The idea of what an “America” might be has existed longer than the country itself. Some of the earliest Puritan migrations were cast in a biblical light, with famed English clergyman John Cotton’s influential 1630 sermon “God’s Promise to His Plantation” cast the New World as a new Canaan, a Promised Land with the Puritans taking the role of “God’s chosen people.” The inherent contradictions and resulting tensions are already evident, as Cotton portrays the New World as “a place for all Nations to inhabit, and have all the Earth replenished” while simultaneously laying the foundation for Manifest Destiny, expansionism, and the brutal genocide and subjugation of the continent’s indigenous populations. As well know, from its early formation, America was the “land of the free”, but some were more free than others.
These foundational myths would grow more complex as the New World attracted new settlers. Manifest Destiny, the Promised Land, and the Chosen People were just a few of the mythologies Americans from these migrant generations have perpetuated over the last 400 years. One of the most enduring and influential foundational myths is what historian Richard Hofstadter termed “the Agrarian Myth” in his 1955 seminal analysis of the history of progressive thought in the United States, The Age of Reform. “But what the articulate people who talked and wrote about farmers and farming—the preachers, poets, philosophers, writers, and statesmen—liked about American farming was not, in every respect, what the typical working farmer liked,” Hofstadter observes.