American Myths Part One: Origins

We take a closer look at four well-worn stories: that of Christopher Columbus, Pocahontas, the Pilgrims and Puritans and the Founding Fathers and ask what is actually true. They're our foundational origin myths, but why? And since when? Author Heike Paul, author of The Myths That Made America, is our guide.

American Myths Part 1.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

American Myths Part 1.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix This transcript may contain errors.

Hannah McCarthy:
Hi, Nick.

Nick Capoodice:
Hey, Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy:
And hello listener. You're listening to Civics 101 and its story time. And actually, this is going to be an episode in two parts Part one America's Origin Stories. More specifically, America's origin myths.

Nick Capoodice:
Do we have myths?

Hannah McCarthy:
Oh, Nick, we are myths.

Nick Capoodice:
Okay. I'm very excited for this, in part because my older son right now is absolutely obsessed with Greek myths. And it's Greek above all else. Like other myths don't even come close to cutting it. He sees Greek myth as the truest myth.

Hannah McCarthy:
Okay, this is very interesting because, Nick, what's a true myth like truth is not the point of myth. The point of myth is to create morals and principles and power dynamics and cultural practices, which is not necessarily to say that myths are about lying. They're just about finding the strongest story to build a world around. And mind you, myths are important. We do need them. But sometimes the question is how long do we need them for?

Heike Paul:
Let's start with this idea of a myth. You know, when you look at what is a myth, a myth is something that tries to create kind of a larger framework, a larger meaning, maybe kind of a spiritual dimension even. And you do this by mythic narratives. Of course, those myths that I discuss are modern myths, if you will. They are not classical myths. They don't go back to antiquity. So these are modern myths that provide ontological security and that eliminate contingency.

Hannah McCarthy:
This is Heike Paul. Anyone who reads our newsletter knows that I recently discovered her wonderful book, The Myths That Made America. And I devoured it. And Heike, as you may guess, is not herself American. She's a professor of American studies at Friedrich Alexander University in Bavaria.

Heike Paul:
I think there's always this fascination with the US as this very strong. At least we used to think that way. Very strong, imagined community that likes to display the flag all over the place, you know, that is into civil religion, the Pledge of Allegiance. I mean, these are things that, for a German, are very strange.

Hannah McCarthy:
And before we dig into this American strangeness, I have to say that, like his book is nuanced and it's deep and it's really good. And, Nick, I'm not going to do a justice. I can't There is so much more going on. And if you read it, I believe that you will get a complete picture. And also it's open source on JSTOR store. So if you can, I encourage you to indeed dig deeper. But what we're going to do today is take a look at the seven myths that she lays out and why on earth they exist and why they matter and how we've used them. So the big why.

Heike Paul:
When I speak to my students about this idea of an imagined community, I always tells them, you know, when you have a romantic relationship with somebody, then you constitute a collectivity. This collectivity needs to be nourished. You know, this is why you always tell each other stories about when you met the first time, what was it that got you interested in this other person? You have an anniversary. You know, you had you do things that that binds you together to eliminate contingency and to make you, you know, convinced that it could be no other person that you're with. No one else would take all the boxes. Right. So any collectivity needs to create this kind of meaning. Right. And so, like, if you are a couple, of course you know each other. If you're your family that gets larger. And a nation, any modern nation state also needs to do that.

Nick Capoodice:
Eliminate contingency.

Hannah McCarthy:
Yeah. In other words, if you have a shared agreed upon collection of stories and beliefs, then you're less likely to have to plan for potential issues in the future, like you're already agreeing. So a partnership needs that and the nation needs that. And these myths that we're about to talk about, they really start to emerge as the country is hitting a fever pitch of immigration in the 19th century.

Heike Paul:
And I think here with the emergence of the modern nation state in the 19th century, we also see the emergence of these kinds of modern myths that are connected to the nation or the nation state and that stabilize the nation state as an entity that is not questioned every other day within Europe. And you think of the emergence of the modern nation states in France or Germany or wherever. Of course, there was this reach back to one's own history, right? You would go back to the Middle Ages or maybe even antiquity. But there was a sense that, you know, something has happened in that place that you could feed into this national mythology. In the US, of course, we all know there were communities living in North America and the Americas at large, but the native perspectives were not the ones that were fed into the foundational mythology. For for a long time, I would say quite the contrary, sort of the native presence is really an exception.

