The major legends of America are all thwarted but the American ambition to make every person purposeful remains the goal of the government.
A myth is an extraordinary event, at least partly magical, which explains the nature of existence. Ovid;s stories are myths and the Oedipus story is a secularized version of a myth, the existence of human life to be ex[lained by the fateful relations that reside in families. As Harold Bloom might have put it, Sy. Paul engaged in a deep misinterpretation of the myth of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to explain that people are essentially evil and so deserve their fates. Woe be this desolate perspective, I would suggest that the Eden story, like the creation story, are added on at the beginning by redactors to provide a universal history to the corpus of historically based works that follow. Myths are interpolated into the Odyssey, less so in the Iliad, and even into modernist novelists like Joyce, who retains his Catholic roots, or Kafka, who turns it into a joke, the doctor getting into bed with his female patient, a clear application of a bedside manner.
A legend, on the other hand, is an historically plausible story that explains the history of a nation and, by extension, ant social grouping or entity. Johnny Appleseed is a legend that explains how America became so fecund and William Tell explains how independent the Swiss always were. A modern legend is that the Greatest Generation allowed the Allies to be successful at Normandy because of planning, innovation and courage, truly English speaking virtues, rather than naval artillery, air superiority and the blunders of German leadership which kept the Germans from driving the Allies back into the sea. Another legend is the rape of Dinah, in “Genesis”, which explains why the Israelites remained for so long and essentially a nomadic people and why they have such difficulty insisting upon being a nation, finding themselves in a forever war a hundred years or more after the beginning of their resettlement in their ancestral homeland, and so a very distorted or unusual nation.
Here are some other legends that arise in America that can explain its history and so is a replacement for the idea that American national character arises from some single special attribute of the American experience such as in Potter’s “People of Plenty” (1958) and Putman’s “Bowling Alone” (2000) which are generalized into being the modal character for a people. These characterizations are inherently superficial, no matter their apparent generality, like visiting New York City for the first time and judging New Yorkers by noting some are gruff or walk fast. Those generalizations may or may not be true but they are just speculations based on initial acquaintance. On the other hand, legends consist of stories about how America originated and how historical eras evolved. These stories are summarized as observations about American history, all or most of which, however, are wrong or at the least misconstrued.
A legend about the very earliest history of American settlement in the New World is that settlers arrived at a largely unpeopled wilderness and so could make this new place a truly new nation, not beholden to the traditional social relations that had existed in Europe. Jefferson thought that and so a people of yeoman farmers could emerge as the natural conditions of the New World. The same view could be said of Jean De Crevecouer’s “Letters of An American Farmer”, which extolled the agriculturalist as the most prominent and characteristic way of being. But that was a legend dead wrong in that a college was created fourteen years after the founding of Boston and that the Mayflower Compact brought from England the Lockean view of people making and remaking a society explicitly so as to design the society in which they will live rather than the role that is natural for people to take. Moreover, the Constitution was another of these concocted instruments for government inspired in an age of constitution making, such as Rousseau’s constitution for Poland. Moreover, again, the new country could not repeal the laws of economics. Virginia imported slaves, hardly free to prosper on their own, as happened in the white settlement of Australia, because the rice and tobacco plantations had cheap land, readily produced product, but a shortage of manpower that had to be often replaced because of the ravages of the climate and so needed indentured and then slave servitude to make it work. So slavery was not just an adjunct of the nation of the southern colonies but an essential component. No yeoman farmers, however much slavery was regarded by others as abominable even before the Declaration of Independence.
