Builders of the American Dream
The word “myth,” as it has come to be understood in America, has a derogatory connotation. It means that someone has been spreading a fake story. But in Europe, as James K. Fitzpatrick points out in the introduction to his Builders of the American Dream (Arlington House, 165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801, 374 pages), a myth is a tale coming down from prehistoric times that, likely as not, had some original validity. There really were chivalric knights. If Prometheus never actually reached close enough to the sun to bring fire back to man, certainly some Promethean character was the first to make fire by rubbing sticks together or striking something hard with a flint. Myths were perpetuated around hearths and campfires before men had written alphabets. They were the best that ancient man could do to account for his origins.
In America we don’t need myths. We have our history books. But, as Mr. Fitzpatrick says, presumably echoing Russell Kirk, we do need heroes who represent the high principles and moral convictions of a culture. We need the moral imagination. Luckily we can find it in certain larger-than-ordinary-life characters who have refused to settle for the mediocre, who have tried to exemplify admired characteristics at their best.
Mr. Fitzpatrick might have picked many people who have done much for America. But his test is not who should have become an American myth, but who actually did. George Washington Carver, the black scientist who developed so many scores of ways of making peanuts useful, may have done more for the country than Babe Ruth. But the Babe, with his mighty swing and Gargantuan appetite for hot dogs, captured the public imagination. He may not have been an exemplary man in his private life, but his worshipers took him as a combined Bacchus and Alger hero who could be forgiven much for his prowess on the diamond and his climb from an orphanage that might have left him an incorrigible delinquent but didn’t.
The test which Mr. Fitzpatrick has applied to his thirteen chosen builders of the American dream is a double one. First, the virtue and the value must be there. But, second, there must have been something of a breakthrough nature that made their names part of what Mr. Fitzpatrick calls “the vocabulary of our people.”
Daniel Boone
In establishing his double test Mr. Fitzpatrick is almost as interesting in talking about his rejects as he is in seeking the “why” for the popular acceptance of his thirteen builders. His chosen frontier hero is Daniel Boone. Boone was not the first to cross the Appalachians to the “dark and bloody ground” of Kentucky —a man named John Finley preceded him.
In opening up the land between the Ohio and the Mississippi George Rogers Clark did more than Boone for the white settlers who poured West after the Revolution. But it was Boone’s flair, his ability to cajole hostile Indians, his reverence in the belief that God had ordained him to open the wilderness, that made him the people’s legendary hero. His reputation was based on a sense of fairness and justice as much as on bravery. And he kept to his mission—his worshipers had to bring his body back from the Missouri territory to take him to a Kentucky graveyard in a hearse drawn by four white horses.
Naturally, George Washington engages Mr. Fitzpatrick’s attention as the builder of the dream in our revolutionary epoch. Others solidified the dream—Hamilton, who wrote Washington ‘s Farewell Address, Madison and Jefferson, who gave us our defining charters. But if it had not been for a Virginia planter who had the acumen to combine the strategy of Fabius, the Roman delayer, with guerrilla tactics learned from the American Indians, we would never have had the dream to make palpable. In assessing Washington at his true worth, Mr. Fitzpatrick vindicates Parson Weems’ mythologizing biography—after all, Washington could have thrown a dollar across the Rappahannock, and if he did cut down a cherry tree he would not have lied about it.
In the Civil War period Fitzpatrick rejects Sherman and Grant as dream builders, though it is incontestable, as he indicates, that the slugging, victorious Northern generals pioneered the strategies of modern total war. Lee and Lincoln are picked over Sherman and Grant precisely because they fought as gentlemen. Oddly, they both believed that slavery was doomed and they both hoped that it could be abolished by voluntary action.
Why, in dramatization of the Progressive Era in U.S. politics, didn’t Fitzpatrick make Theodore Roosevelt or Robert La Follette his chief protagonist? He chose William Jennings Bryan, who has gone into myth as a blabbermouth and ignoramus. Actually, as Fitzpatrick demonstrates, Bryan was a prairie G. K. Chesterton who had a well-reasoned Distributist ideal for his country. Bryan ‘s essay, “Individualism Versus Socialism,” might have been written by Chesterton or by Hilaire Belloc.
The doers rather than the intellectuals take over when Fitzpatrick gives us beautiful portraits of Thomas Edison, Walter Reed, Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Eddie Rickenbacker. Will Rogers is something of a mixed bag, part cowboy comedian, part folk philosopher. Walt Disney is treated, interestingly, as a savior who enabled American parents to give their children a not negligible substitute for the myths that our schools fail to prescribe as part of their curriculum. True, it would be better if American children were to know C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Hans Christian Andersen, or even A. A. Milne. But if we must substitute TV and the movies for the written word, it is good that we have such Disney feature-length films as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Bambi,” “Pinocchio” and ” Alice in Wonderland.”
Douglas MacArthur
Fitzpatrick’s thirteenth “builder” is General Douglas MacArthur, who was both doer and intellectual. Why MacArthur rather than General George S. Patton if we must have a modern military hero? Because, as Fitzpatrick says, there is a noticeable reluctance in America to glory in war for its own sake. We prefer a Sir Galahad to a pagan warrior like Thor or Odin. MacArthur was just as good a fighting man as Patton, but he always held out for an economy of means in war. Head-on slugging was something for Neanderthals; MacArthur preferred the flank attack or the leapfrog surprise. He felt there was no substitute for victory, but his idea of victory was to bring habeas corpus to the Philippines (as his father did) or to Japan.
MacArthur was no imperialist. And what about “imperialism” as part of the American dream? We drove Spain out of Cuba, but Mr. Fitzpatrick sees it as more important that our Dr. Walter Reed drove yellow fever out of the whole Caribbean basin. This, it might be noted, includes Panama, which was a fever swamp before we cleaned it up.