Nick Capoodice:
Okay, so we needed some collective history, but we didn't want it to have anything to do with the people who were here already, who had a long history.

Hannah McCarthy:
With one notable exception, and we will get to that. But yeah.

Heike Paul:
There was a more conscious process, I would say conscious selection process also by a kind of an intellectual elite at the time of the founding. And it was kind of a balance that needed to be created between, on the one hand, borrowing from highly considered European tradition and sources, but on the other hand making sure this is not who we are, we are not Europeans. We are Americans. And so this is maybe a second dimension of why this is so interesting in the United States. You know, this balancing out of foreign influences with kind of a making it new aspect energy, but at the same time really obscuring the indigenous roots.

Hannah McCarthy:
So in her book, Heike covers seven myths in total. But like I said, this is an episode in two parts. So part one, we're going to talk about the four origin myths. Part two we will take on the three myths that laid the groundwork for America's future. So the origins we've got the stories of Christopher Columbus, Pocahontas, the Pilgrims, Puritans, and the Founding Fathers. Heike calls these:

Heike Paul:
The VIPs of American beginning.

Hannah McCarthy:
Speaking of the VIPS of American beginnings.

Heike Paul:
Yeah, with Columbus, the one thing that we need to be aware, I think, and that's also very funny, is that for being like the first great national hero of the United States, he was somebody who had never set foot on the territory that now is the United States, right? He only got as far as the Caribbean, never even made it to the south of Florida. And so that's kind of a paradox, of course, that you have here. This guy, he's Italian. He sails for the Spanish crown, he visits the Americas. He doesn't know where he is. You know, he doesn't even think that he is in the Americas. He thinks he's on the back side of India, also dies, not finding out that he's not in India, but he's not even touching US American territory. And so many scholars have pointed that out. Of course, I was not the first to point that out. When you have just to see the way that not Columbus discovered America, but that, in fact, I think this is Claudia Bushman, who says America discovered Columbus at some point to make him out sort of a larger than life national hero at a time when they needed one. Right. And so why did they need one? Okay. So it was in the late 18th century.

Nick Capoodice:
Late 18th century America, a.k.a the time of the Constitutional Convention. We finally are our own thing.

Heike Paul:
There was not a tradition to hearken back to in the United States, not the kind in any case that was desired. There was this strong conflict, of course, with the British War, Revolutionary War, War of Independence. You didn't want to really take recourse to the fact that there was a lot of Britishness in the new world. So you had to pick somebody who was not British, and so you picked Columbus.

Nick Capoodice:
So these revolutionaries were desperate for something, anything historical to cling to, and it couldn't have anything to do with the millennia of existing human history that was already here in this country. So they pick someone who technically has nothing to do with what was about to be the United States.

Hannah McCarthy:
Oh, Nick, you mean with what was about to be Columbia?

Nick Capoodice:
All right. Right. We talked about this in another episode. We didn't call ourselves America. We were Columbia back in the day. That's because of Christopher Columbus. And then, of course, we have Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia and towns called Columbus everywhere. Wait, hold on. Columbia University.

Hannah McCarthy:
As in formerly Kings College. Oh, yeah. That's all. Christopher Columbus, or I should say Cristoforo Colombo, because Christopher Columbus is not an Italian name. Right. But he is an Italian man in the US. The man, Christopher Columbus, was revered. But then the idea that he came to represent just became this like, separate, glorious thing. You see these portrayals of America as this sort of goddess woman Columbia, you know what I'm talking about, Like in the painting of Manifest Destiny. Right, right, right, right. With the woman laying out the power lines like that's Columbia. Yeah.

Nick Capoodice:
She was our pre Uncle Sam.

Hannah McCarthy:
Uncle Sam. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So why the man, Christopher Columbus? To begin with.

Heike Paul:
Columbus was not only not British and therefore made a good national hero for Americans, he was also somebody who was a little bit troubled by the fact that he had to sail for a queen who was not forever grateful to him. Quite the contrary. He was incarcerated. You know, he, you know, became this kind of tragic figure in canonical accounts in any case. And so here you had like this larger than life adventurer and explorer who then also became the victim of a monarch was not appreciated. And so, yes, let's take Columbus. And you could at this point, you could use him to to engage with this idea of conquest crossing the continent westward. You could just be those who would successfully continue Columbus Quest to India, you know, one step further. And that would then also nicely tie in with. The frontier narratives with Manifest Destiny, you know, everything kind of could be sensibly connected to the worship of Christopher Columbus.

