REVERENCE FOR A PEWTER IDOL
Richard Shenkman - who garnered an appropriate
bit of fame via
Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History - wrote a sequel called
I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not that ploughs the same ground. The title of the latter
refers to a comment made by Warren Harding during his
last campaign tour after he was informed that the Paul Revere
of Longfellow's home wasn't quite the Paul Revere of
reality, i.e. he was discovered and captured by the
British before giving warning to Concord.
This anecdote nicely summarizes Shenkman's books and the response of those who've reacted negatively to
them, with the latter amounting to - in contemporary
jargon - "So what? No blood, no foul."
This seems quite the unexpected reaction from a
group consisting of many if not most of the same folks
who haven't stopped screaming for the head of someone
they're certain shaded the truth by asking "what 'is'
is" a few years ago.
Actually, they always express their disdain with
phrases a wee bit stronger than "shaded the truth," and
almost inevitably - usually with a hint of if not real
tears rolling down their faces - bring up the permanent
damage this sort of thing will do to the sacred, sacred
children.
If this is indeed true, then just imagine
the damage being done by the prevarications from which
the cloth of their entire childhood reality is woven.
Take the lies of which almost the entirety of
the Thanksgiving mythos consists, for instance.
The Pilgrims never wore that morbid black clothing
including the hats with huge buckles, they weren't
even celebrated as national figures until the 1820s
after a speech by a young Daniel Webster (in which he
gave them the name "Pilgrims"), and the whole "eat until
you drop" thing didn't start until "the Victorians
turned a Pilgrim secular festival into our Thanksgiving." As as for the bedrock on which the
story is based, the Marx Brothers couldn't have conceived of a sillier history. The
legend didn't arise until the 1740s and is "based on
what one old man says he was told as a boy by another
old man who had related what he had heard as a boy."
But after the ball got rolling the rock soon
followed:
But in trying to save the rock, the mythmakers have nearly succeeded in destroying it. The effort began
when town boosters moved the rock inland in the late
18th century, presumably the better to preserve it.
But in moving it inland they split it in two, leaving
half of it on the beach. The half on the beach
subsequently was lost while the half moved inward
became overgrown with weeds. Eventually, the beach
half was found as the doorstep of an old warehouse,
and the rock that was inland was given renewed care.
But that left the town - to the everlasting consternation of the tourists - with two Plymouth
Rocks. In 1880, to end the confusion, the rock that
was inland was dragged down to the beach and attached
to the other one. But to many the rock now seemed too
far from the shore for the Pilgrims to have landed on
it. This necessitated yet another move, this time to
a position closer to shore. In this move the rock was
broken yet again. Since the 1920s it has
remained embedded in the sand beneath a towering stone
temple built of no fewer than sixteen columns, but the
temple is built so high and the rock is so small that
from where visitors stand above the rock it looks
strikingly silly.
Both of Shenkman's books contain more of the same
sorts of unsurprising revelations about how the
canonical version of U.S. history fed to the wee ones
is more fiction than truth. While Shenkman does a
fairly good job in this subgenre, my personal favorite
is still Bill Bryson's
Made in America, which is also on my bathroom
reading top 10, i.e. an ideal book to open at random
to a brief interesting passage or two while answering
nature's call.
posted by Steven Baum
2/4/2001 12:16:51 PM |
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