National Psyche Research Articles

In Search of the American Way of War: The Need for a Wider National and International Context

Whether one agrees with John Keegan that war is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon or adheres to the more traditional Clausewitzian view that war is all about politics, it is clear that armed forces are raised, equipped, organized, supplied, and commanded by discrete social groups. Therefore, the way wars are fought is inherently cultural: it could hardly be otherwise. So Russell Weigley was right, there is an American way of war: we just do not know exactly what that is?yet.1 If Wayne Lee's objective is to track the cultural roots of American military history, the debate must be broader than what he proposes.2 First, it must be grounded more firmly in what might be called the mainstream intellectual debate over the nature of the American national psyche. Only then can the American conception of the purpose and conduct of war be properly assessed. Secondly, to get a handle on what is distinctly American about America's way of war, the debate must be set in a wider, international context. American military history needs to be informed by the literature, the debates, and the shared expe riences of others, including not only America's enemies, but its allies as well. Americans may not always agree with and like what foreigners say about them, but such a debate needs outside perspectives. Lee characterized John Lynn's approach to the problem of culture and war as a dialogue between the nation's discourse on war and the practices of its army. That conception is much too narrow. The dialogue needs to be between the nation's discourse on who and what Americans are?writ large?and how they fight. Despite the existence of a small regular army, the bulk of America's wars have been fought by the great mass of the Ameri can people, who carried with them all the baggage of a dynamic, boisterous, and often uncertain society. The roots, then, of a distinctly American approach to war and fight ing go well beyond the rather limited confines of the discourse on military institutions. Lee's study, therefore, needs to push into the broader debates over what it means to be American and to be an American at war. James Webb's popular but facile treatment of the subject, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, argues that there is something fundamentally combative deep in the nation's collective psyche. Academics have heard this before. A dissenting voice during the panel discussion on World War II at the 2005

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russian Identities

Studies of Russian ‘identity’ have boomed in recent years, yet it is far from clear just what this term means. Is it a synonym for ‘mentality’ or merely a constituent part thereof, or perhaps a substitute for that currently disparaged old favourite, the ‘Russian soul’? Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, who is professor emeritus of European history at the University of California, Berkeley, cleverly sidesteps this problem by writing of ‘identities’ in the plural. He sees the national psyche as having d...

"The Whole Wilderness Shall Blossom As the Rose": Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and the Question of Native Settlement on Cooper's Frontier

This article investigates the formation of two wilderness communities that sprang up in proximity to one another on the American frontier in the late eighteenth century. Cooperstown, founded by William Cooper, the speculator/politician father of James Fenimore Cooper, comes to epitomize the American frontier spirit and produces archetypal narrative templates that remain stubbornly rooted in our national psyche to this day. Brotherton, founded by the Mohegan minister Samson Occom and a group of New England Natives, is equally invested in the dreams and national will of its citizens, and yet it is a settlement that is ultimately subsumed by the suffocating fact of white encroachment. In effect, Brotherton vanishes, falls off the map, thereby serving the American hegemonic dream as fully as Cooperstown. My investigation of these two settlements is necessarily an investigation into the struggle of Native communities to retain political autonomy under relentless colonial pressures. But it also details the unusual event of a Native people seizing control of their own fate, in this era of forced removals, by ordering their own exodus. I explore the complications inherent in the competing models of settlement for these two communities, particularly in terms of how vastly different we imagine the cultural dividing lines to be between Native and Euro-American, and how those perceived differences are enforced by dominant rhetorical strategies. I focus on the writings of Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson who must tap into the prevailing discourse of the day in order to project a viable future community and find the institutional support necessary for its formation. Through the production of letters, journal passages, speeches, sermons, and even hymnals, Occom and Johnson write their imagined community into being. By doing so, however, they are in some ways positioned into reimagining who they are as a people. Ultimately the settling of Cooperstown and Brotherton offers a remarkable instruction in contrast, denoting how the ideology that so invigorated the interests of one ethnic group came to be deployed by another. For the Native American individuals who boldly developed this scheme of emigration, the incredible risks become less the risks of logistics, i.e. travel, shelter, land cultivation, and more about the politics of identity. Through the writings of Occom and Johnson, however, I hope to illustrate how the Brotherton movement was also an act of continuance, or a deliberate effort to maintain autonomy, sovereignty, and a link to communal traditions of the past.

