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Thursday, September 26, 2024

September 26, 2024: Folk Figures: Johnny Appleseed

[On September 26th, 1774, Johnny Appleseed was born. So for the 250th birthday of the man, the myth, the legend, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of folk figures, leading up to Friday’s post on the status of the concept in the 21st century!]

On two contrasting contexts for the iconic folk figure.

Just over 11 years ago, I shared a wonderful Guest Post from William Kerrigan, one of our foremost authorities on Johnny Appleseed. (I also had the chance to return the favor and Guest Post on Kerrigan’s American Orchard blog.) In lieu of my own first paragraph, I’d ask you to check out that great post and then come on back for some more AppleseedStudying.

Welcome back! There’s something really beautiful and inspiring about the legend of Appleseed planting trees as he moved through his Revolutionary-era American world, and iconic science fiction author Ray Bradbury must have felt the same, as he dedicated a chapter of his novel The Martian Chronicles (1950) to a character and story entirely inspired by Appleseed. In that chapter, “The Green Morning,” Bradbury creates the character Benjamin Driscoll, who makes it his mission to plant trees on the barren landscapes of Mars (and achieves results far beyond his expectations). In a book largely defined by at best ironic and at worst (and the majority of the time) horrifying stories, “The Green Morning” doubly stands out as a depiction of how an individual can influence his world for the better, and thus clearly reflects Bradbury’s perception of Appleseed having done the same.

Many of those horrifying Martian Chronicles stories connect to a very different potential context for Appleseed, however: histories of colonization and their negative effects on both places and indigenous communities. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Appleseed was in any direct way a colonizer, much less a participant in the era’s very much ongoing genocides of Native American communities. But at the very least, our images of Appleseed depend on portraying the American landscape as open and available for his intervention, which in its own way is an extension of the “virgin land” argument which fueled so much of the conquest, colonization, and genocide histories that unfolded in the Americas after European arrival. And given, again, how much those processes were continuing to unfold in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—indeed, how much they were really only beginning for many Native American communities across the continent—it’s important to make sure not to reify that inaccurate part of the Appleseed story, even as we rightly celebrate other layers to this iconic folk figure.

Special post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Folk figures or histories you’d highlight?

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