Robertson, American Myth, American Reality

Overture:

Americans and Myths

Where Are We?

THE HUMAN WORLD is a funny messy disorderly illogical nonsequitur sort of place in which most people bumble most of the time, don’t see any but their own little bit of logic and stick to it no matter what the reality around them may be. They often don’t see what it is they are trying to do, much less the implications of what they are actually doing. How can you explain that state of affairs to people who function in precisely the same way but who want logical explanations and rational motivations for everybody else?

America is a memory—a memory of the lives and actions, the beliefs and efforts, of millions of human beings who have lived in American spaces, participated in an American social world, and died Americans. The memory is contained in American names—of people, of places, of events and institutions. The memory is contained in stories Americans tell one another—in poems and histories in speeches and broadcasts, in shows and pictures, in jokes and obituaries. It is, contained in the ways Americans behave and in their expectations of behavior; it is contained in the rituals Americans perform and in the games they play; it is contained in American social groupings, and in the political, economic, and religious institutions Americans maintain.

In the American memory are contained many of the truths which are self-evident to Americans, which help them to understand their country; and to explain their lives.

Some of those truths seem to have grown out of American spaces: America is a vast and productive land; it is the most powerful nation on earth; it is a great breadbasket of the world; it is resourceful and wealthy.

Some of those truths seem, to have come out of American past, out of historical experience: Columbus discovered and Europeans settled and civilized America; Americans fought a Revolution for freedom and independence; Americans fought a Civil War over nationalism and slavery; America created a vast industrial world; Americans require automobiles, and energy, and a high standard of living.

[4] Some of those truths seem to be absolute, more like revelation than the remembrance of things past or the consciousness of great space: America is a New World, America is a democracy, America has a special and important destiny in the world, America is some kind of paradise, America is uniquely influential in modern human affairs—for good or for evil.

But we do not live in some abstract land. Where we are is a very real America near the end of the twentieth century. And we make great efforts to understand and to explain to ourselves and to the world what that America is, what we are, and why we do what we do. Our explanations, as we see it, are modern explanations based on our real, modern world—not leftovers from some mythical past.

Michael Herr, in his award-winning book, Dispatches, wrote of sitting at a battalion aid station during the fighting in the Vietnamese city of Hue with a Marine “with minor shrapnel wounds in his legs.” They were both waiting for a helicopter to take them out, “a long wait with all of the dead and badly wounded going out first, and a couple of sniper rounds snapped across the airstrip, forcing us to move behind some sandbagging. ‘I hate this movie,”’ the Marine said. And Herr thought, “Why not?”

Was the Vietnam War a movie? An American movie? Made in Hollywood? or New York? or Washington? or Saigon? For actors and audience alike, it often seemed to take on characteristics of a movie shown on television, interrupted by commercials, with a rock-music background and a voice-over narration in sharp contrast to the visual images. Was it real? or really a movie?

Both the perception of the war as a movie and the reality of the war itself were part of the peculiarly American realities of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Once the war was over, Americans seemed to try to forget that it had happened, but at the same time, they made and watched and even gave awards to movies about it. “The Vietnam War has become accepted as a proper subject for every form of American popular art,” Hans Koning wrote in The New York Times in 1979: “Now, while entertained, we can purge our doubts and guilts and heal the suppressed divisions of the war years.” Or, as Michael Herr put it: “Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there”:

... After enough time passed and memory receded and settled, the name itself became a prayer, coded like all prayer to go past the extremes of petition and gratitude: Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, say again, until the word lost all its old loads of pain, pleasure, horror, guilt, nostalgia.

The social process of explaining and understanding is often very different from the realities of the actual phenomena being explained. The difference is vividly true of wars. “Then and there,” in Vietnam, Herr continued:

[5]...everyone was just trying to get through it, existential crunch, no atheists in foxholes like you wouldn’t believe. Even bitter refracted faith was better than none at all, like the black Marine I’d heard about during heavy shelling at Con Thien who said, “Don’t worry, baby, God’ll think of something.”

For the individual, “existential crunch” may remain the only explanation, the only way to understand what happened and why; nightmares and the endless retelling of war stories continue throughout a war veteran’s lifetime. But for a society, the telling of stories—the construction of social myths gradually takes on the quality of explanation. The myths create the social illusion that understanding has been achieved.

In an ancient and long-dead society that we think of as simpler, somehow less sophisticated, and more innocent than ours, less scientific and rational, the Trojan War became a proper subject of popular art. The “tellers of tales” of Archaic Greece entertained their society with stories of the war and of the returning veterans; at the same time, they purged and healed. So, too, the modern American tellers of tales with movies, plays, and books about Vietnam. And while there is no guarantee that any great national epic poetry like Homer’s will come from the Vietnam War (Homer, after all, did not sing his epics until four or five hundred years had passed—about the distance in time between us and Columbus), still the technique of telling stories in the popular culture and of generating a social mythology about a traumatic war is very much the same.

