A Great Disorder: National Myth and the

Battle for America Richard Slotkin

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 A Great Disorder
NATIONAL MYTH AND THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA

Richard Slotkin

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
2024
 Copyright © 2024 by Richard Slotkin
All rights reserved
Cover photograph: Adobe Stock
Cover design: Graciela Galup
978-0-674-29238-3 (cloth)
978-0-674-29702-9 (EPUB)
978-0-674-29703-6 (PDF)
“Connoisseur of Chaos” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and
copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century” from An
Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 by Adrienne Rich,
copyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W.
Norton. All rights reserved.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Slotkin, Richard, 1942– author.
Title: A great disorder : national myth and the battle for America /
Richard Slotkin.
Other titles: National myth and the battle for America
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023029111
Subjects: LCSH: Myth—Political aspects—United States—History. |
Culture conflict—United States—History. | United States—History.
Classification: LCC E179 .S63 2024 | DDC 973—dc23/eng/20230725
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029111
For Iris, with love and thanks
A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one.
—Wallace Stevens, “Connoisseur of Chaos” (1942)

Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming

and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.
.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…
A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul
of her country
as she wrestles for her own being.…
—Adrienne Rich, “One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century”
(1991)
 Contents

Introduction
PART I Myths of the White Republic
1 The Myth of the Frontier
2 The Myth of the Founding

PART II Civil War Mythologies

3 Lincoln and Liberation
4 Confederate Founding: Civil War as Culture War
5 The Lost Cause: Redemption and the White Reunion

PART III The Nation Transformed: From the Civil War to the Good
War
6 Industrialization, Vigilantism, and the Imperial Frontier
7 The Great Exception: The New Deal and National Myth
8 The Myth of the Good War: Platoon Movies and the Reconception
of American Nationality
PART IV American Apotheosis: From Kennedy’s New Frontier to
Reagan’s Morning in America
9 The New Frontier: Savage War and Social Justice
10 Cultural Revolution: The Sixties, the Movement, and the Great
Society
11 Back in the Saddle: Reagan, Neoliberalism, and the War against
the Sixties
12 Rising Tide: Climate Change and the Fossil Fuel Frontier
13 Cowboys and Aliens: The Global War on Terror

PART V The Age of Culture War

14 The Obama Presidency: The Myth of the Movement and the Tea
Party Reaction
15 Equalizers: The Gun Rights Movement and Culture-War
Conservatism
16 The Trump Redemption: Make America Great Again
17 Trump in the White House: The President as Insurgent
18 Imagining Civil War: The 2020 Election
19 “The Last President of the Confederacy”: Trump’s Lost Cause
Conclusion: National Myth and the Crisis of Democracy
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
 Introduction

OUR COUNTRY is in the grip of a prolonged crisis that has profoundly

shaken our institutions, our structures of belief, and the solidarities
that sustain us as a nation. The past forty years have seen a steadily
intensifying culture war, expressed politically in a hyperpartisanship
that has crippled the government’s ability to deal constructively with
the problems endemic to modern society. Major crises, like the
financial meltdown of 2008–2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic,
which in the past would have inspired a patriotic rallying of public
opinion, have instead intensified our divisions and raised the
potential for political violence.
It is as if we are living in two different countries: a blue nation,
built around large cities in which many races and ethnic groups
mingle and blend, prospering on a wave of technological change,
sensitive to persistent economic and racial inequality, and willing to
support government programs to regulate the economy and increase
social justice; and a red nation of beleaguered smaller cities and
towns and rural districts, whose people are resistant to the cultural
changes attendant on an increasingly multiethnic society and
changing sexual mores, aggrieved by the loss of employment and
security inflicted by a heartless corporate economy, and disaffected
with a government whose regulations harm their economic interests
and foster secular values at the expense of religious tradition. The
latter has generated a political movement, Make America Great
Again (MAGA), whose angry passion and propensity for verbal and
physical violence has altered the language and the conduct of
American politics. Some of this partisan rancor can be attributed to
the propaganda of well-financed special interest groups, to
politicized cable news networks and internet feeds that lock
consumers into ideological echo chambers, but it would be a mistake
to ignore the depth of the passions behind the partisan split.1
The differences between red and blue America are rooted in
culture: in enduring systems of belief developed over long periods of
time, reflecting different experiences of life and understandings of
what America is, what it has been, and what it is supposed to be.
Each has a different understanding of who counts as American, a
different reading of American history, and a different vision of what
our future ought to be. For blue America, the election of Barack
Obama, the first African American president, symbolized the
culmination of the political and cultural transformations that began in
the 1960s. For red America, Obama’s election was an affront, a
confirmation of the fact that the political power and cultural
authority of conservative Christians were inexorably shrinking, as
non-White people became an ever-larger share of the population
and cultural liberalization continued to undermine traditional values.
As Michael Gerson, an anti–Donald Trump conservative who served
as speechwriter to George W. Bush, observes in his column in the
Washington Post, “A factual debate can be adjudicated. Policy
differences can be compromised. Even an ideological conflict can be
bridged or transcended. But if our differences are an expression of
our identities—rural vs. urban, religious vs. secular, nationalist vs.
cosmopolitan—then political loss threatens a whole way of life.”2
National security expert Michael Vlahos, writing in American
Conservative, argues that the effect of this kind of identity-based
conflict “is to condition the whole of society to believe that an
existential clash is coming, that all must choose, and that there are
no realistic alternatives to a final test of wills.” Opinion polls taken
before the 2020 election showed that 36 percent of Republicans and
33 percent of Democrats believed there would be some justification
for using violence to achieve their party’s goals. As many as 20
percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats thought there
would be “ ‘a great deal’ of justification” if their party were to lose
the election. Given these terms of conflict, it is easy to see why so
many political commentators have compared our era to the decade
before the Civil War.3
Each side in our culture war appeals to American history to
explain and justify its beliefs about who we are and the purposes for
which our political community exists. They share the same body of
historical referents, the stories we have accepted as symbols of our
heritage. These constitute our national mythology, an essential
element of the culture that sustains the modern nation-state. It
defines nationality, the system of beliefs that allows a diverse and
contentious population, dispersed over a vast and varied country, to
think of itself as a community and form a broad political consensus.
It provides models of patriotic action that enable the nation’s people
to imagine ways of responding to crises in the name of a common
good. The irony and peril of our situation is that the myths and
symbols that have traditionally united Americans have become the
slogans and banners of a cultural civil war.
The crisis we face is not an immediate threat, like Southern
secession in 1861, the Great Depression in 1930, or the attack on
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Rather, it arises from problems endemic to the
modern social and economic order: the economic and social
disruptions caused by the globalization of the economy, the extreme
inequality between the very rich and the middle and working classes,
the growing racial and ethnic diversity of our people, the enduring
effects of racial injustice, and the profound challenges posed by
global warming and climate change. These persistent and
interlocking problems cannot be resolved unless we can reestablish a
broad consensus on the meaning of American nationality and the
purposes of patriotic action. Failing that, disorder and dysfunction
will become the normal condition of our politics, and our future as a
civil society and a nation-state will be in danger.
A Great Disorder turns to America’s foundational myths to expose
the deep structures of thought and belief that underlie today’s
culture wars. The first half of the book describes the historical
evolution of the foundational myths that are most central to our
national mythology. These are the Myth of the Frontier, which uses
the history of colonial settlement and westward expansion to explain
our national character and our spectacular economic growth; the
Myth of the Founding, which sanctifies the establishment of our
national government and its foundational texts, the revolutionary
Declaration of Independence, and the countervailing legal structures
of the Constitution; the Myths of the Civil War, which offer conflicting
versions of the moral and political crisis that nearly destroyed the
nation; and the Myth of the Good War, which celebrates the nation’s
emergence as a multiracial and multiethnic democracy, as well as a
world power. The second half of the book shows how these myths
have played through the culture war politics and the multiple crises
that have shaken American society since the 1990s.
This book is based on more than fifty years of research on the
creation and development of American national myths, which began
with my study of the colonial origins of the Myth of the Frontier,
Regeneration through Violence (1973). In The Fatal Environment:
The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890
(1985), I traced the evolution of the original myth into a fable of
imperial expansion and “bonanza” capitalism, and described the
interaction of the Frontier Myth with mythic responses to the Civil
War and Reconstruction. That study culminated with the publication
of Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America (1992), which dealt with the transformations of national
myth under the pressures of massive immigration, the Depression
and World War II, the cultural transformations of the 1960s, and the
emergence of mass media, especially movies and television. In Lost
Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality
(2005), I looked beyond the Myth of the Frontier to consider the
ways in which military mobilization in the twentieth century
compelled Americans to broaden and reframe their national myth,
and extend their definition of nationality to include hitherto
marginalized racial and ethnic minorities.
 Why National Myths Matter
Nation-states are a political innovation that began to replace
dynastic and feudal systems of governance in seventeenth-century
Europe, organized by elites to co-opt the power of the emerging
middle classes and bring diverse ethnic, religious, and linguistic
groups to think of themselves as a single “people,” under a common
legal regime. Although nation-states have taken the form of
monarchies, dictatorships, and republics—and everything in between
—all depend for legitimacy on cultural mechanisms that maintain
broad popular consent. To win that consent, to get culturally diverse
people to identify as members of a single polity, the political classes
developed national mythologies: semifictional or wholly imaginary
histories of the origins of their people and territories, which would
enable Provençals, Bretons, and Franks to see themselves as French,
or Bavarians, Prussians, and Swabians as German. They created
what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities”—or, as
Immanuel Wallerstein has it, “fictive ethnicities.”4
No modern nation is more indebted to, or dependent on, its myths
than the United States of America. The ethnic origins of our people
are the most diverse of any nation. Our myths have to work for the
descendants of Indigenous Americans and the settlers who
dispossessed them; for the heirs of masters and of the enslaved; for
those whose ancestors came centuries ago and those who arrived
yesterday; for Yiddish-speaking Jews and Sicilian Italians, Germans
and Irish, Brahmins and Dalits, Shia and Sunni, Turks and
Armenians; for a public divided by differences of class, culture,
provincial loyalties, religion, and interest.
The nation is everywhere and nowhere. We are born to our
families and the communities to which they belong, but we have to
learn to think of ourselves as spiritual descendants of ancestors not
related to us by blood—imaginary ancestors, made kindred by our
participation in a shared and ongoing history. The teaching is done
through organized public rituals, in schools provided (mostly) by the
state, and by mass media organized to address a national public.
The result of this cultural work is to establish a public consensus
about a common “American” history: the idea that we belong to a
single society, continuous in time, that we are heirs to a common
past and bear responsibility for a common future. When that
consensus breaks down, or splits into warring camps, it limits or
frustrates our ability to act as a People for an idea of the common
good.
As I use the term, myths are the stories—true, untrue, half-true—
that effectively evoke the sense of nationality and provide an
otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action.
Patriotism in this context is the political expression of nationality. It is
not simply loyalty to the state, but the acting out of a particular
understanding of why that state exists and for what purposes. It
entails a distinct set of understandings about the nation’s history,
which see its past as the necessary prelude to a certain kind of
future or destiny.
Nationality is the concept that defines full membership in the
“fictive ethnicity” of the nation-state. It is both a set of publicly
accepted standards and a subjective state of mind—the sense of
belonging to the society and of sharing fully in its culture.
Ethnonationalist states restrict full membership (officially or in
practice) to those who belong to the dominant ethnic or racial group.
This is the case, or tendency, in countries like Japan, Russia, Turkey,
and Hungary. Others (France and the United States are prime
examples) have adopted a “civic” model of nationality, which allows
immigrants to become active citizens when they have met certain
basic requirements, such as learning the language and the laws, and
taking an oath of allegiance. The strictness and limiting function of
civic standards vary from country to country, and within countries
from one period to another. US immigration and naturalization policy
changed from “open” to highly restricted in the 1920s, to more
broadly “open” again in 1965, to restrictive under the Trump
administration.
The concept of civic (or civil) religion, developed by Robert Bellah
and his associates in the 1960s, is a useful way of describing the
core ideological values carried by American national myth. Its
principal features are a reverence for the Constitution; a belief in
individual rights; a positive attitude toward religion in general and
Christianity in particular, coupled with religious toleration; a
commitment to “free enterprise”; and a government that interferes
as little as possible with civil society.5 But the principles of civic
religion can be stated as propositions to be argued. Recasting those
principles as myth puts them beyond argument. Myth does not
argue its ideology; it tells a story and equates that story with history,
as if it were undeniable fact. Moreover, myths are not only versions
of the past—they are symbolic models that are used to interpret and
respond to a present crisis. When myth-histories are invoked as
analogies to some present question, we immediately understand
how the speaker wants us to respond to the situation. “Our political
conflicts are like the Civil War.” (Radicals on both sides are
destroying the nation.) “Space is the new frontier.” (Develop it!) “The
9 / 11 attack is like Pearl Harbor.” (Go to war to avenge it.) National
myths transform the principles of civil religion into scripts, in which
believers see themselves as actors on a historical stage, fulfilling—or
failing to achieve—the nation’s historical destiny.
Public awareness of the role of national myth, and of its
increasingly embattled state, has been growing. In 2012 the editors
of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, devoted a whole issue to the question, “Is there an
American narrative and what is it?” The responses of scholars in
several disciplines expressed a common concern: “Every nation
requires a story—or many stories, which taken together form a
national narrative—about its origins, a self-defining mythos that says
something about the character of the people and how they operate
in the larger world and among each other.” And “Americans, having
no ethnic uniformity, depend on myths, which lend an aura of
destiny to our collective aspirations.” But there was no agreement
among the contributors as to what that “mythos” was or ought to
be. The collection, taken as a whole, expressed a troubled sense of
slippage and disparity.6
That disparity has developed into the intense partisan and cultural
divisions that have been characterized as the “culture war.” David
Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times, sees the
United States as suffering from a “national identity crisis” arising
from the fact that “different groups see themselves living out
different national stories” and therefore “feel they are living in
different nations.” William Smith, writing in American Conservative in
2018, saw blue and red America interpreting the “national story
through different symbolic mythologies,” leading them to embrace
“two diametrically opposed civic religions,” one libertarian and the
other tending toward socialism. There is a “Civil War on America’s
horizon,” he concluded: “All that’s required now is a spark.”7