A second legend that is a presumption rather than a story is that the expansion beyond the Mississippi River into the Plains and the Mountain States led to an inevitable equality, a view shared by those who thought the frontier the basis for a rough democracy. Women were taken seriously; people all had to do the practical work so that people could survive; able people would rise to the to[p. This is the image immortalized in the Western movie; gruff and unsophisticated people living by their wits and hard work so as to make the land and its society bloom. This legend of independence and equality is memorialized in idea and law with the hand gun as the great equalizer in that any pistol made you an equal of anyone else. But that does not seem to work in that it makes some people with quicker trigger fingers as more equal than other people as arbiters of law rather than enforcers of fairness. It seems progress and civilization come when guns have to be checked at the local saloon and when the school marm trains the next generation of the young once women have come to civilize men from those who had previously resided in bunkhouses, just as they had as young men did in Sparta. Families civilize life. But the legend that the West became abundant as well as civilized is mistaken as is shown by the disappointment when so many states were created in the West and still remain unpopulated. People did not rush to the West and so Wyoming has two Senators for less than a million people while California has that same two Senators for its forty million persons. Why has the population not caught up? A mystery.
A later summarization of American history was that we are a nation of immigrants to the extent that Americans welcome immigration, that we welcome our tired and poor, the wretched refuse that comes to our stores. Buty, in fact, the national consensus is to reject the immigrants. The Irish, Italians and Jews were reviled and, like Trump, prefer nordic and white Protestant immigrants. It takes trouble and generations for people to assimilate into becoming American, though that indeed does come true but the population is impatient, even about hispanic immigrants legal or otherwise who have been productive citizens for decades. That impulse to reject the other violates economic reason in that America, like Virginia, needs manpower and only large-scale immigration, is likely to fill up the Plains and Mountain states so that representation in the Senate becomes more proportionate. We need these people, illegal or not.
A current formulation of a legend about America is that Yankee ingenuity such as those exemplified by Connecticut tinkerers, and Henry Ford, made America great. It invented electricity and the internet and computers. But Bill Gates was a generation or two before us and innovators were often brought to American shores from elsewhere. Einstein and Slizard and came from Euyrope and Oppenheimer who was American born studied in Europe. As Werner Von Brawn said to Eisenhower, the American Germans were better than the Soviet Germans. American universities today train chinese students so they will stay in America which needs them as does China which wants to bring them back. The reason for the rejection of elite immigrants is again zenophobic rather than economic or patriotic.
Step back a moment. What is the purpose of such remediation? Is it to cure a particular problem such as a broken leg, with the government directing its energies to reestablishing the status quo ante? Or is it to create a more perfect union? There is a radical difference between teleological organizations, like the Church, which in one way or another meaning of the word, are trying to achieve salvation for all of humanity and so government is regarded by conservatives as a muddle and middle distance set of efforts, such as getting a larger labor force or more effective flood control, and those Liberals, like Thomas Jefferson who thought that a government was indeed teleological because it was supposed to provide the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which means a secular utopia where people had the resources not only to be secure but travel each and every one of them into an adventure whereby they sought the ends they established for themselves. The goal of government is not stability or even minimum support but anything that might allow their spirits to prosper. The goal of poverty programs is not to appease a conscience or reintroduce people to work but give them the opportunity, which means the right, to be as fully human as each of them can be, a goal as long as that of Spinoza who was not a stoic but thought people’s psyches as complicated as the material world was and as psychological evolution could become. So don’t think of government as doing the bare necessities, like defense, badly but intervening in the higher good, however crude were the soviets and however only practical ways, as when FDR came up with one remedy after another so as to shift to government the responsibility of helping people in whatever they needed, not just what they wanted.
Look back at our legends. They are all overturned by the recalcitrance of social facts and social customs. We spite ourselves by rejecting legal and illegal minorities. We worry about governmental alms for the poor and prefer charity that makes congregations feel good about themselves. We want equality from firearms rather than equality before the law, which redeems everybody, We rely on human nature over the social compacts which are made because it is natural for people to realign how their societies can operate, and so America muddles through with its shortcomings. But a a spirit opened to human possibility is to turn short lived jerry rigged solutions into a mosaic of programs that accumu;ate into making all of us a more perfect union and a more perfect spirit.