[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to continue exploding some foundational American myths. Leading up to my favorite crowd-sourced post of the year, so please share your own non-favorites—in every category—for that collective airing of grievances!]
On two
interconnected problems with the mythic category, and one way to move past
them.
In one
of those non-favorites posts from last year’s series, I focused on a few
different myths about George Washington to which we frustratingly still cling. The
deeper truth, of course, is that the entire concept of “Founding
Fathers” is itself a myth, and one that operates in similar ways to those
specifically Washingtonian myths: flattening any and all biographical and
historical complexities in service of simplified and larger-than-life images of
heroic icons. That means that when historians and other folks try to remind us
of some of those complexities—such as Washington’s dogged pursuit of escaped
enslaved people, undertaken while he was President of the United States no less,
as I discuss in that post and as Erica
Dunbar has done such a phenomenal job tracing—it seems to far too many
Americans not like an addition to our collective memories, but a fundamental
threat to those originating and defining myths, a seditious attack that must be
resisted at all costs.
That’s one
problem with the Founding Fathers category, and it’s a significant one. But
there’s another, distinct but interconnected and to my mind even more serious problem
with the concept: it at least implies, and often states outright, that these
individuals represent starting points for American identity. There’s no doubt
that many of these folks helped start and lead the Revolution, which originated
the United States as a nation; and, more importantly, that many of them later
took part in the Constitutional Convention, which constructed that nation’s
enduring set of governmental and legal ideas. Those are important influences,
and certainly make these individuals and this community worth remembering (if
in those more three-dimensional and nuanced ways for which I argued above). But
I don’t believe very many of us would say that American identity is equated
with our government and laws, or even with our nation’s existence as a distinct
political entity. So the idea that because someone contributed to the origins
of those elements they comprise a “founding” American is quite simply putting
undue weight and pressure on their lives and stories, and leads directly to
that mythic lionizing.
Challenging that
longstanding trend will take more than just complicating the simplified vision
of these figures and this community, I’d say. Instead, I would argue for a more
comprehensive and overarching shift, one that I first articulated in this
Twitter thread late last year: defining this group as Framers (a term that
is used at
times, but in my experience not nearly as consistently; note that that
hyperlink still defines them as “founding fathers” in the URL) rather than
Founders. That would not only help us focus on their role in framing those key
governmental and legal elements, but also and more importantly achieve two
other effects: lessening the need to view them as iconic heroes (and thus to
see attacks on them as attacks on America itself); and, as I traced in that
thread, opening up space to consider other Revolutionary figures and
communities as “founders.” Like my friend Christina
Proenza-Coles, I would call African Americans like Elizabeth
Freeman and Quock Walker particularly great candidates for this revised
vision of “American Founders”—but in any case, creating room for many different
Revolutionary Americans to be considered Founders would be a long-overdue and
important change.
Next
non-favorite myth tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other non-favorites, myths and everything else, you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment