Whistler’s Druthers
To have a history in America, one had to make it up oneself.
-JAMES ATLAS
In his seventh decade, James Whistler was confronted in a London restaurant by a fellow native of Lowell, Massachusetts. This man wondered why the artist claimed to be sixty-seven when they’d both been born around the same time and he was sixty-eight. “Ha-ha!” responded Whistler. “Very charming! And so you are 68 and were born at Lowell! Most interesting, no doubt, and as you please. But I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born at Lowell, and I refuse to be 68!”
America has always been a nation of blarney peddlers. Telling lies about themselves is as American as apple crisp. This country’s very name derived from a tall-tale merchant, Amerigo Vespucci, who apparently made few of the trips to the New World that he claimed to have made. By rights America should be named Columbia after its actual “discoverer,” Christopher Columbus. Columbus himself was an explorer of dubious character who kept
two logs on his 1492 journey, one genuine, one faked to suggest to his anxious crew that they were not as far from home as they feared. The Italian adventurer was a man of many faces and names: Christoforo Colombo in his native land, Cristovao Colom in Portugal (where he lived for a time), Cristóbal Colon in Spain, and Christopher Columbus in the anglicized version historians thought would go easier on Anglo ears. Much of what we “know” about Columbus is apocryphal, owing less to the historical record than to a wildly popular, highly embellished biography written by Washington Irving in 1828.
America’s bedrock parable of honesty—little George Washington admitting he’d cut down the cherry tree—was invented by another biographer, Parson Mason Locke Weems. Weems’s best-selling biography of America’s first president, in which his father told him “Truth, George, is the loveliest quality of youth,” contained far more fiction than fact, including the fanciful story of Washington on his knees in prayer at Valley Forge during the supposedly severe but actually mild winter of 1777, and, of course, the one about the honest little boy caught redhanded next to a fallen cherry tree with a hatchet in his hand. Parson Weems, whose novelization of Washington’s life went through multiple editions, himself claimed to have been “Rector of Mount-Vernon Parish.” There was no such church.
Although humbuggery is hardly an American invention, America’s citizens took this practice to breathtaking levels. The New World was a land of unlimited opportunities, including the opportunity to reconceive concepts of truthfulness. As historian Daniel Boorstin put it, in such a land, “the old boundaries—between fact and wish … no longer served.” American speech changed continually to accommodate Americans’ need to make things sound bigger, better, and more spectacular than they actually were. For a
contemporary example, go no further than your local Starbucks, where the smallest cup of coffee is called a “Tall.” Boorstin called this form of inflated expression “tall talk.” Tall talk blurred the distinction between fact and fiction. It was “the language of the neither true-nor-false, the language of ill-defined magnificence,” wrote Boorstin. A mid-nineteenth-century American didn’t just sleep soundly, he “slept so sound it would take an earthquake to wake him.” When angry he would “blow up like a steamboat.” Davy Crockett was said to be able to “walk like an ox, run like a fox, swim like an eel, yell like an Indian, fight like a devil, spout like an earthquake, [and] make love like a mad bull.” Like Columbus and Washington, Crockett benefited from biographers who were less than fastidious about facts. The so-called King of the Wild Frontier only began wearing a coonskin cap after a character in a popular play (The Lion of the West) did so. Crockett thought wearing this cap might help him get elected to Congress, as it did. He was notorious for making up his own legend, including the false claim that he had participated in a mutiny against General Andrew Jackson.
A striking number of America’s historical legends are apocryphal in whole or in part. Many of our most stirring quotations—“Give me liberty or give me death,” “No taxation without representation,” “I have not yet begun to fight!”—were never uttered in the form they’re remembered, at the time they were supposed to have been said, or by the person who was supposed to have said them. Historians seriously doubt that Pocahontas begged her father to spare John Smith’s life, that Paul Revere made it to Concord, or that Betsy Ross sewed America’s first flag. There is no recorded episode of two westerners ever facing each other wielding guns. The gunfight at the OK Corral was little more than a street brawl. Wyatt Earp was an obscure figure of dubious character who
was reconceived as an upright lawman by yet another fictionalized biography, this one published in 1931. Far from being like Gary Cooper, many western lawmen such as Earp had second careers as thieves, poachers, and cattle rustlers.
Could citizens of any country face the truth about their own history? Clearly that’s been a problem for those who live in the United States. If Americans ever fully confronted less attractive facts about their own history, especially the way its settlers treated Indians and African slaves, they might question whether God actually did shed his grace on them.
