fices that had stood for generations without anyone thinking they needed such stern brazen reminders.
Intellectuals veered left in the 1920s, but that was a consequence, not a cause. At heart they were not moving leftward so much as moving away from the traditional American narrative of values, which they felt had been discredited by the repressive hyper-patriotism of World War I and the vulgar middle-class prosperity of the '20s.
Edmund Wilson in the depths of the Great Depression celebrated the young intellectuals "who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding out of everything they cared about." For them, the Depression years "were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden, unexpected collapse of the stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power."
Scott Fitzgerald put it bluntly in 1932: "The New Generation had matured to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken; all they knew was that America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." Another author, in a polemical book published the same year, summed it up like this: "Having surrendered idealism for the sake of prosperity, the 'practical men' bankrupted us on both of them."
Other intellectuals before had stepped outside the American mainstream and criticized it as narrowly violent, materialistic, crass, obsessed with false gods and rotten ideals -- Thoreau, Henry James. In the 1930s, this became a prevailing theme. Since then, it has only increased in fury. So much of the literary and academic class is fixated on American evil, to the degree of seeing nothing but it. Theirs is not the mature, whole vision foreseen by McMaster, but an infantile and poisonous replacement for Parson Weems.
They seem never to have advanced past the moment they learned Washington did not, in fact, skip a silver dollar across the Potomac. Somebody lied to them. Because the myths were not real, the virtues are not. America to them has been a perpetual disappointment. They pitched the whole project and set up a rival pantheon of "heroes" from some truly awful raw material -- from John Brown to Stalin to the Black Panthers. Would Che Guevara's life hold up as well as Washington's, if raked with the same historical scrutiny?
The "American scene" paintings of Grant Wood (1891—1942) are gentle satires. "Parson Weems' Fable" (1939, above) is based on Charles Willson Peale's portrait of himself lifting the curtain on his own museum in Philadelphia in which he sought to display and classify all the rich natural life of America. In Wood's painting, the parson lifts the curtain on a scene in which the cherries are as artificial as the curtain tassles. There are the slaves, too -- the embarrassing fact, in the background, and there is little George, with the head of old President George right off the 3-cent stamp. The picture is squared off and lit like a theater stage. Parson Weems's fable is a lie told to teach that lies are wrong. Wood enjoys this paradox and gently mocks it.
But much of the intellectual class in America has turned so hard and vicious in its contempt that it does not even recognize Wood's satire for what it is. Wood's paintings, such as "American Gothic," have been used as the basis of more brutal satire.
Such as here, on the cover of the book in which Ward Churchill's infamous essay is printed, comparing the Sept. 11 victims in the World Trade Center to Nazi Jew-killers. If Parson Weems missed the irony in telling a lie to teach the virtue of truth, Churchill, or his book designer, reveal their folly in tearing up a straw man of satire and thinking they are shooting arrows into the heart of Evil Amerikkka.
Washington's soldiers protected the captive Hessians from the Philadelphia mob in 1777. It also is true that the colonials in arms sometimes swapped barbarity for barbarity with their enemies, plundered and raped, and occasionally tortured and butchered POWs -- especially loyalists and runaway slaves who had join