The Power of Myths

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, in front of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and told the crowd, “Feeling themselves too harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress.” The British denied the redress, and thus the “fathers” fought the American Revolution. Douglass says that years after the fact it’s easy to say “that America was right, and England wrong,” but during the moment, that did not occur.

Throughout What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglass praises the revolution, but he couches that praise in the fact that it did not bring about democracy and equality for all, as he notes by calling the revolutionaries “your fathers.” He does not include himself within that discussion. He praises George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and others, but he also says that Washington’s “monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout — ‘We have Washington to our father.’” Douglass points out, a little over 70 years following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the power of myth making and the ways that it serves to placate a populace and also to maintain social hierarchies.

Ultimately, Douglass, as I’ve written before, calls upon us to think about the myths that we create and the…