Like so many Americans of my generation, I was raised on the gruel that yes, slavery was bad, but, well, maybe not that bad. Probably most owners treated their slaves pretty well, right? When doing research about the Underground Railroad I discovered that the peculiar institution wasn’t just that bad, it was worse: not only physically vicious but unspeakably cruel in complying with the pitiless market logic that impelled even benevolent slave owners to break up families so they could sell members separately to the highest bidder. In the course of this research, I was also struck by how much that we think we know about the Underground Railroad itself is dubious. Few participants ever dug a tunnel, built a secret compartment, learned a special handshake, or murmured code words in the night. Much of this romantic tall talk originated with the remarkable number of Americans who claimed to have been conductors on the Underground Railroad once the Civil War had ended.
Sojourner Truth was said to have been active in the Underground Railroad. That’s unlikely. A lot of mythology surrounded this ex-slave, much of it due to her own efforts. Truth, whose adopted last name alluded to her reputation for rectitude, was an energetic self-promoter who embellished her own myth as she
went along. According to biographer Nell Irvin Painter, this shrewd platform personality cultivated a persona of an uneducated, uncultured, dialect-spouting Negress that promoted her lecturing business and thrilled her audiences. Some pitched in on her mythmaking. Truth’s signature line, “Ain’t I a woman?” (originally “Ar’n’t I a woman?”) is thought to have been uttered by the former slave at an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. This bit of folk eloquence was actually concocted by a writer named Frances Dana Gage, who inserted it into an account of Truth’s speech that was written more than a decade after the Akron gathering. According to Painter, Truth’s famous four words were not anything she actually said; they are “what we need her to have said.”
This pattern is repeated throughout American history. Too little of what we think we know about our past can withstand scholarly scrutiny. Why should that be? In Daniel Boorstin’s opinion, a young country such as this one, hungry for legends, heroes, and stirring quotations, wasn’t picky about their authenticity. Many legendary American figures benefited from imaginative historiography, their best quotations from posthumous ghostwriting. But the leading source of historical mythology was the subjects themselves. Not only swashbuckling figures like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Buffalo Bill but beacons of integrity such as Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau stirred liberal dashes of myth into the reality of their identity. To this day Thoreau symbolizes a moral man pursuing an ethical life alone in the wilderness. Except the woods where Thoreau sought solitude were only a mile from his family’s home. While communing with nature by Walden Pond, Thoreau went home almost daily. One biographer concluded that he merely “bivouacked” pondside. Had Winnebagos been available, Thoreau might have parked one
there. During his year in the woods Thoreau was visited regularly by dozens of friends and hordes of curiosity seekers. He was little more than a camper engaged in creating a rustic legend about himself for an eager audience. Walden itself is a work of uneven veracity. Its author was a fine writer, creative thinker, and imaginative inventor of his own legend.
Self-invention is a national pastime among Americans. “I reinvented myself,” they’re prone to say, with a little blush of pride. That process often involves dispensing with inconvenient old facts and replacing them with better new ones. This has been called “Marilynizing,” in honor of the self-created Marilyn Monroe (nee Norma Jean Baker). Today it might better be called “Laurenizing” or “Marthaizing” in recognition of Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart, the quintessential reinvented Americans. The neoaristocrat Lauren (né Ralph Lifshitz) makes little effort to disguise his actual origins. Stewart does. Long before she was convicted of lying about her investments, it was clear that truthfulness was not Martha Stewart’s strong suit. Not that she agreed. In an early edition of Martha Stewart Living, Stewart wrote a tribute to honesty. After flaying public figures who misrepresented themselves and engaged in other forms of deception, she bemoaned the fact that truth telling no longer received the same respect it had in her childhood. Dishonesty was a thief of time, energy, and pride, Stewart advised her readers. Honesty helped one cope with fear. Truth tellers were admirable, liars cowards. No matter the immediate impact, in the long run being truthful obviated guilt and anxiety about truth coming out. “We must remember,” Stewart concluded, “—and teach our children (and perhaps our political figures)—one essential: the truth shall make you free.”
If that was true, she herself must have felt in bondage. Martha Stewart routinely misrepresented the type of family she grew up in, her father’s occupation, whom she dated in college, where her roommate was from, what she earned as a model, the size of parties she threw, her husband’s ability to father children, how much of her own writing she did, where her home was located (to avoid paying taxes), and why she sold her ImClone stocks. “Martha made stuff up all the time,” a friend told biographer Jerry Oppenheimer. “The truth was never good enough,” said her ex-husband. When Stewart’s aunt was asked why her niece embroidered information so routinely, she responded, “It makes a better story.” The most fantastic story of all, of course, was that this shrewd, unscrupulous businesswoman was a down-to-earth domestic goddess.
