April 18, 2024: Mythic Patriotisms: Defining America’s Origins

[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 the multiple mythic patriotic layers to a Puritan-centered American origin story.

In the introduction to Of Thee I Sing, I define my book’s four types of American patriotism using the four verses of Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” (1893). While I hadn’t overtly created my terms for them yet when I wrote that hyperlinked 2019 blog post, everything I said there about the song’s second verse and its emphasis on the Pilgrims/Puritans as an American origin point exemplifies mythic patriotism as I would now define it. It’s not just that Bates’ verse celebrates the Pilgrims as part of the nation’s past, after all—it’s that she describes them as “beating” a “thoroughfare for freedom” into a “wilderness,” and thus as originating American ideals in a place that was apparently devoid of other communities until their arrival. Connecting the Pilgrims/Puritans to “freedom” is a fraught endeavor to be sure, but doing so by eliminating the indigenous peoples who were already present in New England (and everywhere else on the continent) is an explicitly exclusionary and white supremacist one.

Over the course of the century following Bates’ composition, moreover, multiple exclusionary and white supremacist narratives were created that depended upon that mythic patriotic vision of America’s origins. None was more blatant than South Carolina Senator Ellison DuRant Smith’s use of that vision to argue for the discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924 in a xenophobic speech on the Senate floor. Smith argues, “Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock…It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood.” “That splendid stock that has characterized us” is a particularly clear vision of an Anglo origin point for the United States, and the entirety of Smith’s speech—as well as the development of national immigration laws overall—makes clear the potential white supremacist use of that vision.

Far more subtle, but ultimately quite problematic in its own right, is the longstanding vision, one really created as a 20^th century tourist narrative, of Plymouth, Massachusetts as “America’s hometown” (NB. That site and project seem even more overtly problematic still, so my link is for evidence only, not in any way endorsement). Would it be possible to include indigenous communities like the Wampanoag tribe in that vision of Plymouth? Maybe, but in practice that tribe has been portrayed as at best a historical predecessor to the Pilgrims, and at worst one of the challenges that they overcame to establish this American origin point. It was to counter those white-centered and exclusionary practices and narratives that Native American activist Wamsutta James delivered his 1970 speech in Plymouth making the case to reframe Thanksgiving as a “National Day of Mourning.” As readers of this blog know well, I’m all about an additive vision of our history, and I’m not trying to suggest that the Pilgrims/Puritans weren’t part of America’s 17^th century origins—but any narrative that treats them as isolated or elides indigenous communities in any way is simply perpetuating these mythic patriotic visions.

Last patriotism post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?