How are Americans to explain the war in Vietnam? How are they to understand that war? Such questions have disturbed many Americans for nearly two decades. Their answers have been American answers.

“The impulse to escape, the drive to conquest and expansion, was never contradicted in America ... by physical boundaries or by the persistence of strong traditions,” Frances FitzGerald wrote in Fire in the Lake, a widely acclaimed book explaining the Vietnam War even before that war had come to an end. Part of FitzGerald’s explanation of the Vietnam War was an explanation of Americans. Americans’ sense that they are unique in the world, vested with characteristics so peculiarly their own that they cannot be understood without explanation, leads to frequent self-examination. The explanations characteristically appeal to circumstances of the peculiarly American experience and to the mythologies Americans believe, as FitzGerald wrote:

...The national myth is that of creativity and progress, of a steady climbing upward into power and prosperity, both for the individual and for the country as a whole. Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind...

[6] A myth is a story told or an oft-told story referred to by label or allusion which explains a problem (for example, “that’s his Achilles’ heel,” or “it was a Trojan horse”). Very often, the problem being “solved” by a myth is a contradiction or a paradox, something which is beyond the power of reason or rational logic to resolve. But the telling of the story, or the re-creation of a vivid and familiar image which is part of a myth, carries with it—for those who are accustomed to the myth, those who believe it—a satisfying sense that the contradiction has been resolved, the elements of the paradox have been reconciled. Dramatic retelling provides catharsis, as Aristotle pointed out about tragedy, which the audience—the participants in the myth—takes to be an explanation, a structured understanding, of the original problem.

Myths often surround, and explain, heroes and heroines. But in modern America, many believe there are no heroes, that we have become either too disillusioned or too rational to participate in the myths that create heroes and heroines or to believe in human efficacy sufficiently to create heroic myths. Yet Americans do have “stars” and “superstars”; there are still national figures in the contemporary world as well as the remnants of traditional heroes and heroic stereotypes from the mythical past. When then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was asked by an Italian interviewer, Oriana Fallaci, how he explained “the incredible movie-star status” he enjoyed, Kissinger replied that it came from “the fact” that he had always “acted alone.” “Americans like that immensely,” he said.

Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town ... with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol.

... this cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into the town and does everything by himself...

The image of the cowboy riding alone is an image in American heroic mythology. It is available to Americans: it comes to their minds easily, in many variations; it is rich in associated images and ideals; it grows from thousands of tellings and retellings—in stories, movies, television programs, history books, children’s play—of cowboy stories which are part of life in America. Almost intuitively, Americans know it explains American loneliness, independence, conviction, and the need for approval, while at the same time it reconciles some of the contradictions among those characteristics.

The cowboy is a heroic type, and even for those who do not believe heroes exist in America, the use of such a mythological image by an American Secretary of State in order to explain his behavior seems natural. Particularly when the explanation is of “movie-star status.” Stars and national figures in contemporary America may not fit some scholarly typology of heroes or heroism, but they are part of our social mythology. They exist, and like all [7] other heroes and heroines, they are perceived to be set apart from ordinary human beings and at the same time to be models for and explanations of American social life.

Americans frequently voice the fear that their world is falling apart. The specter of war threatens either imminent atomic holocaust or continuing Vietnams. There is fear that the wealth and productivity of America may decline or cease to exist. There is great ambivalence among Americans, increasingly conscious and obvious, concerning government of all kinds, the Presidency, the military and defense, and the availability and consumption of American resources. There are conscious, public discussions of and ambivalence about the fundamental distinctions to be made among human beings and the propriety of such distinctions in American life—distinctions in regard to caste, race, and sex, as well as distinctions between life and death, and human and animal life.

Many Americans believe that their ambivalence is new in American life, that they are unique in discovering contradictions among ideals or in discerning irreconcilable opposition between what Americans profess and what they do. Many feel that they have of necessity parted company with the past, with traditional ideals as well as with American practice, because the realities they perceive in this world do not coincide with the “traditional” American view of the world and its realities.

The sense that the present world is in increasing crisis, that the wars and weapons, the waste and pollution, the reforms and revolutions, the exhaustion of resources and the economic crises of contemporary life are signs that today’s world is very different from the past, has led to a sense that the ideals and perceptions, the interpretations and explanations of reality, upon which Americans seem always to have depended no longer apply. Yesterday’s easy solutions do not solve today’s complex, sophisticated, relativistic, insoluble problems: so many of us believe. Our world is different; change itself is more rapid, more far-reaching than ever before. Things happen faster.

