготы, что и их средний класс соотечественников, а также неравномерная налоговая структура, дискриминирующая семьи рабочего класса.109 Исчезновение рабочего класса было только очевидным, хотя (средний класс вырос только с 37% до 44% с 1952 г. до 1964 г.); просто проблемы рабочего класса редко решались в 44 Американская культура 1950-х годов любой глубины СМИ. Даже Бетти Фридан пришлось преуменьшить ее левые симпатии; в начале 1950-х она боролась против заработной платы дискриминации, но в "Женской мистике" она почти исключительно о проблемах загородной хозяйки. Годы писать для журналов среднего класса Mademoiselle, McCall’s и Ladies Домашний журнал побудил Фридан рассматривать "женскую мистику" как национальная проблема, когда классовая самобытность исчезает из поля зрения, раса и региональная идентичность.110 Это также верно в отношении многих художественных произведений 1950-х годов. и кино, авторы и кинематографисты гораздо менее готовы иметь дело с классовый конфликт, чем в предыдущие десятилетия, в основном из-за страха репрессий от правительственного следственного органа, Палаты представителей неамериканских Комитет по деятельности (HUAC), который стал постоянным комитетом в 1946 году первоначально для расследования трудовых споров в Голливуде. В В результате получился оскароносный фильм Элии Казана «На набережной». (1954) меньше сосредотачивается на страданиях докеров Хобокена и больше внимательно следит за правилом мафии, о чем свидетельствует свидетельство Терри Моллоя (Марлон Брандо) помогает расстаться. Дело в том, что на набережной часто бывает читается как тонко завуалированная аллегория Казани и сценариста Бадда Показания Шульберга перед HUAC (в которых они назвали названий, хотя Казань поначалу отказалась) предполагает, что фильм был с антикоммунистическим климатом, а не сосредоточиться на жизни рабочих111 Если бы жизнь рабочего класса практически отсутствовала в популярных культурных представлениях тогда афроамериканцы были еще более маргинализованы. После Национальной ассоциации содействия развитию цветного В 1953 году люди (NAACP) лоббировали отмену «расистских» комедийных фильмов. Шоу Амоса и Энди (1951–1953) и Беула (1950–1993). почти полное отсутствие афроамериканских представительств на телевидение (см. главу 4). В киноиндустрии присутствие черного актеров было очень мало, только Сидни Пуатье, Гарри Белафонте и Дороти Дэндридж, добившиеся успеха. И хотя Гарлем породил некоторых молодых черных драматургов в середине десятилетия, только в 1959 году с Лоррейн Хэнсберри новаторская пьеса на Бродвее "Изюм на солнце" сделала черный Движение искусств набирает обороты (см. Главу 2). Но это всего лишь частичная картина. Мы обнаруживаем совершенно другую историю, когда обращаемся к региональная музыка и местное радио, показывая, что афроамериканец культура оказала большое влияние на формирование более широких музыкальных и музыкальных стили исполнения на протяжении десятилетия. Важность черного музыка 1950-х годов заставила музыкального критика Бена Сидрана утверждать, что она открыли "новую видимость" афроамериканской культуры, которая Интеллектуальный контекст 45 противостоит прочному образу в названии романа Ральфа Эллисона 1952 года. Человек невидимка. 112 Некоторые очень интересные исследования послевоенных черных культурных форм имеют возникла с начала 1990-х113. Но история афроамериканцев в 1950-е годы реже прослеживается через культурные представления (которые были в основном проблемными в кино, на телевидении и на национальном театр) и чаще через крупные общественные мероприятия, такие как Отказ члена NAACP Росы Паркс уступить место в автобусе 1 декабря 1955 года (что вызвало бойкот автобусов в Монтгомери) и создание Южно-христианской конференции лидеров в 1957 году под председательством Мартина Лютера Кинга младшего (который обеспечил фокус для сидячих забастовок студентов 1960 года и Свободы Аттракционы 1961 г.). В борьбе за гражданские права, но расовая дискриминация, жестокое обращение и гибель людей характерны десятилетие, особенно в августе 1955 года, когда 14-летний Эммет Тилль из Миссисипи был жестоко избит и выстрелил в голову за то, что якобы свистнул белой женщине. 1950-е можно рассматривать как время зарождения черного активизма, но, как говорит Ричард Кинг, на протяжении десятилетия многие критики, как черные, так и белые, предлагали 'В значительной степени негативное или, в лучшем случае, двойственное мнение об афроамериканцах культуры », из атаки социолога Э. Франклина Фрейзера на соответствие черных среднего класса в Black Bourgeoisie (1957) к напряженности встроенная в черную идентичность, исследованная писателями Ричардом Райтом и Джеймс Болдуин пишет в изгнании из Парижа после отъезда из США в 1947 году. и 1948. 