If the newly drafted Constitution wasn’t ratified, he warned in Federalist No. 8, a “War between the States,” fought by irregular armies across unfortified borders, was imminent. Large states would overrun small ones. “Plunder and devastation” would march across the landscape, reducing the citizenry to “a state of continual danger” that would nourish authoritarian, militarized institutions.

“If we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated, or … thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe,” he continued. “Our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.”

Hamilton’s 1787 plea was successful, of course, in that we adopted a new, stronger Constitution two years later. But Americans still didn’t agree on why it was we had come together and what defined us as a people.

Maintaining a shared sense of nationhood has always been a special challenge for the United States, arguably the world’s first civic nation, defined not by organic ties, but by a shared commitment to a set of ideals. The U.S. came into being not as a nation, but as a contractual agreement, a means to an end for 13 disparate rebel colonies facing a common enemy. Its people lacked a shared history, religion, or ethnicity. They didn’t speak a language uniquely their own. Most hadn’t occupied the continent long enough to imagine it as their mythic homeland. They had no shared story of who they were and what their purpose was. In short, they had none of the foundations of a nation-state.

The one unifying story Americans had told themselves—that they had all participated in the shared struggle of the American Revolution—lost its strength as the Founders’ generation passed from the scene, and had been shaken by secession movements in the Appalachian backcountry of Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1790s and in New England during the war of 1812. By the 1830s, it had become increasingly clear that this identity crisis could no longer be papered over: Americans knew they needed a story of United States nationhood, if their experiment were to survive.

The first person to package and present such a national story for the United States was the historian-statesman George Bancroft. Bancroft, the son of a famous Unitarian preacher in Massachusetts, who graduated from Harvard in 1817 and was promptly sent by that college’s president on an epic study-abroad trip to the German Confederation, another federation of states contemplating its identity. In Europe, Bancroft studied under Arnold Heeren, Georg Hegel, and other intellectuals who were developing ideas of Germanic nationhood; chummed around with Lafayette, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, and Goethe; backpacked on foot from Paris to Rome; and returned home, doctorate in hand, with his head churning with ideas about his country’s place in the world. After failing in bids to be a poet, professor, prep school master, and preacher (who memorably evoked the image of “our pelican Jesus” in a sermon), Bancroft embarked upon what would prove to be his life’s work: giving his young nation a history that would answer those great questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

Bancroft’s vision—laid out over four decades in his massive, 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms, following a plan that history had laid out for them. Americans, Bancroft argued, would implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom. This promise was open to people everywhere: “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “Of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.”

Bancroft’s expansive notion of American identity had questionable aspects, too. He claimed that the Founders were guided by God, that Americans were a chosen people destined to spread across the continent, that success was all but preordained—notions whose hubris and imperialist implications would become clear during his lifetime. But the core of it has remained with us to this day: a civic national vision that defined an American as one devoted to the ideals set down in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: equality, liberty, self-government, and the natural rights of all people to these things.

Bancroft’s draft of our national myth was taken up and refined by Abraham Lincoln. In the Gettysburg Address, the president presented the myth—“a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—not as our destiny, but as an ideal that had not yet been achieved and, if not fought for, could perish from the Earth. It’s no accident that the definitive copy of the Address is one Lincoln handwrote and sent to Bancroft, who months later was chosen by Congress to deliver the official eulogy for the assassinated president. One had influenced the other.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass—who like Bancroft had traveled to the White House during the war to lobby Lincoln to take a stand for the Declaration’s ideals—carried this civic nationalist torch through the dark days of the 1870s and 1880s. It was a time when Northern and Southern whites agreed to put aside America’s commitments to human equality in favor of sectional unity, even when it meant tolerating death squads in the South and the effective nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said in an 1869 speech that summarized U.S. civic nationalism as well as anyone ever has. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter … [and] all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.” Douglass, who had escaped from slavery, was, unlike Bancroft, well aware that America had not implemented its ideals and that it was not at all inevitable that it ever would. That made his framing of the task and its stakes far more compelling, accurate, and ultimately inspirational than the bookish and often oblivious historian’s.

But Bancroft’s vision of American civic cohesion was not the only national narrative on offer from the 1830s onward, or even the strongest one. From the moment Bancroft articulated his ideas, they met a vigorous challenge from the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country, who had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the federation’s purpose was to be. People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the Antebellum South’s leading man of letters; the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people, which conquers, also educates the inferior,” Simms proclaimed in 1837, “and their reward, for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter.”

