From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue May 18 2004 - 06:39:26 MDT
This one came with the Skeptic newsleter:
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I don't know if this is common knowledge at the Skeptic Society or not, but I just read about the origins of the word "debunking" and I thought it was interesting, so I'm sending this excerpt from the book I just read. The book is Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, published by Oxford University Press, 2004. Pages 442-444 of the hardcover.
In the excerpt, the author uses the word "Filiopietist," which he defines as a person who has excess reverence for the founding fathers of the United States.
Start of Excerpt
Debunkers
A year after President Warren Harding dedicated the Princeton Battle Monument, Americans invented another new word to describe a contrarian school of historical interpretation. They called it "debunking," a term that rose from an interview that Henry Ford gave to reporter Charles N. Wheeler of the Chicago Tribune in 1916. That great industrialist declared, "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present. The only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today."
The Tribune ran an editorial that called Ford an "ignorant idealist," and was sued for libel. In the courtroom, a lawyer for the newspaper cruelly tested Henry Ford's knowledge of history in general and the American Revolution in particular:
"Have there ever been any revolutions in this country?" the lawyer asked.
"There was, I understand," Ford replied.
"When?"
"In 1812."
"Did you ever hear of Benedict Arnold?"
"I have heard the name."
"Who was he?"
"I have forgotten just who he is. He is a writer I think."
The jury awarded Henry Ford damages of six cents. But the idea that history was bunk began to grow. With it came a new school of anti-historians called debunkers. A favorite target was the American Revolution and the spirit of filiopietism that flourished in America. Debunking took many forms. Some of it sought to explode national pieties as erroneous myths and legends. Others argued history had no teleology and insisted that it was a series of accidents without a plan or purpose. They rejected large visions and made a mockery of idealism.
Many debunkers in the early twentieth century were conservatives who were hostile to Whig or Liberal history. More than a few were Americans of old family who were not happy about what had happened to their country and felt that they had been displaced by vulgar upstarts. A leading debunker was a prominent Philadelphian, Sydney George Fisher, who attacked what he called "The Legendary and Mythmaking Process in the History of the American Revolution." The members of the Adams family in Massachusetts debunked the story of Paul Revere's Ride and deeply resented the adulation of George Washington.
The history of the battles at Trenton and Princeton began to be debunked in this spirit. An early example was an essay by Charles Kendall Adams, who argued that it all happened because of a small mistake by a British general. Adams wrote, "Cornwallis was so sure of his game that he made the most stupendous blunder of the war, and decided to refresh his men by a night's sleep...It appears to have been simply this mistake that enabled Washington not only to draw his army out of extreme peril, but also to fall upon the enemy at Princeton." Adams concluded that "if the British commander had attacked vigorously on the afternoon of his arrival, as Washington, Grant, Lee, or any other great general would have done, the chances seem to have been more than ten to one that Washington and his whole army would have been taken prisoners." So much for the generalship of George Washington.
A few brave debunkers went after Washington in a more rounded way. One of them was William E. Woodward, the son of a southern tenant farmer, and a writer of strong radical opinions. He first used the verb "debunk" in a novel called "Bunk" in 1923 and defined it as "taking the bunk out of ideas and opinions." In 1926 he published a debunking biography of George Washington, which argued that Washington was a stupid, ignorant, greedy, selfish man who combined the vices of a modern businessman, a southern slave driver, and a western Indian fighter. Woodward insisted that he was a poor general and owed his successes merely to luck.
Woodward gained a brief notoriety, but the debunking of George Washington was uphill work. The difficulties appeared in the career of English writer Rupert Hughes, who started a multivolume biography to debunk Washington. By the end of volume III, Hughes was celebrating his subject more enthusiastically than the filiopietists did.
A more successful approach was to debunk the filiopietists themselves by comparing them with the Revolutionary leaders of 1776. The leading example was a painting by Grant Wood, in which Washington's Crossing had a part. Wood was an artist of the American Middle West, who lived all his life in Iowa and painted the world he knew with deep affection that was combined with a sharp critical edge. His favorite subjects were the American myths that he loved and celebrated and criticized in paintings such as American Gothic, Paul Revere's Ride, and Parson Weems' Fable.
One of these paintings was about the battle of Trenton and Princeton. It rose from an event in 1929, when Grant Wood installed a handsome stained glass window in the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It combined an allegorical image of the Republic with stained-glass images of soldiers from six American wars. To the artist's amazement, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution attacked him as un-American, for having the window manufactured in Germany. The controversy grew so bitter that the dedication was postponed for twenty-five years, when tempers had cooled.
The artist took his revenge in a painting called "Daughters of Revolution." It was done for the Washington Bicentennial, a flood of filiopietism. Much of it came from the Daughters of the American Revolution who claimed to be the true keepers of the Revolutionary memory. Grant Wood did not agree. He called them "Tory Gals," and condemned them as "the people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in the Republic."
His painting showed three Daughters of the American Revolution, with smug expressions and unseeing eyes. One holds an imported blue willow teacup in an affected way. Behind them Grant Wood painted a faded image of Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" as a symbol of the true Revolutionary spirit. The artist was not debunking George Washington. We used Leutze's image to debunk the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The painting was widely exhibited and much discussed in the press. The San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution reviled it as "scandalous" and "destructive of American traditions." Grant Wood claimed that the Baltimore chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution tried to have him deported as a "Red." But other Daughters loved the satire, and the painting gave many Americans a much needed laugh during the Great Depression.
End of Excerpt
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