Wednesday, April 17, 2024

April 17, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: “Self-Made”

[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]

On how an iconic American image is mythic patriotic in both meanings and effects.

I’ve written at length in this space about the mythic but ubiquitous American narrative of the “self-made man”: first for one of my earliest posts in October 2011 (man I’ve been writing this blog for a long time!); and then in a February 2021 follow-up as part of my annual non-favorites series. Before I dive into a couple ways to connect that mythic narrative to the concept of mythic patriotism, I’d ask you to check out those two posts if you would.

Welcome back! Obviously it would be possible for any person to be described as “self-made,” but I believe it’s quite telling that almost all of the figures most commonly associated with this narrative have been white men: Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Carnegie (something about those Andrews, I dunno), pretty much all of Horatio Alger’s protagonists, Jay Gatsby, contemporary folks like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, etc. While the self-made man narrative is ostensibly a celebration of  such individuals and their achievements, it is at least as much a rejection of the presence and influence of communities—or even a direct attack on them as an obstacle to be transcended in pursuit of the American Dream. I’d certainly call that vision of American identities mythic in general, but I would also add that it is a myth which specifically and overtly privileges white men, who for most if not all of American history have had a greater degree of autonomy and mobility than any other group. To be clear, even those iconic individual white men have depended on communal support, so the image is mythic in their cases too—but its rejection of the need for community does exclude most other Americans, past and present.

The problems with mythic patriotic narratives aren’t just due to their inaccuracies and exclusions, though—it’s also in the ways they can contribute to or even help create other, sometimes even more overtly exclusionary, narratives. For example, I would say it’s far from coincidental that the late 19th century in America was both an era in which the self-made man narrative proliferated and a period of intensifying attacks on the nascent labor movement as un- and anti-American. After all, at the heart of that evolving labor movement was an emphasis on workers’ communities in at least two key ways: that supposedly “self-made” individuals like the Gilded Age Robber Barons were instead achieving their successes on the backs of those communities; and that it would thus take communal solidarity to resist and challenge and change those realities. In my early 20th century chapter of Of Thee I Sing I argue that 1910s and 1920s attacks on the labor movement constituted a potent form of mythic patriotism, but I would add that those trends really began in the late 19th century, right alongside the resurgence of the self-made man narrative.

Next patriotism post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? 

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