Nick Capoodice:
And in the soon to be independent United States, I assume the whole conquest thing was really useful when it came to sanctifying our tendency to oppress and enslave.

Heike Paul:
When you see early visual representations, you will always see that there is this immense hierarchy between a figure like Columbus and his his cross, you know, superior religiosity closed, fully closed, ornamental. And then there's always not really individual people that he meets upon arrival. They always the groups of natives, you know, they're not individualized. And there are usually naked. They're depicted as much smaller than Columbus in the images. And they also depicted as being in or being oppressed, frightened, but obviously accepting this figure of this authority of the white explorer.

Hannah McCarthy:
And then, Nick, and this is really important not just to this American myth, but to all of the myths that Heike talks about in her book, The shifting populace of the United States shifted the myth itself.

Heike Paul:
For all the reasons that he was so practical as a hero for early America. I think in the 19th century we can see that there were also some who felt that maybe he was not the right kind of guy to represent the American nation, for one thing, because it was discovered or people remember that after all, he was Catholic.

Nick Capoodice:
Why is that a problem?

Hannah McCarthy:
Well, Catholic immigrants in the 19th century experienced a good deal of stigmatization and discrimination as immigrants from Ireland and Italy streamed in, Protestant America in particular became suspicious of Catholics. So Columbus is a Catholic, just like these immigrants. They don't love that. But what ended up happening is that some Irish and many Italian immigrants in particular began to think of Columbus as a kind of founding father. He was Italian. He was credited with being the first one here in America, etc., etc..

Nick Capoodice:
So when was the turnaround Like? What point did people finally take a look at the whole picture and start talking about how Christopher Columbus was in fact a murderer and an enslaver and he might not be the best choice as the representative of a country who is trying to wrestle with its own past atrocities.

Heike Paul:
With the 20th century major revisionism taking place around the 1992 anniversary, quote unquote, of the quote unquote discovery. So what do you do? 500 years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean, what is there to celebrate?

Hannah McCarthy:
It was actually during this quincentennial that states started sheepishly backing away from the nationwide devotion to an unsavory historical figure who never actually came here to begin with. That's when you started to hear about Indigenous People's day being celebrated in place of Columbus Day.

Nick Capoodice:
I think the first time I started to hear about this was when I read this book Lies My teacher told me, But what you've been telling me is is true. Like he wasn't here, he was a bad guy. And yet there is so much resistance to that shift away from Columbus.

Archival:
It is Columbus Day, if you didn't know. But several cities across the country will celebrate Indigenous Indigenous Peoples Day instead. Indigenous. Some far left groups like Antifa are...

Hannah McCarthy:
Calling for violence yet. Well, Christopher Columbus was actually taken in by the Irish and especially the Italians who were predominantly Catholic.

Nick Capoodice:
Absolutely. I think we had a Columbus bust in our house growing up.

Hannah McCarthy:
Oh, wow. Okay. Because that was the connection that these immigrants had to America's founding. Their legitimacy and their patriotism all wrapped up with a nice, neat little bow in one historical figure and in part two of civics one and one on American myths. I'm going to come back to that point, Nick, of why it's so seriously hard to let go of all of these myths. But for now, origin myth number two, Pocahontas.

Heike Paul:
Even though we still see her as this wonderful woman, enticing, attractive, exotic as the object of a romantic affair, of romantic desire. We know now, of course, you could have done all along that. Of course, she was not romantically infatuated with John Smith because she was, I don't know, seven, nine, 11. I don't know. She was she was a child and he was in his mid to late thirties.

Hannah McCarthy:
Also, Pocahontas, not her formal name. Her formal name was Amonute. Pocahontas was a nickname. So a major part of the Pocahontas story is the part about her being a quote unquote, "Indian princess." She's the daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Algonquin Nation, and the leader of a very strong coalition of tribes. When Captain John Smith and others came from England to Jamestown, Virginia.

Heike Paul:
And so there is an encounter. Pocahontas is a little girl. John Smith is a man in his thirties. They meet I guess we know that they met the Smith falls out of favor or not? I mean, it goes back and forth, but then he feels like he's being captured by Powhatan and he is supposedly about to be executed. And in his own retelling of what happened, it is Pocahontas who falls, jumps into the arms of Powhatan to say, No, please, I love him, don't kill him. That is the official version. And then John Smith says, You know, she saved my life because she is madly in love with me as women all over the world. Because we know from his trip to Turkey and the other places that always women fell in love with him and saved him. And that's his that's his story all along.

