Other patriots: Minority appropriations of the George Washington myth

Combining cultural history with the close reading of texts, "Other Patriots: Minority Appropriations of the George Washington Myth" sheds light on a neglected area between two oppositional academic/political camps: the conservative Washington studies, which cherishes the details of Washington's life while ignoring minorities as active subjects of history, and Ethnic Studies, which scorns patriotism, privileging instead resistances to assimilation. The dissertation contends that in response to the super-patriotic climate of the early twentieth century immigrants and racial minorities made use of patriotic cliches in order to debate the terms of their civic allegiance to the United States. In doing so, they reworked aspects of the Washington myth that are suppressed or taken for granted in the patriotic contexts where the myth functions as a cliche. Russian Jewish Mary Antin and Texas Mexican Americo Paredes shift the focus of Mason Locke Weems' cherry tree away from young Washington's exemplary honesty. Antin shows that Americanization is based on "noble lies" and conscious compromises, while Paredes, who also revises James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, questions the violent rejection of self and community inherent in the forced declaration of patriotic allegiance in times of war. Gertrude Stein and W. E. B. Du Bois access Washington through their shared birthdays in February. Stein strips this political symbol down to its linguistic attributes and encodes political messages on functional levels below the semantic. Du Bois revives the abolitionist strategy of protest at the time of patriotic celebration by replacing the commemoration of Washington's birth during the 1932 federally-sponsored and racially-segregated Bicentennial with events from African American history. Part-Cherokee political humorist Will Rogers, who casts George Washington as the first American real-estate agent reveals his ambivalence about American Indian citizenship, granted as a result of forced allotment and the conversion of his native Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma. Rhetorically, Rogers pledges his allegiance to North America, asserting the Native wish for territorial independence. While Washington has lost his salience in U.S. patriotic culture, his recurrence in recovered minority texts reveals some broadly applicable strategies of minority engagement with dominant patriotic rhetoric.