What’s in it for me? Essay authors dismantle lies that have become the battle cries of right-wing America.
“America does not practice empire building.
” “Socialism is a new and foreign threat.
” “Feminists seek to dismantle the ideal nuclear, heterosexual family.
” “Hordes of nonwhite immigrants will mongrelize our nation.
” These are some of the false, yet pervasive, narratives examined in Kevin Kruze and Julian Zelizer’s Myth America.
At a time when anyone can claim to be an expert and social media grants large and instant followings, the authors believe it’s more crucial than ever to be thoughtful about separating facts from propaganda.
In this Blink, we’ll focus on a few of the most prominent and damaging narratives found in Myth America and break down how and why they’ve gained traction in an increasingly fractured America.
The story of America is intertwined with myths and alternate narratives.
Which stories truly tell the American story?
Every nation has a narrative, a bold and stirring tale of creation and recreation.
The American story is a special one because of the nation’s influence around the world and its role as standard-bearer of democracy.
But as a growingly fractured country with a narrative that has increasingly become hijacked by the political right, it’s become harder to separate fact from fiction.
There are more ways to communicate than ever, but in this new reality, it seems anyone can claim to be an expert – just look at the nonhistorians raging about “revisionist history” that highlights the undeniable facts of slavery and subsequent systemic racism.
Consider the arrival of the Europeans.
Their whole journey is underpinned by legends of destiny, mirroring stories from the Bible of special people who are owed a land by sacred decree.
This drove not only their arrival but relentless expansion.
All collateral damage in this march to create America was excused by the notion of “American exceptionalism.
” Newt Gingrich made this a weapon for the right during his 1994 election stump speeches and crystallized for many the idea of America as an ideal, a notion that is echoed in its spirit by Trump’s “Make America Great” slogans.
These origin stories leave out one convenient fact though: you can’t discover a continent that was already occupied and had been for millennia by its own people.
But you can try and deny it, as Rick Santorum did during a 2021 speech for the Young America’s Foundation when he said the Europeans found in America a “blank state” with “nothing here.
” This myth of the vanishing Indian has been perpetuated and echoed in tropes throughout the past three centuries, lending support to the idea that the time had come for native civilization to make way for a superior European one.
Such claims were backed by pseudoscientists like Josiah Nott, an Alabama physician who stated that the Native Americans were a separate race incapable of change and destined to eventually die out.
These creation myths work to set the stage for false alternative narratives that can be easily used as a tool to discriminate and suppress others – especially when it benefits those spreading them.
“They keep coming.
The myth of nonwhite immigrants overrunning America is designed to create panic.
” That’s the horror story frequently told about the hordes of dark-skinned foreign immigrants pouring across the southern border to threaten America.
This myth has served to disenfranchise many waves of immigrants over the centuries.
Not only is it a rallying cry for those looking to place restrictions on immigrants, but it also justifies racism and discrimination toward those already here.
And it’s not a new idea.
Benjamin Franklin complained about the Germans who flooded Pennsylvania.
Later, Protestant colonists wrung their hands over Catholic and Irish “invasions.
” The same discriminatory treatment was meted out to other “less than” immigrants: “swarthy” southern and central Europeans, Jewish people, Russians, and Asians.
In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 to establish quotas based on national origin to keep out these Europeans who were perceived as inferior to Anglo-Saxon ones.
But the fact remains that throughout history and in the present, America needs – and openly courts – immigrant labor, although it doesn’t want to reward that labor with a kind welcome and equal participation.
During the 1800s, Chinese people were actively recruited to work on railroads, farms, and factories.
But when demand for this labor waned, they found themselves no longer welcome by the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which emboldened acts of violence against them and prevented them from establishing families and communities in America.
This same need for labor triggered waves of at least a half million Mexicans migrating into the United States between 1900 and 1930, although, unlike the Chinese, this group often was already connected to the land by family that had lived there for generations before America even existed.
The entry of these Mexican laborers was tacitly encouraged, with border patrols turning a blind eye to their crossing.
At the same time, anti-immigrant rhetoric sought to depict them as inferior to white immigrants, the type who’d mongrelize the white nature of America, and made it difficult for them to obtain citizenship.
