James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers.
MAGA Myths Versus the Reality of Early America.
Natty Bumppo Makes a Mockery of the MAGA View of History.
Burton Weltman
The Pioneers: The Point.
I am writing this essay in early January, 2024. We are living through terrible times in much of the world. Environmental disasters and global climate change. Wars, terrorist threats and massacres. Rampant gun violence. Racial, religious and ethnic bigotry. Famine and homelessness. Fascist movements and authoritarian rulers. Just to name a few of the horrors.
Among the rightwing movements besetting the world and begetting many of its horrors is the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the United States. The underlying theme of the MAGA movement is a claim that things were better in the past when white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men ruled the roost in America. The Good Old Boys in the Good Old Days.
MAGA supporters look in particular to the 1780’s and 1790’s, when the United States Constitution was adopted, as the high point in American history from which we have mostly been falling away ever since. Central to the MAGA complaint is that the old WASP male hierarchy has been undermined and that inferior groups which were previously subordinate have risen in the ranks. As a consequence, they claim, the country has declined and continues to fall.
The MAGA movement is, thus, founded on an interpretation of American history. Getting back to an Edenic American past that has been frittered away is the purpose of the movement. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how ridiculous is the MAGA view of American history. So ridiculous that it is largely discredited by James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers, a two-hundred-year-old story that is read mainly by young people. A kid’s book whose main character is a backwoodsman named Natty Bumppo who makes a mockery of MAGA.
Written in 1823, The Pioneers is set in 1793 on what was then the frontier in New York State. +
In MAGA imagery this was an ideal time and place in which men were men, women were womanly, and the lower orders stayed in their places. The significance of The Pioneers is that its description of America in 1793 does not fit with MAGA imagery and that it gives the lie to many of the rightwing myths that feed the MAGA movement.
Among these MAGA myths are historically baseless claims that governments in early America were strictly minimalist, that laissez-faire economics prevailed, that gun ownership was widespread, that Christianity, Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and individualistic ethics were universal, and that blacks were contented slaves while women were happy helpmeets to their patriarchal husbands. The Pioneers contradicts all of these myths. None of them is true. And Cooper was there, so he should know. Cooper grew up and lived as a young man in the time and place in which the story takes place. His book merely tells it like it was. Cooper was, in addition, a self-styled conservative, so he can be trusted with the seemingly liberal conclusions of his book.
The thesis of this essay is that if the rationale for your movement can be discredited by a two-hundred-year-old contemporaneous novel directed at young people, your movement must be pretty pathetic. Dangerous, but pathetic.[1]
The Pioneers: The Plot.
The Pioneers is a combination mystery story, romance, and clash of ideologies. It is set in in a region of New York State that in 1793 had recently been settled by a colony of white people. The settlement was led by the owner of the land, Marmaduke Temple, who is also a judge in administrative charge of the area.
The mystery centers on two questions. First, who and what is Oliver Edwards, a young man of genteel manners incongruously living in a rustic shack in the forest with a backwoodsman, Natty Bumppo, and Natty’s indigenous friend Chingachgook? Second, what is Natty hiding in his cabin that he won’t let anyone other than Oliver and Chingachgook see? The romance centers on whether Oliver Edwards and Elizabeth Temple, the Judge’s daughter, will recognize and realize their budding mutual love?
Embedded in the mysteries and the romance is a clash of ideologies which is the main point of the novel. This clash pits the communitarian conservationism of Judge Temple against the laissez-faire exploitationism of Sheriff Richard Jones and both of them against the isolationist preservationism of the hunter Natty Bumppo.
Judge Temple is a disciple of the Quaker William Penn. His portrait is based largely on Cooper’s father who was a judge, a Quaker and a large landowner after whom Cooperstown is named. Judge Temple wants his settlement to develop peacefully and productively in harmony with the Indians and the natural environment. He insists, for example, on cutting down only so many trees as are needed for use. And he believes in sharing the work and the fruits of the common labor. He is a stickler for the law, especially conservation laws as to hunting and land use. His goal is a well and fully regulated community.
Sheriff Jones is a Hobbesian predator who believes Indians are to be ruthlessly conquered and nature destructively exploited. As an example, he clear-cuts all of the trees in a forest, for the sake of convenience, even though most of the wood isn’t needed, and he uses explosives to catch huge quantities of fish even though most of them will rot and be wasted. His goal is to exercise power and accumulate personal wealth.