Puffery is an art form in the United States. This is for two reasons in particular: (1) it is a civilization of immigrants and their descendants who like to think they control not only their own destiny but their own identity, and (2) Americans are hypermobile, continually reintroducing themselves to others, often succumbing to the temptation to re-create their past in the process. Opportunities to touch up a self-portrait arise every time Americans move, as one in five do every year, and half do every five years. “For much of his life,” memoirist Cyra McFadden wrote of her itinerant father, rodeo announcer Cy Taillon, “he was engaged in the game of inventing himself—adding to what was true and what was desirable, stirring counterclockwise and serving up the mix.”
Obviously, deception about the self (and lots of other things) is not limited to Americans, or to our era. The wish to seem better than real is eternal and universal. Jacob, after all, wanted to be more like Esau. Odysseus made up a new identity for himself whenever an opportunity arose. The context of American life makes it easier to engage in this type of flimflam, however. It could hardly be
otherwise in a country populated primarily by immigrants and their descendants. Excepting those who were already here and the ones brought in chains, America was settled by those shaking off Old World restrictions. Along with their previous lives, they left behind anyone who had known them in that life. Those who arrived in this country were in a position to wipe the slate clean. They felt free—duty-bound even—to re-create themselves, shedding inconvenient facts along the way like a snake molting old skin. Here Albert Einstein, a cold husband and indifferent father in Europe, could reintroduce himself as a warm humanitarian after arriving alone in New York. Occidental Petroleum founder Armand Hammer made up a personal past doing relief work with starving peasants and initiating business projects in Russia. Meg Greenfield’s father successfully transformed himself from a first-generation son of Russian immigrants who grew up in a Philadelphia slum to something resembling a well-bred English gentleman. In her book Washington, Greenfield observed that “at least since Yankee Doodle tried his scam, Americans have been engaged in the business of personally reinventing themselves—enthusiastically, with varying degrees of fraudulence (or ingenuity, if you prefer), and often to perfectly good purpose.”
Their penchant for mythmaking, and receptivity to each other’s tall tales, doesn’t make Americans less moral than those they left behind, simply more opportunistic. If no one around you knows your actual history, why be candid about it? Who was going to blow your cover? From the moment when immigrants Americanized their names at a port of entry, or had this done for them, how could it not occur to them that this was a whole new ball game. Gorodetsky a little hard to pronounce? How about Gordon? Shakishavili a bit of a mouthful? Try Shaw. If names could be changed that easily, what else might be changed as well? Age? Occupation?
Family origins? America was a land of unlimited possibilities, in many senses of the word.
Nearly half a century after he disembarked in Hoboken in 1939, Bruno Bettelheim could still remember how exuberant he felt while walking the streets of New York across the Hudson River. “It was a hot summer day,” recalled the psychotherapist, “with blue skies; the sun was shining. At that moment, I felt … I would make a new life for myself very different from the old one.” In the course of his research about Bettelheim, biographer Richard Pollak found out what he meant by this. The personal and professional self-portrait that this distinguished psychotherapist painted of himself was riddled with apocrypha. Bettelheim awarded himself degrees he hadn’t earned back in Austria, inflated the number of patients he’d treated there, and even fictionalized parts of an account he wrote about his year in a concentration camp. To make matters worse, as Pollak recounted in excruciating detail in The Creation of Dr. B, Bettelheim also plagiarized more than a little of his prolific oeuvre.
A decade after Bettelheim arrived in Hoboken, Paul de Man came to the United States from Belgium. By the time he died of cancer in 1983, de Man had become a leading American literary light, a prominent member of Yale’s faculty who was lauded not just for his intellectual precocity but for his personal integrity. “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” said a colleague at the time of de Man’s death. Four years later, a researcher discovered that de Man had left behind a past as a Nazi collaborator who engaged in shady business practices before fleeing creditors and abandoning his wife and three children when he left for the United States in 1948. There de Man claimed that his uncle was actually his father, remarried without divorcing his first wife, and introduced himself as a humane man of letters. This reincarnation was
extraordinarily successful. De Man grew adept at deflecting questions about his past. When asked, the Yale professor suggested he’d spent the war years working as a translator in England, or studying in Paris, or as a resistance fighter in France. None of this was true. “De Man’s triumphant American career seems either to dramatize something about our national capacity for amnesia,” wrote biographer David Lehman, “or to illustrate the idea of America as a haven for those who want to bury the past.”
Among the dissatisfactions that drove immigrants to American shores was dissatisfaction with the self. The very act of coming to the New World was an attempt at rebirth. Many hoped their self-doubt could be remedied here by becoming the person they wanted to be. If that proved impossible, they could at least claim to be that person. The vagueness of personal histories in this strange new land combined with its residents’ penchant for tall talk created problems for descendants who wanted to learn something about their family’s tree.
