Commemorations and mythologies

National myths matter. They define, or perhaps more accurately they express, national character.

One of the most memorable conversations I had was with a Mexican friend explaining to me how important, to a Mexican, was the story of the ‘Malinche’. She was the native woman who became the mistress of the conquistador Cortés. She is the mother of the nation, formed as it is from the mixture of Spanish and native bloods; she is also the woman who betrayed her people to become the mistress of the man who led a bloody and deadly conquest of her land.

By the same token, Cortés is the father of that people. And yet he was also the murderer of thousands of its ancestors. That erotic but treacherous, intimate but murderous relationship is at the root of Mexican mythological history. And it’s as complex and fluid as Mexican life itself.

The United States has its mythical past too. And like most mythologies, what it owes to historical fact is pretty limited.

Celebration of the myth:
Mayflower pilgrims bring godliness and love of freedom to North America

American mythology starts with a bunch of pilgrims landing at what is now Plymouth rock in Massachusetts, seeking religious freedom. It then picks up the current of representative government, of the notion that the people are the true sovereign power in a state. It culminates in the emergence of democratic rule, at a time when in old Europe democracy was still a dirty word, though it would ultimately become the aspiration of so many countries.

Much of this is true. In the nineteenth century, the torch of democracy was held almost exclusively by the Americans. When Abraham Lincoln talked about the American Civil War as a conflict fought to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth, he was voicing an important truth. And yet, the United States was no democracy when he spoke it: no blacks and no women enjoyed the rights of white men. Even Catholics were far from enjoying the same rights as Protestants.

Those contradictions can be traced right back to the historical roots of the myth.

The Mayflower pilgrims weren’t concerned with religious freedom in general, only with their own religious freedom. As their descendants would show, most dramatically in the Salem witch trials, they were fully capable of being as vicious in their persecution of others as those they fled back in England.

In addition, they weren’t even the first to land in North America. They got there in 1620. A full twelve years earlier, the first permanent European settlement had been set up in Virginia. And a year before the pilgrims landed, two events occurred in Virginia whose fourth centennials have been celebrated in the last few weeks.

Back in July, it was the launching of representative government. Trump attended that commemoration. And this weekend, it was the arrival of the first slaves from West Africa. Trump stayed well away.

At the weekend, today's African Americans commemorated
the first arrival of African slaves in North America
A year before the Mayflower Pilgrims

Back in August 1619, the British privateer White Lion arrived near what is now the town of Hampton in Virgina and landed “20 and odd Negroes” whom he traded for food. The principle that humans could be bought and sold had been established. Slavery had begun its grisly existence on the North American continent and would not end for nearly two and a half centuries. Only in 1865, with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution, would slavery finally and for all time be abolished in the US.

Its consequences would not die so soon, however. When Trump tells black Congresswomen to go back where they came from, he is expressing an attitude that underlay slavery and still hasn’t been driven out of US culture: that people of African ancestry are not fully members of American society.

That the attitude still persists is not a truth with which all Americans are at ease. Which is why the foundation myth of the country is much more concerned with the Mayflower pilgrims, misrepresented as champions of religious liberty. And with the birth of representative government, an event in which it’s easier to take pride than in the first arrival of slaves.

Which is why Trump went to the first commemoration. About representative government. Not to the other one. The one about slavery.

But it’s much more important that the second one happened.