Slavery was endorsed by God, declared the leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, in 1861. It was one of many Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideas he imbued on his loyal son, Woodrow. The younger Wilson spent the 1880s and 1890s writing histories disparaging the racial fitness of Black people and Catholic immigrants. On becoming president in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal government. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House—a film that quoted his own history writings to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction.

Simms, the Wilsons, and Birth of a Nation producer D.W. Griffith offered a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group, and in the 1910s and 1920s, this model reigned across the United States. Confederate monuments popped up across former Confederate and Union territory alike; Jim Crow laws cemented an apartheid system in Southern and border states. Directly inspired by the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation, a second Klan was established to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, assaulting, or killing a wide range of non-Anglo Saxons; it grew to a million members by 1921 and possibly as many as 5 million by 1925, among them future leaders from governors to senators to big-city mayors, in addition to at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. The Immigration Act of 1924 established racial and ethnic quotas devised to maintain Anglo-Saxon numerical and cultural supremacy.

This ethno-nationalist vision of our country was dethroned in the 1960s, but it remains with us, resurgent, today. Its strength can’t be underestimated: Simms’s vision is as old and as “American” as Bancroft’s, and it was the dominant paradigm in this country for nearly as many decades. It will not just slink off into the night. It must be smothered by a more compelling alternative.

The civic nationalist story of America that Bancroft envisioned still has the potential to unify the country. Its essential covenant is to ensure freedom and equality of opportunity for everyone: for African Americans and Native Americans—inheritors of the legacies of slavery and genocide—to be sure, but also for Americans with ancestors from Asia and Latin America, India and China, Poland, France, or Ireland. For rural and urban people; evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and atheists; men, women, nonbinary people, and, most certainly, children.

It’s a coalition for Americans, a people defined by this quest, tasked by the preamble of the Constitution to promote the common good and individual liberty across generations. It’s a framework that could unite the Democratic Party with the non-Trumpist branch of the Republican Party, and most independents to boot. And over the past century, cultural, judicial, and demographic changes have strengthened its hand, ending white Christian control over the electorate in all the large states, not a few of the small ones, and in the federation as a whole. It’s not an off-the-shelf product, however. Its biggest failings—arrogance, messianic hubris, a self-regard so bright as to blind one to shortcomings—stem from the Puritan legacy Bancroft was so steeped in. The Puritans thought they had been chosen by God to build a New Zion. Bancroft believed the product of their mission was the United States, and that it was destined to spread its ideals across a continent and the world. This notion of American Exceptionalism—that the U.S. can walk on water when other nations cannot—needs to be jettisoned and replaced by the humility that comes with being mere mortals, able to recognize the failures of our past and the fragility of our present and future.

It’s a task that will take a generation, but could bring us together again, from one shining sea to the other.

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You can find Bigfoot everywhere. Its image adorns coffee cups, T-shirts, bumper stickers, bottle openers, and other sundries. Bigfoot is the Canadian-American version of the abominable snowman that has been in the public imagination for over 60 years. It is a curious celebrity in that the kind of phenomenon that it represents—whether exclusively cultural or also biological—has yet to be worked out. What is not in dispute is that people insist that they have seen Bigfoot, even if what “seeing” entails is not entirely clear. If you count eyewitness reports irrespective of their apparent authenticity, claimed encounters with this inhumanly tall and hairy beast number in the thousands.

The prosaic explanation is that there is an ape in the woods that’s pretty shy, and if you see one it is like seeing a bobcat—you’re lucky. But the persistence of this animal in the American imagination, considering that we have collected exactly zero verified specimens, suggests that this phenomenon is much more than a zoological curiosity. What really sets Bigfoot apart is its mythological gravity.

A good myth has to have at least three ingredients: It has to say something about the human condition, it must signify something that people care about, and it has to communicate its deeper meaning in a concise and effective way. Take any of these elements away and the myth loses traction. The one thing that isn’t essential to a myth is a verifiable physical presence. The absence of specimens, the documentation of hoaxes, and even admissions of fakery haven’t eroded the Bigfoot myth. But that’s not to say that Bigfoot leaves no trace.

Tales of feral man-monster chimeras were known from North America well before 1958, but it was a photograph of a cast of a gigantic, not-quite-human footprint on the front page of the Humboldt Times on October 6 of that year that thrust Bigfoot into the American collective consciousness. This was more than a campfire story; it was a record of something’s passing set in stone, enigmatic but undeniably real—you could touch it, after all.