According to family lore, my mother’s great-grandfather Charles “Carl” Reiser was a wealthy civil engineer in Romania who helped build that country’s first railroad. After leaving Romania for the United States in 1869, Carl ended up in San Francisco. There, his descendants were told, he had several wives, one of whom absconded with his money. This money came from the fleet of merchant ships Carl owned in California. He’d broken his leg while climbing a mainmast as an old man, and used a wooden one thereafter. When he died at 102, Carl was buried next to his amputated leg. Or so we were told.
While doing some genealogical research, my cousin Richard Reiser found an 1889 San Francisco Directory that listed Charles
Reiser as the proprietor of a secondhand-clothing store on Folsom Street. According to a gravestone Richard located south of San Francisco, Carl Reiser died on November 22, 1900, at the age of eighty-seven. No amputated leg was noted on the gravestone.
Carl’s granddaughter, my grandmother Rachel, always told us she was the same age as her husband. After Rachel died we discovered that she was five years older than he was. This husband, my grandfather Jean, came to America as a young man, in 1906. Here he affected a French accent to imply that he was actually from Paris, France, not Sulina, Romania. Jean also said he came from a family of once-wealthy bankers. Four decades after her father died, my mother mentioned our bank-owning heritage to Jean’s half brother Willy in Haifa, Israel. Willy snorted, “Bank clerks was more like it.” Mimicking a teller counting bills, Willy added, “We counted money. We never owned any.”
On the other side of the family, my father’s grandfather Horace Scott was a druggist in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Horace said he hailed from a town named after his forebears: Scottsville, Vermont. That “town” is actually a block-square neighborhood, long ago absorbed by Danby (population three hundred). Horace also claimed to have been the richest man in South Dakota until the Depression wiped him out. I believed this claim until I read a stack of his letters that revealed the pre-1929 Horace Scott to be a moderately prosperous pharmacist and stock speculator who was not nearly as wealthy as he wanted others to believe.
When recounting their families’ histories, high aspirations among Americans met great opportunity to improve the actual record. This penchant makes genealogy problematic for their descendants. During the Gilded Age, Tiffany’s offered a genealogical service that helped customers prune unattractive limbs from their family tree and graft on more impressive ones. Such pruning and
grafting frustrated ancestors who might rather have had an accurate record. But help was on the way. The growing interest in genealogy combined with sophisticated modern research tools has played havoc with many a family’s legends. Based on DNA tests, more than one white genealogical explorer has discovered black ancestors. Others have found that they are not even related to those they assumed were kin (presumably because of concealed adoptions or out-of-wedlock births). Their presumed origins proved to be mythical.
Self-serving concoctions are part of almost any family’s collective memory. With so much fudge clogging the gears, however, if trying to reconstruct a genealogy is demanding, writing a family memoir can be downright dangerous. While studying their origins, memoirists ranging from Geoffrey Wolff through Richard Rovere to Mary Gordon discovered that their fathers were not just petty fabricators but out-and-out frauds. Gordon’s anti-Semitic Catholic father proved to be a convert from Judaism. After moving to America from France, Rovere’s father had assumed a completely new identity, including a fantasy mother in New Orleans. Memoirist Clark Blaise developed a rule of thumb about his own Quebec-born father: any story that made him look good was probably a lie; the sad ones might be true. His father’s tales of losing wealth, earning a Harvard degree, and being descended from French aristocracy turned out to be false. The ones about coming from a poverty-stricken family of twenty were largely accurate.
Geoffrey Wolff thought the social insecurity of Americans was what allowed such bunkum to be successfully merchandised. Geoffrey once listened as his father, Arthur “Duke” Wolff, told a Yale graduate that they were in the same class at Old Eli. (Duke Wolff had actually attended the University of Pennsylvania.) Far from expressing skepticism, this man apologized for his poor memory.
Geoffrey Wolff doubted that this would have happened in England. “Duke is it?” he thought an Englishman might have responded. “Duke of what, old man? Oh, quite, I see, Duke of nothing then, rilly. At Eton were you? What years? Then you know Bamber Lushington? No? Then you weren’t at Eton, were you?”
Geoffrey Wolff based a bestselling memoir on his father’s lifetime of lies: The Duke of Deception. Like so many other books about impostors, Wolff’s intrigued reviewers and readers alike. One reason we’re more fascinated than outraged when frauds like Duke Wolff get unmasked is that we identify with them. Most of us make up a little about our background and wonder what it would be like to make up a lot. Along the way we’ve struck an implicit bargain with each other: if you don’t question my stories about myself, I won’t question yours. As a result, so many of us have done ID makeovers that contemporary society is chockablock with members who are not, in ways large and small, exactly whom they appear to be.