How National Myths Are Formed

American culture is rich in myths of all sorts. For immigrants and
their descendants, the coming-to-America story is their origin myth.
The South is still marked by its history of slavery, secession, and Civil
War; westerners by their history of settlement and the struggle over
rights to public lands and natural resources. Black people and
Mexican Americans have their own myths of oppression and Exodus-
themed escapes, of trickster ploys and corrido outlaws who defend
the poor. Beyond this, Hollywood is in the business of fabricating
mythologies for the commercial market through the creation of story
genres and franchises. Two of these, the Western and the Platoon
Movie, became the basis of modern national myths; others, like the
current wave of superhero franchises, create mythic fables for
imaginary worlds.
“The American Dream” is a compendium of many different beliefs
about American life, which we invoke in rags-to-riches or log cabin–
to–White House fables, or tales of immigrants seeking religious or
political freedom and economic opportunity. Some such fables are
historical, others present-day; some represent the American Dream
as individual, others see it as a collective aspiration. There is no
single master story that grounds the Dream in a particular history
and links it to a specific idea about the power and purpose of the
state, so it does not function as a national myth.
Any well-remembered event will have its myth: a story and set of
symbols whose interpretation becomes standardized through
repetition. Rhetorical tags or memes referring to “Valley Forge” or
“the Alamo” will remind most Americans of patriotic endurance and
sacrifice. “Custer’s Last Stand” evokes the possibility of a disastrous
reversal of fortune, “Gettysburg” a decisive moment of supreme
moral and military crisis. The same is true of more recent episodes
like the appeal for a more inclusive community in Martin Luther King
Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or the surge of patriotic unity roused
by “9 / 11.”
When we speak of national myths, we refer not to single episodes
or stories such as these but to broad and consistent patterns in
storytelling, which directly address the fundamental character and
purposes of the American nation-state. Such myths arise in response
to existential crises in the life of the nation, events that test society’s
ability to react and adapt to the contingencies of history. They deal
with ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of national
life. We invoke those myths, and bring them to bear, when our
fundamental values are at stake.8
No one storyteller, however great their power, can create a myth.
Stories told by people become mythic through a process of repetition
and accretion. Like the pearl in the oyster, stories gather around
areas of persistent irritation and conflict. In nearly every phase of US
history, we can observe the recurrent conflict between individual
rights and state power, or between egalitarian ideals and persistent
racism, or between market freedom and the public interest. The
traditions we inherit, for all their seeming coherence, are a registry
of old conflicts, rich in internal contradictions and alternative political
visions, to which we ourselves continually make additions. The more
vital and enduring the problem, the more powerful and enduring the
myth.
Because they encapsulate perennial conflicts, myths are always
partially open-ended. The struggles they depict are never fully
resolved. They invite us, as believers, to complete the unfinished
business of destiny left to us by our heroes. By leaving the struggle
imperfectly resolved, they also ask us to imagine alternative
histories, what the nation might have been like if Lincoln had lived,
or the Confederacy had won, or Native Americans had succeeded in
keeping the wilderness wild. Myths thus preserve, in some form, the
values of those who were historically defeated, keeping open the
possibility of change.
Implicit in every myth is a theory of historical cause and effect: an
explanation of the forces that shaped the historical past that, if
properly understood, would give us the power to control the present
and future. This is what enables myth to function as a script for
action, to promote imaginative responses to present crises.9

How Myths Function: Mythological Thinking

Once a myth is well established, new crises can be interpreted by
recognizing analogies between current events and the scenarios of
the myth, and recalling the historical memories the myth embodies—
a process I call mythological thinking. Although it involves a poetic
leap rather than rational analysis, mythological thinking can help us
imagine effective responses to a crisis and to see those responses as
acts of patriotism. Leaders may actually think mythologically when
developing policies in response to a crisis, and they will typically
deploy mythological thinking as a mechanism for producing consent.
If the public recognizes and accepts the myth scenario as a valid
analogy for the present crisis, it will consent to political measures
that conform to that scenario.
When the thinking is creative and based on an understanding of
both past and present, our use of myth may help us imagine and
legitimize effective responses to new crises. However, it is often the
case that mythic precedents constrain our ability to understand and
respond to unprecedented crises, and provide a limited path of
action. In times of great fear and anger, the invocation of myth can
lock public consciousness into a preset pattern of thought and
action, so that we respond to an imagined past rather than a present
reality. When the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks were compared to Pearl
Harbor, and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, the analogy to
World War II gave Americans a clear understanding of how their
leaders perceived the danger and what kind of response would be
forthcoming. But the analogy was misconceived, and the resulting
invasion of Iraq was a disaster not anticipated by the historical
model.
A culture’s heritage of myth can also provide instrumentalities
through which people can transform their way of thinking and
acting. Lincoln at Gettysburg reframed the nation’s understanding of
the constitutional order when he characterized the Founders’
creation as “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.” When Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream”
speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he was framing the
modern civil rights movement not as a disruption but as the
continuation of Lincoln’s Civil War, when the aspiration to racial
equality was seen as intrinsic to the preservation of the national
union.
We use our myths to guide us in moments of crisis. But when we
do so, we test their validity against existential reality. In a healthy
society, each test produces an adaptation or adjustment of the
mythic paradigm, to keep its premises in balance with the conditions
we actually face. The fabrication and revision of mythology is an
ongoing activity, a coping mechanism of organized society. When a
mythic paradigm fails, the consequences can be serious. There have
been several such episodes of crisis and readjustment in the course
of American history. The most notable of these occurred in the
1850s, when the commitment of North and South to antithetical
myths tore the nation apart. The best that can happen is
represented by the transformation of American myth during and
after World War II, when the Good War Myth redefined America as a
multiethnic, multiracial democracy united in struggle against the
ethnonationalist tyrannies of Nazi Germany and the Japanese
Empire.10
National myths themselves have a history—that is, they change
through time. The longest-lived mythologies are the highly evolved
products of numerous crises of belief and revision. That is why a
crisis in the state of public myth signals a potential rupture of the
web of beliefs and practices that holds nations together.
 The Rupture and Repair of National Mythology
America’s crisis of national culture is part of a larger phenomenon. In
the aftermath of the Cold War, it appeared that nation-states and
nationalism were in decline, as the rapid globalization of economic
networks reduced the power of national governments to regulate or
otherwise set the terms of trade. Francis Fukuyama and other social
scientists saw this as the “end of history,” since the political,
religious, and ideological conflicts that had hitherto shaped world
history were now subsumed by a dominant neoliberal capitalist
order. For neoliberal purists, the new order would dispense with
national sovereignty in favor of a world governed by market
operations. With the collapse of Soviet Communism and China’s
apparent transition to a market economy, there was not much
strength in the Old Left vision of a world governed by an
international working class, acting for humanity as a whole.11
The fallacy of the globalist view became clear in the aftermath of
the 2008 banking crisis and the Great Recession that followed. A
wave of nationalist movements espousing populist ideologies swept
across the industrialized world, reflecting the deep discontent of
working- and lower-middle-class people with the long-term decline
of wages and economic security, the pace and direction of cultural
change, and the effects of increased immigration on both culture
and wages. The Brexit campaign that carried the United Kingdom
out of the European Union, the rise of France’s National Front and of
Hindu nationalism in India, the Fidesz takeover in Hungary, and the
MAGA movement in the United States are cases in point.
In America, the division of power between states and the federal
government has traditionally served to compartmentalize such
movements. But the hyperpartisanship and culture-war rhetoric that
now dominate American discourse reflect the nationalization of
American politics: the absorption of what once were distinctively
local political cultures into national movements exclusively identified
with one national party or the other, each with its own nationwide
media complex.12
 For better or worse, the nation-state remains the most powerful
political structure in the contemporary world. It is the largest form of
political community that has proved capable of maintaining civil
order, and some form of consensual governance, among populations
that are socially complex and ethnically diverse. It is the only
political structure with the authority to regulate the domestic
operations of capital for its own people and, in concert with like
powers, to regulate the forces of globalization in the interests of
humanity.
Patriotism is a concept to which some respond skeptically,
because it has too frequently been distorted by nationalist
chauvinism and exploited for partisan gain. Samuel Johnson’s
famous definition of patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel” is
all too apt. But patriotism is the active principle of consensual
government, the sentiment that expresses the consent of the
governed, without which republican and democratic government is
impossible. It is an essential act of social and political imagination, in
which the people of a state see themselves as a community, acting
through chosen leaders and united for self-defense and mutual
service.
In recent years, scholars, public intellectuals, and serious
journalists have produced a spate of studies aimed at explaining the
rise of illiberal populist nationalism and exploring ways of reconciling
“patriotism,” and the defense of nationality, with liberal values. The
Case for Nationalism, by the conservative Rich Lowry, argues for a
return to traditional nationalism, which has made us powerful and
free. Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: A Short History and Amitai
Etzioni’s Reclaiming Patriotism try to find paths to a new kind of
liberal nationalism through an examination of the history and variety
of nation-state organization. Jill Lepore’s This America is a plea for
historians to rethink how they write (or fail to write) national history,
arguing that the way we tell our national story shapes both our
sense of membership or belonging and our understanding of what
patriotic action can and should be. These studies are, in effect, a call
for the revision and renewal of national mythology. They are right to
see the loss of a common national story as central to the
contemporary crisis of politics and culture.13
But a new national myth cannot be fabricated on demand or
revised at a stroke. We first have to understand the nature and roots
of the myths that are actually operative, as well as the processes
through which they have evolved. It is certainly true that national
myths, here as elsewhere, have contributed to the development of
chauvinist and ethnonationalist movements. But there is more to
national mythology, and certainly elements of American national
myth have made possible a culture that has become increasingly
open to diversity of all kinds and newly sensitized to bigotry and
injustice.