It was this concoction of the tangible and monstrous that hooked me on the myth as a child. My brother, eight years my senior, regularly fed me thirdhand stories of encounters, some of which were sensational accounts of abduction or violence toward human interlopers. He was an experienced backpacker, and if he decided such tales should not be dismissed out of hand, then I felt obligated to take them seriously. Beginning in the late 1960s, motion pictures of Bigfoot appeared. I regarded many of these films as hokey, but the better ones were wonderfully ambiguous, perfect fuel for an evolving myth.

The myth of Bigfoot can be understood in the context of contemporary cultural anxieties, and it has adapted as those anxieties changed. In 1961 playwright and science writer Robert Ardrey’s popular account of human emergence, African Genesis, painted our ancestors as inherently homicidal, with an unquenchable thirst for territory. With the Cold War threatening our species with annihilation, we could understand how we got to that point but Ardrey’s thesis (which drew from the scientific orthodoxy of the time) explained why. Our predicament was a product, perhaps an inevitable one, from our ugly evolutionary past.

Originally, Bigfoot was cast in this monster motif: tossing culverts, smelling terrible, terrorizing intruders. But as encounters increased, Bigfoot’s bellicosity faded. Most eyewitnesses had peaceful or at least merely startling experiences. Bigfoot pivoted gracefully from bogeyman—Ardrey’s nightmarish vision of our true nature—to something that we could all aspire to be. The monster morphed into an intelligent being that could really, truly, perpetually live off the land—a symbol for environmental stewardship.

Bigfoot spoke to growing anxieties about the environment and our relentless destruction of it. As humans expanded in number, the wilderness shrank, becoming less mysterious and perhaps less interesting, and was definitely further fouled by garbage and pollution. Bigfoot endured in those shrinking woods, living quietly and invisibly without an apparent need for material things, and sightings continued unabated. Bigfoot fought no wars, built no factories, and persisted without destroying the natural order of things. Here was our hirsute kin, without the trappings of technology, existing without the comforts of civilization but living simply and wisely. Maybe Ardrey was wrong. We could have peace if we could only learn from our cousin, a teacher without words who led by example. Having Bigfoot in the woods brought back the allure of the unknown; it served as a foil for the intrepid explorer at a time when exploration itself was seemingly endangered.

Bigfoot’s endurance thus has to do with its malleability. We do not know quite what it is. The sphinx is odd—being an amalgam of lion and human with a fondness for riddles—but it is not ambiguous. Bigfoot, being just beyond clear perception, defies a neat categorization. It seems menacing, but is this borne of our fear or is it truly dangerous? Is it hidden because it is wise to avoid us or merely—just like ourselves—afraid of the unknown?

The unending argument among Bigfoot hunters is what ought to be a simple matter of taxonomy: Is this an ape or a human? If it is something in between the two, how does it straddle these two completely different realms of existence? The comedian Mitch Hedberg was going for laughs but unveiled the staying power of the myth in explaining “Bigfoot is blurry, and that’s extra scary to me. There’s a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”

The consistent traits of Bigfoot are being big, hairy, and bipedal. Beyond that, all other characteristics are negotiable. Bigfoot’s ambiguity enables it to stay relevant. It serves us well as a monster when we need that escape, and it just as easily can stand in for as an imperturbable guardian of the wilderness. Either way Bigfoot embodies the American ideal of the rugged individualist; it is telling that Bigfoot is almost always described as being and acting alone.

Bigfoot also challenges scientific orthodoxy in ways that give myths legs. The disinterest of the scientific community in what some believe is our closest living relative is, to the community of Bigfoot enthusiasts, a moral transgression. Searching for it is deemed a waste of time by academics. Perhaps the idea that Bigfoot is not a real animal is understandable, but how easy it would be to disprove this! The prevailing attitude—that there is no value in investing time and money in a search—shows that the scientific community doesn’t even understand the importance of questions about Bigfoot. Why should scientists get to decide what is interesting and meaningful?

Americans have always had a fraught relationship with scientific elites, because those elites act as gatekeepers of knowledge, and with that, they control some levers of power. Today, the elites’ disdain for Bigfoot seems to implicate them in bigger conspiracies: If the government won’t cop to knowing about Bigfoot, what more consequential secrets are they hiding? It is no accident that as the myth has evolved, an association has emerged between Bigfoot and UFOs.