The “they keep coming” myth came to a head during the Trump presidency, when “they” were used to label everyone from Muslims to the Chinese, who were blamed for terrorism and COVID, respectively.
This myth has turned into a weapon in the hands of everyone from isolationists to white supremacists, all the people who have much to be gained from “otherization.
Through aid, diplomacy, and military action, America has always been an empire.
Consider this fact: In the past 75 years, there have been only two years – 1977 and 1979 – when US forces were neither invading nor fighting in another country.
The United States is perceived as a leader of civilized, modern nations that agree that occupying other countries is no longer acceptable.
Yet, the existence of American territories like Puerto Rico and Guam and the military presence of 750 American bases in places ranging from Japan to Saudi Arabia belie this, making it easy to shatter the myth that America isn’t an empire.
What happened in Guatemala in the 1950s is a prime example.
In 1950, elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz set in motion a land-reform campaign to give more land ownership to more Guatemalans.
This move threatened large landholders, one of which was the United Fruit Company, a conglomerate based in the United States.
America supplied Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan lieutenant colonel who had trained in Kansas, with arms and support to stage a coup.
Armas got the presidency, jailed his opponents, and returned the United Fruit Company’s land.
And Guatemala lost an elected leader.
There are at least 64 documented cases of the United States ousting a leader or contesting an election in another country during the Cold War.
They succeeded 25 times.
In two-thirds of these situations, with Iran and Chile being notable examples, the Americans supported authoritarian puppet regimes.
The US supplies arms, money, and training to forces around the world, but in return, expects the recipients of this generosity to express their gratitude in favorable ways.
Not all American intercessions are military in nature, but aid of any kind comes with expectations.
Postwar Europe benefited from billions of dollars of Marshall Plan and other aid from the United States, but it came with a tacit – and sometimes overt – understanding that in return, European countries would open their borders to American trade while severing connections with communist bloc nations, as well as dampening leftist or union movements.
Perhaps former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau said it best when he described living with America as “sleeping with an elephant.
No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
” It may be a republic in name, but the country whose language, currency, pop culture, and politics dominate the world is undeniably an empire.
The world’s flagship capitalist nation has always had a thread of socialism in its veins.
In his 2019 State of the Union address, Donald Trump stated before Congress: “America will never be a socialist country.
” He was echoing the distaste of many of his supporters for the word “socialism,” a philosophy derided by many Americans as a new and foreign threat to American values.
And yet, just 200 years prior to Trump, another man stood in front of Congress to talk about the harm that a purely capitalist society poses, one where a “surplus of wealth and power to the few” results in “poverty and subjection” on the many.
Robert Owen was a wealthy Welsh industrialist who went on to coin the phrase socialism.
Although he was a foreigner to America, his ideas were met not with scorn but with respect and, to a degree, agreement.
As much as modern conservatives like to view socialism as a modern threat to American values, the philosophy has coexisted with other political values in the country almost since its founding.
Even in relatively right-leaning states such as Oklahoma, one-sixth of voters in 1912 supported union leader Eugene Debs when he ran for president as a Socialist Party candidate.
Part of this support arose from the fact that many Oklahomans were small farmers, and the Socialist Party had a plan that touted, among other things, the removal of property taxes on farms worth less than $1,000.
During the Great Depression, American communists rallied people for aid and to form unions and helped to convince President Franklin D.
Roosevelt to push for the New Deal.
Just like the farmers, other groups benefited from policies that were either initiated or championed by socialists, including Medicare, minimum wage, civil rights, and women’s suffrage.
Famous Americans respected across the political spectrum, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Orson Wells to Woody Guthrie, have supported socialism and its implications.
So too did Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.
Although there’s always been pushback, socialists have enjoyed some successes since the 2008 recession – just look how far Bernie Sanders got in the presidential races.
The 2020 election saw 101 members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a group founded in 1982, take up elected office.
Just as they pushed forward the causes of women’s rights and workers’ rights, it’s the socialists of America who work actively today for causes such as universal Medicare and renewable energy – causes that work to benefit every American.
