If I were running for president, I have a pretty good idea how I would present myself to the American people. Not as a Ph.D. in medieval literature. Not as the author or editor of more than 15 books on reading, writing, and language. Not even as a teacher of literacy.
By the way, all of those qualifications, I believe, would make me a better public servant. Imagine a president who could actually teach! But those credentials would be too easy to dismiss by a political opponent. I’d be called elitist, pointy-headed, soft, and out of touch with working people in America.
So let me try another approach. What if, instead, I began by saying that I was the first member in an immigrant family to go to college? What if I said that in 1931 my father was valedictorian of his eighth-grade class, but never had another day of schooling because he went to work as a ditch-digger during the Depression? What if I pointed to the document that hangs over my desk, the ship’s manifest with the names of those arriving from Italy in 1900 at Ellis Island? I could point to the name of my grandfather, Pellegrino Marino, the youngest child of a family of six who came to America, declaring that they brought with them 12 cents. I could hold up a photograph of him taken in the 1930s, a political poster of him running as a Republican for the New York State Assembly.
Now, suddenly, I feel the political power of being dirt poor.
The Log Cabin Myth
The most popular manifestation of the dirt poor narrative might be called the Log Cabin myth.
To discover the origins of this myth, I purchased an inexpensive biography of Abraham Lincoln titled “Abe Lincoln Grows Up.” Written by poet and biographer Carl Sandburg, this heroic life story covers the early years of Lincoln’s life and has been condensed for young readers.
We learn that on the morning of February 12, 1809, Tom Lincoln, a carpenter by trade, stepped out of the log cabin he had built in Kentucky to seek out the services of a midwife. On that Sunday, the midwife and the father and the moaning Nancy Hanks Lincoln “welcomed into a world of battle and blood, of whispering dreams and wistful dust, a new child, a boy.”
It doesn’t take much critical vision to see in Sandburg’s narrative a retelling of the story of the Christ child, rendered in the terms of American salvation history, how the son of a carpenter, born into the lowest of circumstances, will grow to become his nation’s savior, purifying it from the sins of disunity and slavery.
“So came the birth of Abraham Lincoln,” writes the evangelical Sandburg, “…in silence and pain from a wilderness mother on a bed of corn-husks and bearskins — with an early…prophecy he would never come to much.”
At the age of seven Abe learns his reading, writing, and numbers in a schoolhouse that “was built of logs, with a dirt floor, no window, one door.” The main chore of the Lincoln children was to walk a mile with an empty pail, and walk it back to the family cabin full of water.
The next time an older relative complains about riding a bus to school on a snowy day, you can testify that Abe and Sally Lincoln walked nine miles to school, and nine miles back, 18 miles a day.
Go West, Young Ronnie
I also bought a biography of Ronald Reagan. The level of young Reagan’s deprivation was nothing like Lincoln’s. By the time young Reagan grew up in Illinois — the land of Lincoln — the wilderness was a national memory, but that doesn’t mean that life was easy.
The Reagan biography, written by Michael Burgan for young readers, understands something about wealth and poverty, a strategy that political apologists have learned about the shaping of a narrative. Every person on the face of the earth comes from poverty — if you go back in time far enough.
“During the 1840s,” writes Burgan, “several million Irish people left their homeland, driven out by a deadly famine. Many of them settled in the United States. Some flocked into already-crowded cities; others headed for the open prairies of the American Midwest. Ronald Reagan’s great-grandparents were among those Irish immigrants who headed west, looking for a better life for their family.”
In literary terms, the author is tapping into a familiar pattern in the American cultural narrative, sometimes referred to as the “westering myth.” The country began, after all, as a haven for outcasts from foreign soil, the persecuted and impoverished, who traveled west for freedom and opportunity. If things go badly for them in the cities, they light out for the territories, looking for what eventually was called The American Dream.
But before you can escape to something, you need something to escape from.
We learn that Reagan’s father Jack was an orphan as a child and an alcoholic as an adult. “When he was 11, Ronald (or ‘Dutch’ as he was known) came home one evening and found his father passed out on the front steps. He dragged the much-larger man inside. Ronald later called this his first act of accepting responsibility. Even at that young age, he knew he had to take action to help his father and the family.”
Ronald was not born in a log cabin, but in a tiny apartment above a bakery in Tampico, Illinois. “During one four-year stretch, Ronald attended four different schools. The family never had much money or owned its own home, and Ronald often ended up wearing his brother’s hand-me-down clothes.” Wearing hand-me-downs is worth a mention in one’s political biography.
When the time came, Reagan would test the theories behind the westering myth and set off for California. He became a direct purveyor of that myth in his career as a cowboy actor, and then found wealth and greatness in the studios of Hollywood and in the seats of government in Sacramento and Washington.
Friendly and hostile narratives
Any time a candidate stakes a claim to these formative myths, his opponents begin the process of chipping away at them. Ann Richards, former Democratic governor of Texas, did this most famously with her debunking an evolving narrative about the common touch of George W. Bush.
“Poor George,” she said. “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.”
Mitt Romney wants to be a character in a story, one that makes him the son and grandson of carpenters, not the privileged investment banker who left the working poor in the dust.
Class warfare is in our culture, from the very beginning. For politicians, the image of wealth and privilege is a burden. Look how hard it was for John Kerry to project himself as a working man, especially after he married into the Heinz fortune.
All counter-attacks on political narrative must be watched closely, because they reveal as much about the teller as they do about the tale. In his own narrative, President Obama claims a tradition of aspiration that he traces back to Lincoln and Dr. King. He wants you to know him as the son of a poor, hard-working single mother, a man who has overcome his strange name and darker skin to ascend to the highest office in the land.
We are all too familiar with the counter-narrative.That Obama is foreign, alien, aloof, arrogant, superior, a product of the Ivy League, an admirer of European socialism, maybe even a secret Muslim who may not even have been born in this country, an heir not of Abraham Lincoln but of the rabble rousing community organizer Saul Alinsky. He is just not one of us. Or so the story goes.
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