Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

17. The Mexican-American War and Whitman’s “Song of Myself ”:A Foundational Borderline Fantasy

385 chapter 17 The MexicanAmerican War and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” A Foundational Borderline Fantasy Donald Pease In A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States, Ali Behdad has established a heretofore unrecognized connection between U.S. culture’s mythical representation of itself as an “Immigrant Nation” and the negation of the history of the violence inflicted against immigrants that this self-forgetful representation necessitates.1 “Immigrant America” has always been a myth rather than a historical fact. This foundational national fantasy projects the ways that Americans want to represent themselves to the rest of the world. This origin myth is not remembered. It is reproduced through a scene of the nation’s founding that represents what Americans want to believe about themselves. What Americans want to believe requires the erasure of historical facts that contradict such beliefs. With the publication of A Forgetful Nation, Behdad interrupts the recollection of this foundational fantasy. Instead, he reminds the nation of 386 Donald Pease historically factual violence inflicted on immigrants. Behdad’s critique of this dimension of the national myth involves a demonstration of the ways in which Walt Whitman’s populist form of assimilationism eclipsed cultural differences and economic inequalities so as to celebrate the nation as a sacred geography populated by unique and free individuals. In what follows, I build on Behdad’s revisionist reading of the relationship between Whitman’s poetry and and the nation’s foundational fantasy. My observations turn on two interrelated claims: that colonial violence constituted the disavowed underside of the nation’s foundational myth, and that this underside was the site of enunciation for Walt Whitman’s celebration of the United States itself as the greatest poem. Walt Whitman associated “Song of Myself ” with the effort to establish the United States’ hemispheric sovereignty, and he deployed this foundational fiction to delineate a border between the United States and Mexico at the extraterritorial site that he forged out of his account of the Battle of Goliad . Further, Whitman’s foundational fiction was structured in the belief that the immortality of the national state required the production of the mortalized body of Mexico as its underside, and Whitman deployed this foundational narrative to obscure the conditions from which he constructed and policed an imaginary border separating the United States and Mexico. I begin with an effort to explain Whitman’s association of his literary project with the effort to establish the United States’ hemispheric sovereignty in the military campaign that President James A. Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to undertake against the state of Mexico from 1846 to 1848. This effort obliges me to begin with a discussion of the editorials that Whitman wrote while working for the Brooklyn Eagle from 1846 to 1848.2 Whitman first gave expression to the United States’ presumption of the hemisphere itself as a national entitlement in an editorial he composed for the May 2, 1846, edition of the Brooklyn Eagle in which he characterized the memories of the Alamo and Goliad as violations of that presumption: May 2, 1846 The massacre at the Alamo, the bloody business at Goliad, the red butcheries which the cowardly Mexicans effected whenever they got the people of Texas in their power during the course of the sanguinary contest, should be avenged more signally than ever outrage was avenged before. . . . The Whigs have laudation for them (the Mexicans), The Mexican-American War and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” 387 but not a word for the sacred martyrs whose bones yet whiten the soil of San Antonio de Bexar, whose blood reddens the river that wets its borders. At the Alamo they preferred death by sword to subjugation—so the difference between the two was that the latter accepted the conditions of the peace but the former did not and the latter ended with same fate as the former.3 In this editorial, Whitman relocated the origins of the Mexican War in the scene of the war crime that reputedly took place at Goliad, Texas. The Battle of Goliad was part of the Texas Revolution that culminated in the Independence of Texas in April of 1836. This battle marked the conclusion to a much larger battle that took place in Coleta, Texas, on March 19–20, 1836. On March 27, 1836, some 354 American prisoners from the battle were executed under the command of General Santa Anna. The soldiers...