Wild man myths are common around the world and their origins are difficult to trace owing to their great antiquity. Not surprisingly, they have different manifestations cross-culturally. In Nepal it is promiscuous, gets drunk, and wrecks crops. In Russia it seems to seek out human contact and is a more of a cultural being. The beast has variable attributes in different Native American traditions.

By comparison, the modern American Bigfoot is very mundane. In many encounters it is more or less indifferent to human presence, but the human eyewitness is changed forever. I am not certain why that is, but I’d guess it has to do with an encounter changing one’s sense of place in the cosmic order. Bigfoot presents an impossible uncertainty. In defying categorization, it makes no sense at all. It is then up to the percipient to construct a category that necessarily reorders reality. A heretofore, undreamt-of natural history emerges out of that reordering that assures us that we do not know all there is to know. The footprints, the photos, and the persuasion of other eyewitnesses testify that Bigfoot is there, and the rest of us can be drawn in, reassured that our sense of wonder is not borne of foolishness.

I’ve never seen Bigfoot and do not expect to. Human shenanigans seem to provide a sensible explanation as to what is going on. Even so, it is clear that Bigfoot is not impossible. I have wondered if an encounter would precipitate an existential crisis for me. Perhaps it would be similar to how I felt after viewing a total solar eclipse. The astronomical event by itself was profound, but an inextricable part of the experience was walking to the top of a Georgia mountain with hundreds of strangers, every one of us hoping for and finding a common wish fulfilled. A friend texted me a few hours afterwards to ask what it was like. I struggled to articulate the depth of the experience. I could only write back to say, “I’ll never be the same.”

How long will the Bigfoot myth endure? That might depend on it remaining undiscovered. If Bigfoot is ever found, primatologists will flock to the Pacific Northwest and we will begin to learn all about Sasquatch behavior, ecology, reproduction, and the like. There will be less room to imagine other possibilities.

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For roughly 10 years, I have studied the legacy of the 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. Even after a decade, I continue to be astounded by how regularly Roosevelt is invoked in politics and beyond.

Today, TR is ubiquitous. If you follow sports, you may have seen Teddy Goalsevelt, the self-appointed mascot for Team USA soccer who ran for FIFA president in 2016. Or you may have watched the giant-headed Roosevelt who rarely wins the Presidents’ Race at Washington Nationals baseball games. If you enjoy the cinema, you will likely recall Robin Williams as Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum trilogy, or might know that a biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Roosevelt is slated for production.

In politics, Roosevelt has become the rare figure popular with both left and right. Vice President Mike Pence recently compared his boss Donald Trump to Roosevelt; in 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton named the Rough Rider as her political lodestar. Environmentalists celebrate Roosevelt as the founding father of conservation and a wilderness warrior, and small business interests celebrate his battles against large corporations.

And more than a century after he was shot in Milwaukee during the 1912 presidential campaign, Roosevelt remains a target; last year, his statue in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York was splattered in red paint in protest of its symbolic relationship to white supremacy, among other things.

Roosevelt’s high profile is no mere accident of history. Shortly after Roosevelt’s death, two memorial associations organized and worked to perpetuate his legacy.

One of these organizations sought to tie Roosevelt to the politics of the early 20th century, and cast him as a national icon of Americanism. At that time, Americanism stood for patriotism and civic-mindedness, as well as anti-communism and anti-immigration. This ideology helped Republicans win back the White House in 1920, but it also galvanized the first Red Scare.

The second memorial organization rejected the political approach to commemoration, choosing to represent Roosevelt’s legacy in artistic, creative, and utilitarian forms, including monuments, films, artwork, and by applying the Roosevelt name to bridges and buildings. Of course, some of these activities had implicit political angles, but they generally avoided association with overt causes, in favor of historical commemoration. When it came to fundraising, the apolitical organization raised 10 times as much income as the political one, and within ten years the two organizations folded into a single memorial association that abandoned political interpretations. Roosevelt became bipartisan and polygonal.

This is not to say Roosevelt’s legacy lost all meaning. Quite the opposite; our perception of Roosevelt has endured a number of declines and revivals. And, through the rounds of historical revision and re-revision, he has maintained certain characteristics.

His civic-minded Americanism endures, as does his record as a conservationist and a progressive. Roosevelt still evokes an image of an American cowboy, a preacher of righteousness, and a leading intellectual.