Nick Capoodice:
John Smith is like, Women are obsessed with me everywhere I go.

Hannah McCarthy:
It's in his journals, man. Oh, by the way, here's another major part of the Pocahontas story. We don't have anything that she wrote. It's all just accounts from other people in her life. So John Smith writes that he's about to be executed and Pocahontas saves him. You may have seen the fairly well known drawing. It's from the 1600s. It shows Pocahontas throwing her body over John Smith to prevent the executioner's blow. Alternatively, you may have seen the 1995 Disney classic animated film Pocahontas, in which the exact same scene happens.

Nick Capoodice:
Still haven't seen it.

Heike Paul:
But I was writing the book actually. I still had students young enough to have been in the Disney craze when the film came out. And then then we had one session where everyone brought their Pocahontas Barbies.

Hannah McCarthy:
Full disclosure, I had the Pocahontas Barbie.

Nick Capoodice:
You didn't.

Hannah McCarthy:
I did.

Nick Capoodice:
Where is it?

Hannah McCarthy:
I don't know where it is now, man. Anyway, back to the supposed rescue.

Heike Paul:
Now, in light of ethnographic and anthropological scholarship, we now tend to read the rescue scene. Not as a rescue scene at all. We tend to read it as a scene of adoption. There are a number of scholars who are quite established who have convincingly argued that what is happening here is that Smith is adopted into the tribe of the Algonquin and that Pocahontas is given the role of being kind of the special mediator, of being kind of a special relation to him, but not in a romantic way at all.

Nick Capoodice:
All right. So not only was Pocahontas a child who most certainly was not madly in love with Captain John Smith, she also never dramatically saved his life.

Hannah McCarthy:
No, it was more like an elaborate ceremony to improve interrelations that John Smith totally misinterpreted.

Heike Paul:
He's wounded. He goes back to England. Pocahontas thinks he's actually dead. You know, she nobody tells her that he has left. You know, she thinks he has died within the conflict between the natives and the English. She's taken captive. She's held in captivity by the English. And then she's basically forced, coerced or whatever to marry John Rolfe to settle interracial relations in the colony. And she does that. She marries son. She has a son with him. They go to England to promote the colony. This is a big promotion thing, you know, And I want to get more resources. They need more people. So they go to London. Saw her off as lady Rebecca, as is most famous. Famous portrays when she looks like she's, in fact not Indian at all or not native. And as Lady Rebecca, she is having an audience at the court. She catches the virus, after all, she's sick and then she dies and is now buried in Gravesend in south of England. She never makes it back on the ship to go home.

Hannah McCarthy:
And Heike pointed out that when you see etchings or images of Pocahontas, of humanity post marriage to John Rolfe, she's portrayed as someone who appears a lot closer to a white woman than anything else. I mean, they called her Lady Rebecca.

Nick Capoodice:
Hmm.

Hannah McCarthy:
She was this figure used to represent unity, cohesion, defense of the white colonizer. Harmony.

Heike Paul:
So Pocahontas is made out to be this exceptional figure because she, again, in the colonial mindset, was the first one to see how important the English were and how attractive and.

Hannah McCarthy:
How.

Heike Paul:
How much of the future was the English in America. And so in the 19th century, again, there is this concoction of this romantic plot between her and John Smith. Sometimes it's just like really one author who writes about it, and then it is carried over by other authors. And it's, you know, it becomes this tradition. But then when you go back to the source, you see what nonsense this actually is. But it has given us volumes and volumes of trashy romance novels.

Nick Capoodice:
So basically there's this completely false alternative narrative about things somehow being good. Some love story at the center of important relationships between the Jamestown settlers and the Poulton, Even though it didn't happen.

Heike Paul:
Since this could not take place, this utopian scenario did not evolve. That also then gave white settlers a reason or legitimacy or justification just to have it any other way.

Hannah McCarthy:
In other words, because Pocahontas represented both settler and trans-Atlantic romance and unification, which she did not. This kind of takes care of the problem of the displacement and worse of indigenous people. And we have two more origin myths coming your way. But first, we're going to take a quick break.

