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After a career dedicated to tracing the country’s afterlife through the myths that motivate Americans to fight, kill, and make money, Richard Slotkin needs a kinder story.
By Nicole Hemmer
Nicole Hemmer is the protagonist of “Supporters: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. ”
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A GREAT DISORDER: The National Myth and the Battle for America, through Richard Slotkin
“A patriot is a gun,” Adrienne Rich wrote in a 1991 poem. “A patriot is one who fights for the soul of his country/as she fights for her own being. “Historian Richard Slotkin uses these words as the epigraph to his radical new work, “A Great Disorder,” in which he attempts to redeem nationalism from its violent and exclusionary politics through an exploration of Americans’ concepts of their country. Array’s e-book is the culmination of a prolific career and a new way of making sense only of the past, but also of new culture wars.
Through 3 books of American history: “Regeneration Through Violence”, which covers the era from 1600 to the Civil War; “The Fatal Environment,” about nineteenth-century industrialization; and “Gunfighter Nation,” about the imperial ambitions of the 20th century. Slotkin argued that Americans resorted to what he called the “myth of the border,” a perception that reinvention may not be achieved solely through the white supremacist violence of displacement and Indigenous deaths. Shootings. The effects have been environmental degradation and capitalist exploitation.
An American iconography developed. The idea of the cowboy, the wilderness explorer and the fertile but deadly frontier landscape consumed the white American imagination, inspiring late-19th-century prospectors who hunted for coal and oil in Texas and Oklahoma as well as John F. Kennedy, who invoked the “opportunities and perils” of a “new frontier” to call for bold economic and civil reforms at home while waging brutal Cold War battles abroad.
Having interpreted 400 years of American history through this lens, Slotkin now turns his attention to the 21st century. Distressed by the division and dysfunction that have come to define U.S. politics, especially since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, he looks again to the motives we find in the stories we tell.
The present polarization, Slotkin argues, is rooted in competing national mythologies, “a different understanding of who counts as American, a different reading of American history and a different vision of what our future ought to be.” Only by understanding how those competing myths fell into place, then forging a new, unifying myth, can the country emerge from its current political crisis.
To emphasize the centrality of myth in American history, Slotkin adds several others to his frontier myth: the myth of the founding, the myths of the Civil War, the myth of the maiden war, the myth of movement. It’s a huge chaos how ambitious their task is.
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