Natty Bumppo is what we today might call a survivalist. He wants to leave nature alone, and most of his fellow humans as well. He wants to coexist with the forest animals and plants, killing and harvesting only what he needs at the moment, living like the proverbial lilies of the field. He is a hermit who will help others in a crisis but is otherwise mostly a loner.
The story in The Pioneers is slow to develop and is full of lengthy descriptions of conditions on the frontier during the 1790’s. Cooper’s descriptions of flora and fauna, hunting and fishing, panthers and deer, mountains and lakes, as well as social classes, governmental practices, ethics and ethnicities, make for more of a guidebook than a storybook. He clearly wanted his audience in the nineteenth century to know what things were like in the late eighteenth century. And the country he describes was not the place imagined and demanded today by MAGA supporters.
The plot is convoluted but after many trials, tribulations, and misidentifications, the two mysteries are solved and the romance is resolved. It turns out that both mysteries revolve around one man, an exiled Tory grandee named Edward Effingham. Effingham had been one of the original co-owners of the land currently held by Judge Temple. Unlike Temple, who stood with the Patriots in the American Revolution, Effingham had been a pro-British Loyalist. At the end of the war, he had fled from the United States as a traitor, and his interest in the land had been confiscated and turned over to his Patriot partner, Judge Temple.
As the story unfolds, it is revealed that Oliver Edwards is the grandson of Effingham and he has secretly accompanied his mortally ill grandfather back to New York so that Effingham can die on his homeland. Natty Bumppo, who it turns out was a former retainer of Effingham, has been hiding the dying man in his cabin. As these mysteries are unraveled, Oliver Edwards and Elizabeth Temple duly realize their affection for each other.
Mysteries solved and romance resolved, Effingham is welcomed back into the community. The Judge generously gives a half interest in his estate to his long-lost partner, which Oliver will seemingly soon inherit. That will make Oliver a rich man and a suitable suitor for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. A happy ending so far. But not everything ends happily.
Natty’s colleague Chingachgook, who is the last member of his decimated Mohican tribe, dies as the result of a gunpowder explosion. It is a symbolic but significant loss to the diversity of the human species in America. It is also an example of the unfortunate but inevitable consequences of introducing guns to America, a weapon that is dangerous to friend as well as foe. Meanwhile, Natty recognizes that he is a misfit in the community as it is developing. Much to the chagrin of all the characters in the story except for Sheriff Jones, Natty rejects an offer of land and income from the Judge and leaves for western lands that are for the time being still uninhabited and unravaged by white pioneers.
As the book ends, the ideological battle remains unresolved and, writing this story in 1823, Cooper seemed to fear that the Richard Joneses were winning. The middle ground of controlled, cooperative and conservationist development, that was represented in the story by Judge Temple and in real life by Cooper’s father, was being lost to selfish laissez-faire individualists and chauvinists. The exploiters and destroyers, the MAGA movement of that day, were winning.
Making American Great Again for Natty Bumppo.
MAGA is a movement that aspires to Make America Great Again by having the United States return to the way MAGA supporters conceive the country originally was. The movement’s aims are articulated mainly in terms of what its supporters oppose and whom they hate – mainly liberals, feminists, immigrants, and ethnic minorities of all sorts. What and whom MAGA supporters are against is clear, what they are in favor of is not.
MAGA is essentially an emotional movement. It is based largely on its supporters’ feelings of grievance, their gut reactions that they are getting a raw deal out of the social and economic changes of the past century or so. They claim to be fed up and are not going to take it anymore. So, they want to restore what they claim were the original social, economic and political relationships established by the Founders.
In MAGA historiography, the country was founded as a haven for he-men WASPs. It was a sanctum of small government and a sanctuary for self-made individualists. It was a hierarchy in which the best people, generally defined by MAGA supporters as white, Anglo-Saxon male Protestants, had a hold on the top positions. In their view, the country has progressively fallen away from that ideal, especially in recent years, as upstart groups and government regulations have decimated the original hierarchy and supposedly destroyed people’s freedoms.
