Old Glory

Amused by the Althouse/WaPo/Atlantic fray over the semiquincentennial (yes, really), I went to look for the 1939 classic cartoon about the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge itself was controversial, being authored by a Socialist and having in it a dedication to the union being "indivisible," at one time a very controversial point (as, indeed, it deserves to be separate from the older issues around why it once was: a union that you cannot leave is a prison, not an exercise in free association but a sort of domination by whomever comes to control it).

Ironically, the only full version I saw on  YouTube is dubbed into Ukrainian (and even that version seems to hang up after a while). I suppose Ukraine has more reason than many Americans to feel patriotic about us and our traditions just now.

I wanted to watch it again because the 1939 version of the story -- drawn up amid other American disputes in the run-up to World War II -- might be worth considering. This was the part they thought was uncontroversial, after all: Paul Revere's ride, the Revolution, the Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny. If I recall correctly, it elided the Civil War into a dispute not much explored, but that was presented as having been resolved by the Gettysburg Address (another uncontroversial as a popular American moment).

To do something similar today, you'd have to cut out everything after the Revolution; and even before then, you'd have to already be addressing the controversies over the Western Expansion, which after all began with General Lachlan McIntosh's efforts in the Ohio River Valley during the Revolution (or even earlier, with British colonialism).

On the other hand, the exercise does show that the nation's history has always been more controversial than we like to remember. Just the other day I mentioned Thomas' Legion of Indians and Highlanders, which is a good example of how much more complex the history is than fits either narrative: 

• The simplified 1939 version of history had the British as the Bad Guys in the Revolution, Westward Pioneers as the Good Guys and Indians as the bad guys, the Union as the Good Guys and the Confederates as Misguided Sons and Daughters; 
• The revisited ~1969 version has the British as the Bad Guys for being Settler Colonists, but the American Revolutionaries as also Bad Guys for the same reason; Native Americans as the Good Guys; the Union still as the Good Guys while fighting against slavery, but the Bad Guys while fighting against the Native Americans. 
• Yet the Cherokee were on the British side of the Revolutionary War (Bad!) and then the Confederate side of the Civil War (Bad!). Nevertheless, they have to be shoehorned into the Good Guys side because they were Natives (Good!).

None of those unified views of American History really works out. Literally the same people who won the war against slavery, Sherman and Sheridan and Custer and their troops, are the ones who fought the war that the later movement wants to call a "genocide" against Native Americans. The same people are the heroes and the villains. In the Revolution sometimes too: Thomas Jefferson is at once the author of the Declaration of Independence, and a slaver who forced Sally Jennings into a secret adulterous affair that lasted for many years. 

Also other American conflicts: Jim Bowie, hero of the Texas revolution and martyr of the Alamo, smuggled slaves into the United States and ran a land fraud operation; his sometime partner in slave-smuggling, the pirate Lafitte, was a hero of the War of 1812. That whole business was so confused that when John Wayne wanted to do the Alamo, he adopted in the Iliad as his model instead of using the real historical figures at all.

We could do the same thing, reaching for mythology since the history is too complicated. Fighting over who wore the white hats in American history is otherwise not going to be a clean exercise. The truth is more interesting, but there's a lot of accepting one ends up having to do about how flawed even the best of humanity can be.