The Core Myths

From the country’s beginnings as a collection of colonies or settler
states, the central question shaping the formation of an American
nationality has been whether it was possible—or even desirable—to
form a single political society out of diverse racial, religious, and
ethnic elements. In colonial and early national times, numerous
Native American tribes lived side by side with settlements that
included Africans and Europeans of several nationalities—English,
Welsh, Scots, Irish, Scots-Irish, Dutch, German, Spanish, French
Huguenot, Sephardic Jews. Through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the list expanded to include every race and ethnicity on
planet Earth. So the reconciliation of diversity and nationality has
historically been a central problem of our political culture. It has
become the most significant line of cleavage in modern politics,
between the White ethnonationalism of the Trump-led Right and the
racial and ethnic pluralism of the Democratic Center-Left.
The central conflicts in the evolution of American patriotism have
concerned the proper role and ultimate goals of the state in shaping
the domestic social order and pursuing the national interest in a
world of nations. In both spheres, ideas and issues have been
shaped by the extraordinary scale and rapidity of the nation’s
geographical expansion and economic growth, and its rise from
colonial outpost to Great Power. In the domestic sphere, the central
questions have concerned the balance between state power and
private enterprise, and the role of government in the emerging
conflicts among economic interests. On a deeper level, these evolved
into a conflict between contending concepts of social justice and
individual rights, and of the proper role of government in shaping
the conditions of social life.
Four myths have historically been the most crucial to Americans’
understanding of what their nation is, where it came from, and what
it stands for: the Myth of the Frontier; the Myth of the Founding;
three different Myths of the Civil War; and the Myth of the Good
War. To fully understand the ideological charge that each myth
carries, we have to look closely at its historical origins. That will be
the focus of the first part of A Great Disorder.
The Myth of the Frontier is the oldest and most enduring of these
myths, and the only one that did not arise from a singular crisis. The
stories that constitute the Frontier Myth are legion, appearing in
every medium and many genres—histories, personal narratives,
political speeches, popular fiction, movies—and they refer to
episodes from colonial times to the heyday of westward expansion
and the jungle wars of the twentieth century. The Myth of the
Frontier locates our national origin in the experience of settlers
establishing settlements in the wilderness of the New World. It
enshrines a distinctively American concept of capitalist development:
America has enjoyed extraordinary growth and progress, and
development as a democracy, thanks to the discovery and
exploitation of abundant natural resources, or “bonanzas,” beyond
the zone of settlement and established order. However, winning the
frontier also required “savage wars” to dispossess and subjugate the
Indigenous peoples, which made racial distinction and exclusion part
of our original concept of nationality. In the Myth of the Frontier,
these wars transform individual frontiersmen into heroes, and the
American people into members of a heroic nationality, in a process I
have called regeneration through violence. The Frontier Myth
combines bonanza economics with regeneration through violence to
explain the origin of America’s exceptional character and
unparalleled prosperity.
The Myth of the Founding centers on the creation of our political
state, which is seen as the work of an extraordinarily intelligent and
virtuous set of men of European descent, the Founding Fathers.
Certain preeminent heroes stand out—George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin—
each with a story that celebrates his personal character and his
moral and political principles. The story of the Founding is so much a
given of cultural memory that its meaning is most often invoked by
reference to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,
now sanctified as national scripture. Although these texts are
symbols of national unity, they are critically different in character and
embody the contradictions at the heart of our ideal of free
government: one a revolutionary declaration of principles that
transcend law; the other the basis of a fixed and stable
governmental and legal structure.
The Civil War would put the Myth of the Founding to its most
severe test. That conflict—which threatened America’s survival as a
nation—led to the creation of three conflicting mythic traditions. The
first of these is the Liberation Myth, with its focus on emancipation.
It sees the Civil War as an ordeal of regeneration through violence,
which not only preserved Lincoln’s “government of the people, by
the people, for the people” but produced what, in the Gettysburg
Address, Lincoln called a “new birth of freedom” that included
formerly enslaved Black people. A related Unionist variant is the
“White Reunion,” which sees the war as a conflict between brothers
who were divided by politics but reunited through respectful
recognition of each other’s courage and devotion to their cause—a
reconciliation that minimizes the importance of slavery and rejects
Black claims to civic equality. Opposed to both of these Unionist
myths is the Southern Myth of the Lost Cause, which celebrates the
virtues of the Old South and justifies the struggle to restore its
traditional culture and the structures of White supremacy. The
Liberation Myth would shape Reconstruction and ongoing efforts to
build a multiracial democracy. The Lost Cause would overthrow
Reconstruction and establish the violent and oppressive regime of
Jim Crow, an outcome tacitly ratified by Northerners who embraced
White Reunion. As the North and West began to experience mass
immigration and labor-capital conflicts between 1875 and 1930, Lost
Cause ideology would shape the formulation of a new,
ethnonationalist concept of American citizenship in which White
Protestant identity was fundamental.
In the Frontier Myth, the Myth of the Founding, and the Civil War
Myths, American nationality is defined as White, Christian, and
largely northern European. That conception of American nationality
would be challenged by a series of linked and overlapping crises in
the twentieth century: the Great War, the Depression, and World
War II. These crises—especially the two wars—compelled the
nation’s political and cultural elites to broaden the concept of
American nationality and to embrace on terms of equality racial and
ethnic minorities that had hitherto been marginalized or excluded
from the body politic. The result was the creation of a new national
myth, the Myth of the Good War, which used the war-movie
convention of the multiethnic “platoon” to celebrate a diverse
American nationality and linked the achievement of unity to our
success as a world-liberating Great Power and Cold War “leader of
the free world.” It also created the basis for public acceptance of the
civil rights movement and the overthrow of Jim Crow.
The postwar civil rights movement challenged the racialist
presumptions that were so fundamental to our national myths. It
would cue a series of cultural transformations, including a wave of
“liberation” movements affecting race, gender, and sexuality, which
coincided with radical changes in popular culture and music, and in
“manners” generally. It would also produce a major movement in
universities calling for the wholesale revision of our ways of reading
and understanding national history. With hindsight, we can see these
developments as the formation of what might be called a “Myth of
the Movement,” in which the nonviolent victory of civil rights
provided a script for transformations that blue America has generally
seen as progressive, and red America as the cause of national
degeneracy. The Myth of the Movement is only a potential addition
to the repertoire of national myth, but that potential has made it a
battlefield in the culture wars.
Although the chapters in the first half of the book relate the
development of myths to political and economic developments in
particular periods, they are not thoroughgoing studies of political
history. Rather, they are designed to show how events were
organized into story patterns, which gained mythic force through
their propagation in public media and systems of education.
References in the first half of the book are therefore drawn from my
own prior research and from the best recent scholarly books on each
period, which describe broad patterns of development, while the
discussion is focused on the formation of mythic narratives.
The second half of the book analyzes the use of national myths in
the culture-war politics of the past fifty years. It draws on both
scholarly literature and a range of primary sources, including political
speeches and manifestos, contemporary journalism, and the popular
arts (especially film and television). These chapters deal with the
ways in which the various national myths have shaped (and been
reshaped by) responses to a series of political and economic crises.
The discussion of our culture war begins with the advent of
“culture war conservatism,” announced by Pat Buchanan in his
campaign against George H. W. Bush for the 1992 presidential
nomination. The movement was rooted in the combination of
populist reaction against the economic strains of the globalized
economy and the anxieties of conservative White Christians at their
loss of cultural authority and political power. The latter strain would
eventually lead to the formation of a Christian nationalist movement
calling for the use of government power to establish a purified moral
regime. As they merged to form the popular base of MAGA, both
strains of the movement would appeal for historical authority to a
Christian version of the Myth of the Founding and, above all, to the
Lost Cause Myth that finds national salvation in the overthrow of
liberalism and restoration of the traditional social and cultural
hierarchies.
After the twentieth century, the “savage war” aspect of the Myth
of the Frontier would be reinvigorated as an organizing principle of
George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror, and the related domestic
issues of race and immigration, while the emerging conflict over
global warming pitted the imperatives of oil-based bonanza
economics against the concerns of ecologists. Finally, the Obama
presidency saw the gun rights movement become the nexus of
several strains of cultural conservatism and national myth: the
fetishization of the 2nd Amendment, which first linked unregulated
gun rights to libertarian economics, then asserted the insurrectionary
right of “2nd Amendment remedies” to block or overturn
government action—the principle behind Frontier vigilantism and the
antigovernment violence of the Lost Cause.
The concluding chapters will show that the use of myth by MAGA
is more than a one-man show. Rather, it arises from deep roots in
American culture and ideological traditions woven into our national
myths. As such, I will argue that MAGA is a movement akin to
Fascism, but with authentically American roots, combining the
ethnonationalist racism of the Lost Cause, an insurrectionist version
of the Founding, and the peculiar blend of violent vigilantism and
libertarian economics associated with the Frontier.
Reading American history through the lens of national myths will
highlight certain critical themes that run through our belief systems
and the language of our politics, allowing us to see the connections
between seemingly different aspects of our political culture—guns,
oil, race, nostalgia, nature, capitalism. It may help explain some of
the contradictions of our current politics. Why have gun rights
become a signature issue for twenty-first-century conservatives?
Why do exponents of American nationalism wave the Confederate
battle flag? Why does racial animus often outweigh considerations of
economic interest in our elections? How does our history of slave
owning affect our beliefs about the relations of labor and capital?
Why do we keep opening wilderness areas to oil drilling, even
though seven in ten Americans believe that global warming is a
menace?
Although we’ll examine the conduct of several administrations and
consider important changes in the nation’s economy, this is not a
history of policy, or an analysis of the modern capitalist system.
Rather, it is an analysis of the belief structures that underlie
policymaking and shape our understanding of capitalism. My hope is
that this study will help explain how and why historical legacies in
mythic form have constrained our responses to the problems of
global warming, racism, and economic change.
The American nation was born at a time when culture was being
reshaped by the rapid growth of print media and literacy. The
nation’s development went hand in hand with the expansion of
mass-circulation media. Journalism is the oldest and in some ways
most critical of these forms, and a primary locus of myth
development, but popular fiction is also a central feature of mass
culture. Certain story types become so popular that they evolve into
formulas or genres; and many of these coalesce around operative
myths. The Western movie and its antecedent literary forms are the
classic case, but we will look at a number of other genres as we
follow the development of national mythology.
American mythology is suffused at every level with the problem of
race. To some extent, this is true of all national mythologies. When
European nation-states took their modern form in the nineteenth
century, their national myths invoked folkloric tribal roots, often
called “racial stocks,” which lent nationality an imaginary genetic
basis. But the settlers who formed the American nation-state came
from different European nations, and the state grew in power by
displacing Indigenous people and enslaving Black Africans. Hence
the most enduring line between those who belonged to the nation
and those who did not was drawn not by language, history, or
religion (as in Europe) but by color. The contested meanings of the
color line have been fundamental to the shaping of American
nationality, politics, and mythology.14
The traditional forms of national myth were developed by and for
a society whose power structures were dominated by White men. In
consequence, the balance of gender roles in these myths is radically
unequal—men are at the center of the narratives, women at the
margins. It follows that a shift in that balance—when new
invocations of myth give central roles and agency to non-White
people and women—significant social and cultural change may be
occurring. As we’ll see, changes of that kind began to occur across a
range of expressive genres in the 1950s and 1960s.
The culture war of our time can be understood as a clash between
conflicting versions of the myths that define our national identity.
The dysfunction of our politics and our continued coherence as a
nation will depend on our ability to reconcile that conflict, and that
will require a reform or revision of our lexicon of myths. The myths
we live by arose from, and connect us to, the dark and bloody
ground of a history in which slavery shares the space with freedom,
dispossession with progress, hatred with heritage. No new or revised
mythology can unite us if it does not enable us to recognize and
begin to deal with the racial and class conflicts that have divided us.
But critical analysis of national myth by itself changes nothing. What
will be needed are new ways of telling the American story in order to
redefine the nation as the common ground of an extraordinarily
diverse people. In the Conclusion I will sketch the form such a story
might take.
 PART I