Natty Bumppo, the hero of The Pioneers, would seem to be an ideal candidate for a MAGA hero, only he won’t cooperate. Natty is a rugged individualist who has no use for government or for the rules that constrain a self-made man like himself. He is a gun-toting, sharp-shooting hunter who could wrestle a bear, and is the sort of he-man that MAGA supporters like to idealize and imagine themselves being. Making America safe again for the Natty Bumppos among us is their vision of remaking America great. Natty, however, would not agree. He sees himself as an obsolescent oddity, and he accepts that he must make way for the advance of civilization.
The irony of Natty Bumppo is that he can’t help being used for purposes he rejects. He is a self-styled backwoodsman who scorns society and wants to stay away from human communities, and especially the destructive communities spawned by the likes of Sheriff Jones. But he unwittingly functions as a frontiersman, that is, as someone who opens up the backwoods and pushes outward the boundaries of the frontier. As such, he paves the way for pioneers who will set up the very sort of society that he is perpetually trying to escape, but which is continually catching up to him.
Natty struggles to remain an outsider, a social outcaste. He does not want to be seen as a model citizen and realizes that a society full of Natty Bumppos could not function. In the person of Natty Bumppo, Cooper has, in effect, portrayed a model MAGA hero as someone who rejects MAGA goals. That is not good for the MAGA theory of American history.
The Pioneers is a test case for MAGA historiography. The story presents a realistic picture of early America painted by someone who was there. Although the plots are romanticized, the situation and circumstances are faithful to reality. And the moral of this essay is that MAGA historiography fails the test represented by The Pioneers. In fact, it is essentially a fraud, and a vicious trick being played on MAGA supporters as well as their opponents.
MAGA Myths of American History.
MAGA ideology is rooted in a theory of American history, a venomous theory that has liberal reformers as the enemy of all that is decent and true. The theory is founded on a claim that things were better in the bygone days before liberal reformers got going. The theory provides a way of denouncing present-day liberals and the supposedly degenerate state of present-day society by comparing America today with an idealized version of early America. And it provides a rationale for insisting that the way things ostensibly were is the way they should still be and shall be again.
In MAGA imaginary, when the United States was founded during the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras of the late eighteenth century, the country enjoyed the blessings of a small unobtrusive government, a laissez-faire free enterprise economic system, almost universal evangelical Christianity, a modest immigration of hard-working European settlers, a patriarchy of strong men with their happy female helpmeets and happy-go-lucky African slaves, and a widespread gun culture. In MAGA historiography, all of these things began to fall apart in the late nineteenth century and continue to do so to the present day. And it is the goal of MAGA supporters and other right-wingers to restore these things to their original form.
This story of a fall from Eden, with liberals playing the role of serpent, is a very attractive view of history for right-wingers battling liberals today. The problem with this view is that it is false, almost universally rejected by historians, and even given the lie by a two-hundred-year-old kids’ book, The Pioneers. None of the things that MAGA supporters say existed at the time of the Revolution and the Constitution existed at that time. In fact, the MAGA view of history has things exactly backward.
At the time of the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, local governments were almost ubiquitous in the lives and doings of Americans. Economic regulations were the norm and there was very little free about enterprise. Communalism was the predominant ethos. Slavery was widely considered by the Founders to be an unfortunately necessary evil in the settlement of the country that was expected to die out soon. Women’s role in the family and status in society was greater than it would be again until the twentieth century. Few people owned guns and guns were considered useful only to hunters and soldiers. Religion played at most a perfunctory role in most people’s lives and in society, it being the least religious generation in American history. Despite MAGA mythmaking to the contrary, these things have been well-documented by historians. And we can see them in The Pioneers.
The things that right-wingers claim existed in the late eighteenth century did not, in fact, come to the fore until well into the nineteenth century, and they came as deviations from the theories and practices of the Founders. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that right-wingers of that time began to successfully promote ideas of small government, laissez-faire economics, evangelical religion, strictly domesticated women, happy slaves, and a gun culture. These were all developments that most of the remaining Founders opposed, and for good reason.
Most people in the course of history have been poor. Most lived below what could be considered the poverty level for their place and time. This was not the case in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when most white Americans lived at a comfortable level. But it became so during the course of the nineteenth century when the things the MAGA supporters mistakenly ascribe to the generation of the Founders actually came to pass and made things worse for most Americans. MAGA supporters are actually clamoring to make America worse again. And most of this is evident in The Pioneers.