It is not necessary to deny that there are differences between the contemporary world and the past in order to repeat Frances FitzGerald’s “Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind” as a partial explanation of the way contemporary Americans feel. As a nation, as a society, we may possibly feel the way we do because we are connected to our past, because we participate in the traditional mythology of America—not because, as many of us feel, we are separated from that past and those myths. Our sense that we live in a new world, with new crises, new problems, new solutions, even new horrors, may stem as much from Columbus’s discovery and the enormous human migrations that followed, along with the beliefs that grew in conjunction with the discovery and migrations, as it does from the realities of new crises, [8] problems, and horrors. Does our sense of being at the cutting edge of history come from our ancestors’ belief that they were colonizing and settling at the edge of the earth? A belief we have not only not lost, but one we rather fiercely hang on to?

There are no simple answers to the question “Where are we?” We are in a world which we have made and inherited; a world which, at the same time, has happened to us. But it is identifiably an American world, and such a world is possible only if it is inherited. The inheritance is not genetic—it is a social inheritance: it is not physical parentage and “bloodlines” but rather a matter of the estate and even more importantly the upbringing, training, and education within the family. The American world is a world looked at through American perceptions, explained in American ways, discussed and rationalized in the American language, told about and understood in American stories, peopled by Americans. It is a real world—so was the world of the ancient Greeks—but it is perceived, understood, and explained in ways which are fundamentally American: the myths, the stories, the slogans, the images are socially comprehensible, bundled together with traditions and associations which are pleasing and logical to Americans, which tell satisfying stories and give off “good vibes.”

We are Americans in a world we are trying to explain and understand. Our myths, whether they lead us to positive or negative responses—and they can do both—give us a sense that the world is understandable and explicable. They lead us to believe that the manifest contradictions among our ideals, or between our ideals and the realities we see around us, can be reconciled. They keep our ideals for our society and for the world alive in us. And at the same time, they pose the problems and underline the polarities in American society which generate tensions in individuals and give the society its energy.

What Holds Us Together?

[9] IT WAS A cold raining miserable November morning in Venice. We had arrived the day before on a ship from Asia, from Bombay. As we had sailed almost into the Piazza San Marco and then up a Venetian canal, and as we had disembarked, we had felt we had come home: here was Europe, the West, our world.

We had to buy gloves at least, to keep from freezing. It was too gray and dark to see inside San Marco. So we shopped—bought gloves, looked at lovely glass.

Not once, but several times, as it became obvious to the Venetians that we were Americans, they asked: “What is this holiday you celebrate today? This Thanksgiving?” or they said: “Today is your holiday”—dissociating themselves from this incomprehensible practice.

We had always known Thanksgiving was American, but somehow we had also felt that what was Western was American, and vice versa. How do you explain Thanksgiving? I don’t think it had ever occurred to the Italians we knew to give thanks for the existence of Italy. Or was it really America we were thankful for?

America has a calendar, just as most peoples and nations do. It is based on the movement of the sun, but it retains ancient lunar features as well as remnants of pagan and early Christian ritual. It marks days and weeks and seasons, as most calendars do. And it also marks an annual cycle of specifically American, cultural and religious ritual celebrations which make the year American and which provide for the annual renewal of American ideals and national myths. In this it functions no differently from the calendars of other peoples, both ancient and modern, although many Americans are not consciously aware of its functioning.

The first national holiday (after New Year’s Day marks the beginning of the cycle) is Washington’s Birthday, a celebration of the Father of Our Country, of both the establishment of the nation and the Revolution which gave it birth. That celebration is supported in the calendar—and therefore [10] emphasized in American beliefs—by Martin Luther King Day, Lincoln’s Birthday, and Robert E. Lee Day (none is completely national). These commemorate the Civil War and celebrate freedom from oppression and slavery, a second revolution, the part played by black Americans in national life. The next nationally celebrated holiday is Mother’s Day, with its emphasis on origins, nurturing, and family in the midst of the revolutionary portion of the cycle. Memorial Day follows, a remembrance of all American wars and of the preservation of the nation. Finally, the first portion of the annual cycle culminates, in the summer, with the Fourth of July, Independence Day, a ritual reinforcement of the ideals of revolution, independence, freedom, and nationalism.

The second half of the annual cycle is less concerned with the revolutionary mythology of American and more with the celebration of the peoples and the land of America. Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Veterans Day all build a pattern of remembrance of the New World, of pathfinders and discoverers, of workers and fighters. This part of the cycle culminates in Thanksgiving, a ritual celebration of family and community in the New World.

The cycle is climaxed by Christmas, an official national holiday, which, if treated in a secular way (ignoring its powerful and important religious significance), is a celebration of hope, of newness, of salvation, and of great bounty and blessings—a combination of many of the dominant elements celebrated in the rest of the annual cycle.

The beginning and end of the year are marked by festivals which are not specifically American: New Year’s Day, which is a slightly displaced Saturnalia, a part of Western culture since the Romans; and Christmas, which is an important part of the Christian heritage of the Western world—although both holidays, in America, have characteristics which distinguish them from those of other Western nations. Washington’s Birthday marks the beginning and Thanksgiving the end of the specifically, American cycle. Both these holidays, along with the other national holidays, are ritual celebrations of American myths. The function of these myths, and the reason for their annual ritual celebration, is to project specifically American ideals as imperatives in all Americans. It is to provide American explanations for American experiences, for the American past, for the existence and continuation of the American people. It is to provide a logic for the reconciliation of the contradictions in important aspects of American life and experience.

