Humans are story-telling animals and boy have we told some doozies. The world is replete with stories people have chosen to tell about themselves. Every work of art, of literature; every religion or scientific exploration is an attempt to capture some truth or reflection humans are seeking about themselves. These narratives, regardless of medium, are brilliant, really; they’re the language we use to express our consciousness. The fact that humans can construct narratives is marvelous, isn’t it? We’ve created countless narratives about ourselves throughout history, some of which are wonderful. Others are dubious at best. The United States was created with narratives, long before any of those states were formed or codified or declared independent, and some of those narratives persist to this day. We Americans fancy ourselves a shining city on a hill. Cowboys. A melting pot. But before ascribing to any of those narratives, America germinated with one simple narrative: The United States Is a Free Nation.

Europeans came for different reasons: freedom to make money, freedom of religion, freedom from political persecution. In the New World, settlers were free from the overreach of their native countries on the other side of the gigantic Atlantic. And when the ruling colonizer threatened and exploited that freedom, they ditched their colonial masters in a little ditty we like to call the Revolutionary War.

What a novel, noble experiment, the Land of the Free! The world watched doubtfully as the framers of the Constitution insisted upon putting the power of government in the hands of the citizenry, granting them inalienable rights. Well, the men, anyway. The white ones, that is. That owned land. But even putting aside for a moment these implied marginalizations, the founding fathers were some of the most aggressive big-picture thinkers the world has ever produced, members of Team Icarus, all. They weren’t perfect, and they knew it; but they were smart enough to include a proviso in the Declaration of Independence to help future generations:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (US 1776)

In other words, if it’s not working, fix it. Pretty brilliant, right? And Americans have followed their advice by altering the government in the form of amendments to the Constitution: slavery was abolished; women and minorities and people over the age of 18 can vote. Americans changed their narrative, moving from saying it’s the Land of the Free toward proving it is. And while the U.S. has historically pushed to ensure freedom for all, there’s still more to do. At the foot of the greatest visual aide to America’s Freedom narrative is the last stanza of the sonnet, “The New Colossus”:1

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Those words, written by poet, activist, and Icarus-style badass Emma Lazarus, are still on the Statue of Liberty today, while prototypes for border walls are being built in the southwestern desert. Regardless of how you personally feel about the complicated and nuanced immigration issues we face today, we Americans are wrestling with our identity and producing some mixed messages. Americans haven’t always gotten it right, but we keep trying because Freedom is the primary narrative we’ve chosen to tell to and about ourselves. The U.S. has made tremendous strides in the last few years in truly opening the opportunity of freedom to all citizens, and yet there’s more work to do. There will always be more work to do on this front until every American citizen can pursue their inalienable rights. And this work can be tense and uncomfortable; it always has been, whether that work is declaring independence or abolishing slavery, agitating for suffrage, civil rights, or marriage equality. The Freedom narrative is a wonderful one to be proud of, but one that we must continually question to ensure the ideal is upheld. This requires effort and often pain when we hold the mirror up to reveal our unsightly blemishes. But failure to really look at those blemishes is tantamount to belly flop.

Sometimes narratives are created as an excuse for not looking in the mirror. The U.S. has done this with a little narrative called American Exceptionalism. This is the idea that the United States, with its rallying cry of freedom for all, is superior to every other nation on the planet. It’s tempting to bask in that glory; America’s foundational, institutionalized freedoms are a light to the world, showing a better way to live together—America should be proud of that. Americans share no racial, ethnic, or economic identity with which to define the nation; the commonality is an abiding belief: Freedom. Freedom is exceptional, it makes America the shining city on a hill. That phrase, by the way—the shining city on a hill—has been an integral part of the American national identity since our nation’s quickening. It was lifted by John Winthrop from fellow Team Icarus member, Jesus Christ, in his sermon on the mount:

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” (New International Version, Matthew 5:14)2

Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and he preached this narrative of the City On A Hill while he was still at sea aboard the Arabella, before he even got to America. He told his fellow passengers:

"We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us."3

He meant that the ideals of the New World were to be an example. Presidents galore have repeated Winthrop’s story, promoting this narrative, from JFK’s “City On A Hill” speech; to Reagan, both upon his election, and at the very end of his beautiful farewell speech; to Obama and countless other political figures. This ideal is deeply ingrained in American consciousness: America is a beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of humanity. America is Exceptional.

Yet it’s also tempting to use that exceptionalism to bully, subjugate, and isolate. It didn’t take long for John Winthrop and the Puritans to be settled here before they became religious authoritarians, expelling dissenters. If the expelled returned to their colony, they risked capital punishment. You know, freedom. There was the narrative of Manifest Destiny, the 19th century doctrine that it was the divine right of the U.S. to seize land from coast to coast. Journalist and editor John L O’Sullivan coined the phrase, writing:

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”4

It was a distorted idea which grew from an outsized sense of exceptionalism, a blunt-force weapon to grab land, no matter how many were slaughtered along the way. It should be noted that Presidents Lincoln and Grant and the Whig party vocally opposed Manifest Destiny, and thank goodness they did; it requires such vociferous advocates of unity to keep us all swimming together as human beings. And while the politicians were slugging it out to euthanize that diseased idea on the political field, Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing about it in The Scarlet Letter.