Myths of the White Republic

 1
The Myth of the Frontier

THE HISTORY of “America” really begins with the migration of Asian

peoples out of prehistoric Beringia, along the coasts, through the
mountains, across the plains, and into the woodlands, until the
North American continent was peopled and parceled into the
territories of the First Nations. The history of the nation-state named
“the United States of America”—and of the people or nationality
called “American”—begins with the invasion, conquest, and
colonization of the North Atlantic coast by European settlers, mainly
from the British Isles, in the seventeenth century. Over the course of
four centuries, the clutch of colonial settlements would grow in
population, wealth, and political power while continually expanding
their settled territory westward, from the coast to the foothills of the
Appalachians by 1750. After the War of Independence united the
colonies as a nation-state, population, wealth, power, and territory
would expand exponentially: reaching across the Appalachians to the
east bank of the Mississippi by 1810, tripling the original colonial
domain; pushing west to the Rocky Mountains and south to the Gulf
of Mexico by 1820, doubling it again; and seizing Texas and the
Southwest from Mexico and sweeping to the Pacific Coast by 1849,
increasing national territory by another third. From the settlement of
Jamestown in 1607 to 1890, when the Census Bureau declared that
the country no longer had a distinct “frontier” facing a wilderness of
undeveloped land—the history of the United States is a tale of
continual expansion, of the discovery, conquest, and settlement of
new frontiers.
This powerful and persistent association between the growing
wealth and power of the American nation-state and the expansion of
its territory into lands that were, from a European perspective,
undeveloped is the core of our oldest national myth, the Myth of the
Frontier. It defines American nationality by creating a virtual
genealogy: we Americans are the descendants (by blood or
acculturation) of those heroes who discovered, conquered, and
settled the virgin land of the wild frontier. Only a small minority of
Americans ever experienced frontier life, but through history texts
and the media of mass culture, later generations nonetheless came
to see the frontier as a symbol of their collective past, the source of
such markedly American characteristics as individualism, informality,
pragmatism, and egalitarianism. The Myth of the Frontier also
asserts that our capitalist development has been exceptional in its
successful combination of economic growth with liberal democracy,
and finds the material basis of that unique history in the continual
discovery and rapid exploitation of new frontiers in free land, natural
resources, or (in modern times) new technologies.1

Colonial Origins: Captives and Indian Fighters, 1600–1776

The colonist is the first “American” in our sense of the term: the first
of those whose political enterprise would eventually establish the
American nation-state. Colonists stand on the border between two
very different worlds: the “civilized” world of the European home
country or the metropolis, and the “wilderness” of the continent they
have come to colonize.
From the first, the promise that drove the settlement enterprise
was the expectation or hope of an economic bonanza—an
extravagant return on investment, an unprecedented abundance.
British expectations were shaped by Spanish narratives of
colonization, which described the Edenic islands of the Caribbean
floating in an azure sea, and the fantastically wealthy and
sophisticated Indigenous empires of Mexico and Peru. The first
British colonizers expected to find empires and mines of gold in
North America, and the hope of gold persisted even after it became
evident that no empires were hidden among the Appalachians. Still,
the chartered corporations that financed the original colonies, and
the settlers and entrepreneurs who followed them, did so in the
expectation of large returns from the cultivation of tobacco, the fur
trade, or the culling of ship timber from the vast American forests,
and later from products like rice and indigo.
Extravagant expectations were not restricted to commerce.
America was a kind of blank screen, onto which all sorts of fantasy
could be projected: not just the literary fantasies of Thomas More’s
Utopia or William Shakespeare’s The Tempest but operationalized
fantasies of economic, political, and religious organization. All
colonies were created by corporate charters, granted or ratified by
the king. Each created a unique kind of state, and their ocean-wide
distance from Europe gave them unprecedented license for self-
government. Some were commercial franchises granted to royal
clients to produce valuable commodities—Virginia, the Carolinas, and
New York were of this type. Others were established as refuges from
the religious warfare that tore England apart in the seventeenth
century. Sects that obtained charters could establish colonies in
which church and state conformed to their peculiar notions, and
exclude or disenfranchise the competition. The Puritan colonies of
New England imagined themselves a “New Israel,” a “city on a hill”
whose model of Christian government would ultimately spread
throughout the world. But theological differences led dissenters to
set up their own colonies in Rhode Island (Baptists), Connecticut
(quasi-Presbyterians), and New Hampshire (Antinomians). The small
and persecuted Quaker minority got one of the largest and richest
colonies, Pennsylvania. Catholics had a refuge in Maryland. Georgia
was founded by the Christian philanthropist General James
Oglethorpe to rehabilitate convicts.
It seemed that in America, the ambitious colonist could establish
and order a world entirely to his liking. That was, and is, the
grandiose vision at the heart of what we call the American Dream. In
that dream, Indigenous peoples played a complex role. Early
explorers reported that the Natives were innocent, “voyde of guile,
and such as live after the manner of the Golden Age,” in a setting
that recalled the Garden of Eden. In going to America, the colonist
could simultaneously better his material condition and restore his
connection to a prelapsarian world.2
There was a dark side to this fantasy. For some colonists, the
Natives were not Arcadian innocents but bloodthirsty savages,
cannibals who would cut “collops” of living flesh from their victims
and devour them before their eyes. Native culture also posed a more
insidious threat: the temptation for colonists to “go native,”
abandoning the constraints of civilized law and Christian morality for
the promise of greater sexual freedom and the ability to live off the
natural abundance of the land instead of earning a laborious
subsistence by the sweat of their brows. Emblematic of this problem
was the conflict in 1622–1624 between the Puritan settlers of
Plymouth and the fur-trading establishment of Thomas Morton,
called “Merry Mount” or “Ma-re Mount.” Morton allied with
neighboring tribes, encouraged marriage or sexual relations between
his employees and the Natives, and shared pagan ceremonies with
them that blended Native rituals and costumes with pagan elements
from English folk life, like the Maypole celebrations presided over by
a “Lord of Misrule.” The menace was both economic and spiritual.
Plymouth deployed its military force to drive Morton from the
country.3
It should be said at the start that all these versions of the
Indigenous peoples are fantasies, the projection of European fears
and wishes. Europeans buried the extremely varied cultures of
Indigenous America in the single concept of Indians: a name derived
from Christopher Columbus’s mistaken identification of the New
World with Asia. It is a name that reduced cultural diversity to a
single, implicitly racial identity and licensed the colonists to treat all
Natives the same way: as subjects to be exploited at will, obstacles
to settlement, or outright enemies. The real culture, spirituality,
psychology, and ambition of the Indigenous peoples differed
between nations (or tribes, as they are called), and were in any case
not at all what the Europeans imagined them to be. At the core of
colonial fantasies about Natives is the half-conscious recognition that
such reductivist symbolism was inadequate, and that Indigenous
peoples were ever capable of exceeding their presumptions and
springing terrible surprises. That sense of unknown potential—for
good, for ill, for making history different—is responsible for the
emotional and moral tension at the heart of the Frontier Myth.4
It would eventually become a premise of the Frontier Myth that
conflict between Natives and settlers was inevitable: that “savage”
hunter and “civilized” farmer, pagan and Christian, “redskins” and
White people could not peacefully coexist in the same space. The
myth would ultimately see conflict as rooted in racial difference, a
natural blood antipathy. The history of other European colonies,
notably the French in Canada (who encouraged intermarriage), gives
the lie to that assumption. But the English were settlers rather than
traders. They wanted land for an ever-increasing population, and
therefore pressed the Natives first into shrinking enclaves and
ultimately into distant territories. Native chieftains had to concede
sovereignty to colonial governors; Native villages had to welcome
Christian missionaries, but their holy men and women could not
proselytize among Christians.
Frontier settlers were also often at odds with colonial magistrates
and governors, who tried to regulate their seizure or purchase of
Indian lands—to keep the peace, to serve their own trading
operations, or simply to maintain social control. As early as 1677, the
Puritan minister-magistrate Cotton Mather complained that civil
order and Christian piety were being undermined by settlers pushing
into the woods in search of “land and elbow room.” A hundred years
later, Daniel Boone would cite the wish for “elbow room” to explain
his motives for moving ever westward, and the phrase would
become an American folk idiom. To truly have a world at your will,
and enjoy its benefits free of interference, you need to keep your
fellow man at a distance. To establish that space, you have to clear
out the Indians on one side, then fend off the demands of
metropolitan government on the other.5
 And there you have the situation of the first “American,” the
pioneer settler. He or she has made a home on the frontier between
two worlds. On the west is Indian country, beyond law or regulation,
a natural wilderness filled with unknown potential for wealth and
power, but haunted by “savages” endowed with a native
understanding of the wilderness that can and will be used against
the settler. On the east is the metropolis, the home culture that sent
the settler forth and to which he or she owes allegiance, but a place
whose ministers and magistrates seek to control the opportunities of
frontier life.

