On social and historical issues, we are over-fictioned. Our love of narrative means the needle of truth gets buried in a haystack of stories.
Older people will see dramas on TV set in past decades, where the clothes and furniture are right, but not the language and attitudes; and the more we see, the harder it becomes to remember how things really were. Further back, only good historians can help us, and they are often swimming against the tide.
Take this 1948 Disney production for example, about the American John Chapman aka ‘Johnny Appleseed.’
Some details are right - the northwest migration of settlers after 1787, the planting of cider apple trees (and the list of ways the fruit was used), Chapman’s Christian faith (with a guardian angel guiding him like Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket), his solitary life. At the end we are left feeling that he had done fine altruistic service.
Yet other points left out of the animation cast a different and much more interesting light. Chapman was not mainstream Protestant but a sectarian, a follower of the Swedish theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg; his angelic adviser was not fictional, but he had two angels with whom he conversed regularly and who promised him a couple of spiritual wives in the afterlife if he remained celibate in this.
Perhaps these matters could be left out from a children’s entertainment, but another that is central is the motivation behind the scattering of apple seeds: sound business sense. Chapman didn’t just follow the covered wagons, he bought tracts of land ahead of them, planted orchards and flipped the thus partly-developed properties for profit:
Under the deal offered by the Ohio Company, any settler who planned to start a new farmstead was given 100 acres of land. There was an important condition — the newcomers had to prove they intended to establish a permanent settlement. To show their intent, they had to plant 50 apple trees and 30 peach trees within three years…
Including this in the animation would have been a useful lesson for young people in entrepreneurship. It’s one of Britain’s tragedies that we are highly inventive yet poor at turning ideas into businesses; if only we helped British children develop the nous of a Bezos, a Zuckerberg, or even a Bill Gates (who ‘didn’t invent anything’) …
Both in learning about the past, and in thinking about current affairs (notably Ukraine, at the moment) narrative is used to oversimplify, distort and mislead. The Age of Communication is fast and dangerously becoming the Age of Disinformation.
Some links:
- (1871 Harper’s article) https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/Vta2/bsb11045628/bsb:3117104?queries=chapman&language=de&c=default
- https://social.entrepreneur.com/s/johnny-appleseeds-real-history/
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appleseed-brought-applesand-booze-american-frontier-180953263/
- https://www.in.gov/history/about-indiana-history-and-trivia/explore-indiana-history-by-topic/marking-hoosier-history-archive/hoosier-legends-johnny-appleseed/
- (Detailed monograph including list of land acquisitions) https://swedenborg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/SF_TheCoreofJohnnyAppleseed.pdf
3 comments:
Most heroes of history had feet of clay. Read any real amount of Roman or Greek history, and ask yourself why we admired them.
Then look at people like Churchill, and his thoroughly racist views towards India.
I wish you would write more about these matters.
Because I am not an historian.
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