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Nativism and Western Myth: The Influence of Nativist Ideas on the American Self-Image

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Bronwen J. Cohen
Bronwen J. Cohen
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

In his seminal work Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith depicted the bymbolic meaning that Americans attached to their Western empire during the nineteenth century. The West appealed to the American imagination variously as a possible passage to India, a land to be filled, farmed and civilized and a land to lend territorial grandeur to the existing American nation. But a certain squeamishness pervaded the attitudes of many upper-class Easterners to Western society itself, and only towards die end of the nineteenth century did they begin to show a marked enthusiasm for life in the West, and for their own pioneering origins.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 1974 , pp. 23 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

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55 Something similar to this seems to have occurred in Argentina, a country which, in approxi mately the same period, faced the impact of rapid social and economic change, and an even greater relative influx of immigrants than the United States. The image of the ‘gaucho’ underwent a transformation similar to that of the American cowboy, and the cult of the ‘gaucho’ seems to have been used to contrast traditional Creole values with those of the immigrants and to depict the immigrant as inept and unsuited for an idealized, vanishing epoch of Argentinian history. This can be seen in José Hernández' famous and influential poem, Martin Fierro. See also Onega, Gladys S., La Inmigración en la Literatura Argentina (Buenos Aires, Editorial Galerna, 1969), esp. pp. 68–70Google Scholar; and Solberg, Carl, Immigration and Nationalism. Argentina and Chile 1890–1914 (Austin and London, University of Texas, 1970), pp. 154–6.Google Scholar

56 I would like to thank Dr Klaus J. Hansen, of Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, for his criticisms and comments on an earlier draft of this paper.