114 Даже прогрессивные ответы на «негритянскую проблему» поблекли. из вида к середине 1950-х годов. Например, тринидадский интеллектуал К. Л. Р. Джеймс призывал к «революционному ответу» в 1948 г. предложение объединить энергии пролетариата и черных движения, но он стал более осторожным несколько лет спустя, утверждая, что соблазн образа жизни среднего класса подрывал радикальные позиции движения115. Несмотря на эту внутреннюю критику афроамериканской культуры, Крайне важно не недооценивать изменения, которые возникла во второй половине десятилетия, инициированной поистине исторической момент в федеральном законе США. 46 Американская культура 1950-х годов Интеллектуальный контекст 47 Браун против Совета по образованию (1954) Самым важным судебным решением десятилетия было решение 1954 г. case Oliver Brown et al. против Совета по образованию Топики, штат Канзас, который сделали неконституционным расовую сегрегацию школ. После двух лет судебных дел под руководством Университета Говарда и NAACP, декларация вынесенный Верховным судом 17 мая 1954 г. образовательные учреждения по своей сути неравны »и требуют десегрегации школ по всей стране. Под руководством поверенного Тергуда Маршалла, Браун против Совета по образованию включил интерпретацию 10-го и 14-я поправка, при этом сторонники сегрегации утверждают, что конституция не требовать, чтобы белые и черные дети посещали одну школу, в то время как десегрегационисты утверждали, что проводившаяся «отдельная, но равная» политика Дело Плесси против Фергюсона 1896 года было неверным истолкованием 14-го Поправка и что правительство должно запретить штатам устанавливать политика сегрегации в общественных местах. Учитывая, что в начале десятилетия 70 процентов афроамериканцев жили в штатах, имел некоторую форму сегрегации, Браун был не просто абстрактным законодательством но глубоко связаны с личностями детей и студентов повсюду страна. Одно важное доказательство, которое десегрегационисты использовали в суде был результатом исследования нью-йоркского психолога Кеннета Кларка. в 1940-е гг. Кларк проверил различные психологические реакции детей. в возрасте трех лет и старше в ряде школ, причем большинство детей в сегрегированных школах выражали свое негативное отношение к цветным куклы и положительно отзывались о белых куклах. Поставляется как доклад на конференции середины века в Белом доме, посвященной детям и Молодежь в 1950 году, Кларк скептически относился к тому, научное доказательство, но NAACP осознал их ценность и Тургуд Маршалл использовали их в суде как доказательство психологического вреда, нанесенного изолированным школы. Ответ суда по делу Брауна был единодушным и вызвало много оптимизма у членов NAACP, но постановление к далеко идущим социальным и культурным проблемам. Эйзенхауэр хотел отложить реализация до следующей администрации и возмездие возникло в многие южные штаты. Вопросы о том, как реализовать Браун светодиод Главный судья Эрл Уоррен проведет второе решение суда в 1955 году (известный как Браун II), предусматривающий переходный период для некоторых государств настроить на полную интеграцию. Фраза "целенаправленная скорость" предназначалась чтобы свести к минимуму этот период корректировки, но привнес элемент неопределенности во время, необходимое для внесения изменений: предлагается обсуждение осторожный ответ, а не немедленные действия, требуемые Активисты NAACP. Неуверенность Эйзенхауэра в усилении Брауна сдерживалась из страха, что последствия массового сопротивления - растяжение от закрытия школ и переезда учеников к пропаганде превосходства белой расы и расовое очищение конкурсов красоты - будет сочетаться с 48 Американская культура 1950-х годов создают более острые социальные проблемы, чем те, которые постановил суд пытался исправить. События сентября 1957 г. были почти такими же знаменательными, как и Браун. когда Эйзенхауэр был вынужден вызвать 11000 федеральных войск для защиты группа из девяти чернокожих студентов в Литл-Роке, штат Арканзас. Литл-Рок Девять 'не пустили в Центральную среднюю школу Литл-Рока из-за 2 сентября полиция штата действует по приказу губернатора Орваля Фобуса. После того, как мэр отменил судебный запрет против Фаубуса 23 сентября ученики снова попытались войти в школу, но их встретила тысяча озлобленные горожане. Использование