American Literary History

Richard Slotkin
Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality
American Literary History - Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2001, pp. 469-498

Oxford University Press

Richard Slotkin - Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality - American Literary History 13:3 American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 469-498 Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality Richard Slotkin We are watching a movie about American soldiers at war. A small unit is about to engage the enemy. They form ranks and the sergeant calls the roll, reeling off a list of names (the camera shows their faces one by one) that is obviously intended to represent the mixture of ethnic, regional, and (usually) racial groups that compose our heterogeneous population. The movie might be Bataan (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1946), Fixed Bayonets (1951), All the Young Men (1960), The Dirty Dozen (1965), Platoon (1986), or Saving Private Ryan (1998). The "melting pot" roll call has become a basic trope of the war movie, a cinematic cliché. But it also expresses a myth of American nationality that remains vital in our political and cultural life: the idealized self-image of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy, hospitable to difference but united by a common sense of national belonging. Here, for example, is the response of a reporter to the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1985: "The shuttle crew, spectacularly democratic (male, female, black, white, Japanese-American, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant), was the best of us, Americans thought, doing the best of things Americans do. The mission seemed symbolically...