Nick Capoodice:
But before we go, Hannah, I'm willing to bet whatever newsletter comes after this episode will be essentially what would happen if anyone out there asked you a question about this book?

Hannah McCarthy:
In other words, 3 hours of slightly free form stream of consciousness gushing about American myths?

Nick Capoodice:
Yes, my current one I'm typing up now is about black licorice. So but all the stuff that Hannah and I write is compacted to fit in our newsletter, which you really should subscribe to. It's just good stuff and we don't try to sell you anything.

Hannah McCarthy:
And I will tell you about the early days of American History scholarship and how it defined basically everything we learned for like well over 100 years.

Nick Capoodice:
You can subscribe to that newsletter, Extra credit at our website, civics101podcast.org.

Hannah McCarthy:
We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. And in part one of this two parter on American Myths, I'm speaking with Heike Paul about her book, The Myths That Made America. We're talking about the origin stories held so near and dear and sometimes less near and dear. Moving on to the third origin myth that Heike covers the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Promised Land.

Heike Paul:
Here we have, I think, a myth that is clearly steeped in kind of a religious experience or that is using religious experience to talk about a secular dimension or secular development. So the Promised Land, of course, is a a topos that we take from the Old Testament. It's the narrative of the exodus. So actually quite early in the Old Testament and the Exodus story is about the Israelites escaping bondage and slavery in Egypt, crossing the wilderness, crossing the Red Sea, and then finding their utopia or their home or their own sort of territorial sovereignty. And so in the midst of the promised land, the exodus part is always the nice part to tell. Everyone likes to tell that part. It's about the Mayflower. It's about escaping British oppression, it's about religious toleration, and it is about finding freedom for religious practice elsewhere in the United States and Massachusetts Bay. Of course, from the beginning there is conflict in the colony. And then, of course, there's also conflict with those who are already there living there, namely the Native Americans. The idea of the promised land is giving a religious dimension to the narrative of settler colonialism. Again, it makes it less contingent. It makes it justifiable. It makes it legitimate because it's been ordained by God himself. It is a contract, as it is often called. A covenant between God and the worshipers. And God is rewarding the worshipers with the land that He brings them to. So that would be the straightforward narrative of the Pilgrims and the Puritans. This has gone down the centuries also as a narrative of a land grab, as a narrative of extermination, as a narrative of being extremely narrow minded, in fact, talking about religious toleration. Right.

Hannah McCarthy:
See religion and God, not unlike the exact way they had been used by the monarchy of England for forever ordained and justified Puritan takeover and condemnation of everything that wasn't Puritan and all under the guise of liberty, right? Religious liberty. And you might say, well, how is that tied to modern America?

Heike Paul:
Well, Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy:
Yes, Nick.

Nick Capoodice:
How is that tied to modern America?

Heike Paul:
I think this whole idea of civil religion is linked to the to the Puritans.

Nick Capoodice:
What does she mean by civil religion here?

Hannah McCarthy:
This is the concept that even though America doesn't have an actual sectarian national religion, we do have collective beliefs and rituals and iconography. So that is what we refer to as civil religion.

Heike Paul:
Of course, we have other elements of religious connotations that we find in civil religion. God bless America and God we trust. I mean, these are things that are also quite striking for a secular nation state. And when you have an outside perspective, this may be puzzling, you know, because Americans always find it strange that, you know, in Bavaria we have lots of religious holidays in the calendar and we're a secular nation. Why do you have religious holidays? You know, and then, you know, I point out, yeah, but you have in God, we trust on every corner.

Hannah McCarthy:
So moving forward in time, you can tie God to this idea of America as utopia, as a biblical promised land. And then that becomes a useful myth to, for example, empower people who were brought here against their will, who were enslaved. Post emancipation. This idea could, you know, reinforce what the formerly enslaved were owed here in the promised Land and then jump ahead again. Look at the immigrants whose transition to America was an exodus to the city on the Hill.

Nick Capoodice:
Real quick, out of curiosity, I understand that this idea of the promised Land is this really powerful image. And God has always, always been a useful justification for all sorts of power moves. But why the Puritans and why this like why this Massachusetts centric creation story about what America is? Why is it these folks in hats with buckles on their shoes shooting turkeys? Why is it that the Puritans get the first Americans ever prize?

Hannah McCarthy:
Apparently, Nick, a big part of it is that they just wrote prodigiously, like talk about not having any of Pocahontas writings. We have gobs of Puritan writing.