Most interestingly, these elements of his legacy are not mutually exclusive. Invoking one does not require us to exclude another. For example, Barack Obama promoted the Affordable Care Act in 2010 by memorializing Roosevelt’s advocacy for national healthcare in 1911. Obama could recall Roosevelt’s progressivism while avoiding the Bull Moose’s mixed record on race relations or his support of American imperialism. In short, commemorators can take from Roosevelt what they want and, consequently, his legacy grows ever more complex and elastic.

The upcoming centenary of Roosevelt’s death in January 2019 offers us an opportunity to understand more about how presidential legacies are shaped by successive generations. Images of former presidents come from various sources, and because they can act as a powerful emblem for any cause, their images proliferate without much scrutiny.

Politicians are well aware of this. Sarah Palin, a right-wing Republican, co-opted the legacy of Democrat Harry Truman in her 2008 vice-presidential nomination speech, and Barack Obama had a penchant for invoking Ronald Reagan. In a political swamp full of alligators, summoning the ghosts of dead presidents is relatively safe ground.

Likewise, commercial advertisers take great liberty with the past. Beer and whiskey producers have long used presidents as brand ambassadors (Old Hickory bourbon and Budweiser are good examples). Automobile companies have named vehicles for Washington, Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, and Roosevelt.

These contemporary invocations remind us of the real value of legacy, however it might be interpreted. The past has meaning for the present, and that meaning can be translated into advantage. Truth is not the highest value in the contest between presidential ghosts.

Happy Warrior: Teddy Roosevelt in 1919, the last year of his life. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Despite being the subject of scholarly historical biographies that document their lives with precision and care, American presidents are dogged by half-truths, myths, and arbitrary citations in public memory. At a time when our political climate is referred to as “post-truth,” and a celebrity tycoon who has mastered the art of self-promotion sits in the Oval Office, it is worth reflecting on how these legacies are produced.

If, as philosopher Williams James once said, “The use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it,” the former American presidents have lived boundlessly productive lives, with legacies that far outlast their tenure. But because their legacies are produced by successive generations, they often tell us more about the agents of commemoration than the men who sat behind the Resolute Desk.

Examining presidential legacies helps us solve a historical problem: It allows us to see who shapes our perceptions of the past. Memorializers lay claim to historical narratives and create the illusion of public memory, invoking select elements of our shared past as shiny baubles to emulate and admire. So by understanding these myths, the mythmakers, and the motives of memorialization, we can see a laminated past with countless layers. The more myths and the more layers, the more insight we gain into the ways the past connects with the present, and the present with the future.

The “real” Theodore Roosevelt is lost to us. He is an imagined character, even to family. Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie met his grandfather only once. Still, every time he visited Sagamore Hill—his grandfather’s home in Oyster Bay, Long Island—he sensed his ghost. Archie felt that TR’s spirit looked over the kids as they played. On numerous occasions Archie reflected on his grandfather’s likely expectations for his family and even attempted to model his life on that conception. “We knew him only as a ghost,” Archie related, “but what a merry, vital, and energetic ghost he was. And how much encouragement and strength he left behind to help us play the role Fate has assigned us for the rest of the century.”

Indeed, conjuring Roosevelt’s ghost gives us another means of observing the last century, a period of time that Roosevelt himself never saw. Because so many have invoked Roosevelt in the way Archie did, examining his legacy helps to illustrate the motives and judgements of those who remember the past. Theodore Roosevelt’s ghost continues to haunt public memory because we continue to conjure it. TR has been dead for a century, but we refuse to let him rest in peace, believing the use of his life can help us achieve our ends.

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Blumenbach kindled scientific interest in whiteness when he claimed to have found five distinct varieties of humankind in his collection. While he thought these varieties—which he called “races” in 1795—were more or less equal in character and intelligence, Blumenbach ranked them in terms of what he saw as their physical perfection.

Taken from the body of an unnamed Georgian woman in the Caucasus, Blumenbach’s favorite skull became the basis of his “Caucasian” race, and with that, a scientific typology of whiteness was born. Supporting the hierarchical theories of the new “race science” took work, which can be seen in the strange—and retrospectively unbelievable—discoveries of lost white tribes that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While none of these clans proved to be white in the racial sense intended by explorers, the legacy of these “lost tribes” continues to quietly but indelibly shape the lives of millions of people from Rwanda to India.

