“A Theory of America”: Mythmaking With Richard Slotkin

From Public Books:

Over a stunning career, which has lasted more than half a century, the historian Richard Slotkin has devoted himself to documenting the stories we tell ourselves about nation, violence, inclusion, and exclusion. From his trilogy on the place of guns in American culture—starting with Regeneration Through Violence in 1973—Slotkin has defined the study of American mythmaking. Over these same 50 years, he has witnessed the massive transformations of the late 20th century and the uneasy opening of the 21st. In his new epic, A Great Disorder, Slotkin uses foundational myths like the founding, the lost cause, the frontier, and the good war, to explore how such stories shape the limits and possibilities of our current-day political imaginaries.

Over a stunning career, which has lasted more than half a century, the historian Richard Slotkin has devoted himself to documenting the stories we tell ourselves about nation, violence, inclusion, and exclusion. From his trilogy on the place of guns in American culture—starting with Regeneration Through Violence in 1973—Slotkin has defined the study of American mythmaking. Over these same 50 years, he has witnessed the massive transformations of the late 20th century and the uneasy opening of the 21st. In his new epic, A Great Disorder, Slotkin uses foundational myths like the founding, the lost cause, the frontier, and the good war, to explore how such stories shape the limits and possibilities of our current-day political imaginaries.

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Kathleen Belew (KB): Let’s start by queuing up the four big myths you talk about and why you felt it was important to bring them together in one story now, having addressed some of these themes in your earlier work.

Richard Slotkin (RS): Over the longer term, I’ve been thinking about the theory of national myth and the way in which national myths are a crucial part of the culture that holds nation states together.

National myths are developed through long-term usage in every medium of cultural expression: histories, school textbooks, newspapers, advertisements, sermons, political speeches, popular fiction, movies. They are the form in which we remember our history. But they are also, and most critically, the means through which we turn history into an instrument of political power. In any major crisis, one of our cultural reflexes is to scan our memory archives, our lexicon of myths, for analogies that will help us interpret the crisis, and precedents on which to model a successful or even “heroic” response.

Four mythologies have been central to the development of American nationality. The myth of the frontier is our oldest myth, tracing the origin of our society to the settler states of the colonial period and its phenomenal growth to the exploitation of abundant natural resources. The myth of the founding deals with the establishment of national independence and constitutional government. The myth of the Civil War arose from the existential crisis that overtook the nation in the 1860s, over slavery and Southern secession. This myth has three significant variants: the liberation myth, centered on Lincoln and emancipation; the reconciliation myth, which emphasizes the postwar coming together of whites from North and South; and the lost cause myth, which sanctifies the Confederate cause and the postwar struggle to restore white supremacy. Finally, the myth of the good war emerged in the 1940s, as the nation for the first time embraced its racial and ethnic diversity, to unite its people in a struggle for the Free World.

My past work had focused on the myth of the frontier, which was really the earliest and the most basic myth. It deals with national character and race. It deals with economic development. But then I had neglected other myths that have equal or similar power in shaping the way in which we think about our nationality specifically, that is, who counts as an American and what it is that the political structure of America is supposed to do. It seemed to me that the Civil War was certainly one of the things that was most critical to talk about. So, I wrote about the Civil War as well.

What really crystallized the idea for the book, though, was the demonstrations in Charlottesville. I realized that the Civil War was very much alive and that the banners that people were carrying on both sides were really like the headlines from myths. Behind each banner was a version of what the United States was supposed to be. If you looked at the antidemonstrators, the ones who were opposing Unite the Right, they had standard American flags, flags expressing Black Power, rainbow flags—the flags of liberalism and leftism in a sense.

On the other side, you had flags with the Confederate stars and bars, the Gadsden flag—the yellow flag with the rattlesnake that says Don’t Tread on Me, which has come to represent a gun rights flag—and right-wing paramilitary flags. It seemed to me that what we were getting there was a war of symbols, and that behind the symbols were stories, and that each of the stories amounted to a different version of what the United States was about. That’s why the book had to bring all four together.

To be clear, nobody really sits down and composes each myth, though Hollywood has at times come close to doing so.

Rather, they emerge from the rationalization of a historical crisis. They almost always have an ambivalence, a contradiction built in.

For example, there’s a white side and a Native side to the frontier story. There’s a Union side and a Confederate side, and a Black side and a white side to the Civil War story. Those ambiguities or contradictions remain embedded in the story.

Or take the lost cause. I could see somebody, a populist but not necessarily right-wing person, thinking of the Confederacy through the lens of, “That’s what you do. You rebel against the established order, when the established order gets too oppressive.” The myth makes itself available for that thing. And that’s why myths retain their power—they can serve a number of different purposes and play both sides of a contradiction.

KB: As someone who has written about this over several chapters in what we would call the culture wars, do you see this as more of a continuity across the years you’ve been writing? Or is today really different in some tactile way?

RS: Both of those things are true. Certainly, these wars are continuous. If you follow any one of the stories—the story of the founding, the story of the frontier, the story of the lost cause and then the liberation myth of the Civil War, the good war myth—they run pretty much throughout the period with greater and lesser periods of activity of intense usage.

But starting in 2000, the Civil War became really a live term explicitly, where people were saying, “We’re in a civil war.” You saw that analogy being made not only on the right in the American Conservative, but also in Sean Wilentz’s writings about how our contemporary moment resembles the 1850s. So the Civil War was very alive in mainstream culture even before Charlottesville.

With Charlottesville, what happened is what was implicit suddenly became the front and center drama. We’re now actually fighting about the legacy of Robert E. Lee. We’re actually arguing with the president about the legacy of Robert E. Lee. It turned out that in order to defend Robert E. Lee, Trump could reach back and compare him to George Washington. Washington was a slave holder too. Now, all of a sudden, the founding of the nation is involved.