It was, in turn, largely the actions of right-wingers that prompted liberals to try to thwart movements toward minimalist government, laissez-faire economics, guns galore, biologically-based racism, domestication of women, and other oppressive developments. Liberals were significantly successful during the twentieth century in growing government to solve social problems; enacting economic regulations in the public interest; promoting ethnic, religious, racial and gender diversity and equality; trying to reign in gun violence; and, welcoming the immigrants who have largely built the economy. All of these developments have moved the country closer to the society originally envisioned by the Founders than the things promoted by MAGA. And it is the success of these liberal developments that so enrages MAGA supporters.
MAGA Misconceptions of Early American Government and Economics.
Right-wingers regularly claim and complain that big government is the product of liberal Presidents and Congresses who have run rough-shod over the Constitution during the twentieth century, first by President Wilson’s “New Freedom,” then most significantly by President Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” and then even further by the “Great Society” of President Johnson and other Democrat liberals since. The result, right-wingers complain, has been a government-dominated society very different from that created by the Founders. But that isn’t so.
Invasive government was an assumption of the Founders of the country. And laissez-faire economics was a novel idea but not on their agenda. People in most areas of the country during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries expected government to regulate almost everything, especially on the frontier where Europeans were first settling. The question that divided people was whether big government should be local or national. This was a key difference between those colonists who supported the Revolution and those who supported England. It was also key to the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton during the 1790’s. Jefferson promoted the sort of local government arrangements that big planters had established in the South. Hamilton wanted a strong national government that could promote commercial and industrial development. But neither wanted the sort of small and weak governments that right-wingers have been promoting since the early nineteenth century and that MAGA supporters clamor for today.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States, you had to get local government permission and some sort of license or permit to do almost anything. MAGA supporters fantasize that in early America a man could just go out onto the frontier, claim a piece of land for himself, and then do whatever he wanted. This was not the case. There were indigenous settlements on much of the land and white owners of the rest. You generally had to become part of a community and submit to its regulations before you could settle on its land. And settlements were generally made by groups of people who came to the frontier together, and who often knew each other and came from the same places. This is the case in the The Pioneers where the Judge initially owned all of the land and recruited a community of settlers.
The first thing new settlers invariably did was to set up a town government that had the authority to regulate an orderly settlement of the area. Town governments often had the power to equitably divide up the adjacent farmland so that every settler had a decent quantity and quality of land. Sometimes land allotments were rotated from year to year to make it even more fair. There was an egalitarian theme in most new settlements even if it wasn’t always practiced.
Eighteenth and early nineteenth century pioneers were not free to do whatever they wanted. Most social and economic activities were regulated by local government, often including the prices of goods and services, the wages of workers, and the quality of goods and services offered for sale. If you wanted to start a new business you had to get local government permission that defined what you could do. And you might be denied a permit if there were already enough businesses of your kind in the locality, so that another one of the same kind was not necessary for the public good and might work unfair injury on the businesses already operating.
All in all, there was a strong communal element in eighteenth century America., especially on the frontier that MAGA supporters fantasize was a time and place for unbridled individualism. Among the European settlers there was generally a sentiment of everyone being in this venture together. People regularly helped each other with the planting and harvesting of crops and the raising of farm animals. We can see this in The Pioneers where people routinely help each other with farming, fishing and tree cutting, and share the produce. The communal emphasis was also evident in sumptuary laws that prohibited the rich from flaunting their wealth in conspicuous consumption that would exacerbate class differences and generate envy among ordinary people.
Contrary to the claims of MAGA supporters, cooperation not competition, government regulation not laissez-faire free enterprise, and communalism not individualism, were prevailing themes of early American history. And we see this demonstrated in The Pioneers.
MAGA Misconceptions of the Civil War and Slavery.
As I am writing this essay in early January, 2024, three would-be MAGA candidates for the Republican nomination for President have offered comments about the Civil War and slavery that have ignited furious backlash in the press as being out of line with what historians consider to be the consensus view of the Civil War and slavery.
First, the former governor of South Carolina claimed that the Civil War was about states’ rights and not about slavery. Then the current governor of Florida opined that slavery wasn’t all bad and had helped to civilize African slaves. Finally, the former President of the United States and current MAGA-in-Chief claimed that the Civil War should have been avoided through negotiation and that President Lincoln screwed up in the way he conducted the matter. As a result of the backlash, the two governors have both half-heartedly and half-bakedly revised their statements but have not as of this writing completely rejected them. The former President has not retracted anything to this point.