The lost tribes grew out of the Blumenbach’s central theory: that Caucasians were the original human type, a form that changed—or, in his word, “degenerated”—into other racial forms as Caucasians migrated from an ancestral homeland in the Caucasus Mountains to other areas of the world where they encountered the effects of new climates. This idea was bolstered by British scholar William Jones, who believed he had unearthed evidence of an original human type from his study of languages. Finding structural similarities among ancient languages of the West (Latin, Celtic, Ancient Greek) and the East (Old Persian, Sanskrit) he posited an early homeland for humankind somewhere in the lands that lay between. That such a homeland was close to the Caucasus—as in Blumenbach’s hypothesis—as well as Mt. Ararat, the Biblical site of the homeland for those who survived the Flood, gave weight to the idea that humanity first emerged in Central Asia then migrated outward to populate other regions of the world. By the late 19th century, this ancient people of Central Asia had been given a name: Aryans.

That idea that a white race had once existed in Central Asia and left home to conquer the world was not popularized merely by zealots and xenophobes, but also by leading members of the scientific community. Among scholars of Africa, it was called the “Hamitic Hypothesis,” after Ham, son of Noah, who was mistakenly identified as the common ancestor of all African peoples. Egyptologists called it the “Dynastic Race Theory.” Linguists described it as the “Aryan Invasion Theory.” Among European anthropologists, it was called the “Nordic Race Theory.” While each of these theories had its own variations, they all promoted the idea that a light-skinned, racially superior population left its ancestral homeland to conquer Europe, Africa, and Asia in the ancient past.

Not all scientists subscribed to these theories. How human races were related—if they were related—remained a matter of debate in the 19th century. Scientists also disagreed about the extent of racial difference. Was it a superficial attribute of skin and hair or did it touch the deeper qualities of temperament and intellect? Finally, there were doubters—the most prominent of whom was Charles Darwin—who thought that the homeland of the human species lay elsewhere, probably in Africa. Still, these voices of dissent barely impacted the seductive idea of the ancient white invasion. By the turn of the 20th century, it was lodged firmly within the fields of linguistics, physical anthropology, and, among African scholars, history and archaeology.

The obvious question was what had happened to these white conquerors? Explorers, scientists, and colonial officials invented explanations. British archaeologists excavating the spectacular ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the 1890s did not believe Africans were capable of having produced such beautiful and sophisticated structures. Therefore, the site director James Theodore Bent concluded that a foreign “prehistoric race built the ruins in this country, a race like the mythical Pelasgi who inhabited the shores of Greece and Asia Minor, a race like the mythical inhabitants of Great Britain and France who built Stonehenge.”

Elsewhere in Africa, explorers identified clans that they believed to be the remnants of an earlier white conquering force. Henry Morton Stanley described his encounter with a “white race of Africa” that lived in the mountains west of Lake Victoria. In the Arctic islands above North America, Vilhajlmur Stefansson reported finding a tribe of “Blonde Eskimos.” In Panama, Richard Marsh returned to the United States with a family of “white Indians.”

Across the world, colonial officials categorized peoples—Ainu, Maori, Tutsi, Brahmin—according to their supposed connection to an ancestral white race, while others—Hutu, Pygmy, Dravidian, Ati—were labeled native or black, creating a global racial caste system that was enforced through European colonization.

Illustration of the “five races” identified in a treatise by German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

While there’s little doubt that explorers were seeing real physiological differences among different groups, they were interpreting them according to categories of race imagined by Blumenbach and filtered through popular ideas of white ancestry. Whiteness, after all, is not a color but an idea. There is no simple way to determine ancestry according to a person’s pigment. So explorers did what we so often do—size people up by their hair, facial features, language, clothing, and comportment. In short, the discovery of “white tribes” was less an anthropological discovery than a psychological one: a Rorschach test in which Europeans—confronted by figures that seemed ambiguous—made sense of them using deeply held beliefs about race and history.

None of these beliefs turned out to be true. Blonde Eskimos are the Copper Inuit (Kitlinermiut) of Banks Island—the descendants of an early Thule migration out of Asia. The Ainu of Hokkaido, physically distinct from the Japanese of other islands, are genetically similar to South Asian populations, not European ones. Richard Marsh’s “white Indians” turned out to be Cuna Indians who expressed a form of albinism.

Scientists gradually abandoned theories of white invasion in the decades after World War II as a result of scientific discoveries, as well as a newfound revulsion for the excesses of racial thinking that had led directly to the Holocaust.

