[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 20th
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 17th 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?
No comments:
Post a Comment