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The American myth comes equipped with a system of spiritual filters. Americans seem at each moment to view the heroic past in a certain golden nimbus; as the present recedes into the past, it seems to acquire a vague glow; the violence is forgotten. The present, by contrast, sometimes seems squalid and unworthy of the American tradition. Thus, for all the whooping energy of ambition and greed that Americans showed for so much of their history, there runs through it a deep strain of pessimism, division and violence that is evident in almost every era. George Washington received his beatification from Parson Weems (one of the first myths to help forge the disparate 13 states into something like a nation); Weems laid on the pious fabrications like a hagiographer: " 'I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.' 'Run to my arms, my dearest boy,' cried his father in transports, 'run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold.'" In life, Washington was attacked all through his presidency as brutally as Richard Nixon ever was.
Washington predicted that the 13 states would fly apart in civil war and economic chaos. The rancor among the founders, especially between Federalists and Jeffersonians over the question of democracy, was nearly homicidal. Wrote the Federalist Fisher Ames in 1803: "Our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty. . .A democracy cannot last." In the Jacksonian tide of 1835, Niles' Register declared: "The state of society is awful. Brute force has superseded the law. . .The time predicted seems rapidly approaching when the mob shall rule." Indeed, lynch mobs, cholera and riots tore through the Republic.
The many years before, during and after the Civil War had the stuff of grand tragedy in them, but they seemed more often merely vile: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks caned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate. Even Walt Whitman, the profligately hospitable Democrat, admitted in 1871: "The problem of the future of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast." With the arrival of the Depression, the critic Edmund Wilson reported matter of factly: "The money-making phase of the Republic is over." In the middle of the Eisenhower years, Columnist Murray Kempton wrote: "It is already very hard to remember that, only a generation ago, there were a number of Americans, of significant character and talent, who believed that our society was not merely doomed but undeserving of survival, and to whom every one of its institutions seemed not just unworthy of preservation but crying out to be exterminated."
Americans forget these darker moments. They ignore too, except in a small, anxious corner of their memory, the American strains of isolation, failure, vulnerability and heartbreaking distances. Risk and individualism have always conspired to pitch a lot of Americans out into a freezing, deadly loneliness. Jim Marshall, the first man to discover gold in the California rush, died broke and crazy.