How the stories at the core of these myths are told, and with what elaborations and variations, is not important to the functioning of the myths—so long as they are told to and listened to by Americans. The historical veracity and accuracy, of the stories is also unimportant to the functioning of the myths. It does not matter whether George Washington actually cut down a [11] cherry tree, so long as Americans “know” that he did—so long as there is in that story a structure of ideals and understanding, a “logic” which answers important American questions.

In 1800, Mason Weems set out to write a pamphlet biography of George Washington, who had died the year before, and who was already being revered as the Father of His Country. Weems intended to emphasize Washington’s great virtues in order to provide examples to the new and self-conscious nation. Not the most dependable of men, Weems claimed to have been the minister of the (nonexistent) parish of Mount Vernon and in later years was almost always referred to as “Parson” Weems. His pamphlet grew into a book, which ultimately went through eighty editions. Some of his stories about Washington were incorporated into McGuffey’s Readers and were thus imprinted on the minds of generations of Americans throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most famous of all was Weems’s parable of the cherry tree.

Seen without the benefit of his early-nineteenth-century inspirational prose, the story Weems told was a simple one. George Washington, as a little boy, was given a hatchet for his birthday. Tempted by his shiny new tool, George went out and practiced chopping on one of his father’s cherry trees. When the tree was found dead (Weems did not actually write that George chopped it down), George was asked by his father if he had done it.

“‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’

“‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports.”

This is the one story almost all Americans know about George Washington. It is still told, particularly in schools, in connection with the celebration of Washington’s Birthday. Clearly the story has something about it which has made it survive. On the face of it, it is merely a child’s moral tale, quite as forgettable as most such tales. Yet, for some reason, Americans have found it a peculiarly memorable myth—one of the things that hold us together.

First of all, the story implies the challenge and the thrill of a child deliberately disobeying, what must have been parental injunction, or deliberately destroying something the parent presumably treasures. It is a truism of modern American psychology that defying parents, challenging parental authority and parental limits, is a universal phenomenon indulged in for a variety of strong psychic reasons. The tale of George Washington and the cherry tree appeals, to that psychology; the myth calls upon the energies of the child challenging the parent.

The story also describes—and by describing in a strongly favorable light encourages—the projection of the boy-child into the world through chopping with his new tool. Again generally recognized and generally available psychic energy is called upon by the story. But it is not called upon in some [12] vague and general way, rather, it is placed clearly in an American context, and in a context intended, to symbolize both America and Americans.

The child involved in this act of defiance and destruction was the “Father of His Country”—a man who was “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” There is no way to miss that this act on the part of this child is symbolic, as Washington himself is a symbol. It is a deliberate signal that what might in other circumstances be an innocent parable is much stronger and more important.

The child set out to disobey, or defy, or destroy something valuable to his father. Is that father God? or the King? or Europe, with its older, more tired, more decadent ways? or fathers and parents and families in general? Any or all of these are possible, and the unconscious of an American listener to the tale can slide easily through all of them. America will defy the old ways, the established authorities, whatever they are. So will Americans, and so they do; as George Washington did. (In Weems’s original tale, the tree, significantly, was an “English cherry-tree,” and although the “English” is usually not mentioned in modern tellings, the meaning seems to remain.)

Every American (except those entirely descended from native Americans) had and has, in personal or ancestral background, a “break” with family—a defiance. The immigrant to America had to defy the family and the familiar, in fact “destroy” the treasured possessions of place and family tree and community in order to leave them and venture into the New World. Those who came as slaves had those treasured possessions cut off involuntarily. It was a “chopping down” of the older trees of life, a “cutting off” of oneself from family tree and father’s tree. Americans remain fascinated by family trees. And with that break, that cutting off, came a venturing into the unknown, the forbidden, certainly the terrifying—a venturing to a New World and a frontier.

In the story, no reason for George’s act is given, only that he had been given a hatchet for his birthday. Very rarely does it occur to an American to ask, “Why did he chop a tree with that hatchet?” The answer seems obvious to all of us. He could chop a tree because he had a tool for chopping trees: so he did chop a tree. Tools and the knowledge of how to use them are, for Americans, imperatives to action. So the defiance or disobedience becomes “necessary” because there is a way to carry it out. The cherry tree becomes a temptation, a dare to George, because he has a tree-cutting tool in his hand. The New World is, by its existence, a defiance to the Old; it is a way out, a, new beginning, a new experience. Those who came to it defy those who are left behind. They “dare” because they are in a New World.

