of Liberty is emblazoned with an inscription, erected in the nineteenth century but expressive of these earlier centuries as well,
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore,
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside
the golden door.
This myth of the New World has continued down to the present. In his orations during World War II, Churchill proclaimed that “England will hold on until the New World comes to the rescue of the Old.”
In the settling of this land the pilgrims and pioneers and explorers, even the forebears of the Hollywood gunmen like Clint Eastwood who took the law into their own hands, were pictured as believing in divine righteousness or its synonym, manifest destiny. The myth of the lone pioneer borrowed power from the classical myth of Odysseus, whose own heart had become the battleground for the strife of the gods, as the frontiersmen portrayed in this country are the expression of the destiny of America. Lord Byron interrupted Childe Harold to rhapsodize about Daniel Boone and the American wilderness, in which Boone is pictured as innocent, happy, benevolent, not savage but simple, in his old age still a child of nature “whose virtues showed the corruptions of civilization.” *
There was a sense of destiny in the western desert, or if you were religious, a sense of the presence of God wherever the desert might be. Hence Jesus went into the desert for forty daysand nights; Buddha did the same, and many a hermit has gone into the solitary desert to commune with himself and God. The desert of the West is what Paul Tillich called the “holy void.” It is a myth into which one sinks, and whether or not it is holy or anxiety-producing depends upon you, the individual viewer.
The fact that Satan (or Mephistopheles or Lucifer) was originally God’s co-worker casts light on the strange identification of people in America with the evil figures, say Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde or the train robber called the Grey Fox, whom all the townspeople including the school band turned out to cheer as he was taken off to the penitentiary. Even now when children sing the western song, “He robbed from the rich/And gave to the poor,” it is part of their identification with the myth of Robin Hood, a mythical medieval outlaw who robbed for the sake of the poor.
One of the curious things about the myth of the Wild West is that the west was reputed to have a healing power. Theodore Roosevelt, a sickly teen-ager, went west to develop his physique, to find himself psychologically, and to build himself into a courageous man. In the Horatio Alger myth, as we shall see in “Luke Larkin’s Luck” (see Chapter 7 ), the “evil” family, the members of the aristocratic Duncans, were sentenced by the judge to go west to rebuild their honesty and integrity.
Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill, not only were our personal heroes but also stood for the myth of the healing power of the new land. These mythic heroes were quite conscious of their function as God’s agents appointed to civilize the west—Buffalo Bill believed that he stood between civilization and savagery.
The myths of American freedom can also be used for very different effects. A young man in therapy described how his family had come from the Old World as homesteaders and moved as immigrants to a farm in South Dakota. Nobody would speak to this homestead family for the first four years. As a child he and his siblings took the bus to school, where they were also ostracized. His family was Catholic, and when heharmlessly asked another child which church the latter attended, the other child’s mother drove a horse and buggy later that afternoon four miles to his house to rebuke his parents noisily for their son’s prying into others’ religion. His older brother got into fights because he was mocked
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore,
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside
the golden door.
This myth of the New World has continued down to the present. In his orations during World War II, Churchill proclaimed that “England will hold on until the New World comes to the rescue of the Old.”
In the settling of this land the pilgrims and pioneers and explorers, even the forebears of the Hollywood gunmen like Clint Eastwood who took the law into their own hands, were pictured as believing in divine righteousness or its synonym, manifest destiny. The myth of the lone pioneer borrowed power from the classical myth of Odysseus, whose own heart had become the battleground for the strife of the gods, as the frontiersmen portrayed in this country are the expression of the destiny of America. Lord Byron interrupted Childe Harold to rhapsodize about Daniel Boone and the American wilderness, in which Boone is pictured as innocent, happy, benevolent, not savage but simple, in his old age still a child of nature “whose virtues showed the corruptions of civilization.” *
There was a sense of destiny in the western desert, or if you were religious, a sense of the presence of God wherever the desert might be. Hence Jesus went into the desert for forty daysand nights; Buddha did the same, and many a hermit has gone into the solitary desert to commune with himself and God. The desert of the West is what Paul Tillich called the “holy void.” It is a myth into which one sinks, and whether or not it is holy or anxiety-producing depends upon you, the individual viewer.
The fact that Satan (or Mephistopheles or Lucifer) was originally God’s co-worker casts light on the strange identification of people in America with the evil figures, say Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde or the train robber called the Grey Fox, whom all the townspeople including the school band turned out to cheer as he was taken off to the penitentiary. Even now when children sing the western song, “He robbed from the rich/And gave to the poor,” it is part of their identification with the myth of Robin Hood, a mythical medieval outlaw who robbed for the sake of the poor.
One of the curious things about the myth of the Wild West is that the west was reputed to have a healing power. Theodore Roosevelt, a sickly teen-ager, went west to develop his physique, to find himself psychologically, and to build himself into a courageous man. In the Horatio Alger myth, as we shall see in “Luke Larkin’s Luck” (see Chapter 7 ), the “evil” family, the members of the aristocratic Duncans, were sentenced by the judge to go west to rebuild their honesty and integrity.
Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Mike Fink, Calamity Jane, even Custer and Buffalo Bill, not only were our personal heroes but also stood for the myth of the healing power of the new land. These mythic heroes were quite conscious of their function as God’s agents appointed to civilize the west—Buffalo Bill believed that he stood between civilization and savagery.
The myths of American freedom can also be used for very different effects. A young man in therapy described how his family had come from the Old World as homesteaders and moved as immigrants to a farm in South Dakota. Nobody would speak to this homestead family for the first four years. As a child he and his siblings took the bus to school, where they were also ostracized. His family was Catholic, and when heharmlessly asked another child which church the latter attended, the other child’s mother drove a horse and buggy later that afternoon four miles to his house to rebuke his parents noisily for their son’s prying into others’ religion. His older brother got into fights because he was mocked
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