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The story was not fogged in myth, like that of Romulus and Remus; it occurred in the bright morning sun of the Enlightenment, with a generation of astonishingly literate men in attendance. From a distance of 100 years, Henry Adams, normally a man of elegant bitterness, looked back at that primal national moment: "Stripped for the hardest work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of man."
In his novel The Public Burning, Robert Coover satirized the myth from the mordant angle of Watergate America: "Throughout the solemn unfolding of the American miracle, men have noticed this remarkable phenomenon: what at the moment seems to be nothing more than the random rise and fall of men and ideas, false starts and sudden brainstorms, erratic bursts of passion and apathy, brief setbacks and partial victories, is later discovered to be—in the light of America's gradual unveiling as the New Athens, New Rome and New Jerusalem all in one —an inevitable sequence of interlocking events, a divine code. . ."
Given a nation with such dogmatically resplendent papers, a Chosen People, "like Israel of Old in the center of nations," the problem of America became one of theodicy: how to explain a history so often at odds with the virtuous myth? Most succinctly: What was the author of the Declaration of Independence doing with a houseful of slaves? The contradiction between promise and reality rarely torments mellower cultures—life is one thing and rhetoric another, and it takes a literal-minded innocent to be deviled by the discrepancy. But Americans often somehow held to the fierce, insistent innocence of their myth even when they penetrated to the deeper parts of the forest, regions of dense moral distress, ambiguity and, in the darkest places, tragedy. In his almost spookily prescient 1955 novel about Viet Nam, The Quiet American, Graham Greene remarked that their innocence makes Americans the most dangerous people in the world.
To be realistic about it, American innocence was never all that innocent. A walk on the wild side of the American past can leave even an enthusiastic patriot shaken: D.H. Lawrence once urged his readers to "look through the surfaces of American art, and see the inner diabolism." "The essential American soul," Lawrence said extravagantly, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." In 19th century portrayals, Uncle Sam has a certain look in his eye that had disappeared by the time of the famous World War I I WANT YOU recruiting poster. The look is conniving, raw and whip-mean, the squint-shrewd eye of a man with a rope who is about a week's ride from the nearest law court.
The generation of the 1960s came upon this side of the American character with an air of shocked discovery, with the sudden rage of people who felt that they had been lied to by the myth. In fact, they had. The American history that they had been taught did not realistically show them the violent underside of their huge and diverse nation, and thus they fell headlong into an apocalyptic absolutism that is common among Americans. If they are not the best in the world, then they imagine that surely they must be the worst. The psychological pattern still applies.