Hope, history and the American myth we still believe In

By Mark Griswold | FāVS News Columnist

A couple of weeks ago, I stood on the edge of a street, a spectator watching a solemn procession for two slain firefighters pass by. That was real. That was palpable. It had to be. It was fresh history. The smoke hadn’t even cleared.

But then, it was July 4th. I was the one walking down that street as others looked on, a different air altogether as thousands of us, spectators and parade participants alike, celebrated the 249th birthday of the nation. None of us were there, of course. As best I know, I have a 5x-great-grandfather who was. Private Elisha Wolcott made hats for the Continental soldiers in a shed behind his house in Wethersfield, Connecticut. As best I know.

The John Ford classic, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” concludes with the line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Do we know the facts, the truth? Are they knowable, especially when they concern events of a quarter-millennium ago? Is it important that we do?

Veritas et factum

Today, we call something that invents or perhaps bends the truth a myth, but the myths the Ancient Greeks devised to explain the unknown, the history long forgotten, were very much true, at least in the moral or poetic sense. 

Sometimes that truth is more important than the empirical facts, a concept the great stoics of Ancient Rome knew well and differentiated with the words veritas, an ultimate, transcendent truth, and factum, the observable or constructed facts. 

Marcus Aurelius, in his “Meditations,” wrote “The facts themselves cannot touch the soul; only our judgments give them weight.” Seneca wrote, “It is not the thing itself we must observe, but what the thing produces.”

The lie that becomes truth

I recently rewatched the 1998 Kevin Costner movie “The Postman” recently. It’s not high-cinema, and it will never make it into the same pantheon as films like “Liberty Valance” or “Dances with Wolves.” It did tell an interesting tale though, and one, like “Liberty Valance,” that we should reflect on, especially as we celebrate our own nation’s origin story.

In “The Postman,” which is set in a post-apocalyptic American West — several scenes were filmed in Metaline Falls, Washington, just two hours from my home — Costner’s eponymous character, on the run from a militia that shows mercy to no one, finds an old mail truck and takes the uniform and mailbag from the skeletal remains of a postman. 

He passes himself off as a postman of the “Restored United States of America” to gain access to a small town — in this post-apocalyptic world, they’re all heavily guarded — and food and shelter. He’s fabricated a myth about himself and a restored nation for selfish reasons, but the lie gives the people hope. 

It gives them hope not just in an ordered society that they missed but hope through renewed communication with loved ones in faraway towns and that hope grows. 

Soon, he recruits others, and the lie becomes true until the counterfeit postman becomes not just a real postman, but the leader of a movement that defeats the militia and, eventually, in the coda of the movie, has restored real order. The myth didn’t have to be true at the outset to serve as a catalyst for hope that made it true in the end.

America’s founding myth: A study in shades of gray

And so it is with America. Yes, I believe our own origin story has far more truth than the origin story of the Postman or the man who shot Liberty Valance, but anyone who has studied history beyond a fourth-grade level knows that it is never so black and white. Even the heroes and movements we revere and revere for good reason have their flaws.

Of course, we all know this nation carried the sin of slavery for four score and 9 years following its founding. Beyond that, there are many examples that are glossed over or are completely unknown to all but the most ardent historian.

Patriot “Committees of Safety,” an Orwellian-sounding phrase centuries before Orwell wrote “1984,” would pressure and punish Loyalists who refused to pledge allegiance to the Patriot cause through sanctions, social shunning, property confiscation and even violence. This led to more than 60,000 Loyalists fleeing to Canada, the Caribbean and Britain, wrote Alan Taylor in his book “American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804.”

I don’t mean to be a Monday morning quarterback here. None of us were there, and the history is grey, so perhaps they had reasons that we, put in the same place and time, would agree with. War is a messy thing, after all. Punishing those who disagreed with them, though, doesn’t exactly shout First Amendment protections.

A little history

The battle cry of the Revolution, which we all know, “taxation without representation,” while a noble myth with more truth than not and a proclamation that, upended, meant more economic freedom for all, was not the whole truth. 

Much of the cry was made to protect the economic self-interest of the wealthy colonial elites. Let’s not forget that George Washington was one of the wealthiest men in the Colonies and one of the wealthiest presidents we’ve ever had. Jefferson and Madison also rank in the top 10.

