My husband directed me to a book in our library relevant to the series I thought I had finished – a book entitled, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950.) I recalled that I had come across the name of the author, Henry Nash Smith, in my research, but I wanted to read a bit before looking for where. I read the chapter headings, then I started the preface to the first printing (1949,) a preface that immediately defines how Smith uses the terms, “myth” and “symbol” as: “an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image.” Since this definition reminded me of Carl Jung I looked him up in the index, but found no reference. I then found a connection between the author and another historian I had encountered – the author of American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen. This reference then brought to mind an article I had read entitled, “White Out: Race and Nationalism in American Studies.”1 I want to be fair, so I’ll also link to an article by Idaho State University professor Brian Attebery, an article that tries to give Smith and the American Studies school the benefit of the doubt2.
After reading both essays, I couldn’t help wondering why Smith – and Leo Marx3, the protégé discussed in the latter article – wrote about myths and symbols while ignoring the work of Jung, by then the most famous scholar on the topic. Even Attebery uses the name (if in a derived adjective) only once. Given Smith’s prominence in the “White Out” essay, I should also mention that Jung, whose work had been pro-Nazi until he saw the horrors of the regime, then publicly reversed his opinion in 1936. Lastly, I should note that Smith’s preface credits his financier – the Rockefeller Foundation. Therefore, to honor the scholar who brought attention to this “white out,” here is a long passage from the autobiography by abolitionist Harriet Jacobs.
Being in servitude to the Anglo-Saxon race, I was not put into a “Jim Crow car,” on our way to Rockaway[, Queens], neither was I invited to ride through the streets on top of trunks in a truck; but every where I found the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people.[4] We reached Rockaway before dark, and put up at the Pavilion – a large hotel, beautifully situated by the sea-side – a great resort of the fashionable world… Thirty or forty nurses were there, of a great variety of nations. Some of the ladies had colored waiting-maids and coachmen, but I was the only nurse tinged with the blood of Africa. When the tea bell rang, I took little Mary and followed the other nurses. Supper was served in a long hall. A young man, who had the ordering of things, took the circuit of a table two or three times, and finally pointed me to a seat at the lower end of it. As there was but one chair, I sat down and took the child on my lap. Whereupon the young man came to me and said, in the blandest manner possible, “Will you please to seat the little girl on the chair, and stand behind it and feed her? After they have done, you will be shown to the kitchen, where you will have a good supper.”
This was the climax! I found it hard to preserve my self-control, when I looked round, and saw women who were nurses, as I was, and only one shade lighter in complexion, eyeing me with a defiant look, as if my presence were a contamination. However, I said nothing. I quietly took the child in my arms, went to our room, and refused to go to the table again. Mr. Bruce ordered meals to be sent to the room for little Mary and I. This answered for a few days; but the waiters of the establishment were white, and they soon began to complain, saying they were not hired to wait on negroes. The landlord requested Mr. Bruce to send me down to my meals, because his servants rebelled against bringing them up, and the colored servants of other boarders were dissatisfied because all were not treated alike.
My answer was that the colored servants ought to be dissatisfied with themselves, for not having too much self-respect to submit to such treatment; that there was no difference in the price of board for colored and white servants, and there was no justification for difference of treatment. I staid a month after this, and finding I was resolved to stand up for my rights, they concluded to treat me well. Let every colored man and woman do this, and eventually we shall cease to be trampled under foot by our oppressors.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, Ch. 35)
I think its appropriate to end with a preview of a mockumentary I enjoyed in the ’80’s, a satire on American white culture:
1 Jay, Gregory S. “White Out: Race and Nationalism in American Studies.” American Quarterly, vol. 55 no. 4, 2003, p. 781-795. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2003.0042.
2 Attebery, B. (1996). “American Studies: A Not so Unscientific Method.” American Quarterly, 48(2), 316–343. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30041538
3 Author of The Machine in the Garden – sounds vaguely familiar…
4 In 1838 the car to which blacks were restricted was referred to as “the dirt car.” In 1841 it was widely spoken of as the “Jim Crow” car, a reference to the blackface song and dance routine of white performer Thomas D. Rice, who impersonated a black man called “Jim Crow.” Ruchames, “Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts,” p. 62; Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 28.
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