IF ONE is inclined to use history as a means of answering the question: “How did we get to where we are now?”, then the result of the US presidential election could produce two very different narratives of the American story. If Barack Obama wins, the narrative will no doubt feature the Bill of Rights and the Civil Rights Movement; if the McCain/Palin ticket is successful, it will all be about the pioneering spirit.
Yet one of the leading figures in both mythologies will be the same — Thomas Jefferson — and the phrase “Empire of Liberty” might be adopted by either party. Such are the contradictions inherent in the American psyche that characters as different as Senator Obama and Governor Palin can adopt the same rhetoric for their diverse campaigns.
Last week, Professor David Reynolds launched his radio history, America, Empire of Liberty (Radio 4, weekdays), one of the central themes of which is the age-old tension between the founding myth of the US as the land of freedom and opportunity, and its need — both economic and ideological — to expand.
From the earliest years of European settlement, as we heard in the second programme, the Europeans’ intensive farming methods drove them further into Native American territory, much of which had been depopulated as a result of epidemics brought by explorers from Columbus onwards.
It is possible to adopt a very jaundiced view of it all; not least if you are worried about a moose-shooting, evangelical Conservative who is a heartbeat away from the presidency. In a debate (Radio 4, Monday of last week) which introduced the America, Empire of Liberty series, Justin Webb, the BBC North America editor, chaired a discussion which brought together some distinguished historians of the United States, and demonstrated that there are no harsher critics of American culture than American academics themselves.
Howard Zinn described the US as the true “evil empire”, while Susan Castillo saw Governor Palin’s recent proclamations — the Iraq deployment as “a task that is from God”, and the Alaskan pipeline as a manifestation of God’s will — as the reverberations of an ethic whose source is the Founding Fathers.
In this critique, religion has a great deal to answer for. The 17th-century historian William Bradford talks of the massacre of Indians as a “sweet sacrifice to the Lord”. It took the Brits around the table to point out the part played by religion in the anti-slavery and civil-rights movements, and an enduring faith in the redemptive power of politics.
Mr Webb opened the programme by suggesting an approach that was not properly assessed by his panel. As recent hurricanes have reminded us, the US is a First-World country with Third-World perils. The early English settlers knew it, as they feebly retained a foothold on a swampy, malarial continent which offered — in the words of Captain John Smith — no more than “roots, herbs, acorns, walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish”.
In the 1940s, Roosevelt established Columbus Day as a celebration of those who “conquered nature for the benefit of the nation”. Perhaps that is what all that moose-hunting is about. It’s the environment, stupid! |
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