The wealthy colonialists made much of their money through land speculation and smuggling operations that were heavily-restricted or outlawed by the British, according to Gordon S. Wood in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”

Following our newly won independence, but prior to our founding as the nation, we know today under the U.S. Constitution, rebellions like the one led by Daniel Shays fought, at least in their mind, against many of the same tyrannies they’d just defeated. David P. Szatmary writes in “Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection” that class divides, grievances voiced by the yeoman farmers and other “common folk” over crushing debt, foreclosures and new taxes led to fears by the elites of mob rule and were met with swift repression.

These fears may have been justified to some extent. Taxes to pay off the debts incurred during the Revolution were necessary and pure democracy is highly flawed — two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner, as the old saying goes — but Shays had a point and a following that, were the leaders of our new nation more in tune with the ideals they’d just proclaimed, may have approached with more humility and empathy. Again, none of us were there so I don’t judge too harshly.

The granddaddy of all internal conflict in those fledging days, and one that many people who didn’t sleep through 10th-grade U.S. History class are likely to remember, was the debate that led to the creation of our new nation in its current form, that of the Federalists versus the Anti-Federalists.

The more I study and reflect on that time, the more I tend to side with the Anti-Federalists. The 250 years of history that have since passed has done much to support their arguments as our federal government has grown larger and more powerful with every passing year. Even the most conservative (in the traditional sense of the word) of the Federalist founders would be aghast at the power of our federal government. 

Still, hindsight is 20/20, so perhaps the Federalists were right, and we wouldn’t have lasted a generation had we continued with something more like the government we had under the Articles of Confederation. As it was, it took the firm — some even say despotic — hand of Lincoln to keep our nation together.

During Washington’s presidency, there were fierce crackdowns on dissent, with a massive military response, the largest since the Revolution, massed to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, according to the book “What the Anti-Federalists Were For” by Herbert J. Storing. This may be something people across the political spectrum might reflect on when they call the governments of the past 20 years tyrannical.

There are more examples, like the Paxton Boys Massacre or the South Carolina Regulators, events that don’t make it into many of our sanitized history books, events that we might rather forget, that show the Revolution and the early days of our nation were not so Manichean.

And many of the tyrannies our forefathers listed in our Declaration of Independence exist today in different and perhaps more subtle ways. We are an imperfect nation because we are an imperfect people. Yet, the truth, the veritas, helped keep our hope alive in those nascent days of our republic and keeps it alive today.

The factum of U.S. hegemony

I know the truth, the factum, at least more of it than many of our more jingoistic fellow citizens do. I know that while the causes many of our men and women in uniform have fought for in far off lands are noble in some sense — totalitarian and terroristic regimes are far more evil on their best days than America is on its worst — our troops haven’t fought so that we could be free in our homeland since World War II, and even that’s debatable despite the noble fight our nation led 80 years ago.

Most of the wars we’ve fought, while they have noble aims to some extent and maybe even in the sense of veritas, were and are muddled by contradictions and less than idealist aims in the factum sense. They are as much about Northrop Grumman’s bottom line as they are about bringing freedom here or, more correctly, to people abroad and even more so since our nation has become the sole, hegemonic power in the world.

Happy Birthday, America!

Does that mean I’ve burned my draft card and along with it my sense of patriotism? Have I torn down my “Stars and Stripes” and deleted all my John Phillips Sousa albums from my iTunes library? 

No, July 4, as our nation celebrated its 249th birthday, I did what we all do when celebrating a treasured friend’s big day. I didn’t focus on the flaws. I didn’t bring up that time when he left me with the bar tab or stole my date to prom. I celebrated the best of him. I celebrated the best of this nation. 

I celebrated the fact that we are still far freer and more prosperous than we might have been. I celebrated the fact that hundreds of thousands still flock here from other nations for a chance at a life that most of us take for granted. I celebrated the “Star Spangle Banner” and the Marines at Iwo Jima, the Blue Angels, fireworks, hot dogs and apple pie. 

I celebrated the veritas — that imperfect poetic truth of our nation’s story — of the myth that a group of men living 249 years ago in a town 2,000 miles away pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, so that I could be writing these words today, in a house my great-grandfather Elisha could never have dreamed of while he sat making hats for Washington’s army, surrounded by a wife, three kids and a dog. 

I celebrated freedom. There are 364 other days I can focus on the rest.

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.