A false narrative of the Lost Cause props up racism in the American South.
During the past few years, an old rallying cry gained momentum, one to tear down Confederate flags, statues, and memorials because of the racist, slave-owning past they represent.
But it’s just a statue, supporters of the Confederate monuments state.
And it’s history!
The truth is that a statue is rarely just a statue, and the “history” these memorials represent is less a factual representation of the American South than it is the myth of the Lost Cause, a battle cry to which defiant southerners flocked after their defeat in the Civil War.
This myth created a false narrative of a glorious land whose just cause was overcome by a bullying North trampling on states’ rights.
Gilding over the issue of slavery or the treatment of post-slavery Blacks, the Lost Cause myth allowed white southerners to luxuriate in a sense of nostalgia for an imaginary idealized culture.
This myth was perpetuated almost immediately after the Civil War by the construction of memorials to the Confederacy and a series of ceremonies during which such statues were unveiled or memorialized, with speeches and dedications by supporters and Confederate veterans.
These organizers and speech-givers often connected the Lost Cause to the American Revolution, thus adding to the narrative the notion of a north that was actually unpatriotic and faithless to the ideals of the Founding Fathers.
As the myth rapidly spread through the south, the situation of Blacks correspondingly declined.
Their voting rights were stripped and lynchings and racial tensions spread across the land.
White women played a huge role in these shifts; membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy grew from 30 women in 1894 to 100,000 by 1914.
These were the types of organizations that led to the creation and dedication of monuments and statues.
Through such events, they hardened their argument that rather than being people who lost a war because they insisted on enslaving people, they’d been unjustly overrun by people who threatened a way of life that honored American principles.
Black writers, politicians, and activists decried the tacit approval of such statues and pointed out the hollow core of the argument, demanding the flags be ripped out and statues removed.
Expanding to incorporate anti-immigrant sentiments through the 1990s and especially after 9/11, supporters of the Lost Cause remained committed to their alternate narrative.
Rather than fighting against the American family, feminists seek to strengthen it.
Here’s the irony of the war waged by anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly: although she and her ilk claimed that women who were fighting for their rights were degrading the American family, in almost every case, the feminists’ demand for self-hood could only result in strengthening families.
Take Planned Parenthood, the organization Schlafly and her followers often point to when they want to drive home their claims.
Founder Margaret Sanger, who started it as the American Birth Control League in 1921, wanted to help families become stronger by virtue of planning and controlling their births and bodies.
It was a personal mission for her – she raised eleven children and saw her own mother suffer seven miscarriages.
For her work spreading information about contraceptives, she was attacked and even arrested.
Yet, as time passed, she gained thoughtful support from across the political spectrum.
Republican Dwight Eisenhower even served as an honorary chair of Planned Parenthood in 1964.
From conservative politicians to prominent evangelists such as Billy Graham, conservatives voiced their approval for birth control.
But the cause of women’s autonomy lost ground when faced with the opposition many had toward abortion and toward more liberal notions of family.
In 1973, when the court ruled in favor of Roe in the case of Roe v.
Wade, Republican activists opposed abortion partly because they viewed it as a blow against the American family.
Support for nuclear, patriarchal families came from all sides, even from some liberal Democrats.
Even Betty Friedan, leader of the National Organization of Women, was opposed to granting the same familial rights to lesbian couples and their families.
The conservative ideal of the neat, white Christian heterosexual nuclear package belied the many realities that have always existed in America, from multigenerational immigrant households to some matriarchal Black ones.
Gay families, blended ones, and single-parent families have always existed, overtly or otherwise, and their increasing visibility only gave momentum to the cries of conservatives lamenting the end of an era.
In response, feminist movements have become more intersectional as women enter the fray fighting to protect families from all angles; witness the right of Moms Demand Action who work to fight against gun violence.
Today, a feminist no longer needs to be a mother, but the work they do only serves to strengthen American families.
Final Summary
The story of America has many threads.
But some of these threads are false narratives that have gained traction and support a far-right agenda.
At a time when anyone can have an audience and claim to be an expert, and where truth has become viewed as a choice, it’s crucial to understand and dismantle the most damaging of these myths.