Two Steps Forward, One and a Half Steps Back: Police Reform in Peru, 2001–2004

Two Steps Forward, One and a Half Steps Back: Police Reform in Peru, 2001–2004

A World of Enemies: New Perspectives on German Military Culture and the Origins of the First World War

In the introduction to his 1915 book Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk, Otto Hintze ruefully quoted an Englishman's observation that, “Prussian history is endlessly boring because it speaks so much of war and so little of revolution.” As the “Great War” entered its second year, and with Germany's hopes for a quick and decisive victory fading, Hintze saw history repeating itself. Like Frederick the Great's Prussia, he wrote, “The German Reich, under a Hohenzollern Kaiser, [now] battles for its existence against a world of enemies.” Since the beginning of the war, Entente propaganda had mobilized the home front by depicting the war as an epochal struggle against the enemy of all civilized men: the savage “Hun,” the jack-booted, spike-helmeted despoiler of innocent Belgium. The crudity of this propaganda caricature aside, its power to persuade nevertheless drew on a widespread conviction that the story of war constituted the core of German history and that the disease of “militarism” was a peculiarly German deformation of the national psyche. In response to the censure of their nation's enemies, the German intellectuals rejected that diagnosis while defending the role war had played in their nation's history. Published in the Kölnische Zeitung on October 4, 1914, the hastily drafted manifesto “To the Civilized World!” was endorsed (if not read) by ninety-three of the Second Reich's most prominent scholars, scientists, philosophers, and theologians, including Peter Behrens, Lujo Brentano, Adolph von Harnack, Max Lenz, and Gustav von Schmoller. They vehemently repudiated the distortion of Germany's history: “Were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated.” “The word militarism,” the liberal jurist Gerhard Anschütz defiantly declared in 1915, “which is being used throughout the world as a swear word against us, let it be for us a badge of honor.” As Hintze, Anschütz, and their contemporaries understood the course of German unification (and Germany's rise as a great power under Prussian leadership), the modern German nation-state owed its very existence to what Hintze called “the monarchical-military factor.” If we are to advance our understanding of how a nationalist discourse obsessed with foreign and domestic threats supported a foreign policy that ignited two world wars in the space of twenty-five years, we must be prepared, I believe, to re-think the “Sonderweg thesis,” not in its relation to the putative immaturity of German liberalism or an atavistic predilection for autocratic rule, but as it was rooted in German military culture. The books under discussion in this essay reframe the militarism/“Sonderweg” debate by examining the unique connection between modern German visions of the nation and the waging of war as revealed in the experience of the First World War. Representing the maturation of the new intellectual and cultural history of war, they pose two fundamental questions: What kind of war did the Second Reich's military, political, and intellectual leadership envision that would “complete” the German nation? And how did they define Germany's enemies?

Aboriginal Surfing: Reinstating Culture and Country

Mainstream surfing in Australia is a discursive cultural practice, institutionally sanctioned as integral to national identity. represents the nation through a mode of white heterosexual orientation that is encoded into its practices and its texts. represents an historical transformation in the national psyche from the bush, inaugurated by the nation’s literary canon, to the beach, which has become the modern site of the nation’s identity. Indigenous surfing provides an oppositional view of nation and country that reinscribes the beach with cultural meanings specific to Aboriginal cultures. in this context can be seen as a reclamation of culture and a challenge to the dominance of white conceptions of nation and identity. This paper examines the indigenous surfing film, Surfing the Healing Wave and explores the film's representations of histories that are relevant to Aboriginal people. The film's narrative disruption of the surfing film genre instates a pedagogical practice that functions to reinscribe Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal histories through the contemporary event of the indigenous surfing contest.