All these misconceptions might seem a strange, innocuous curiosity of history were it not for the fact that these theories continue to thrive and cause harm despite their repudiation. In the early 1900s, the Aryan invasion theory of India became popular with Brahmin scholars and statesmen who tried to explain, and sometimes defend, the caste system which placed Brahmins in positions of power.

Between 1965 and 1979 the apartheid government of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was eager to promote the idea that white settlers, not Africans, had built Great Zimbabwe, going so far as to exile archaeologists who said otherwise.

Most tragic was the role of the white invasion myth in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Over the course of the twentieth century, many Tutsis of Rwanda—portrayed as being of white or proto-white ancestry rather than of African descent—were praised by their colonial overseers as being more advanced than the Hutus and given positions of power in the colonial administration. When this era came to an end, Hutus took power and used the invasion myth to express their grievances. The extremist Hutu radio station Radio Télévision des Milles Collines fanned the flames of Hutu rage, calling for the end of the “invading Tutsis.” While the Rwandan Genocide has many causes, it was encouraged by the idea that Tutsis were not truly African. They were, in this racial myth, foreigners who had usurped power from the native Hutus who were the rightful occupants of the country.

Today the most visible heralds of white supremacy are those who play dress-up in Nazi uniforms or Klan robes. But the greater danger is the legacy of white supremacy that still exists out of sight—sown by European scientists and colonial officials in the 19th century, but continuing to perpetuate ethnic divisions across India and Africa today. These hateful ideas—the final echoes of a theory of white prehistory—will shape the world long after the last tiki torch has been extinguished.

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This legend, repeated for more than a century, blends truth with fiction, and reminds us that history is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. Flagler and a woman named Julia Tuttle stand at the center of the story: The importance of Flagler’s East Coast Railroad and Royal Palm Hotel led some residents to propose naming the city after him, and he is often depicted as the city’s “father.” Tuttle, a businesswoman who lured Flagler to Miami and otherwise promoted the region during the 1890s, earned the title of “Mother of Miami.” But Tuttle and Flagler did not create something out of nothing. On the contrary, Tuttle’s home and Flagler’s hotel stood precisely where earlier settlers had already left indelible marks over 2,000 years of continuous occupation.

These Miamians included Tequesta Indians who lived in the area for more than 1,500 years, and Spanish missionaries who tried to convert them; African enslaved persons tasked with turning the land into sugar fields, who instead created orchards of fruit trees; Seminole Indians who came to trade and harvest the local bounty, and U.S. soldiers who waged a war to exterminate them; and a continuous stream of Bahamian mariners, fugitive soldiers from various armies, and shipwrecked sailors. These earlier generations have been forgotten largely because Tuttle and Flagler were master illusionists who engaged in a combination of physical sleight of hand and intellectual misdirection. Rather than create something out of nothing, they built upon the storied history that preceded them—and then helped others forget it.

Julia Tuttle, widely known as the Mother of Miami. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/29793>State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Tuttle clearly knew that she was not the first occupant of her waterfront property. Recently widowed, she relocated in 1891 from Cleveland to the mouth of the Miami River on Biscayne Bay, where she worked tenaciously to promote the region as a commercial and agricultural opportunity. Tuttle moved into a 19th-century plantation house that had been built by enslaved Africans in the early 1830s, and constantly referred to it as “Fort Dallas,” which had been the name given to it when it was turned into a military outpost during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Tuttle’s property contained a man-made well, a stone wall, and several gravestones. There was a decades-old road that connected her home to the community on the New River—today’s Fort Lauderdale—and elsewhere up the Atlantic coast.

Still, despite all this evidence of earlier occupation, Tuttle declared to all who would listen that she was a founder of a new community. In words that would be widely repeated, she explained her ambitions. “It may seem strange to you but it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country,” she wrote. One day, she hoped, “where this tangled mass of vine brush, trees and rocks now are to see homes with modern improvements surrounded by beautiful grassy lawns, flowers, shrubs and shade trees.” Tuttle wanted to “settle” a place that had been settled for centuries and turn it into an agricultural or commercial entrepôt.