We insist on believing that the child cut down a tree—the one central act all Americans know as the act of civilizing the wilderness. The trees had to be cut, the great forests leveled, in order to make civilized land out of the [13] wilderness; in order to clear the land and plant it and make it grow; in order to build log cabins for civilized shelter; in order to get fuel for warmth and cooking; in order to split rails for fences to make boundaries and keep animals and other uncivilized things in their place; in order to build stockades against the Indians; and, in a more modern world, in order to have lumber for houses and paper to read from. The backwoodsman, the tree-cutting harbinger of civilization, the hardy pioneer, rail-splitting honest Abe, lumberjack Paul Bunyan can all be summoned up by the vision of an eighteenth century Virginia boy in silk breeches with a hatchet in his hand—when that boy is Father of His Country.

The hatchet, the tree-cutting implement, is the essential tool for civilizing the wilderness. It is wholly appropriate, indeed necessary, that it be put into the hands of the Father of Our Country at an early age and on a significant day, his birthday. In the symbolism of the wilderness, and perhaps often in fact, the hatchet could also become a tomahawk—the man-killing weapon of the native inhabitant and symbol of the wilderness, the Indian. In the hands of a white American it could be a killer of Indians, and an implement for civilizing the wilderness. To use a tomahawk to kill a man was, however, an Indian skill, a wilderness skill which required learning from the Indian, in a sense becoming an Indian and part of the wilderness. The symbiotic relationship of Americans and the wilderness is in the hands of little George Washington as a hatchet which could turn into a tomahawk.

The tree the child cut was a cherry tree. It was a domestic tree, a thing of gardens and orchards, which belonged to his father. To cut it, then, was to cut down tame and domestic things, established and old things, in favor of youth and tools, of wilderness and newness. George Washington, the leader of the Revolution, chopped down the cherry tree of the fertility of the old civilization, the Old Country, the “old man” and his civilization; he cut America away from the protection and richness of King George’s England.

The cherry, too, is an ancient symbol of fertility and of virginity. To cut into the virgin land, the fecundity of the wilderness, is to cut down a cherry tree. The boy becomes, symbolically, the Father of His Country by cutting down a cherry tree. The tool-hatchet carries the energy of a phallic symbol.

The child-father refuses to hide his act from the father-god. He is honest. He intended the act, intended to cut England away, intended to tame the wilderness, intended to break the virgin land, clear the forest, and civilize the New World. Not for him the dark evil of untamed wilderness. Like the wilderness, he is innocent, but his is not a hidden, malevolent innocence; rather, he is openly and honestly innocent. And the father approved of that honest innocence despite the destructiveness of the act. The honesty, in fact, redeemed the child in the father’s eye and sent the father into “transports.”

George Washington cutting and killing the cherry tree is a paradigm of [14] the young revolutionary, of the American entrusted with the Revolution. The act of revolution is the destruction of the father’s treasure, but for us it is significant that the act is done innocently and honestly. Only by innocent, honest destruction is, independence, gained or acted out. Independence is both individual and national when the story is told of the child who is father of the nation, leader of the Revolution, progenitor of independence.

“Run to my arms, you dearest boy,” the father had cried, and the Revolution was validated by the love and approval of the father. The story fulfills the wish of every rebellious child that rebellion and independence will be met with approval and will result in being once again enfolded in the arms of the father.

The tale is told on Washington’s Birthday, which emphasizes its connection to birth and beginnings and newness and innocence; the deep significance of the cherries is ritually established by eating them in sweet pies. The way the story is told matters little; it can be elaborated; it can be dramatized; it can be made a parable of Oedipal feelings. So long as the elements of George Washington, hatchet, cherry tree, honesty, and redemption remain, the mythic power remains.

The cherry-tree myth is, for Americans, a clear statement of a logical and moral proposition. It is as obvious as the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Americans can do what they wish to improve their lot, to defy ancient authority or restraint, so long as they are open and honest about what they do; honesty of purpose can replace whatever purity and innocence might be destroyed. America is redeemed because she is transmuted into the wilderness that has been destroyed and civilized. The innocence of the wilderness is ours, because we are the wilderness. Americans have found a new innocence—the innocence of honesty—in the New World. When aroused, they will even try to impeach a President, not because he did evil things, but because he lied and persisted in lying, because he refused to be open—and therefore refused to be innocent and redeemed.

The logic is, of course, not rational at all. It is a function of myths, in any society, that they can—and do—by their juxtaposition of images and metaphors and ideals make logic out of the rationally illogical. They provide, thereby, a tension which seems necessary to human thought and necessary, too, to maintain dynamic human societies.

Myths carry with them the implication that they have resolved the paradoxes and contradictions they contain. Do you want destruction of the wilderness reconciled with admiration of the wilderness? shame at its destruction reconciled to a vision of a virtuous people? Tell the cherry-tree story. The mythical logic is something we seek out and make every effort to maintain; we appeal to it in the face of reason because reason often does not produce resolutions but rather gaping holes in what we urgently hoped was [15] logic. The myths create frustration, because they do not do what they promise, but their near-fulfillment of their promise is powerfully satisfying. Parson Weems’s tale has been told for more than 175 years and it shows little sign of decay.