Originally published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter was set more than 200 years earlier than that, in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. In case you forgot to read your homework that night, it’s about Hester Prynne, who has a child out of wedlock and is sentenced by her community to wear a big, fat, red letter A (for Adultress) on her chest at all times. Hester takes the fall for her Baby Daddy, who more or less just sits back and lets her suffer the consequences on her own until the very end when SPOILER ALERT: he confesses in front of the whole town and promptly dies. Turns out that Baby Daddy (née Arthur Dimmesdale) was no other than the town’s beloved reverend, who gives a speech to the whole town just before his (literal and figurative) demise. Hawthorne, as the book’s narrator, describes Dimmesdale’s speech:

“His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. And as he drew towards the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him…whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord.”5 (240)

Perhaps Hawthorne was tying the threads of his present-day narrative, Manifest Destiny, to the Puritanical take on American Exceptionalism. And Hawthorne had a personal axe to grind with Puritan exceptionalism; he was the great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, one of the three judges involved in the Salem witch trials—the only one that never repented his role. John’s dad, William Hathorne, was also a real peach, having been a mover and shaker in early Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously ordering public whippings of Quakers. If you’re slick, you may have noticed that Nathaniel’s name is spelled differently than John’s and William’s. Word on the street is that Nathaniel was so ashamed of his ancestors’ actions that he added the W to distance himself from them. In the introduction of The Scarlet Letter, “The Custom House,” Hawthorne laments an apparent lack of evidence that his ancestors had any remorse for their cruelty. Hawthorne uses “The Custom House” to set himself up as narrator for his story and writes:

 “…[John Hathorne] made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it…I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.”6 (7-8)

Hawthorne was so distraught by the Hathorne legacy—a legacy that induced his family to consider themselves cursed—that he sought redemption. He was a writer obsessed with the past and the legacies it left. Hawthorne had been a personal friend of John L. O’Sullivan, the man who coined Manifest Destiny; it was O’Sullivan that gave Hawthorne his start as a writer by publishing his early short stories in his literary magazine, Democratic Review. Hawthorne was drawn to O’Sullivan’s early ideas and eager to develop the voice of his generation. Although Hawthorne and many other contributing writers to Democratic Review (like Emerson and Whitman) were perceived as non-partisan, they later distanced themselves from O’Sullivan’s political leanings and inconsistencies. Perhaps Hawthorne used his pen to draw a line from his present-day atrocities to his own ancestors’ atrocities in the hopes of shaping his generation, imploring them to edit their narrative.

We should look around and question Exceptionalism and the world we’re creating. We should ask: What are we doing? Who are we hurting? What can we do to make things better? Hawthorne, like many people, was frustrated by his own powerlessness, but he was determined to do something within his purview to take responsibility. Hawthorne continues in “The Custom House”:

          “No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of               mine—if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success—            would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. ‘What is he?’           murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. ‘A writer of story-books!                What kind of a business in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to            mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow                        might as well have been a fiddler!’” (8)

Hawthorne was neither disgraceful, degenerate nor powerless; he may not have been a politician or leader of his community; he may have only been ‘a writer of story-books,’ but his stories persist today. It’s easier by far to look back and castigate ancestors; the real challenge is using your voice to shape narrative with the abilities you have. And Hawthorne’s abilities were considerable, even if writing fiction wasn’t considered respectable in his time; the point is that he used his abilities. The same is true of that poet, Emma Lazarus, who couldn’t even vote in her own democracy, but her words went on to uplift the ideals of her nation while she worked to improve the lives of immigrants seeking our shores. It’s also true of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a BFF of Emma Lazarus and daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was so inspired by “The New Colossus” that she founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, an organization aiming to care for destitute cancer patients, and which still operates to this day. Our words, our gifts, our actions—our narratives—are ripples that move away from us, spurring others to speak and share and act. The choice is ours, whether we create narratives to lift each other up or to push each other down.

What narratives are being crafted today? Are they upholding the best possible ideals, not only of the United States, but of the human race? Or are our narratives being bastardized with arrogance and intolerance? Are they lifting us up or drowning us? And the most important question of all: how am I, a member of Team Icarus, helping to shape the narrative? It’s not good enough to think I’m not powerful, why bother? It’s not good enough to enjoy our freedom while others are tormented, persecuted, or marginalized. You may be only a writer or a fiddler or a _____. That doesn’t matter. What matters is being that _____ for the collective effort of swimming. Otherwise, you toss the dice on leaving a legacy of shame. Just ask the Hathornes about that; word on the street is that their bones are still stained with the blood of the narratives they created.

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Notes:

Artwork by GOEducationalTours, is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons

1.         Lazarus, Emma. "The New Colossus." Historic American Documents. Lit2Go Edition. 1883. http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/133/historic-american-documents/4959/the-new-colossus. November 06, 2017.

2.         The Student Bible. New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. 1996.

3.         U.S. History Online Textbook. 2017. “Massachusetts Bay — ‘The City Upon a Hill.’” http://www.ushistory.org/us/3c.asp. November 06, 2017.

4.         Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Manifest Destiny and U.S Westward Expansion.” http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Manifest-Destiny-and-U.S-Westward-Expansion__.pdf. November 06, 2017.

5.         Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Watermill Classic ed. Mahwah: Watermill Press, 1983.

6.      Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Custom House Introductory.” The Scarlet Letter. Watermill Classic ed. Mahwah: Watermill Press, 1983.