For many Europeans, the American mind is a hard thing to fathom. Considering the cultural influence the United States have exercised over the Mother Continent since 1918, and their political dominance since 1945, it is an important question. Nor are the Americans one is likely to meet in Europe much help—we are hardly representative of our countrymen. Less than 20% of Americans own passports, and a minority of that number actually use them beyond Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. We Americans abroad may be very pro- or anti-European, well-informed or ignorant, but we are not typical.
Even if we were, as a whole, Americans tend not to be very introspective. We may seek the self-affirmation of American Exceptionalism or the self-hatred of Wokery, but the calm pursuit of self-knowledge is not usually in our purview. This, of course, is not uncommon amongst either Imperial or Calvinist peoples; we are both—the latter in a strange, secularised sense peculiar to ourselves. So it is that probing the American mind presents unique challenges even to natives—let alone Europeans.
It has been observed that at the bottom of American differences from Europe lie two qualities: race and space. Certainly, the Indian and Black issues on the one hand, and the sheer immensity of our country on the other, make for a very great difference. So does the great divorce between rulers and ruled, despite the need of the former to corral the latter into election booths every so often. I often tell foreigners that if they want to love my country, they need to take a long road trip through it; if they wish to hate it, they need only to read the history of its foreign policy. The dissonance between the two experiences is astonishing.
The Thirteen English colonies are the original seats of the ‘cultural hearths’ which became major subcultures: New England (the ideological ‘active ingredient’ of the country); the Mid-Atlantic—New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—with a cosmopolitanism dating back to their foundations; and the Old South, which would eventually expand all the way West to southeastern New Mexico’s ‘Little Texas.’ In addition, French Louisiana—and scattered French settlements across the central part of the country—alongside the Spanish Southwest all played their part. But the most purely American part of the country—settled after independence, and despite the little islands of French culture just mentioned—is the Midwest. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska—alongside parts of Missouri—comprise this realm. Heavily settled in parts by both New England Yankees, Southerners, and very many descendants of later European immigrants (often in rural ethnic settlements of their own), this most American region is often considered quiet, uneventful, and even dull. But the reality is different.
If historically it was a region considered conformist and repressed by its native-born writers (cf. Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and on and on), the very existence of such a host of artists tells us something about the Midwestern imagination, even if it has rarely been allowed to blossom in its own soil. Such figures as Frank Lloyd Wright, Hubert Eaton, Ronald Reagan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and many others had to go more fertile soil to plant their dreams—often enough in Southern California, where both the nascent film industry and the profusion of alternate spiritualities produced an atmosphere conducive to making visions concrete, regardless of how bizarre they may have been. Paradoxically, although their accomplishments might not have been possible elsewhere, the dreams that inspired them could only have been dreamed by Midwesterners. The most successful of these visionaries, arguably, was the late, great Walt Disney (1901-1966).
It is a very popular pastime among intellectuals to complain about the “Disneyfication” of such works as Pinocchio or Bambi: that is to say, taking serious and often tragic works, and remaking them into cheery children’s films with inevitably happy endings. No one familiar with the originals would argue with those assertions. Nevertheless, Disney often plucked works out of obscurity, made a fortune out of them, and in time became a cultural and financial force to be reckoned with. In many ways, he epitomised the American mind and spirit. To understand him is to begin to understand America.
Romanticism in America has always played a strong component in our national makeup since the 19th century. Our first important writers—Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the rest—were bona fide Romantics. In search of material, they went back and forth between Old Europe, New America, and their own imaginations. They travelled extensively in the Old World and the New, and celebrated what they liked in both. In, with, and under his distinctively Midwestern imagination, Disney followed these pioneers in search of inspiration, and found it where and as they did. From Dr. Syn, the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, to Zorro and his associates in Old California, Disney’s active mind ranged. Whether in cartoons or live action films—in addition his own creations like Mickey and Minnie Mouse—Disney brought to life works of Jules Verne, and stories of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Johnny Tremain, Davey Crockett, and a great many more historical and fictional characters. It is no mistake that, in one cartoon, he bracketed that most English of novels, The Wind in the Willows, with the uber-American Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Basil Rathbone—best known at the time for his Sherlock Holmes films—and crooner Bing Crosby were the respective narrators: the first being the quintessential Englishman, and the other the ultimate Yank.
In a certain sense, however, the blueprint of Disney’s—and indeed the American—mind was literally set in stone beginning in 1955 with the opening of his world-famed (and five times replicated) amusement theme park, Disneyland. It is amazing how clearly the park depicts both its creator’s imagination and the major themes in the American mentality.