Embedded in the cherry-tree story are allusions to many of the elements in the complex of American mythology. Most of the mythology of a people will spiral in and out of the telling of any single myth. But the cherry-tree story, and George Washington, are quite specifically connected to Thanksgiving by the annual cycle of American festival and ritual. The mythology of the New World and of the wilderness, which Washington’s Birthday introduces each year, are elaborated and ritually celebrated in Thanksgiving at the end of the year. The connections between them, for Americans, are inescapable.

Modern celebration of Thanksgiving Day is a ritual affirmation of what Americans believe was the Pilgrim experience, the particularly American experience of confronting, settling, adapting to, and civilizing the New World. Turkey is consumed at Thanksgiving feasts because it was native to America, and because it is a symbol of the bounteous richness of the wilderness and of the sustenance Americans have taken from the wilderness. It is a symbol of the peculiar combination of wildness and civilization which is America. Pumpkins, cranberries, squash, and corn—all native, some cultivated, all plentiful—reinforce the symbolism of the feast. (So, of course, do tomatoes and potatoes—also natives of the New World—although Americans are less conscious of those facts and less likely to see these common foods as part of the ritual.) In the feasting as well as in the family reunions of Thanksgiving, Americans affirm the survival of civilized people and their culture in the New World through the use of the plenty which was native to the wilderness and through the ingestion of the wilderness itself.

Like the cherry-tree story, the myth of the First Thanksgiving is a simple one: The Pilgrims, persecuted in England and unhappy in Holland, took the ship Mayflower and sailed ultimately to a place they called Plymouth, near Cape Cod. They met with harsh times and starvation through the winter, while they struggled to build log cabins to live in and hunted to get food. In the spring, the Indians taught them how to plant corn (maize) and fertilize it with fish, and how to plant other Indian foods. When the harvest was in, the Pilgrims had a feast of thanksgiving to which the Indians came. At the feast, they ate the corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins which they had learned to grow from the Indians, and they ate wild turkeys and other game the Indians had taught them to hunt. And they gave thanks to God for the new land, for their new life in it, and for all the bountiful things He had given to them.

The myth of the First Thanksgiving, which is associated with the holiday, [16] contains reminders of the violence and dangers of the New World wilderness. Children are taught in school that during the first winter the Pilgrims starved and that many died, the victims of disease, storms, cold, hunger, and despair. But eventually (according to the familiar story it was the next spring) they learned the ways of this New World and they survived and prospered. The “savage” Indians terrified the new settlers, appearing out of the desolate forests, shooting them with arrows, killing them with tomahawks. But the Indians also taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn. The violence was mitigated by the bounty. The Indians taught the settlers what to hunt in the forests, and what fruits and berries to eat.

So, the myth has it, the Indians (who were, to the European immigrants, the powerful symbols of the violence of the New World) were invited to the First Thanksgiving. They were thus taken in and made part of the Pilgrims’ lives, they and their skills and their bounty (and their violence?)—the Pilgrims were not, therefore, in the logic of the myth, taken in by the Indians. And the thanks were, of course, given to God (whom the Pilgrims brought with them)—not to the Indians—for the bounty of the wilderness and for survival in it.

The connection of Thanksgiving to God and to Christianity is overt: thanks are given to God for all the bounty of the New World, for home and family and the good things of American life. The Pilgrims came to the New World bringing a religion and intending to find a home for that religion. So did the Puritans, and so have many of the millions of people who have migrated to America since. The religion brought by the Pilgrims was a form of Protestant Christianity which they consciously intended to establish in the New World and spread, free of the persecution it faced in the Old. Thanksgiving celebrates freedom of religion (as a freedom of protest) in America today, and it reinforces the strong American belief that settlers came to the New World seeking such freedom and that they found it.

Thanksgiving is celebrated almost exactly a month before Christmas, and the myth of the First Thanksgiving is strongly reminiscent of the First Noel: the First Thanksgiving is myth and symbol of a New World, of hope, of salvation, and of a new dispensation. Men—of exotic color—brought gifts to the First Thanksgiving, as others had to the First Noel: gifts of life and survival, treasures of the New World. There were no inns in this wilderness—something William Bradford mentions in his account of the Pilgrims’ trials, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. The native Americans who resided in the Plymouth area, like the shepherds of old, surrounded the First Thanksgiving.