We’ll drink till we drop, regardless

It is our national psyche and not licensing law that governs the way we drink, says Tim Turner

HISTORIC TRAUMA AND THE POLITICS OF THE PRESENT IN INDIA

India has had a very different history of violence and conflict from South Africa's, yet each democracy has had to face questions of how to deal with memories of past suffering, which bear directly on the quality of political life in the present. In India, the dream of national independence in 1947 rapidly changed into a nightmare of religious and ethnic violence. Britain's empire in the sub-continent was divided into two countries, Muslim-based Pakistan and constitutionally secular India, amid horrific massacres of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. This experience has remained a fundamental trauma in India's national psyche. This article looks to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as offering India a potentially creative way of dealing with the wounds of the past. It identifies in the recent South African experience a model of dealing with history which avoids the twin dangers of forgetting or uncritically rehearsing an accepted version of the past.

Long-Term Follow-Up (32 Years) of PTSD in Israeli Yom Kippur War Veterans

The Yom Kippur War came as a major shock to the confidence and stability of the national psyche in Israel, and it may be suggested that the incidence of associated psychological trauma at least in war veterans may be more profound and long-standing. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the presence of PTSD in a naturalistic cohort of Yom Kippur veterans 32 years after the war managed for PTSD in a specialized unit during the war. Results indicated that of the 277 (20.9%) initial battle front-injured referred for evaluation who were diagnosed with PTSD, 32 years later only 19 war veterans were still suffering with PTSD (6.85% of the PTSD subpopulation or 1.43% of the original injured combat veteran cohort). Results from this long-term follow-up study indicate a low incidence of chronic symptomatology that may be accounted for by the nature of the initial care, follow-up, and subpopulation investigated.

Jews and the American soul: human nature in the twentieth century

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION: Jews and the American Soul 1 PART I. One Nation under Stress, Divisible: Jewish Immigrants and the National Psyche CHAPTER 1: Jews and the Psychodynamics of American Life 11 PART II. The Moral Universe of the Jews CHAPTER 2: Benjamin Franklin in Hebrew: The Musar Sage of Philadelphia 39 CHAPTER 3: Jews and the Crisis of the Psyche 50 CHAPTER 4: Freud and Adler: The Rise of Jewish Psychoanalytic Moralism 64 PART III. Jewish Morality and the Psychological Shift of American Culture ,1890-1945 CHAPTER 5: Popular Psychology: The Great American Synthesis of Religion and Science 87 CHAPTER 6: Jewish Psychological Evangelism: A Collective Biography of the First Generation 103 CHAPTER 7: The Moronic Immigrant and the Neurotic Jew: Jews and American Perceptions of Intelligence, Personality, and Race 140 CHAPTER 8: The Specter of the Mob: Jews and the Battle for the American Unconscious 165 PART IV. Peace of Mind: Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America CHAPTER 9: Rabbi Liebman and the Psychic Pain of the World War II Generation 195 CHAPTER 10: Peace of Mind :A New Jewish Gospel of Love 217 CHAPTER 11: Clare Boothe Luce and the Catholic-Jewish Clash over Freud in America 241 PART V. Jews and the American Search for Meaning, 1950-2000 CHAPTER 12: Jews and the Creation of American Humanism 261 CHAPTER 13: Joyce Brothers: The Jewish Woman as Psychologist of Suburban America 295 CHAPTER 14: Holocaust, Hasidism, Suffering, Redemption 321 Conclusion 349 Notes 353 Index 419