The political dog-whistling behind these statements is appalling. The racism is blatant. But what is more appalling is that these statements represent the actual beliefs today of many Americans and perhaps most white southerners. And it is no accident that this is the case because these statements reflect the view that was contained in almost every history textbook from the early 1900’s until the 1960’s. It was the historical consensus of those times, albeit a racist and reactionary consensus, and it was the view that I was taught in school in Chicago.
It is a truism that the winners get to write the history of a war. But it did not happen in the case of the Civil War. It was southerners who, starting in the early 1900’s, dominated the writing of the history of slavery and the Civil War. And their “Gone with the Wind” story, based largely on evidence and testimonies from slaveowners, made it into the textbooks and stuck there until the 1960’s. At that point the story changed, based in large part on newly discovered evidence gleaned from enslaved people and from ante bellum northern and European travelers to the South. This new view, that slavery was an unadulterated evil and the Civil War was about slavery, became the new consensus among historians.
But “Lost Cause” holdouts among southerners and, more recently, MAGA supporters have not accepted this view. Their benevolent view of slavery and heroic view of southern resistance to federal oppression fit well with the imaginary MAGA Eden of the late eighteenth century. After all, if slavery was good enough for the Founders, then it could not have been all bad. And if slavery wasn’t all bad, then the Civil War couldn’t have been about slavery and should have been avoided. But that isn’t the way it was.
The fact of the matter is that most of the Founders – including Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison and Franklin – were either opposed to slavery or at least uncomfortable with it and hoped to see it ended in the near future. The general opinion of the time was that slavery was an evil expedient that had been necessary for the initial settlement of the country, but no longer. Slaves had been particularly useful in tobacco production that had been a major colonial export, but growing tobacco had ruined the soil in the border states where it had thrived.
Since there was little use at that time for slaves in other fields, it was opined that slavery would soon die out. And consistent with this opinion, the Founders prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories in 1787. Unfortunately, Eli Whitney, ironically an anti-slavery Quaker, invented the cotton gin in 1793 which made possible and profitable the use of slave labor to produce cotton in the deep South, and his invention gave a whole new lease on life to slavery.
Thereafter, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, white southerners developed the ideology that is reflected in the MAGA supporters’ recent statements about slavery and the Civil War. They claimed that Africans were biologically as well as culturally inferior, and that slavery was a good thing because it Christianized and civilized savage blacks and made productive use of their labor. In this view, which is still the MAGA view, slavery saved the souls of black folks. In turn, the Civil War was a defense of states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. It is this slaveholders’ ideology that was adapted and adopted in early to mid-twentieth century textbooks.
The consensus view of slavery changed dramatically starting in the 1950’s and accelerating during the 1960’s. Based on a wealth of new evidence that previous historians had neglected or refused to use, historians reached a new consensus that slavery was not civilizing and that the Civil War was not about states’ rights. Africans were not uncivilized and the Civil War was about keeping them enslaved.
The reality is that most enslaved Africans were skilled agriculturalists, more so than most European settlers, which was one reason they were sought after. Most also came from complex and sophisticated cultures. Slaveowners, rather than civilizing their slaves, worked to strip them of their cultures. And slaves did not see their situation as beneficial. The myth of the happy plantation is given the lie by the facts that so many slaves were escaping and that most white southerners lived in fear of slave uprisings. To deal with runaway slaves and potential slave uprisings, white southerners organized militias, which were ubiquitous in much of the South. This was the meaning of the Second Amendment. Southern whites wanted assurance that in the case of slave uprisings they could rely on their own militias and not have to rely on the federal army to put them down.
That slavery was not a happy institution for enslaved people can be seen in The Pioneers. Slavery was still legal in New York State in 1793, the year in which the story takes place. Sheriff Jones owns a slave, Aggy, and treats him with disrespect. The Judge, raised as Quaker, is clearly opposed to slavery and uses his influence to protect Aggy from Jones’ anger. Aggy is an intelligent character who is working toward his freedom. He respects the Judge and secretly makes fun of and occasionally sabotages the Sheriff. All were not happy in the slave system. It was obvious enough in 1823 when The Pioneers was written, but the fact was historically buried for some one hundred fifty years until a new and more accurate consensus on slavery developed.