Heike Paul:
Just by the sheer amount of text production they did. They made sure that they had a lasting grip on whoever came after them.

Hannah McCarthy:
All right. Fourth and last origin myth. You know who's coming, Nick?

Nick Capoodice:
Who?

Heike Paul:
So we move on to the Founding Fathers.

Archival:
For God's sake, listen.

Hannah McCarthy:
To one big, happy, harmonious group of dads.

Heike Paul:
No matter where you make the cuts and who's in and who's out, there's always this idea, you know, Thomas Jefferson, Madison and, of course, Washington representing Virginia or the South at the founding moment. And then there are people like Franklin or John Adams or who are more representing the North. And then we can see that it's really hard to make them out as a group because they were so different from each other and they were not really kind of a harmonious group to to steer those colonies and to make them into one homogenous nation. Right? So from the beginning, the closer you look at them, the more you will see that they had lots of issues with each other. I mean, I think Adams and Jefferson probably hated each other.

Hannah McCarthy:
I did want to point out that the conversation about the Founding Fathers, those revered and utmost principled men who bestowed upon us the greatest government foundation known to man, has thankfully shifted in part to an acknowledgment of their flaws, failings and contributions to and participation in enslavement.

Heike Paul:
And I think that the myth of the Founding Fathers has evolved because of these debates, has evolved a lot, you know, So I think that's very important to see them not no longer as these figures of progress, enlightenment, independence and so forth, but to see them really as representatives of all of the cognitive dissonances of the time that they were living in still.

Nick Capoodice:
Hannah there is an almost worshipful reverence for these men who penned the precious documents at the center of American life.

Heike Paul:
I think that with regard to the foundational documents and the so called authors of that documents, there is a lot of mythologizing. Right. Pauline Mayer. She refers to the foundational documents as American scripture, as kind of the Bible of Americans. And when you go look at them at the archives, National Archives, that is the sense that you get. I remember that the first time I went there, I, I was asked to get rid of my chewing gum. I was asked to stand straight in a row. And I was really disciplined. Right. Disciplined not only for security reasons before I could enter this hall, you know, dimly lit and bow in front of the shrine that held the Declaration of Independence. And to me, this was really strange, you know, But I remember the chewing gum thing. So, yeah, I was disciplined into kind of a right kind of person to be able to visit this document. So it's a document, but of course, it's also the people it's about they were self-consciously stylizing themselves and each other with regard to the foundational role that they played in the creation of the United States.

Hannah McCarthy:
The founding Fathers, or importantly, framers, as you'll often hear us refer to them on this show, because to make his point, the father thing is part of the myth. Our personifications of American patriotism, of the establishment of an independent nation and rebirth through revolution of a homogenous group coming together to foster and facilitate a new world in the new world to perform a near miracle. Of course, they were in actuality, statesmen, politicians who disagreed, who enslaved people who represented the cultural and economic elite, who in this part, Nick, I had honestly never considered, but of course, who lucked into a fortunate confluence of events.

Heike Paul:
When we think of a miracle, then I think it really the miracle is really the coincidence of so many different things that happened that made this possible. Maybe, yeah, this is really retroactively inventing a position of power and authority to speak and to utter performatively we the people right at the moment, they utter it. They are not authorized. But then with the sort of retroactively installing themselves at the seat of power, it kind of makes sense.

Hannah McCarthy:
By the way, do you know when the term Founding fathers was first used?

Nick Capoodice:
I don't. Do you?

Hannah McCarthy:
I do. It was used by at the time, Senator Warren G. Harding at the 1916 Republican National Convention in a speech of his.

Nick Capoodice:
Wow. So, like, right before our involvement in World War One.

Heike Paul:
Mm hmm.

Hannah McCarthy:
So, Nick, that takes care of, like, a for origin myths for America. And there are three more where that came from. In part two, America's Progress and Future Myths, which I warmly recommend you listen to right now. This episode of Civics one two, one was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Jacqui Fulton is our producer. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music In this episode by Lobo Loco 91Nova, Casa, Kick Osamayo, Marxist. Howard Harper Barnes, Chris Zabriskie, Tigran Viken, Gregor Quendell, Timothy Infinite and Sara the Illstrumentalist. You can check out everything we've ever made at our website, civics101podcast.org. And while you're there, if you like what you hear, consider making a donation. We are, after all, public. Very public radio. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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