Jacqueline Kennedy: first lady of the New Frontier

In a mere one thousand days, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy created an entrancing public persona that has remained intact for nearly forty years. Even now, a decade after her death, she remains a figure of enduring - and endearing - interest. Yet, while innumerable books have focused on the legends and gossip surrounding this charismatic figure, Barbara Perry's is the first to focus largely on Kennedy's White House years, portraying a First Lady far more complex and enigmatic than previously perceived. Noting how Jackie's celebrity and devotion to privacy have for years precluded a more serious treatment, Perry's engaging and well-crafted story illuminates Kennedy's immeasurable impact on the institution of the First Lady. Perry vividly illustrates the complexities of Jacqueline Bouvier's marriage to John F. Kennedy, and shows how she transformed herself from a reluctant political wife to an effective, confident presidential partner. Perry is especially illuminating in tracing the First Lady's mastery of political symbolism and imagery, along with her use of television and state entertainment to disseminate her work to a global audience. By offering the White House as a stage for the arts, Jackie also bolstered the president's Cold War efforts to portray the United States as the epitome of a free society. From redecorating the White House to championing Lafayette Square's preservation to lending her name to fund-raising for the National Cultural Center, she had a profound impact on the nation's psyche and cultural life. Meanwhile, her fashionable clothes and glamorous hairdos stood in stark contrast to the dowdiness of her predecessors and the drab appearances of Communist leaders' spouses. Never before or since has a First Lady (and her husband) sparkled with so much hope and vigor on the stage of American public life. Perry's deft narrative captures all of that and more, even as it also insightfully depicts Jackie's struggles to preserve her own identity amid the pressures of an institution she changed forever. Grounded on the author's painstaking research into previously overlooked or unavailable archives, at the Kennedy Library and elsewhere, as well as interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy's close associates, Perry's work expands and enriches our understanding of a remarkable American woman.

Cyberterrorism: The Sum of All Fears?

Cyberterrorism conjures up images of vicious terrorists unleashing catastrophic attacks against computer networks, wreaking havoc, and paralyzing nations. This is a frightening scenario, but how likely is it to occur? Could terrorists cripple critical military, financial, and service computer systems? This article charts the rise of cyberangst and examines the evidence cited by those who predict imminent catastrophe. Psychological, political, and economic forces have combined to promote the fear of cyberterrorism. From a psychological perspective, two of the greatest fears of modern time are combined in the term “cyberterrorism.” The fear of random, violent victimization segues well with the distrust and outright fear of computer technology. Many of these fears, the report contends, are exaggerated: not a single case of cyberterrorism has yet been recorded, hackers are regularly mistaken for terrorists, and cyberdefenses are more robust than is commonly supposed. Even so, the potential threat is undeniable and seems likely to increase, making it all the more important to address the danger without inflating or manipulating it. Tomorrow"s terrorist may be able to do more damage with a keyboard than with a bomb. National Research Council1 For the foreseeable future, acts of cyberterrorism, such as the ones usually imagined, will be very difficult to perform, unreliable in their impact, and easy to respond to in relatively short periods of time. Douglas Thomas, statement to the Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations2 Our nation is at grave risk of a cyberattack that could devastate the national psyche and economy more broadly than did the 9/11 attacks. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Roy Maxion in a letter to President G. Bush co-signed by 50 computer scientists Terrorists are interested in creating bloodshed and terror. The Internet doesn"t rise to this level of impact in a way that a truck bomb does. George Smith, Co-editor, vmyths.com

The Return of the Native: Recent Scholarship in the Literature of Christianization and Contact