The consensus view of the Civil War also changed during the 1960’s. Southern secession was absolutely not about states’ rights and freedom from federal government oppression. To the contrary. In the secession statement issued by South Carolina, the first state to leave the union, the first and foremost reason given for seceding was the failure of the federal government to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act against northern states. That is, South Carolina’s secession was not for states’ rights but against states’ rights, against the right of northern states to refuse to cooperate with federal authorities in capturing escaped slaves.
The Fugitive Slave Act was an attempt by southern slaveholders to get anti-slavery northerners to participate in the slave system. Most northern states refused to cooperate and southern states were furious that the federal government seemed unwilling to consistently force the issue. Other secessionist states followed South Carolina in this rationale. The Civil War was not fought in favor of southern states’ rights but against northern states’ rights, and in favor of more federal government interference in those states.
MAGA supporters frequently idealize and romanticize the South of the 1850’s, when slavery was legal and black people, both free and enslaved, were not entitled to civil rights. Based on the myth that Africans were savages and that slavery had a civilizing effect on them, slavery is often claimed to have been a beneficial institution for masters and slaves alike. In their nostalgia for the lost Confederate cause and their insistence on celebrating Confederate war heroes – who after all were treasonous traitors – many MAGA supporters seem to believe that the Civil War was won by the wrong side.
Secession was, however, a foolish, self-defeating move on the part of the slave states because it is likely that slavery would not have been abolished but for their secession. Slavery was abolished during the Civil War by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It takes the approval of three-quarters of the states in the union to adopt a Constitutional amendment. It was only because of the secession of the slave states from the union that abolitionists were able to get enough of the remaining states to make up a three-quarters total of the states still in the union so that the Thirteenth Amendment could be adopted.
That leaves as a key question what might have happened with slavery if most of the slave states hadn’t seceded from the union in 1860-1861? The answer, I think, is that we would likely still have racial slavery today.
Slave states constituted more than a quarter of the states in 1860, enough to stymie the Thirteenth Amendment if they had not left the union. And their descendant states still make up more than a quarter of the states. If the slave states had not seceded in 1860-1861, the Thirteenth Amendment could not have been adopted during the 1860’s. And given the hostile attitude toward black people that has continued from that time to the present, especially among MAGA supporters and white southerners, if slavery had not been abolished in the 1860’s, it would have continued to be the law of the land, probably to the present day and beyond. Because there would likely still not be enough states to enact the Thirteenth Amendment. When MAGA supporters celebrate the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the glory that was the Ante-Bellum South, the implication is that they would not mind that at all.
The past is not past for too many southern white people. And the continuing sense of grievance that has been so pervasive among them since losing the Civil War is in sharp contrast to the reaction of most Tories in this country after they lost the American Revolution. While many thousands of Tories fled, mainly to Canada, the overwhelming majority of them stayed in the United States and many who had fled eventually returned. While there was some animosity and retribution against Tories, they were for the most part accepted as Americans. We can see this in The Pioneers. Effingham, the Tory, fled after the war but then returned and was welcomed home.
Most significantly, in contrast to the continuing resentment of white southerners who still cannot accept that the South lost the Civil War, most Tories accepted their defeat and moved on as Americans. Unlike white southerners who still want to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, you don’t hear much today about aggrieved descendants of Tories trying to reverse the Revolution. The Civil War was a blow to white supremacy that many white southerners and even white northerners still can’t get over. The MAGA movement tries to keep that sense of grievance alive with myths and lies.
MAGA Gun Myths.
The MAGA movement is based on fear – fear of blacks, immigrants and the government. To protect themselves against these enemies, MAGA supporters promote gun ownership. No matter that crime has overall trended down over the last one hundred years and in recent years since the pandemic. Nor that the likelihood of a person’s gun being used to thwart a criminal are almost nil and that the most likely people to be shot with a person’s gun are the gunowner and the gunowner’s family. Facts can’t trump fear.
MAGA supporters attribute their right to gun ownership to the Founders. It is a claim without facts. If you listen to MAGA supporters and to the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, you would think that gun ownership was widespread in the late eighteenth century. And, completely bypassing the clear intention of the Second Amendment to apply to militias and not individual people, it is on this basis they contend that the Constitution guarantees the right of a person to protect himself by carrying a gun. Since the Founders carried guns, the Second Amendment must protect the right to carry guns. But it wasn’t so.
