There’s a book I’d like to write but won’t, unless I get younger and less lazy. There are too many other books to read and movies to see and places to visit. I suspect something similar is true of people who like to imagine, if there were world enough and time, they’d design and build the house of their dreams or make an elaborate quilt they’ve got in mind.
The notional book I’d like to write, or read – a lot less work if someone else would write it, would be called America the Mythological. The more I consider our country and what its own people think of it, the more it seems to me it is almost as imaginary as Oz or Narnia and always has been. And there is not just one but many different mythical Americas, many of them competing and antithetical.
Why not? America began as an imaginary place, an East Indies of the mind full of gold and spice. Soon we were seen by the new arrivals as several other places, depending on their preconceptions and desires. To the Puritans, America would be a New Jerusalem, pure in contrast to the profane Old World. To displaced Cavaliers, it would be a place to recreate an aristocratic idyll on country estates in reaction to the rising of corrupt cities crowded with contemptible tradesmen and dissenters. Already we see the myths begin to collide.
Malcolm Gaskill’s recent book, “Between Two Worlds,” argues that our notion of America as a radical, revolutionary place is a misreading of history. In fact, he claims persuasively, many of the 17th Century Englishmen who first populated the country were intent not on a great leap forward but on turning back the clock to a better time when men were more godly or the landed gentry ruled a pastoral paradise benignantly. The conflicts between a Puritan, abolitionist New England and an imaginary Southern aristocracy founded on slave labor and between Jefferson and his yeoman farmers and Hamilton and his urban manufactures, traders and financiers are already implicit in the ideas animating various groups of immigrants 150 years earlier.
Similar competing mythical ideals echo down to the present. Americans are often dreaming of either a utopia to come or a lost paradise to be regained. The imagined future is necessarily gauzy, though we will all be brothers and there will be peace in the valley and no pollution or strife. But the pasts people long to recapture are often equally rose-colored and unhistorical.
Much of the white hot animus toward Obama and the sentimental veneration of Reagan is summed up in the absurd demand that someone, possibly God, “Give us back our country.” Reagan was a master at evoking the Good Old Days. Sometimes they were the City on the Hill, though without mentioning the insufficiently godly were regularly exiled or executed by the Puritan Taliban in those Good Old Days. Other times they were a kind of small town America with more in common with Andy Hardy than Reagan’s own bleak childhood with an unemployed, alcoholic father.
Trouble is, the Hollywood Good Old Days where we won all our wars with pure hearts and every soda jerk followed a Horatio Alger trajectory to fortune by pluck and hard work are imaginary. The Good Old Days are rarely as pictured. And which Good Old Days do we want to recapture? Pre-FDR when government was small but we lived without a safety net but with segregation, lynchings and living conditions we would regard as suitable only for a third World country? Further back, before the Progressive Era, when women couldn’t vote, attempts to organize labor were met with armed force, safe food, drugs, air and water were non-existent, immigrants were reviled and exploited?
The Good Old Days are a prime American myth and a potent one. Many of today’s fights over education are really an attempt to restrict textbooks to some official version of our past or to teach an outmoded science we feel comfy with. Many of our bitterest political fights are really between competing images of an ideal America that partisans carry in their heads, as different as a glittering science fiction future and an ideal Arcadian past. And equally unreal.
It would be a good book. Someone should write it. I’d buy a copy.