Title: Myth America
Rating: 4 Stars
I feel that I should start by explaining the 4 star rating. I think that this is an important book that normally would get 5 stars. The problem is that it is a collection of essays from a variety of historians. Some of them did a better job of understanding the assignment than others. Therefore, since not all of the essays were uniformly of high quality, I had to take a star demerit.
The idea behind this book is that our brains are full of American myths. This really isn’t even a liberal vs conservative argument. There are some American beliefs that are nearly universally accepted. In fact, I’ve heard many of these beliefs repeated by politicians of both parties, talking head pundits, and just reporters in general. These myths are generally accepted as unchallengeable truth.
Just think of some of the ideas that are discussed in this book: American exceptionalism, Reagan Revolution, the magic of capitalism, American socialism, United States as an empire, and white backlash. Regardless of your political affiliation, these are all topics that, unless you’re pretty well read with contemporary historians, you feel that you understand and that you have a good grasp of.
Other myths discussed are topics that are more prevalent among those of a certain political belief: the border, immigration, Confederate monuments, and yes, voter fraud.
There are about twenty such topics discussed in this book. Each topic is written by a different historian. Many of the historians have significant expertise in their assigned topic. For instance, the essay on immigration was written by Erika Lee, author of the excellent America for Americans. The essay on American as an empire was written by Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire. Necessarily, their essays in this book are the Cliff Notes version, but you can read with confidence knowing that they’d already done the deep research required for their books.
This is one of those books that I kind of want to keep in my back pocket. Whenever someone starts talking about with great, undeserved confidence on one of these twenty topics, I just want to take the book out and point them to the chapter that deals with that subject. I know that it wouldn’t do any good. People who have had these myths hammered into their heads for decades are not about to be dissuaded by some pointy-headed ivory tower historian and their ‘facts’.
By now I’ve read a lot of history written by historians that make a point of not just accepting common wisdom that has built up over a period of decades. They go to the original sources and perform their own critical analysis. In so doing, they discover many interesting things.
The immigration question is always interesting. A lot of people think that today’s immigrants should legally immigrate like our own forefathers did. The common archetype of an immigrant is a Mexican that slips across the border to steal our jobs and/or use our public services.
There are several things wrong with this thinking. The fact is that, if your forefathers came to our land before 1924, there (unless you were Chinese, which is a whole other story of American racism) was no concept of illegal immigration. If you set foot in America, you were de factor a legal immigrant. In fact, the US border patrol was not even established until 1924.
In fact, the immigration law of 1924 severely reduced European migration to the US (specifically the then ‘shit hole’ countries like Greece / Italy / Poland, etc). This reduction of supply had a corresponding increase in the demand for low wage migrate workers. With companies looking for alternatives, it was this law that resulted in the dramatic increase of the use of Hispanic labor. Businesses would (and still do) advertise in the Central American countries for available jobs in the US. Nowadays, my understanding is that a significant percentage of immigrants attempting to come to the US originate from Venezuela. US Venezuelan policies are one of (though certainly not the only) the reasons for its state collapse that is forcing people to leave. This is just one example of how US foreign policies actually have a blow back effect on problems like immigration. Reading this chapter on immigration makes it obvious how misguided the simple narrative of brown people coming for our jobs (in a caravan no less!) really is.
Similarly, the chapter on American Socialism was eye opening. When people think of Socialism, they probably think of Lenin and Stalin. They think about gulags. They think about someone coming in, confiscating all property, and giving it to those that are not deserving. They think about people that don’t want to work for a living and just want the government to do everything for them.
Aside as a boogeyman strawman to keep people working at their dead end jobs, this myth, upon simple reflection, is pretty silly. In fact, American socialism was involved in such (at the time) radical concepts like: a woman’s right to vote, health insurance for the elderly (ie Medicare), old age insurance (ie Social Security), minimum wage, workplace safety laws, and fighting for civil rights for all (ie people of color and women). When you read about Socialism as practiced in the US, the consistent theme is that it is championing ideas that are a decade or two in front mainstream thought. If you really want to blow a hard core conservative’s mind, simply tell them that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Christian Socialist (Francis Bellamy).
The White Backlash essay was interesting primarily in how it reframed the issue. The myth is that progress in civil rights (be it race or sex) goes too far and it forces white men to respond (hence the backlash). By framing it in this way, the argument seems to blame the civil rights movement for the white reaction. Simple reflection gives the lie to this argument. After all, people have the choice to respond or not. They were not forced to do anything. White men have the agency to choose their actions. Somehow making the civil rights movement the cause of this reaction obscures the fact that it was the agency of the white power structure that responded to civil rights progress.
I could go on but I need to wrap this up. Since it’s so timely, the chapter on voter fraud was a nice close to the book. It has two main theses. One is that actual individual cases of voter fraud is stunningly low. In one study of a billion individual votes, thirty-one cases of fraud were found. The fact that Trump and his acolytes claim millions of illegal votes is, not only outrageously stupid, but is also incredibly dangerous because it rips away at the very foundation of our democratic system. The fact that tens of millions of people believe this lie astounds me and depresses me.
The second thesis is that the real voter fraud that not only is taking place now but has taken place for 150 years is voter disenfranchisement. Over this entire time, there have been flagrant actions to strip citizens of their right to vote. Whether it’s the old school methods of poll taxes or literacy tests or the newer methods such as automatically purging voter rolls for invalid reasons, the goal is the same: to suppress the vote of people of color. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them, then cheat.
Although I enjoyed reading this book, it actually did leave me a little sad. The thought that kept going through my mind as I read it formed the basis of the blog title. The people that need to read this book are the very people that will never read this book.
dorkenstein 