The First Thanksgiving was a birth ceremony much more than it was a harvest feast—which ties it to the First Noel, as well as to Washington’s Birthday. It was a harvest feast as well, but the time of year for such a feast [17] is wrong, a fact many Americans have noticed. The holiday celebrates the birth of a people, of a nation, of a new Christian civilization in a New World—a secular, national Christmas. Americans have long been wary of associating specifically religious festivals with national festivals. The logic of the Thanksgiving myth and its juxtaposition with Christmas in the national calendar make the association of Thanksgiving and Christmas very close for Americans; the sympathetic vibrations between the First Thanksgiving and the First Noel are part of the imagery of Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving affirms adaptability as the essential element of survival—in the New World, in America, in Americans. The assumption of the Thanksgiving story—reinforced by the ritual foods—is that all right-minded, sensible human beings will seek out and accept and use those things in their environment which will contribute to their physical and social survival, and that they will take up such things immediately and make them part of their lives—whether foodstuffs, techniques of building shelter, fuel, clothing, plants, animals, or trails through the woods. Log cabins, corn, turkeys, canoes—all these are symbols of the settlers’ adaptability. The model of behavior, which underlies the story, was first introduced to literature by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe in 1719. That model of adaptability has become so ingrained in Americans that all Americans assume such behavior to be human nature, not something conditioned by their own culture. The Thanksgiving story and celebration affirms, the myth that an Americans, since the Pilgrims, are, have been, and ought to be people who survive in a hazardous, violent world by protest, ingenuity, and adaptability.

No human society is a rational construct. All societies depend for their continuation, for their very existence, on common assumptions, common forms of communication, common referents for thoughts and’ ideas, common patterns of behavior and ritual, and a common inheritance. The stories of the cherry tree and the First Thanksgiving, accompanied by their repeated ritual celebrations (and in these cases, ritual foods), are among the myths Americans use to maintain common ideals, common images and referents, common behaviors.

These myths function to, preserve and to inculcate belief in innocence, in honesty, in freedom, in the use of wilderness, in adaptability, in the right of the individual to act freely without restraint—they even preserve and project guilt for destruction and ravages—by their continued existence in our minds. Like all myths, their function is to say this is the way it was with Americans, this is the way it is, and this is the way it ought to be.

Myths, like King Arthur, are once and future things: descriptions of the past and imperatives for present and future. The myths of a people carry what uniquely belongs to that people from one generation to the next. What is unique is not always what is good. Any body of mythology—the Bible, [18] Homer’s epics, the Norse sagas, or the stories of King Arthur and Camelot—clearly demonstrates that. And while the explicit moral of a myth-story often emphasizes what is good, the energy of the myth is unselective.

These two myths—George Washington and the Cherry Tree, and the First Thanksgiving—along with all the images and ideals associated with them, and the annual calendrical cycle which happens to connect them to each other as well as to a great many other American myths, are examples of the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and of the functions those stories have in our collective social lives. They are not unique: Americans have a rich store of living, functioning myths. They make us Americans, those myths, able to identify one another because important elements in the identity of each of us are the same, and able, by the same tokens, to distinguish ourselves from the rest of humanity.

The store of American myths is available to all Americans, but not all Americans participate in the same myths. And not all use the same myth in the same ways. While the George Washington stories, for example, are available to all Americans, black Americans rarely use those stories or refer to them. On the other hand, many black Americans use the stories and myths of Abraham Lincoln more frequently than other Americans and very often in order to provide explanations similar to those the George Washington stories provide for others. Southerners use the mythologies of the planter aristocracy to explain their attitudes and behavior more frequently than other Americans. The myths and rituals of Thanksgiving, on the other hand, seem both available and universally used. Even the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande valley region, who tend to be highly conscious of their cultural differences, use the myths of American Thanksgiving. The mythologies, stories, and songs which are part of “soul” are available to white Americans, and sometimes used, but not so frequently as by black Americans. The regional cultural and group variations in the use of American myths are legion: it’s a big country with a lotta people. But those myths are American. They are available to Americans. Their existence and their availability are what make us, all of us, Americans.

Facts and Fantasies

[19] PEOPLE LIVE OUT OF the past into the present. They cannot see, and for all their efforts, they cannot predict the future. They depend, therefore, on their knowledge of the past to create a rational pattern which leads from present to future. Their working knowledge of the past is based on the myths they have inherited.

Myths are self-justifying. Because they often carry social ideals, the people who use them and participate in them assume that the ideals justify the past out of which these ideals came. It is, rationally, as unwise to try to justify the American past on the basis of American myths as it is to try to justify the past of others on a similar basis. While it is true that modern Americans have not participated in organized atrocities on the scale of those that took place in the German Empire of the 1930’s and 1940’s, or on the scale of those in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago since the 1920’s, yet American efforts to get rid of the American Indian tribes, to enslave millions of blacks, to change the nature of Vietnamese society do not support an argument that Americans have been more virtuous and less vicious than other people.