The Return of the Native:Recent Scholarship in the Literature of Christianization and Contact Phillip H. Round (bio) American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. Joanna Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. vi, 255 pp. Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America. Kristina Bross. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. 257 pp. The Eliot Tracts: With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter. Edited by Michael Clark. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. vii, 452 pp. Les Sauvages Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Gordon Sayre. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xxii, 384 pp. The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Laura M. Stevens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 264 pp. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Hillary Wyss. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xiii, 207. Attention to native people has ebbed and flowed among students of early American literature, as trends in the broader scholarship emphasized by turns the frontier, the "national character," and American imperialism. But the present interest in Native American culture may be traced to the 1970s, when parallels between America in Southeast Asia and America in Indian Country became nearly inescapable, and—as Gerald Vizenor recalls—the Vietnam War "aroused the nation to remember the inseparable massacres at My Lai, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee" (149). The same period that sawan incredible resurgence in early American literary studies (led by Sacvan Bercovitch's The Puritan Origins of the American Self) also witnessed a reexamination of the "Indian question." While Bercovitch tacitly condemned conformism in American culture by tracing its roots to the hegemonic symbolic and ritual structures of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence (1973), drew direct attention to indigenous peoples' role in American cultural development. Unlike Bercovitch (and Perry Miller before him), Slotkin saw American Indian people as central to "the fatal opposition" that lay at the center of the nation's psyche. "The story of the evolution of an American mythology is," Slotkin wrote, "the story of our too-slow awakening to the significance of the American Indian in the universal scheme of things generally and in our (or his) American world in particular" (17). Over the ensuing thirty years, scholars have awakened. Ethnohistorians like James Axtell set to work examining the reciprocal cultural relations entailed in Native and Euro-American contact, underscoring "the impact the major competing cultures of eastern North America had upon each other" (ix). This trend in the historiography reached its height in 1990, when Richard White published The Middle Ground, a work that forever changed the way American scholars viewed "Indian/White relations." Other historians, like Neal Salisbury and William Simmons, have written sensitive and native-centered accounts of life in the eastern woodlands in [End Page 376] both precontact and postcontact times. Literary scholars, influenced by Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (Routledge, 1992) and Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism (Oxford, 1991), began to explore the political dimensions of the narrative constructions from which the previous generation had parsed their "information" about native people in early America. Many found Pratt's description of the discourse of "anticonquest"—the ideological mystification of invasion as disinterested observation—particularly potent. Seeing such texts as Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration or New Englands First Fruits through "imperial eyes" meant not only re-envisioning colonialism as a discursive practice central to what is known as "early American literature" but also tracing the nuances, the critical political and mercantile purposes for which writing about native peoples was deployed in the early modern period. Viewing contact texts through imperial eyes in turn fostered a fruitful inquiry into the cultural investments of native people who performed in these texts and in texts of their own making. These performances, however filtered by European editors and writers, became recoverable and legible as parts of an emerging set of discourses surrounding colonial resistance. Many of the classic works of early American literary study have now been read to reveal their "point[s] of revolution," where (in Cheyfitz's words) "the colonized began...

The biology of mental illness

o doubt. the majority of the 28 million Americans taking an antidepressant, or similar drug, were told by a doctor that they have a genetic defect resulting in a shortage of a chemical, and that to rectify this chemical imbalance they need to take a pill. The basic tenet of biological psychiatry is that mental illness is an "organic" disease, meaning that the patient has too much or too little of a neurotransmitter, too much or too little of a receptor, or an overactive or underactive neuronal circuit. Whatever the problem might be, it is "biological and biological problems are best treated with drugs. As everyone now knows, clinical depression is just like diabetes; one patient is short of insulin, another is short of serotonin; one patient needs insulin, another needs Prozac-and so the story goes. Never has a theory with so little scientific evidence been so well accepted by the American public-three of the seven most commonly prescribed drugs are now mood elevators. While the pharmaceutical companies certainly deserve much of the credit for this, unfortunately these companies are not alone. Most of us are sufficiently jaded by the shenanigans of big business to really place too much blame on these companies for turning an unproven theory into a marketing slogan; skepticism of big business is part of our national psyche. The trickier question is deciding how much of a role academicians in the American medical community, particularly those in medical school psychiatry departments, have contributed to the problem. Times have changed so dramatically that psychiatrists no longer see depressed patients as people with complicated issues that might need to be worked out and discussed. Instead, patients are bundles of neu rotransmitters in need of a tune up; out comes the prescription pad and only if the patient is lucky enough to have adequate insurance will they get to see a psychologist or a therapist. A recent study found that it took three minutes for a patient to get a prescription for an anti-depressant medication-about as much time as the typical person spends talking to a grocery store checkout clerk. According to Nathaniel Lehrman, the former clinical director of the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, "We find ourselves in the increasingly difficult position because Psychiatry has badly mishandled depression in its all-consuming reliance on drugs as the first line of treatment." As just one example of how far we have come, in one of her recent columns, Dr. Joyce Brothers diagnoses a woman with depression and recommends therapy and medication-all based on a one-paragraph letter. Like most people who are depressed, there is a reason for her depression-it didn't just appear out of nowhere. Consider her circumstances; the women is getting divorced from her chronically unfaithful husband, her boss just died, and she is about to lose her job. No one is going to argue that people have psychological problems, but does this woman have a disease? Is the anti-depressant recommend by Dr. Brothers treating her serotonin shortage or is it just a little something to take the edge off during a crisis? The only way to say that this person has a "disease" is to ignore her as an individual.