The First Myth: Captivity and Rescue

The literacy rate in colonial New England was high, and in 1638
Harvard College set up the first printing press in British North
America. An active print culture was established, publishing official
documents, histories, religious texts, and personal narratives of
religious experience. It was here that the first stories appeared that
sought to explain and justify the actions and sufferings of the New
English Israel during the crisis-ridden 1670s. The Puritan
government that had ruled England since the Civil Wars of 1649–
1654 was overthrown, King Charles II restored to the throne, and
the Anglican church reestablished in England. Then, in 1675, the
American colony was nearly destroyed by a ruinous Indian war, King
Philip’s War—named for the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whose
“Christian” name was Philip. Half the towns in New England were
burned out or heavily damaged and hundreds of men, women, and
children were killed, wounded, or carried into captivity. For a
community that thought of itself as the New Israel, such calamities
were inevitably seen as signs of God’s displeasure. The ministers
who were the colony’s spiritual and political leaders published
histories of the war framed by sermons, which compared New
England’s travails to those of the Chosen People, seeking analogies
to help them understand what God was trying to tell them. In these
sermon-histories the Indians figured as both devils and agents of
divine displeasure, rebuking those settlers who had ignored their
ministers in their quest for “elbow room.”6
The most influential interpretation of the crisis was composed not
by a minister but by the wife of a frontier preacher whose settlement
was destroyed in an Indian attack, and who had endured a long
captivity. Mary Rowlandson’s Sovereignty and Goodness of God, first
published in 1682, is a vivid personal narrative that distills the
Puritans’ troubled experience to its essentials. Her captivity takes her
on a terrible journey through a wilderness that seems to her a kind
of hell, in which she is carried farther and farther from home and
husband, from civilization and the community of Christians. But the
journey outward in alien space allows her to turn inward, to undergo
self-discovery and spiritual regeneration. She realizes that God has
chosen Indians as the instruments of her punishment, because the
Natives are fit symbols of her own sins. She had become too
acclimated to her American settlement, had come to feel “at ease in
Zion” instead of remaining ever fretful about her salvation, like a
good Puritan. She took too much pleasure in her food (gluttony) and
in smoking tobacco—a sinful pleasure learned from the Natives. In
short, she had moved too close to the “Indian” side, and God has
turned the Indians into devilish persecutors to scare her back into
the fold. Then, when she is reduced nearly to a “savage” herself,
God redeems her by an act of arbitrary grace.
Rowlandson’s captivity is a tale of spiritual rebirth or regeneration
through the suffering of violence. She figures as the representative
of Puritan colonial society as a whole, modeling the way it too can
achieve redemption—by recognizing that without shedding of blood
there is no remission of sin. As such it became the model for the first
homegrown myth of American identity. Her book was the equivalent
of a best seller in the 1680s, and it was never out of print in the
colonial period. It was also the template of a new genre of distinctly
American literature, the captivity narrative. These narratives (both
historical and fictional) were perhaps the most popular and prevalent
form of American adventure story for much of the eighteenth
century. Through the captivity myth, the structures of Protestant
Christian mythology that the settlers had brought from Europe were
applied to the secular experiences of colonization. The captive
symbolizes the values of Christianity and civilization that are
imperiled in the wilderness war.7
As the colonies grew in strength, a second type of narrative
developed, in which a male hero rescues the captive and defeats the
Indians. One of the earliest exemplars was Benjamin Church, a
contemporary of Rowlandson, whose knowledge of Indians and skill
in adapting their tactics allowed him to defeat and kill King Philip.
Church was the kind of settler the Puritan ministers and magistrates
criticized. He lived on close and friendly terms with one of the Native
nations on the Plymouth–Rhode Island border, and when war broke
out, he formed a “ranger” unit that mixed colonists with Indigenous
allies. He was often at odds with the government over strategy.
While officialdom incompetently waged a war of indiscriminate
violence, Church advocated efforts to persuade Philip’s allies to
abandon him and come over to the colonists. Church’s ideas were
vindicated when his Indigenous rangers ambushed and killed Philip
and captured his leading chiefs. Church’s history of the war—which
had the most un-Puritan title Entertaining Passages—ends with a
scene (apparently factual) of powerful symbolism: the war leader of
the captured Indians does homage to Church and clothes him in the
“royalties” of the dead King Philip, in effect anointing the Indian
fighter as the new “king” of the wild frontier.8
It is noteworthy that although Church’s narrative covers the same
time period as Rowlandson’s, his was not published until twenty-four
years later, in 1716. Its publication signals the growing confidence of
the settlers, and a shift in the development of the Frontier Myth, in
which human heroism replaces the sense of vulnerability and
helplessness expressed by the captivity narratives. This new hero is
“the White Man Who Knows Indians,” who uses his understanding of
Indigenous ways to defeat the Natives. The warfare between British
colonials and the French in Canada (and their Native allies) would
produce a series of narratives celebrating the heroism of various
“Indian-fighters,” like Church, Captain John Lovewell, Sir William
Johnson, and Major Robert Rogers of Rogers’s Rangers.
 The National Frontier: Daniel Boone and Thomas Jefferson, 1776–
1824
The American Revolution gave the frontier story a new and explicitly
nationalist twist, and produced a figure who was, after George
Washington, the first hero of American national myth: Daniel Boone,
the “Hunter of Kentucky,” the “Columbus of the Woods.” Boone was
a farmer on the North Carolina frontier whose long hunting
expeditions made him a leading explorer of trans-Appalachian trails
into Kentucky. As an agent for land developer Richard Henderson,
Boone led a party of settlers over Cumberland Gap to establish the
settlement of Boonesborough, one of several in eastern Kentucky.
These enterprises reflected the determination of colonial
entrepreneurs (Washington was one) to exploit the wild lands across
the mountains. Their ambitions were blocked by British colonial
policy that sought to reserve the transmountain west for Native
nations, which would supply furs to British factors in Canada—an
attempt to freeze westward expansion that would be a motive for
the colonists’ rebellion.
The treaties that ended the War of Independence ceded to the
United States all the British-controlled territory between the
Appalachians and the Mississippi, more than doubling the territory
controlled by the colonies in 1776, a windfall of rich farmland,
timber, and mineral resources. This was a financial bonanza for the
new government, which could now pay its demobilized soldiers with
land grants and use the promise of development to attract settlers
and investors to the United States. It was also a symbol of the
limitless potential of the new republic, adding the promise of great
riches to the vision of the United States as a model of enlightened
government for the whole world to follow. Thomas Paine had caught
the essence of that promise early in the war, in Common Sense
(1776). As Americans, he wrote, “we have it in our power to begin
the world over again.”
That utopian vision was linked to a story of frontier adventure in
Kentucke (1784), a remarkable little book by John Filson, a country
schoolmaster turned surveyor and land speculator. Filson employed
Boone as a guide to help him survey tracts for potential settlements,
and Boone told him about his adventurous life as a hunter, explorer,
and Indian fighter. Filson retold the tale, pretending the words were
Boone’s own; and he made it the centerpiece of an elaborate
promotional document, which described in detail the geography of
eastern Kentucky, the state of Indian affairs, and the wealth of good
farmland and mineral resources lying fallow there, waiting for the
firstcomers to exploit and develop it.
Filson’s Kentucky is an earthly paradise, combining the sublimity
of wilderness landscape with the pastoral charms of a new Arcadia,
“trees … gay with blossoms, others rich with fruits.” To settle there
would be to recover the lost innocence of Eden and at the same time
put yourself on the way to wealth. More: the rich promise of
Kentucky, and its strategic location on the Ohio River, would make it
the jumping-off point for a new American empire—a republican
empire like that of Rome, which (the reader will recall) was destined
to conquer the world. “In your country, like the land of promise,
flowing with milk and honey … you shall eat bread without
scarceness, and not lack anything in it.… Thus your country,
favoured by the smile of heaven, will probably be inhabited by the
first people the world ever knew.”9
By following the tale of Boone’s adventures, we imaginatively
enter and take possession of this landscape. It is Boone the hunter
who, on his solitary rambles, introduces us to the gorgeous scenery,
the freedom of the wilderness, the life close to Nature. To gain true
title to this paradise, Boone must lead his family and other civilized
folk to settle in Kentucky, replicating beyond the mountains the
original act of colonization that planted Europeans in the New World.
Like the Puritans of Rowlandson’s time, Boone and his fellow settlers
must come to terms with the Indians, first of all by defending
themselves against Native enmity. Like Rowlandson, Boone’s
daughters are captured by Indians; unlike Rowlandson, they are
rescued, not by divine grace but by the skill and bravery of their
father, the Indian-fighting hero. Thus Boone’s saga unites the two
versions of the frontier story, those of Rowlandson and Church, the
captive and the Indian fighter. But Boone goes further than Church
in identifying himself with the Native American. When Boone is
himself captured by the Shawnee, he earns and accepts adoption
into the tribe, so that “the Shawanese King took great notice of me,
and treated me with profound respect, and entire friendship, often
entreating me to hunt at liberty.” A later biographer would say of
Boone that the Indian way of life was “the way of his heart.” Boone
would become famous for his unending quest for “elbow room” and
his inability to live in a fully settled society.10
What makes him unique as a national hero is that doubleness:
though he serves the mission of settlement, his character embodies
the attraction of being Native, of truly belonging to America. That
quality makes him the most effective fighter against the Natives, but
it alienates him from the settled life his victories make possible. This
irresolution makes him the symbol of a national identity in the
process of formation, its final terms unsettled and open to
imaginative exploration.
Filson’s little book had an astonishing influence on ideas about the
American frontier, both in the United States and in Europe. His
version of Boone’s “autobiography” was frequently reprinted and
plagiarized in books and magazine articles, published in England,
and translated into French and German and circulated among
European intellectuals and businesspeople interested in promoting
emigration. Boone became a celebrity—European and American
tourists would seek him out (some successfully), as if he were an
icon of American scenery like Niagara Falls. American writers