It is important that American myths be examined by Americans, because only those who participate in them can comprehend their power and their imagery. It is, however, of great value to be aware of the insights of others, because outsiders see things we often don’t. Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, Lord Bryce, even Charles Dickens with his snobbery, and more recently Sir Denis Brogan, J.-J. Servan-Schreiber, and Alistair Cooke have perceived us, distortedly, through their myths and thus made it possible for us to see ourselves and our myths more clearly. “One must remember,” Luigi Barzini, an Italian journalist, wrote, “that Americans, like the Chinese, when observed long enough separately at close quarters, no longer look alike.” The shock of such a perception, of seeing ourselves as others see us, can often make it possible for us to look at ourselves more clearly. But what a person not brought up in America sees is not the whole truth, because no one can see our world through our myths. It is necessary to see our [20] world through our own eyes, and to see our myths at the same time, if we are to understand ourselves.

Myths are not accurate descriptions of events which actually took place at some definable time in the past, involving people who were alive at that time. George Washington did not, so far as any evidence shows, mischievously cut down a cherry tree in his youth. Parson Weems seems to have made the story up out of whole cloth. The people at Plymouth did, according to William Bradford’s account, have a harvest feast with some Indians participating. However, Bradford did not mention turkeys being eaten. The people at Plymouth did not live in log cabins—in fact, log cabins were not used until more than a century after the Plymouth settlement. And Plymouth was neither the first nor even the first permanent settlement in North America.

Most of us are shocked to discover that these good stories are false—and the shock goes from one generation to the next as students are taught “the facts” in history courses. We immediately seek to find the perpetrators of these myths and to discover what vile—and perhaps conspiratorial—motives they might have had, or might have, for telling such lies. Or we seek the fault in ourselves and beat our breasts in repentance for our ancestors and for these lies we have all unconsciously accepted. These attitudes—the attack on the conspiracies of “them” and the sense of guilt it, what “we have done”—are reactions to the perception, that what we thought was real and true has turned false, has become myth, before our very eyes.

Many of the books historians have written about American myths reflect these attitudes. Some histories are elaborate efforts to debunk myths through logic or research. But the debunked myths seem to pop up again; the stories continue to be told and the rituals re-enacted. The vivid imagery of the myths, continues to appeal to Americans.

Some historians have given up debunking and instead have attempted to describe the complexity and the meanings of some American myths or of whole mythologies. Yet even in such a complex, well-written book as Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, the author beats his breast (and ours) for the guilt of Americans in having sought innocence and redemption through violence. He concludes that American innocence has led, inevitably, to the exaltation of “warfare between man and nature, between race and race” as an American heroic ideal, and that “our passage through the land” is signified by “piles of wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids of death-cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls.” Yet despite widespread guilt among Americans today about violence and about the war in Vietnam, the ideal of innocence, the possibility of redemption, and the connection with violence remain part of our realities.

[21] Myths are by their nature vague. A myth is often a vivid story, but sometimes its characters are abstractions. Myths bundle together images and symbols, metaphors and models, and complex ideas. They are, as G. S. Kirk wrote, “a cultural storehouse of adjustive responses for individuals” in a particular society, and they are carriers of social ideals. Myths are “strongly reminiscent of dreams”; they make use of fantasy, they suspend or distort “normal reasoning and normal relationships,” and they produce a “special kind of logic.”

No people’s myths are static; there is no canonical version of a mythic story. Myths are accretions of many stories and many images which transform themselves in new circumstances and differing realities. Myths always represent the past—the tradition, the social ideals, the imperatives of explanation and behavior—to the present. In each of them there is a specific core of logic. And they die, they become meaningless, they become “myths” (in a pejorative sense), instead of logical explanations, when they cease to provide imperatives.

But what has this to do with American society today? Myths, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in Structural Anthropology, have been replaced by politics in modern societies. Modern and “modernized” societies do not need myths, so we believe; they have been replaced by rational sciences and logical ideologies, by sociological analysis, psychological experiment, and scientific explanation. Yet the insights and explanations of Freud and Jung—and much of modern psychology—and even Levi-Strauss’s own efforts to create a science of mythology, all lead to the conclusion that mythical thinking or “mythopoeic thought”—myths, in short—are still part of the human individual psyche and therefore undoubtedly part of the shared structure of beliefs even in a modern, complex, industrialized, scientific society.

Mythopoeic thought in modernized societies is overlaid by rationality, logic, and scientific thought; nevertheless it continues to function. As we shall see, the myths in modern American society provide available images by which we, perhaps unconsciously but nevertheless consistently and continuously, attempt to resolve the contradictions and paradoxes in our lives, measure the world we live in, judge it, explain it to ourselves and others, define our reality and act upon it.

The stories we Americans tell arrange themselves logically (the logic is derived from our myths) around several questions. The questions seem very important to us—a reflection of the power of our mythic imperatives. I have selected four of these questions as the basis for the four parts of the book which follow.

The questions are: What is the purpose of America? What is the place of the individual? What is the nature of community? And what is power for? I believe that most American myths can be understood as answers to these [22] questions. Our myths are logical explanations of an American world in which those four questions have been asked again and again over the past five hundred years by increasing numbers of people who have called themselves—and call themselves—Americans.