Lawrence Welk and John Wooden: Midwestern Small-Town Boys Who Never Left Home

Considered by many to be the most American part of America, the Midwest occupies a unique place in the national psyche, and its residents have been called the archetypal or quintessential Americans. The region is – and was – anything but homogenous, and any adequate treatment of it needs to take into account its many variations, complexities, and paradoxes. Any search for the essential character of the region soon founders on recognition of its cultural diversity. Yet, acknowledgment of the hazards of advancing broad generalizations about a region extending from Ohio to the Dakotas and ranging as far south as Missouri should not bar us from inquiring into the qualities and characteristics of its people. Despite the contradictions and complexities attaching to the region, the Midwest possesses a distinctive cultural identity, joining its constituent elements in an unstable and constantly changing, but nevertheless recognizable, pattern.

Big Things

Big Things

Research society: science and technology for the ages

This paper imagines a US society that is obsessed with survival over the very long-term, not just over the next decade or two but over very long-time spans measured in the thousands and millions of years. Given that Americans tend to be achievement-oriented, it is plausible that they could become enthralled with this ultimate challenge. It is folly to argue that a fundamental change in the focus of the national psyche from consumerism to longer-term pursuits will happen anytime soon but the paper suggests that dissatisfaction with consumerism, growing environmentalism, increasingly felt limits of non-renewable resources, the increasing extinction of species, and a tiredness with global power politics as usual and its seemingly inexplicable violence and terrorism can someday lead to archetypal change in our society. In anticipation of this change, this paper presents a roadmap of how we could get from here, consumerism, to there, focused on the journey of life through time and space. The paper also outlines threats that humans must address to maintain the journey of earth-life through time and space; and presents a broad range of activities designed to meet the threats and capitalize on important opportunities. Finally, the paper explores how society would be transformed to meet the challenges and what sectors of today’s economy could be expected to contribute workers to a bourgeoning science and technology workforce and concludes with a few remarks about the future to come.

The Long Shadow of Trianon: Hungarian Alliance Policies during World War II

The Treaty of Trianon was the peace settlement that the victors of World War I imposed on Hungary after the war. The treaty's severity was unprecedented in modern European history. By dismembering the multi-ethnic “historic Kingdom of Hungary” the treaty left Hungarians less than a third of their former territory and transferred 3.3 million of them to neighboring states. Not surprisingly, Trianon came as a shock to the Hungarian people and constituted an enduring blow to the Magyar national psyche. During the next quarter century, Hungarians were obsessed with the idea of reversing this dictum and the primary objective of their foreign policies was the creation of international conditions in which the revision of Trianon could become possible. For this purpose the regime in Budapest sought allies, as this aim could be attained only with outside help. By the first half of 1941 this search had led to Hungary's entanglement in an alliance with Nazi Germany. Once Hungary became a partner in the Nazi war, the ...

Central Asia: a gathering storm?

A fascinating exploration of our evolving national psyche, this book chronicles major traumas in recent American history - from the Depression and Pearl Harbor, to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Columbine - how we responded to them as a nation, and what our responses mean. Reflecting on American popular culture as well as the media, this edition includes a new chapter on 9/11 and other acts of terror within the United States, as well as coverage of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. New student-friendly features, including discussion questions and Symbolic Events boxes in each chapter, give the book added value as a classroom supplement.

"We Want Americans Pure and Simple": Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism

Issues of immigration and assimilation have always troubled the national psyche, with the native-born and immigrants wondering what it means to be an American. Theodore Roosevelt attempted to shape those issues, attempts that still resonate today in the public consciousness.1 This essay examines the mythic themes of Roosevelt's discourse in his narrative history The Winning of the West to explain how he used the Frontier Myth to lionize the immigrant in American culture. Moreover, the essay illuminates how his discourse not only provided a primer to immigrants about the expectations of American culture, but also worked to lessen the anti-immigrationist impulse.