produced several highly popular biographies, but Boone would reach
a kind of apotheosis as the model for Hawkeye in James Fenimore
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, a series of novels published between
1823 and 1841 that would codify the Frontier Myth in memorable
and enduring symbolism.11
Boone’s appeal as a symbol of American heroism owed as much to
real developments in national policy as it did to the literary skill of
Boone’s admirers. The settlement of Kentucky was inaugurated by
freelance settlers and land developers. Then, under the Articles of
Confederation and the Constitution, the national government took
charge of fostering and regulating westward expansion. Conflicting
colonial land claims were resolved by compromise; a government for
the unsettled lands north of the Ohio River was established by the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The government encouraged
settlement by granting parcels of land as payment to Revolutionary
War veterans, and the purchase of these grants by speculators was
also a factor in the development of American banking. What had
been a random popular movement was transformed into a keystone
of national policy, broadly affecting economic development,
expanding the powers of the central government, and altering its
relation with the states, the Indian nations, and foreign powers.
Thomas Jefferson integrated the economics of westward
expansion and the politics of savage war into the first systematic
ideology of American nationalism. Jefferson believed that the basis
of republican government was the citizen-freeholder, a man with
sufficient property (typically a farm) to maintain himself and his
family without becoming a client or tenant of wealthy or aristocratic
superiors. Such men could be relied on to support and defend a
state that protected them and their property, as in the classic
republics of Greece and Rome, whose citizen armies were fired by
patriotic morale. But Rome degenerated into an aristocratic empire
when its freeholder base lost its economic independence. If the
American republic was to endure, it had to foster freeholding on a
broad and permanent basis, and maintain it against the pressures
and blandishments of a world economy in which mercantile and
banking interests were preeminent. The free or undeveloped lands
of the frontier were, for Jefferson, a vast reserve on which
generations of freeholders could establish themselves. This reserve
would offset the interests and pressures that might otherwise draw
surplus population to the cities, where they would become wage-
dependent proletarians.
As president, Jefferson would turn theory into stunning fact,
through his ordering of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and purchase
of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. The Louisiana
Purchase would effectively redouble the size of the United States,
and the expedition would begin the process of pushing the national
territory west to the Pacific. Jefferson believed he had won enough
land to provide freeholding for “a thousand generations.” With its
energies turned toward the development of this vast natural reserve,
the nation would have less reason to embroil itself in foreign affairs,
avoiding the imperial warfare and mercantile competition that
absorbed the European powers and thwarted their peoples’
aspirations for democracy. As it happened, the territory that was to
have absorbed a thousand generations would be settled in five, and
westward expansion would embroil the United States in wars with
Britain and Mexico. But Jefferson had succeeded in making frontier
expansion a keystone of American political ideology, and of a
national sense of destiny.12
There were two anomalies in Jefferson’s vision. For starters, the
“free” lands awaiting American development belonged to the
Indigenous nations that already inhabited them. In Notes on Virginia
(1784), his earliest attempt to articulate a vision of American
nationality, Jefferson expressed the hope that the Natives could be
induced to accept a “civilized” mode of life, by substituting farming
for hunting-gathering and forming civil structures like those of the
colonists. As president he made some effort to achieve this goal, by
fostering trade relations, trying to prevent uncontrolled settler
encroachment on Indian lands, and sponsoring various projects for
developing Native agriculture. But the fundamental assumption of
Jeffersonian Indian policy was that the continued presence of
Natives within the United States was only tolerable if they ceased to
be “Indians,” abandoning their way of life and tribal patriotism. This
they refused to do. In the 1790s a loose confederation of tribes in
the Northwest Territory twice routed American armies, before being
defeated in 1794.
Faced with Native resistance, Jefferson (as president) considered
a plan for removing the tribes to a reserve beyond the Mississippi,
thus clearing the most productive of the new territories for settlers.13
Recognizing the inexorability of American settlement policy, Shawnee
chief Tecumseh attempted to organize the tribes between the
Alleghenies and the Mississippi, combining political confederation
with a movement of cultural revival led by his brother “the Prophet.”
Tecumseh had some success uniting the Northwest tribes and was a
powerful ally of the British in the War of 1812. His death in battle,
and the defeat of his British allies, doomed this effort at
“nationalizing” Indigenous America.14
Jefferson’s successors oversaw the removal of most of the
Northwest Territory tribes, even those that had allied with the
Americans against Tecumseh. In the Southeast several large tribes
attempted to meet Jefferson’s policy halfway by adopting a
“civilized” lifestyle. They had a mixed planting-hunting economy and
stable pattern of settlement, accepted White schoolmasters and
ministers, and even adopted that hallmark of Southern civilization,
chattel slavery. The Cherokee developed a written syllabary and a
print culture. Nevertheless, these “Five Civilized Tribes” were
targeted for removal by the elected officials of Mississippi, Alabama,
Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina, as well as the
administration of President Andrew Jackson. Over the course of the
1830s, some 80,000 were dispossessed by the armed forces of the
government and compelled to make the long march to Indian
Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Thousands perished on the Trail
of Tears—the largest instance of “ethnic cleansing” in US history. It
was an act of outrageous violence, yet not a war, since only one side
was armed.15
The savage-war side of the Frontier Myth provided another kind of
antidote to class differentiation and conflict. In the grand enterprise
of displacing the Indigenous tribes, Americans of different classes
and ethnic origins were united by the combination of economic
interest and racial Whiteness. The difference in wealth and breeding
between a Jefferson and a Daniel Boone was offset by their mutual
dependence in the war to extend White settlement. Whiteness
became the broadest and most unifying way of conceiving American
nationality. It canceled the cultural differences among South Carolina
rice and indigo planters, Virginia tobacco farmers, Kentucky hunters,
Pennsylvania Quakers, and Massachusetts Yankees.
Whiteness also enabled the assimilation of European immigrants,
whose numbers drove the population increase on which American
enterprise depended. This new concept of American nationality was
most clearly described by the French immigrant J. Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). “What,
then, is the American, this new man?” he asked. He may be a
Dutchman or German or “Hebridean” by “race”—that is, by
nationality and birth. But he adapts to the “indulgent laws” of his
adopted country, becomes a citizen or freeman, and reaps the
“ample rewards” for his labor that the laws and the natural
environment guarantee. In so doing he becomes a member of a
“new race,” the “American.” Implicit in Crèvecoeur’s narrative is the
assumption that this process of rebirth is only open to people of
European descent. Indians and Black people remain outside the
“American” racial brotherhood. America was to be a White republic.16
The second and graver anomaly was the fact that at least half of
the western territories gained after the Revolution would be
developed with slave labor. Like many of the Founders, Jefferson
believed that slavery was incompatible with the ideals of
republicanism and a society based on independent farmers. That
idea shaped the decision, made under the Articles of Confederation
in 1787, to exclude slavery from the Northwest Territory. Yet slavery
was the basis of Jefferson’s personal wealth, and of the economy of
his state. After 1795, the development and expansion of cotton
cultivation increased the South’s—and the nation’s—dependence on
plantation agriculture and slave labor. The settlement of the West
south of the Ohio River would be driven by the desire for new cotton
lands, fueled by the bonanza of productivity and profit promised by
the rich alluvial soils of Alabama and the Mississippi valley.
Calculations of economic interest were doubly reinforced by
considerations of race. Jefferson saw Black people as slaves, not
merely by circumstance but by nature: lacking intelligence and
enterprise, incapable of self-government, combining a weak moral
sense with strong sensual appetites. He believed that White and
Black people could not share the same geographical and political
space on terms of equality. One must be subservient to the other, or
“savage war” would result. In his Notes on Virginia, written in 1784,
he warned that emancipating the slaves would “divide us into
parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but
in the extermination of the one or the other race.” In fact, as
Jefferson well knew, freed Black slaves had been living peacefully
and productively in Virginia since the seventeenth century. His
prophecy reflects a deep-seated fear of racial integration, which
would have profound effects on the development of American
nationality.17
Thus the Jeffersonian Myth of the Frontier combined a vision of
America’s perpetual growth through westward expansion into
undeveloped lands with a racially exclusive definition of American
nationality that historian Alexander Saxton has called “the white
republic.”18

Codifying the Myth: Cooper’s Hawkeye and the Role of Literature

The Frontier Myth was developed and propagated through a variety
of print productions, from published sermons and political
pamphlets, to newspaper articles, to works of history and
philosophy. As the American book trade developed, literary fiction by
American writers was added to the mix. Its role in the cultural
marketplace would expand dramatically through the next century, as
literacy and readership expanded and cheaper forms of publication
lowered the cost of books.
The Frontier Myth owes much of its enduring force to the work of
James Fenimore Cooper and his innumerable imitators. The
materials from which Cooper built his novels—his idea of the relation
between wilderness and civilization, his concept of “Indian
character,” his model of the frontier hero, and even his favorite plot
device—the captivity and rescue—were all present in the culture long
before he began writing. His greatest creation, the frontiersman
Hawkeye, derives not only from Daniel Boone but more distantly
from Benjamin Church, and the White women Hawkeye is forever
rescuing from Indian captivity are the figurative descendants of Mary
Rowlandson. Nevertheless, Cooper (and artists like him) made a
critical contribution to national culture by using the novelist’s craft to
systematize the varied themes and characters of the tradition into a
coherent, dramatic, compelling, and memorable set of historically
resonant narratives.19
Another random document with
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reaction is as follows:

C₂H₅AsO + 2HCl = C₂H₅AsCl + H₂O.

