History: How American Myths Are Made

Myths evolve as circumstances and needs change. The Founders at first portrayed Lex- ington and Concord as an unprovoked attack on innocents; "Bloody Butchery, by the British," proclaimed a printed broadside of the time, illustrated with 40 small coffins. The propagandists were trying to stir up sympathy for the rebellion and a desire for revenge. Only a later generation of popularizers, who wanted to inspire a young democracy, stressed the bold resistance of the Minutemen who "fired the shot heard round the world."

The fantasists of the American South after the Civil War had to justify not just defeat but the elimination of a way of life. Thus was born the "Lost Cause," the dreamy fiction that chivalrous "gentlemen-officers" had fallen to forces of greater number but weaker character, and that rapacious "damn Yankees" and carpetbaggers had been exploiting the South ever since. The real cause of the Civil War--slavery--was swept into the shadows. The Lost Cause was used to justify the evils of Jim Crow and perpetuate the myth of white supremacy.

World War II remains the greatest of American myths. (In an old New Yorker cartoon, a glassy-eyed man leans toward the bartender and says, "I remember the Second World War. That's the one that kind of flickers on the screen, right?") President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not hesitate to play to the desire for revenge in his address to Congress after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. "Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a day which will live in world history," the president dictated to a secretary. Looking over the resulting draft, he crossed out "world history" and wrote "infamy" instead. With a flick of his pen, FDR switched from the cool judgment of history to a personal attack on the character of the Japanese people. They were soon portrayed as monkeys, snakes, insects--villainous vermin to be exterminated. Hollywood signed on. In "Air Force" (1943), a grinning Japanese guns down an American pilot who has parachuted and is floating helplessly in the air.

But the moviemakers more often venerated Everyman, as they rallied the country to the soldiers' cause. The standard trope became the polyglot platoon--the wise-guy from Brooklyn, the Midwest farmer, the hillbilly, the rich kid--all fighting for their buddies and their moms and apple pie against the fascist beast. Even when postwar books and movies grew more nuanced and worldly, often edged with bitter satire, the basic myth persisted: that the sons of American democracy had triumphed over tyranny.

Vietnam was a lot harder to explain. Hollywood initially packaged it as the Good War, Part Two, with John Wayne's gung-ho potboiler "The Green Berets" (1968). The film was panned by critics and picketed by antiwar protesters. Later, better movies, including Stone's overwrought but masterful "Platoon" (1986), captured the alienation of the soldiers and the futility of the war. But Vietnam remains troublesome in the American psyche; it's as if we cannot reconcile the war with our mythic (and heroic) self-image.

September 11 could have been equally vexing. What is there to celebrate in the slaughter of nearly 3,000 innocent civilians? Early attempts to canonize George Bush as take-charge commander in chief, as in the hokey made-for-TV production "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," were mostly embarrassing. But there were real heroes on 9/11, and not just the firemen and cops who died trying to rescue their fellow citizens. Although some critics have contended that the quasi documentary "United 93" is a little too raw for the families of the dead, the film shows in graphic, gripping detail how a group of ordinary passengers on an airplane could, as they faced the enormity of their fate, marshal themselves to overwhelm trained killers and terrorists. That these modern-day Minutemen perished in the effort just makes their story more affecting.