One enters Disneyland through the area called ‘Main Street, U.S.A.’ It is based on Walt’s memories of Marceline, Missouri, his home town, back in the early 20th century—as idealised in the mind of Disney. Like Ray Bradbury’s Waukegan, Illinois (“Green Town,” in his writings), Walt’s childhood memories are where all the adventuring really begins. For a long time, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,” wherein a robot impersonated the great emancipator, offered the Main Street visitor quality time with an American figure almost universally accepted as a hero—and indeed, an archetype in the national imagination, alongside George Washington.
But over Main Street towers Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. Inspired by Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein (although this writer enjoys annoying Bavarians by claiming it was the other way around), it is the main entrance to Fantasyland. Here we see in Disney’s and the American popular imagination alike the strong residue of European legend, folklore, and fiction. Rides and attractions are themed around such as Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Mr. Toad, Snow White, and, of course, King Arthur. Regardless of our subsequent cultural and political development on this side of the water, these things anchor us firmly in our places of origin.
But it should not be thought that the history of our Westward expansion—beginning with the European colonists and ending under the Stars and Stripes—does not have at least an equal hold on our national—and Walt Disney’s—mind as those far-off roots. Frontierland is an evocation of that era of our history. The artificial waterway dubbed “Rivers of America” hosts or has hosted such crafts as Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes, the Mark Twain Riverboat, the Mike Fink Keel Boats and the Sailing Ship Columbia—each reflecting different elements of our Western riverine heritage. Tom Sawyer Island in its midst hosts the Pirate’s Lair. Such locales as the Burning Settler’s Cabin, the Ceremonial Dance Circle, Fort Wilderness, and the Indian Village reflected the interaction between Indians and settlers as held in the popular mind—and in recent years have been purged in accord with the prevailing wokery of our time, that Disney would have found as incomprehensible as it is abhorrent. But the trading posts and stores remain much as they were, giving at least the feel of shopping in that long ago era.
A later addition to the park, in 1966, was New Orleans Square, reflecting a sui generis city looming large in Disney’s and the American mind—all at once a sophisticated European city, nevertheless deep within the wild untamed frontier. A nod to New Orleans in the 19th century, its opening in July of 1966 was Disney’s last public appearance. He missed, as a result, the opening in the next year of Pirates of the Caribbean, and in 1969 that of the Haunted Mansion—both of which, however, he was intimately involved in designing. In both are found the fascination with the uncanny, mixed with humour, that is also a big part of the American mindset. From Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne through to H.P. Lovecraft and on to the present we have produced more than our share of writers on the ghostly mixed with Americana. Two of our most American writers working to-day—New Englander Stephen King and Midwesterner Garrison Keillor—are renowned respectively for folksy horror and folksy humour. But the difference is more in degree than kind: there is a good deal of sardonic humour in King’s scariest tales; and, there is a twinge of the unnatural in Keillor’s funniest work—most notably in the film version of A Prairie Home Companion.
Americans are often reputed to have only a sketchy notion of geography, and yet withal a love of the exotic—as witnessed by the popularity of National Geographic. Thus, Adventureland resembles remote jungles in Africa, Asia, South America, Oceania, and the Caribbean, somehow thrown together in the imagination. “To create a land that would make this dream reality,” said Walt Disney, “We pictured ourselves far from civilization, in the remote jungles of Asia and Africa.” The Enchanted Tiki Room, the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, and the Jungle Cruise—as well as assorted shops and eateries—place the entrant into an imaginary and syncretic land of the exotic.
There is, of course, a deeply practical side to the American mind—and to Walt Disney, who harnessed technology so well to bring to life all of these realms of imagination. But as Tomorrowland shows, both America and Disney have a deep fascination with progress. Before the Disney Corporation bought the rights to various science fiction franchises and brought them to life at the park, Walt himself led the charge into the future. As he put it, “Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.”
During my childhood, the Carousel of Progress (which chronicled household appliances from the 19th century to the future), Monsanto’s Adventure Thru Inner Space (in which the thrilled visitors were reduced to the size of an atom), the Flight to the Moon, and the PeopleMover combined to make one feel excited about the prospect of the future and one’s own presumed place in it.
This living model of Disney’s—and indeed America’s—inner life may shed light on the compelling nature of American entertainment in general. From this mix of nostalgia and futurism emerged Vaudeville and Medicine Shows, the Great American Songbook, Jazz, Broadway, Hollywood, radio, television, and latterly online entertainment. Moreover, even when the vast majority of Americans were white Protestants steeped in the themes we have been examining, it was the marginal groups—Jews, Catholics, and Blacks—who were the actual primary practitioners of the popular entertainments conjured up by the American imagination. So it remains that, for those who ponder the American identity, its paradoxes yet outnumber its certainties.