The operation was carried out in an iron kettle lined with lead,
which was cooled externally by means of water and which was
furnished with a lead covered stirrer. To the kettle, which contained
from 500 to 1000 kg. of hydrochloric acid left over from the previous
operation, were added 4000 kg. of ethylarsenous oxide. The
gaseous hydrochloric acid was next led in. The kettle was kept under
slightly diminished pressure in order to assist in the introduction of
hydrochloric acid. The temperature during the reaction must not rise
above 95°. When the hydrochloric acid was no longer absorbed and
was contained in appreciable quantities in the issuing gases, the
operation was stopped. This usually occurred at the end of from one
to two days. The product of the reaction was drawn off by means of
a water pump and heated in a vacuum until drops of oil passed over.
The residue was passed over to a measuring tank and finally to tank-
wagons made of iron. The yield of the product was practically the
theoretical.
On account of the volatility of the compound and its poisonous
character, the apparatus in which it was prepared was surrounded by
an octagonal box, the sides of which were fitted with glass windows.
Through this chamber a constant supply of air was drawn. This was
led into a chimney where the poisonous vapors were burned. The
gases given off during the distillation of the product were passed
through a water scrubber.”

“Lewisite”

The one arsenical which created the most discussion during the
War, and about which many wild stories were circulated, was
“Lewisite,” or as the press called it, “Methyl.” Its discovery and
perfection illustrate the possibilities of research as applied to
Chemical Warfare, and points to the need of a permanent
organization to carry on such work when the pressure of the situation
does not demand such immediate results.
 The reaction of ethylene and sulfur chloride, which led to the
preparation of mustard gas, naturally led the organic chemists to
investigate the reaction of this gas and other unsaturated
hydrocarbons, such as acetylene, upon other inorganic chlorides,
such as arsenic, antimony and tin. There was little absorption of the
gas, either at atmospheric or higher pressures, and upon distilling
the reaction product, most of the gas was evolved, showing that no
chemical reaction had taken place. However, when a catalyser, in
the form of aluminium chloride, was added, Capt. Lewis found that
there was a vigorous reaction and that a highly vesicant product was
formed. The possibilities of this compound were immediately
recognized and the greatest secrecy was maintained regarding all
the details of preparation and of the properties of this new product.
At the close of the War, this was considered one of the most valuable
of Chemical Warfare secrets, and therefore publication of the
reactions involved were withheld. Unfortunately or otherwise, the
British later decided to release the material for publication, and
details may be found in an article by Green and Price in the Journal
of the Chemical Society for April, 1921. It must be emphasized that
the credit for this work belongs, not to these authors, but to Capt. W.
Lee Lewis and the men who worked with him at the Catholic
University branch of the American University Division (the Research
Division of the C. W. S.).
On a laboratory scale, acetylene is bubbled through a mixture of
440 grams of anhydrous arsenic trichloride and 300 grams of
anhydrous aluminium chloride. Absorption is rapid and much heat is
developed. After six hours, about 100 grams of acetylene is
absorbed. The reaction product was dark colored and viscid, and
had developed a very powerful odor, suggestive of pelargoniums.
Attempts to distill this product always led to violent explosions. (It
may be stated here that Lewis was able to perfect a method of
distillation and separation of the products formed, so that pure
materials could be obtained, with little or no danger of explosion.)
The English chemists therefore decomposed the product with ice-
cold hydrochloric acid solution of constant boiling point (this
suggestion was the result of work done by Lewis). The resulting oil
was then distilled in a current of vapor obtained from constant boiling
hydrochloric acid and finally fractionated into three parts.
The first product obtained consist in the addition of one acetylene
to the arsenic trichloride molecule, and, chemically, is
chlorovinyldichloroarsine, CHCl: CH·AsCl₂, a colorless or
faintly yellow liquid, boiling at 93° at a pressure of 26 mm. A small
quantity, even in very dilute solution, applied to the skin causes
painful blistering, its virulence in this respect approaching that of
mustard gas. It is more valuable than mustard gas, however, in that it
is absorbed through the skin, and as stated on page 23, three drops,
placed on the abdomen of a rat, will cause death in from one to three
hours. It is also a very powerful respiratory irritant, the mucous
membrane of the nose being attacked and violent sneezing induced.
More prolonged exposure leads to severe pain in the throat and
chest.
The second fraction (β, β′-dichlorodivinylchloroarsine) is a
product resulting from the addition of two acetylene molecules to one
arsenic trichloride, and boils at 130° to 133° at 26 mm. It is much
less powerful as a vesicant than chlorovinyldichloroarsine, but its
irritant properties on the respiratory system are much more intense.

The third fraction, β, β′, β″-trichlorotrivinylarsine, (CHCl:

CH)₃As, is a colorless liquid, boiling at 151° to 155° at 28 mm.,
which solidifies at 3° to 4°. It is neither a strong vesicating agent nor
a powerful respiratory irritant. At the same time, its odor is pungent
and most unpleasant and it induces violent sneezing.
 CHAPTER XI
CARBON MONOXIDE

Carbon monoxide, because of its cheapness, accessibility and

ease of manufacture, has been frequently considered as a possible
war gas. Actually, it appears never to have been used intentionally
for such purposes. There are several reasons for this. First, its
temperature of liquefaction at atmospheric pressure is -139° C. This
means too high a pressure in the bomb or shell at ordinary
temperatures. Secondly, the weight of carbon monoxide is only
slightly less than that of air, which keeps it from rolling into
depressions, dugouts and trenches, as in the case of ordinary gases,
and also permits of its rather rapid rise and dissipation into the
surrounding atmosphere. A third reason is its comparatively low toxic
value, which is only about one-fifth that of phosgene. However, as it
can be breathed without any discomfort, and as it has some delay
action, its lack of poisonous properties would not seriously militate
against its use were it not for the other reasons given.
It is, nevertheless, a source of serious danger both in marine and
land warfare. Defective ventilation in the boiler rooms of ships and
fires below decks, both in and out of action, are especially
dangerous because of the carbon monoxide which is produced. In
one of the naval engagements between the Germans and the
English, defective high explosive shell, after penetrating into
enclosed portions of the ship, evolved large quantities of carbon
monoxide and thus killed some hundreds of men. On shore, machine
gun fire in enclosed spaces, such as pill boxes, and in tanks,
liberates relatively large quantities of carbon monoxide. Similarly, in
mining and sapping work, the carbon monoxide liberated by the
detonation of high explosives constitutes one of the most serious of
the difficulties connected with this work and necessitated elaborate
equipment and extensive military training in mine rescue work.
 The removal of carbon monoxide from the air is difficult because
of its physical and chemical properties. Its low boiling point and
critical temperature makes adequate adsorption at ordinary
temperatures by the use of an active absorbent out of the question.
Its known insolubility in all solvents similarly precludes its removal by
physical absorption.
After extensive investigation two absorbents have been found.[24]
The first of these consists in a mixture of iodine pentoxide and
fuming sulfuric acid, with pumice stone as a carrier. Using a layer 10
cm. deep and passing a 1 per cent carbon monoxide air mixture at
the rate of 500 cc. per minute per sq. cm. cross section, a
100%-90% removal of the gas could be secured for two hours at
room temperature and almost as long at 0° C. The reaction is not
instantaneous, and a brief induction period always occurs. This may
be reduced to a minimum by the addition of a little iodine to the
original mixture.
The sulfur trioxide given off is very irritating to the lungs, but by
the use of a layer of active charcoal beyond the carbon monoxide
absorbent, this disadvantage was almost completely eliminated.
However, sulfur dioxide is slowly formed as a result of this adsorption
and after prolonged standing or long-continued use of the canister at
a high rate of gas flow gives serious trouble.
Considerable heat is given off in the reaction and a cooling
attachment was required. The most satisfactory device was a metal
box filled with fused sodium thiosulfate pentahydrate, which
absorbed a very considerable amount of the heat.
Still a further disadvantage was the fact that the adsorbents
became spent by use, even in the absence of carbon monoxide,
since it absorbed enough moisture from the air of average humidity
in several hours, to destroy its activity.
The difficulties mentioned were so troublesome that this
absorbent was finally supplanted by the more satisfactory oxide
absorbent described below.
 Fig. 39.—Diagram of Carbon Monoxide Canister,
CMA3.

The metallic oxide mixture was the direct result of an observation

that specially precipitated copper oxide with 1 per cent silver oxide
was an efficient catalyst for the oxidation of arsine by oxygen. After a
study of various oxide mixtures, it was found that a mixture of
manganese dioxide and silver oxide, or a three component system
containing cobaltic oxide, manganese dioxide and silver oxide in the
proportion of 20:34:46 catalyzed the reaction of carbon monoxide at
room temperature. The studies were extended and it was soon found
that the best catalysts contained active manganese dioxide as the
chief constituent. This was prepared by the reaction between
potassium permanganate and anhydrous manganese sulfate in the
presence of fairly concentrated sulfuric acid. It also developed that
the minimum silver oxide content decreased progressively as the
number of components increased from 2 to 4. The standard catalyst
(Hopcalite) finally adopted for production consisted of 50 per cent
manganese dioxide, 30 per cent copper oxide, 15 per cent cobaltic
oxide and 5 per cent silver oxide. The mixture was prepared by
precipitating and washing the first three oxides separately, and then
precipitating the silver oxide in the mixed sludge. After washing, this
sludge was run through a filter press, kneaded in a machine, the
cake dried and ground to size. While it is not difficult to obtain a
product which is catalytically active, it requires a vigorous control of
all the conditions and operations to assure a product at once active,
hard, dense and resistant as possible to the deleterious action of
water vapor.
 Fig. 40.—Tanks and Press for Small Scale
Manufacture
of Carbon Monoxide Absorbent.