федеральных войск для разрешения школы доступ к девяти студентам был символическим моментом, который дал национальную санкции против Брауна, но вызвал еще больше волнений среди белых южан которые рассматривают судебное решение как прямое нападение на их традиции. Если Браун представлял собой исторический перекресток, то этот случай также был перекресток для либеральных интеллектуалов, хотя признаки немедленных перемен было трудно обнаружить. Историк Уолтер Джексон утверждает, что обсуждение гражданские права в национальных журналах, таких как The New Republic, Partisan Review и Атлантика имела тенденцию «иметь вид нереальности, непонимания изменений, которые происходили внутри черной Америки116. реакция на Брауна была почти такой же неуверенной, как и реакция Эйзенхауэра. Вместо того, чтобы соглашаться со шведским социологом Гуннаром Мюрдалом мнение 1944 года о том, что «моралистический оптимизм» Америки решит проблему выпуске, Рейнхольд Нибур и Артур Шлезингер-младший консультировали демократов кандидат Адлай Стивенсон в 1956 году, чтобы принять постепенный подход к десегрегации потому что в год выборов это было политически разумно. Нибур Интересная цифра для оценки амбивалентности интеллектуалов 1950-х годов. В 1956 год он назвал Брауна "не только вехой в истории отношений". между расами в нашей стране, но и в полезном взаимодействии между абстрактным понятием прав человека и конкретными правами гражданина США »117. Однако Нибур беспокоился, что Браун продвигал «Беспечное действие» вместо того, чтобы позволить органическое развитие «закона и обычай постепенно улучшать расовые отношения. И только в начале 1960-х начали ли афроамериканские мыслители регулярно публиковаться, что побудило северных белые интеллектуалы признали, что расовый конфликт был больше, чем просто проблема на юге. Афро-американские писатели также разделились на Брауна. Певец и актер Гарри Белафонте был вовлечен в правозащитную деятельность с ранних лет. сцене, а в мае 1954 года Ральф Эллисон аплодировал «чудесному миру возможности, которые обещали межрасовые классы. Однако Джеймс Болдуин в 1962 году утверждал, что «белые американцы не просто не хотят влияют на эти изменения », но они стали« настолько ленивыми », что «Не в состоянии даже представить их» 118 Сидни Пуатье, самая известная фигура интеграции черных в Голливуде и видная фигура в Браунс празднование шестой и десятой годовщины в 1960 и 1964 гг. обеспокоены тем, что демократическая система оказывается лицемерной в своей нерешительности ответ Брауну.119 Заключение Как показано в этом Введении, подробное рассмотрение расы, пола и класса показывает, что культурное производство 1950-х гораздо более разнообразный, чем часто приписывают. Чтобы изучить это разнообразие, следующие главы связывают четыре системы отсчета обсуждается во введении: культура, идеи, пространство и идентичности. Вместо того, чтобы использовать статичное представление о культуре, главы сосредоточены на культурные переходы 1950-х годов и организованы так, чтобы максимизировать связи между культурными формами, имеющими дело с (1) художественной литературой и поэзия; (2) драма и перформанс; (3) музыка и радио; (4) фильм и телевидение; и (5) изобразительное искусство. И, поскольку я начинаю обсуждать больше в главе 1 холодная война и модернизм дают двойные линзы для изучения американского опыта и социальных моделей сами меняются. В то время как критики, такие как Дэниел Белл, спорили что модернизм исчерпал себя после Второй мировой войны, следующие главы демонстрируют, что модернизм действительно возродился в 1950-е годы в более расплывчатых формах, отчасти в ответ на давление холодной войны но также частично свободен от них.120 Это обсуждение завершается в пятой главе, в которой изобразительное искусство дает четкое указание на то, что модернизм претерпевал метаморфоза 1950-х годов. Иногда это принимало форму мечта социалистов-модернистов о стандартизации, а иногда и отражал более эклектичный модернист, изменяющий жанры, в котором высокие и популярная культура пересекалась сложным образом. Вместе с Заключение, главы развивают точку зрения, что десятилетие было для вспомните два предыдущих описания: «период парадоксов» и «беспокойный смесь тревоги и расслабления, лени и достижений, самоуспокоенности и самокритика »121. Интеллектуальный контекст 49

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мы не знали... Спасибо тем, кто дочитал до конца. ИСТОРИЯ АМЕРИКИ непромокаемая обувь для мужчин чистый понедельник ювелирный изделие