Few of the Founders carried guns. And people in eighteenth century America did not carry guns for self-protection. Guns at that time were a particularly poor choice as a means of self-protection. They were cumbersome, inaccurate, and dangerous to their owners. A spear, hatchet, knife or club was a much better choice. It was mainly hunters who owned their own guns as a tool of their trade. Soldiers and militia men had access to guns as needed to perform their duties but generally did not own them.
Most guns at that time were muskets. Muskets were heavy and clumsy to carry and to shoot. They often misfired and were notoriously unreliable. They also required the bearer to carry a heavy bag of shot and gunpowder. These were not things a person would want to carry around on a regular basis. Especially the gunpowder which was not only heavy but volatile. It could explode with a change of the barometer. Not something you would want in your pocket or in your own home. Something you would, instead, want to store in a militia armory.
Guns of that day were cumbersome to use. They shot only one bullet and then had to be reloaded. They were front-loading, meaning that you had to pour gun powder down the barrel and then force a bullet down the barrel each time you shot it. This was a time-consuming process that made guns impractical for personal protection. If you missed your attacker with your first shot, you could be rushed by your enemy. That is a reason why a spear or an axe was more practical and was generally preferred for self-protection.
Most guns were muskets that were woefully inaccurate. They had smooth barrels. When fired, a bullet would wobble down the barrel, flying out in unpredictable directions. Muskets could not be successfully aimed at anything smaller than the broad side of a barn. That is why soldiers generally stood shoulder to shoulder in a broad line and shot all at once, unleashing a wall of lead that might hit some of their enemies. Muskets were not a good weapon if you wanted to shoot at something and actually hit it.
Some people owned long rifles that had grooved barrels and were cumbersome to use but could be shot accurately. They were, however, very expensive. All guns were hand-made and long rifles took a particularly large amount of labor to make. Pretty much only professional hunters, like Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers, would go to the expense of buying a long rifle. For hunters, a gun was a tool of the trade. Muskets were much less expensive and were, as a result, the weapon of choice in arming a militia.
Militias were common all over the country and were especially important in the southern slave states where they were used to keep the enslaved people enslaved. Arming a town’s militia was the main reason for guns. A town’s guns would, in turn, ordinarily be stored in a militia armory. That is why the British were keen to get to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775 at the beginning of the Revolution when Paul Revere made his famous ride. They were aiming to seize the guns and gun powder stored in the militia armories in those towns.
In sum, it is at best a myth and more likely a lie that guns were common among people in eighteenth century America. We can see in The Pioneers that even on the frontier few people other than hunters had guns. It was not until the late nineteenth century when accurate, multi-shot, mass-produced, light-weight, inexpensive guns were available that guns began to be owned by ordinary people. And it was at that time that gun manufacturers began spreading stories about guns being commonly owned by the Founders, guns being widely used in the Wild West, and the need to own a gun for self-protection, advertising fables that are taken as fact by right-wingers and MAGA supporters
MAGA Religious Myths.
Despite the clear language of the First Amendment and repeated statements from many of the Founders, MAGA enthusiasts claim that the United States was founded in evangelical Christianity. And there are already right-wing Supreme Court Justices who claim that the First Amendment does not require the separation of Church and State. These Justices, along with the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is second in line to the Presidency, seem to believe that there is no Constitutional obstacle to declaring the United States to be a Christian nation. And they base this on the supposed religious principles and practices of the Founders. This is nonsense.
Any inquiry into the factual history of the Revolutionary and Constitutional times contradicts these MAGA myths. Many historians consider the Revolutionary War generation to be the least religious in American history. And most of the Founders studiously kept religion out of their deliberations and decisions. In the wake of the mid-century turmoil of the Great Awakening, most people were tired of religious controversy and were engrossed, instead, in secular issues.
The great men of the era – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin – were neither church goers nor conventional Christians or even Christians at all. At most, they were deists and agnostics. Most important, there is no mention of Christianity in the Constitution. And, of course, there is the First Amendment. The evangelical Christian movement to which the MAGA supporters owe their religious origins did not begin until the early to mid-nineteenth century and was itself a falling away from the theories and practices of the Founders, not a furtherance of them.
You can see the general indifference to religion of the members of the founding generation and their ecumenical approach to religious differences in The Pioneers. A minister is among the main characters but he is portrayed as a weak character, a kindly but narrow-minded person. He has made converting Chingachgook from the Indian’s indigenous animistic beliefs to Christianity as one of his main projects. Chingachgook, himself a kindly and obliging soul, goes along with learning the Bible and occasionally attending church services.