Hopcalite acts catalytically and therefore only a layer sufficiently

deep to insure close contact of all the air with the catalyst is needed.
One and a half inches (310 gm.) were found ample for this purpose.
The normal activity of Hopcalite requires a dry gas mixture. This
was secured by placing a three-inch layer of dry granular calcium
chloride at the inlet side of the canister.
Because of the evolution of heat, a cooling arrangement was also
used in the Hopcalite canisters.
The life of this canister was the same irrespective of whether its
use was continuous or intermittent. The higher the temperature the
longer the life because Hopcalite is less sensitive to water vapors at
higher temperatures. Since, if the effluent air was sufficiently dried,
the Hopcalite should function indefinitely against any concentration
of carbon monoxide, the life of the canister is limited solely by the life
of the drier. Therefore the net gain in weight is a sure criterion of its
condition. After many tests it was determined that any canister which
had gained more than 35 grams above its original weight should be
withdrawn. The canisters, at the time of breakdown, showed a gain
in weight varying between 42 and 71 grams, with a average of 54
grams. It is really, therefore, the actual humidity of the air in which
the canister is used that determines its life.

Fig. 41.—Navy Head Mask and Canister.

 CHAPTER XII
DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAS MASK

While in ordinary warfare the best defense against any implement

of war is a vigorous offense with the same weapon, Chemical
Warfare presents a new point of view. Here it is very important to
make use of all defensive measures against attack. Because of the
nature of the materials used, it has been found possible to furnish,
not only general protection, but also continuous protection during the
time the gas is present.
The first consideration in the protection of troops against a gas
attack is the provision of an efficient individual protective appliance
for each soldier. The gas attack of April 22, 1915 found the Allies
entirely unprepared and unprotected against poisonous gas. While a
few of the men had the presence of mind to protect themselves by
covering their faces with wet cloths, the majority of them became
casualties. Immediately steps were taken to improvise protective
devices among which were gags, made with rags soaked in water or
washing soda solution, handkerchiefs filled with moist earth, etc.
One suggestion was to use bottles with the bottom knocked off and
filled with moist earth. The breath was to be taken in through the
bottle and let out through the nose; but as bottles were scarce and
few of them survived the attempt to get the bottom broken off, the
idea was of no value.
The first masks were made by the women of England in response
to the appeal by Lord Kitchener; they consisted of cotton wool
wrapped in muslin or veiling and were to be kept moist with water,
soda solution or hypo.

English Masks
 The Black Veiling Respirator. The first form of the English mask
is known as the Black Veiling respirator and consisted of cotton
waste enclosed in a length of black veiling. The waste was soaked in
a solution of:
Sodium thiosulphate 10 lbs.
Washing soda 2.5 lbs.
Glycerine 2 lbs.
Water 2 gals.
The glycerine was put in to keep the respirator moist, thus
obviating the need for dipping before use.

Fig. 42.—Early Gas Protection.

The respirator was adjusted over the mouth and nose, the cotton
waste being molded to the shape of the face and the upper edge of
the veiling pulled up so as to protect the eyes. These respirators
were used in the attacks of May 10th and 12th, 1915 and were
reasonably efficient against the low concentration of chlorine then
used; they were difficult to fit exactly to the face, which resulted in
leakage. The cotton waste often became lumpy and had to be
shredded out or discarded.
The Hypo Helmet. The next development of the British
protection was the so-called Hypo helmet. This is said to have
resulted from the suggestion of a Canadian sergeant that he had
seen a German pulling a bag over his head during a gas attack. It
consisted of a flannel bag soaked in the same solution as was used
for the veiling respirator and was fitted with a pane of mica as a
window. The helmet was tucked down inside the jacket which was
then buttoned up tightly around the neck. As may be seen from
Figure 43, this would not prove very satisfactory with the American
type of uniform.
This helmet had many advantages over the veiling respirator but
the window often became cracked or broken from the rough
treatment in the trenches. Later the mica was replaced by celluloid
and still later by glass eyepieces set in metal rings. These were very
effective against chlorine in the field.
The P and PH Helmets. During the summer of 1915 it became
evident that phosgene-chlorine mixtures would be used in gas
attacks and it was therefore necessary to provide protection against
this. The hypo helmet, which offered no protection against
phosgene, was soaked in an alkaline solution of sodium phenolate
(carbolic acid) containing glycerine, and with this new form of
impregnation was called the P helmet. It protected against 300 parts
of phosgene in a million of air. Since this solution attacks flannel, two
layers of flannelette were used. The helmet was further improved by
the addition of an expiratory valve, partly to prevent the man from
breathing any of his own breath over again and partly to prevent the
deterioration of the alkali of the mask by the carbon dioxide of the
expired air.
The protection was later further increased by the addition of
hexamethylenetetramine, and this mask is known as the PH helmet.
This increased the protection to 1,000 p.p.m.
The early types of helmet offered no protection against
lachrymators. For this purpose goggles were used, the later types of
which had glass eyepieces and were fitted around the eyes by
means of rubber sponge. While intended for use only after a
lachrymatory bombardment, the troops frequently used them during
and after an ordinary gas attack when the mask should have been
worn. Consequently they were withdrawn.
The PH helmet was unsatisfactory because of the following
reasons:

(1) It was warm and stuffy in summer;

(2) It deteriorated upon exposure to air;
(3) It was incapable of further development;
(4) It had a peculiar odor and, when wet, frequently
burned the foreheads of the men;
(5) It offered practically no protection against lachrymators.
Fig. 43.—Method of Wearing
the P. H. Helmet
 Fig. 44.—Early Type of Standard
(British) Box Respirator (S. B. R.)

Box Respirator. The increasing concentration of gas from

cylinder attacks and the introduction of shell, with such gases as
chloropicrin and superpalite, led, early in 1916, to very definite and
constructive efforts on the part of the British to increase the
protection offered by the mask. The result was a “polyvalent”
respirator of the canister type (the Standard Box Respirator). This
mask was probably the result of experience with oxygen apparatus
in mine rescue work. The lines on which this canister was modeled
involved the use of a canister filled with highly sensitive absorbent
charcoal mixed with or alternating in layers with oxidizing granules of
alkaline permanganate. It was the result of innumerable
experiments, partly conducted in France but mostly in England under
the direction of the late Lieut. Col. Harrison, who was almost entirely
responsible for the wonderful production of this respirator.
The respirator (Figure 44) consisted of the canister mentioned
above, which is attached by a flexible tube to a facepiece or mask.
The facepiece is made of rubberized fabric and fits the face so that
there is little or no leakage. This is secured by means of tape and
elastic bands which fit over the head. The nose is closed by means
of clips, which are wire springs with rubbered jaws covered with
gauze (Fig. 45). Breathing is done through a mouthpiece of rubber;
the teeth close on the rubber tabs and the rubber flange lies between
the teeth and the lips. The expired air finds exit through a rubber
flutter valve in an angle tube just outside the mask. This
arrangement furnishes a double line of protection; if the face piece is
punctured or torn, gas-containing air cannot be breathed as long as
the noseclip and mouthpiece are in position.
The early English canister was packed with 675 cc. of 8-14 mesh
war gas mixture, 40 per cent of which was wood charcoal and 60 per
cent reddish brown soda-lime granules. The metal dome at the
bottom of the can was covered with a thin film of cotton. At two-thirds
of the distance to the top was placed a paper filter and a heavy wire
screen which differs from our heavy screen in that it is more loosely
woven. The mixture was covered with a cotton filter pad and a wire
screen, over which was placed the wire spring.
The use of this mask ensures that all the air breathed must enter
the lungs through the canister. This air passage is entirely
independent of leaks in the facepiece, due either to a poor fit about
the face or to actual leakage (from a cut or tear) of the fabric itself.
The facepiece is readily cleared of poison gases which may leak in.
This is accomplished by taking a full inspiration, releasing the
noseclip, and exhaling through the nose, which forces the air out
around the edges of the facepiece.
On the other hand, this type of mask possesses a number of very
obvious disadvantages, particularly from a military point of view:
The extreme discomfort of the facepiece. This discomfort arises
from a number of causes certain of which are inherent in this type of
mask, among them being: (a) the noseclip, (b) the mouthpiece, and
(c) the lack of ventilation within the facepiece chamber.
Aside from the actual physical discomfort of the noseclip and
mouthpiece, which becomes intense after long periods of wearing,
this combination forces upon the wearer an unnatural method of
respiration to which it is not only difficult to become accustomed, but
which also causes extreme dryness of the throat. The mouthpiece
greatly increases salivation and as swallowing is rather more difficult
with the nose closed, this adds another extremely objectionable
feature.
Fig. 45.—Interior of S. B. R., Showing
Cotton Wrapped Noseclips.
 Fig. 46.—French M-2 Mask.

The lack of ventilation in the facepiece chamber entraps the heat

radiating from the face and retains the moisture which is constantly
evaporating from the skin. This moisture condenses on the
eyepieces, and even if cleared away by the use of a so-called anti-
dimming paste, usually makes vision nearly impossible.

French Masks
M-2 Mask. The early protection of the French Army was obtained
from a mask of the type M-2 (Fig. 46).
This mask consists of a number of layers of muslin impregnated
with various absorbent chemicals. A typical mask was made up of 20
layers of cheesecloth impregnated with Greasene and 20 layers
impregnated with Complexene. These solutions were made up as
follows:
Complexene: 39.0 lbs. Hexamethylenetetramine
37.5 lbs. Glycerine
Nickel sulfate (NiSO₄·7
27.5 lbs.
H₂O)
Sodium carbonate
11.8 lbs.
(Na₂CO₃)
Water
Greasene: 107.0 Castor oil
lbs.
81.0 lbs. Alcohol (95%)
10.7 lbs. Glycerine (90%)
Sodium hydroxide
3.1 lbs.
(NaOH)
This mask fits the face tightly and as a consequence the inhaled
air can be obtained only by drawing it through the pores of the
impregnated fabric. There is no outlet valve. The exhaled air makes
its escape through the fabric. The eyepieces are made of a special
non-dimming celluloid. The mask is protected from rain by a flap of
weather proof fabric, which also protects the absorbent chemicals
from deterioration.
At the beginning of the war the United States experimented
considerably with the French mask. Several modifications of the
impregnating solutions were suggested, as well as methods of
application. One of these was to separate the components of the
complexene solution and impregnate two separate layers of cloth;
this would make a three-layer mask. In view of the phosgene which
was in use at that time, the following arrangement was suggested:

20 layers of hexamethylenetetramine,
10 layers of nickel sulfate-sodium carbonate,
10 layers of greasene.

This arrangement was more effective than the original French

mask and offered the following protection when tested against the
following gases (concentration 1 to 1,000, rate 30 liters per minute):
Phosgene 65 minutes
Hydrocyanic acid 60 minutes
Chlorine 60 minutes