Narrator: What if the most cherished stories a nation tells about itself are not just inaccurate, but are deliberately crafted weapons in a hidden war over its future? After the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, a common refrain echoed through the media: "This is not who we are." But what if, in some fundamental way, it is? This unsettling question lies at the heart of Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Edited by historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, the book assembles a team of experts to dismantle the most pervasive and politically potent myths that shape American identity. It argues that these are not harmless fables, but powerful distortions of history used to justify inequality, suppress dissent, and obscure the complex, often uncomfortable, truths of the nation's past.

Narrator: The popular image of America's founding is one of divine providence and unparalleled genius, a nation born exceptional and guided by the singular wisdom of figures like James Madison. The book argues this is a carefully constructed myth. The very term "American exceptionalism," for instance, did not begin as a celebration of American greatness. It was first used by American communists in the 1920s to explain to Joseph Stalin why a socialist revolution wasn't taking hold in the United States. It was an analytical term for deviation, not a badge of honor.

It wasn't until the 1990s that the term was weaponized in modern politics. Newt Gingrich, in his rise to power, masterfully transformed "American exceptionalism" into a political litmus test. He framed Republicans as its true believers and Democrats as unpatriotic cosmopolitans who didn't believe in the nation's unique destiny. This narrative ignores that most nations consider themselves exceptional. Similarly, the book challenges the myth of James Madison as the sole "father of the Constitution." While Madison was a key thinker, it was George Washington whose immense prestige and leadership held the Philadelphia Convention together and for whom the powerful executive branch was designed. The most influential arguments for ratification at the time were not Madison's famous Federalist No. 10, but the geostrategic essays by Hamilton and Jay, which warned that without a strong union, the states would become pawns in the games of European empires.

Narrator: A core function of American myth-making has been to define who is a "true" American by erasing or distorting the history of those who are not. The book explores this through the myths of the "Vanishing Indian," the immigrant "invasion," and the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy.

The idea that Native Americans were a "vanishing" race destined to disappear was a convenient fiction that justified westward expansion and absolved settlers of guilt. This myth persists today, as seen in a 2021 incident where former senator Rick Santorum claimed that colonists "birthed a nation from nothing," finding a "blank slate" and that "there isn't much Native American culture in American culture." This erasure ignores centuries of history and the vibrant, ongoing existence of Native nations.

Similarly, the myth of immigration is that "they keep coming"—an endless, threatening tide of foreigners. This narrative was powerfully deployed in California Governor Pete Wilson's 1994 reelection campaign. His infamous ad showed grainy footage of people crossing the border with a menacing voiceover declaring, "They keep coming." This framing ignores the fact that the U.S. has often actively recruited and coerced foreign labor to serve its own economic needs, from Chinese railroad workers to Mexican braceros, only to later demonize them when they are no longer seen as useful.

Perhaps the most enduring distortion is the Lost Cause, the narrative that recasts the Confederacy's fight as a noble struggle for states' rights, not slavery. The book reveals how Confederate monuments were central to this project. They were not simply memorials erected after the war; the vast majority were built decades later, during the height of the Jim Crow era, by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. These statues were tangible symbols of white supremacy, their unveilings massive public rituals designed to reinforce a racial hierarchy and a false history.

Narrator: Simple phrases and ideas, the book argues, are often repurposed as powerful political codes. "America First," for example, sounds like a benign patriotic slogan. Yet its history is deeply tied to bigotry. Its first recorded use as a political slogan was in 1855 by the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic "Know Nothing" party. In the 1920s, it was adopted by the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1940s, it was the banner for an isolationist committee whose spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, delivered anti-Semitic speeches. The slogan's history reveals it as a cover for internal power struggles, defining who is a "real" American by targeting an ever-changing "other."

The myth of widespread voter fraud functions in the same way. The book traces this lie back to the post-Reconstruction South, where white Democrats invented claims of fraud to justify poll taxes and literacy tests designed to disenfranchise Black voters. This strategy was modernized in 1964 with the Republican National Committee's "Operation Eagle Eye," a program designed to intimidate minority voters in urban areas by flooding precincts with "ballot security" forces and challenging their right to vote. The goal, as one conservative activist later admitted, was simple: "Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Narrator: Our modern debates over the government's role in the economy are built on a foundation of myth. The book dismantles the "magic of the marketplace," the idea that an unregulated free market is the natural and only path to freedom and prosperity. This belief, the authors show, was not an organic American value but the result of a decades-long propaganda campaign.

In the 1930s, facing the failures of the Great Depression and the popularity of the New Deal, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) launched a massive public relations effort to sell "free enterprise" to the American people. They invented a false history where government had always been hands-off, equating economic freedom with religious and political freedom. This narrative was used to fight regulations and unions.

This myth-making directly fuels the false claim that the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression. In 2019, Senator Charles Grassley used this exact argument to oppose the Green New Deal. Yet economic data shows the opposite: from 1933 to 1937, the U.S. economy registered the strongest four-year output growth in its history outside of wartime. The argument that World War II ended the Depression is, in fact, an argument for a bigger New Deal, as it proves that massive government spending could and did solve the crisis. The Great Society of the 1960s is similarly misremembered as a failure. Critics ignore its lasting successes, like Medicare, Medicaid, and federal aid to education, which dramatically reduced poverty and desegregated thousands of hospitals and schools.

Narrator: The book's final chapters tackle the myth of the "good protest." This is the sanitized version of the Civil Rights Movement, where figures like Martin Luther King Jr. are remembered as universally beloved figures who easily won the nation's heart. This myth is used to delegitimize modern protests like Black Lives Matter. The reality is that in 1966, polls showed 72 percent of white Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King. The Civil Rights Movement was disruptive, unpopular, and met with fierce resistance.

This resistance is often labeled "white backlash," a term the book argues is itself a myth. The term implies that white resistance is merely a reaction to Black progress, provoked by activists. The authors argue that this is false. White backlash is not a reaction; it is a continuous, proactive political project to maintain the racial hierarchy. It existed long before the major victories of the Civil Rights Movement. As seen in a 1966 CBS documentary titled Black Power–White Backlash, the media framed white fear as a new phenomenon caused by Black activism, ignoring the centuries of violence and oppression that preceded it. This framing wrongly assigns blame to the victims of injustice rather than the perpetrators of the backlash.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Myth America is that historical myths are not innocent fables; they are active and potent political tools. They are deliberately constructed and deployed to serve present-day agendas, whether it's to justify voter suppression, dismantle the social safety net, or delegitimize movements for equality. The book reveals that the battle over America's future is inextricably linked to the battle over its past.

By dismantling these legends, the historians in Myth America issue a profound challenge. They ask us to move beyond comforting narratives and engage with a more complex, and often more troubling, history. The real-world impact of this is clear: a more honest public discourse can only begin when we have the courage to ask which myths we still cling to, and what our responsibility is to finally let them go.