But in the end, as Chingachgook is dying, he reverts to reciting the rituals of his indigenous people, much to the horror and disappointment of the minister but with the understanding and support of the other characters. Other than the minister’s daughter who follows her father, the main characters profess a variety of beliefs and seem mainly indifferent to religion. The Judge, who is the community leader, was raised as a Quaker, which Cooper describes as “a mild religion,” and he is seemingly agnostic at heart. No Christian Nation here.
MAGA as a Social Movement.
Social movements are by their nature mixed bags of motives and motivations. Some are pulled forward mainly by hope, others are pushed back by hate. Some are motivated by benevolence, reason and constructive plans, others by fear and fury, resentment and grievance, gall and vengeance. The MAGA movement is an example of the latter.
Disproportionately supported by white Evangelical Christians, the MAGA deity is the wrathful God of the Old Testament who punishes severely any perceived disrespect to His eminence. In homage to their God, MAGA is a wrathful movement, the core of which is angry white men, furious at being displaced from their dominant position in American society, and replaced in many cases by women and members of minority racial and ethnic groups. Their goal of making America great again essentially translates into restoring white Christian men to the top of the social and political hierarchy.
The sentiments that underlie the MAGA movement are not new and they run deep in American history. In their current form, they largely owe their renaissance to Donald Trump which, if you take seriously the Christian moralism proclaimed by the movement, seems to be a contradiction. MAGA is a movement of self-professed moralists being led by a man who is a self-confessed immoralist. But this seeming contradiction is resolved by the fact that Trump hates the people his supporters hate – liberals, blacks, and immigrants – and whom they fear are replacing them at the top of the heap. Trump feeds this fear while proclaiming himself as the solution and the salvation.
MAGA supporters generally call themselves conservatives, as does the mass media. But this is wrongheaded. MAGA is best described as “radical right-wing” rather than “conservative.” The reason is simple. MAGA adherents are not in favor of conserving anything except themselves. Conservatives, like James Fenimore Cooper, have historically been primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of social change. They are afraid that the good intended by a social change will be overwhelmed by evils that were unforeseen and unintended. So, they are in favor of either no social change or go-slow change.
MAGA supporters, in contrast, are all for radical and extensive social change. Rather than conservative, they are, in fact, revolutionaries, albeit reactionary revolutionaries who want to overthrow most of present-day American society and return to some imagined past when the social and economic hierarchy better fit with their racist, sexist, ethnocentric and classist views. This is radicalism and not conservatism.
MAGA is sometimes called populist, a movement of and for ordinary people, but this is also wrongheaded. Although proponents of MAGA claim to represent the interests and ideas of ordinary people, they are, in fact, elitists who represent the ideas and interests of past ruling classes which they propose to project into the present. And most MAGA supporters are essentially fooled by a delusionary view of history. Oblivious to the fact that in the old days most people like themselves were likely to be members of the lower classes, degraded by the ruling elites and living in poverty, they delusively believe that if only history could be reversed, the old-time social hierarchy could rightfully be restored with themselves at the top. Theirs is a radical and radically harmful delusion.
Natty Bumppo knew better and acted accordingly. He knew that society could not exist without government and regulations, cooperation and mutuality, and that if he did not want to live in that way, he should clear out rather than try to wreck the place so that it might fit his individualistic ways. If only MAGA supporters could learn from Natty Bumppo.
Nonetheless, with an accurate picture of the Founders as a benchmark, we must hope that we can get safely through the present-day morass and genuinely resurrect the ideas and ideals of the Founders so that we can continue to move toward the goal of a more perfect democratic union.
Brief Bibliography.
The Pioneers. James Fenimore Cooper.
The American Democrat. James Fenimore Cooper.
Everyday Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke.
Beyond the Revolution. Wiliam H. Goetzmann.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Daniel Walker Howe.
Arming America: The Origin of a National Gun Culture. Michael A/ Bellestiles.
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. Kenneth M. Stampp.
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[1] I have not footnoted this essay. There is, however, a brief bibliography at the end that cites books which cover the historical facts and conclusions that are discussed herein. There is very little in the way of historical facts and historical conclusions discussed herein that is controversial among historians. It is only MAGA fabulists who are likely to take issue with them.
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