What the modern gun rights movement has done is to make the Second Amendment the center of their myth of the founding, in which the right to bear arms—and not the legal protections of the Bill of Rights—is “the palladium of our liberties” because it enables citizens to resist a tyrannical government. The original “palladium doctrine” was put forward by Supreme Court Justice Story in 1833; but it held that the potential for resistance was to be held by “well regulated” state militias. But the modern movement has asserted this as an individual right and used it to justify the threat or use of armed force to resist the government. NRA spokesman Fred Romero says it directly: “The Second Amendment is there as a balance of power. It is literally a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.” And that power can be used to check the ordinary operations of government. As the antitax activist Grover Norquist said, “Once [the government] get our guns, they don’t have to argue with you about taxes anymore.”¹ The logic of this Second Amendment myth leads straight to the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.

The past becomes infused into modern life and politics.

KB: Do you think that originalism in that context is more a legal theory or a retelling of a cultural myth? Does originalism have the uptake or purchase that it has because it has that story power? Or is it just a legal doctrine?

RS: It’s the story’s power that gives its appeal beyond the narrow circle of legal specialists. I would argue that the legal specialists thought themselves into the mystique of the founding. They have fetishized the founding as a way of undoing the world of precedent that has been developed since the founding or since major amendments were passed.

So it is definitely a fetish, and you can see it most clearly in Clarence Thomas’s opinion in Bruen where he says that you can’t interpret the Second Amendment in any way other than the way in which it would’ve been interpreted in 1791. In a sense, it is patently absurd.

First of all, even as a historian, you can’t figure out authoritatively how the amendment would have been interpreted back then. You can’t truly be authoritative about what the common state of opinion was about that. Second, and more importantly, we’re not in the same world.

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KB: One of the unresolved tensions in teaching US history that comes up over and over for me is the conflicting mythos argument articulated by Jefferson and Hamilton, that asks: Is violence by the mob justified because it seeks to restrain the tyrannical state or is state violence justified because it seeks to restrain the revolutionary anarchist mob? In so many ways, and especially while studying lynching or vigilante groups, it seems to me that we collectively never resolved this question at all.

I’m wondering how much you think there are tensions like that, tensions that exist in one of these stories or crossover between several of these stories?

RS: You can examine the question if you contrast the two halves of the founding myth, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence is about the right of revolution. It’s a moral statement that people always have the right of revolution. The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t acknowledge a right of revolution. That’s really the core, because that’s the fundamental question about government. At some point, government may become tyrannical, and a revolution may be needed to overthrow it. In a practical sense, the point of contradiction that seems to me most meaningful is the Civil War version. I talk about this when I talk about Lincoln and Lincoln’s response to Southern secession.

The Southern states used their militia to resist what they say was a tyrannical government. In response, Lincoln says, okay, you have the right of revolution. Any people, any civil community has the right of revolution. But there are two questions, morally: Why are you rebelling? Are you rebelling to establish freedom or slavery? And Lincoln thinks the answer to that is clear, which is the latter. The South disagrees. But Lincoln’s other question is, okay, you have the right of revolution. Does the government have the right to suppress you? And if so, on what moral basis? Clearly, Lincoln argues, the government has a legal basis to suppress the South’s rebellion. The Constitution says you can suppress an insurrection. The moral basis of this right, Lincoln argues, is free elections—if you have a free election, that’s the essence of the Republican state. If you overthrow a free election, if you substitute bullets for ballots, that’s the end of the republic. It’s the end of Republicanism. And therefore, to defend the principle of free government, it’s necessary to repress the Southern Revolution. That’s the way the reasoning actually works out. That’s the story that justifies saying no to this revolution.

Link to the rest at Public Books

The author of the book is a history professor at one of the so-called “Little Ivies,” expensive small colleges located in New England, the Northeast United States where the Ivy League Universities are sited. The students at the Little Ivies tend to come from wealthy families and fall into contemporary “privileged” status.

PG hasn’t read anything written by Dr. Slotkin, but what’s an American History professor going to publish when all the history professors who have come before him have worked over all the interesting and useful American History topics?

He can discover widely accepted myths that his many predecessors have failed to discern. Many of these myths have undoubtedly been published by less-enlightened and perceptive historians who lacked the intelligence to see all those myths sitting right in front of their noses.

The fact that earlier historians may have personally failed to see these myths in the wild or interviewed older individuals who had witnessed the events that the diligent professor has discovered are nothing more than American mythology.

PG’s gaze was caught by the Professor’s statement that

“The Declaration of Independence is about the right of revolution. It’s a moral statement that people always have the right of revolution. The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t acknowledge a right of revolution.”

PG is merely a humble recovering lawyer not a Professor of American history with tenure, but, for him, The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written for two very different purposes:

1. The Declaration of Independence was written to give notice to one and all that the thirteen colonies would no longer be subject to British rule and refused to be governed by British law and/or its King or the designated representatives of either. Its purpose was to start a revolution.
2. The Constitution was written and approved well after the Revolutionary War was concluded. Its purpose was to set the rules for an entirely new and different form of government, one without kings, hereditary nobility, etc.
3. The Constitution was also written to delineate what the leaders of the new nation had the power and authority to do, and what powers the individual states retained to be exercised under the laws the states would write and approve. Each state would organize its own separate government with elected officers and representatives elected by the people living in the state.

The Civil War was necessary to resolve the right of revolution issue. States and their citizens, while exercising broad areas of independence, were still part of the United States and subject to the laws passed by the democratically elected representatives from all states in Congress, enforced by a President and the nation’s designated officials, and supervised by the President.