James Henry Ingraham, president of the South Florida Railroad Company of the Plant System, was but one of the newcomers she impressed. Ingraham proclaimed that Tuttle had “shown a great deal of energy and enterprise in this frontier country where it is almost a matter of creation to accomplish so much in so short a time.” But his description of Tuttle’s efforts, too, revealed the preexisting history that made her successful. Tuttle, he wrote, “converted [Fort Dallas] into a dwelling house after being renovated and repaired with the addition of a kitchen, etc. The barracks … is used as office and sleeping rooms.” Despite her “improvement … on hammock land which fringes the river and bay,” Ingraham explained, the natural world remained largely untamed. “Lemon and lime trees,” which were planted by the earlier waves of Spanish, Bahamian, and American occupants, “are growing wild all through the uncleared hammock.” Ingraham, Tuttle, and others knew that citrus was not native to South Florida. Their claims about untamed wilderness were disingenuous.

Tuttle ignored evidence of the ancient Indian world that surrounded her. Like others of her generation, she recorded the presence of several large man-made mounds and shell middens in the area. Some were ancient burial sites or ceremonial centers, and others were basically landfills, built from generations of discarded shellfish and tools. They were all constructed by the Tequesta Indians, who had first settled the waterfront site 2,000 years earlier and lived there into the 17th century, when they attracted the unwanted attention of slave raiders, Spanish missionaries, and others moving in. Tuttle, like others who declared themselves to be on the frontier, deemed the Indian past to be inconsequential to the development that would follow.

With Tuttle engaged in acts of intellectual misdirection, Flagler and his construction crews took care of the physical destruction. Flagler, like most Gilded Age industrialists, is more typically associated with building than with razing. He earned his fame for helping found Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and then creating Florida’s modern tourist industry with his railroad and luxury hotels in St. Augustine, Palm Beach, and elsewhere along Florida’s Atlantic Coast. Tuttle lured Flagler to Miami with gifts of orange blossoms after a brutal frost had destroyed the citrus crop in central Florida, and clinched the deal by dividing her property on the Miami River with him.

In 1896, Flagler’s laborers at the mouth of the river leveled the ancient Tequesta mounds that stood in the way of progress. They were unabashedly brutal about it. One of the workers noted that a burial mound “stood out like a small mountain, twenty to twenty-five feet above water” and “about one hundred feet long and seventy feet wide.” Flagler’s African American workers struggled to remove “a poison tree” that grew on the top of the mound, as it “would knock them cold.” Those workers “who were not allergic to it” leveled the mound, uncovering and hastily removing “between fifty and sixty skulls.” One of the workers took home the bones, “stored them away in barrels and gave away a great many … to anyone that wanted them.” When construction ended, he dumped the remaining skeletons “nearby where there was a big hole in the ground.” Another bayside mound was hidden behind a “great tangle of briars and wild lime trees.” The midden materials from these and other mounds were strewn across the property, becoming the foundation for Henry Flagler’s opulent Royal Palm Hotel.

The city of Miami incorporated in July 1896, a bit more than a year after the railroad reached the site of the Royal Palm Hotel. Thanks to the vision of Tuttle and marketing genius of Flagler and others, Miami quickly became a tourist destination. City boosters built roads and canals, plotted new communities, constructed man-made beaches, and established new civic organizations. The real estate boom that followed incorporation pushed the residential community out from the mouth of the river and in only a couple of decades turned the small town into a bustling city. Tuttle died in 1898 and Flagler in 1916, but their collective imprint on Miami survived the hurricane of 1926, even as it destroyed the Royal Palm Hotel and temporarily slowed the city’s growth during the Depression. Miami remained a city committed to reimagining the future rather than one interested in celebrating the past.

Tuttle and Flagler shared an illusion that they were settling untouched wilderness—even as they were surrounded by evidence of earlier occupation. In this way, their story is no different than those of settlers across the continent whose shared myth of the frontier allowed them to ignore the history that preceded them. In the 1880s, the frontier was a fairly simple but magical idea: It allowed white Americans to ignore the ancient history of Native America. The myth of the frontier—that pervasive and most-American idea—allowed Tuttle and others in Miami to see “unclaimed lands” in the United States as an untapped and disappearing resource, and to imagine that white American ingenuity transformed wilderness into civilization.

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A teenager, I didn’t want youth
I wanted the age when I would
be free
Go out and stay out
long as the night
Drive, drink, drink and drive
The unearned freedom of adults
Still it was intriguing …
Could the waters restore,
Preserve, rejuvenate?

Fantasy, history, myth
emblazoned on billboards
I remember a long narrow lane
shaded by strange, massive trees
their canopy touching overhead
Spanish moss making mysterious
the old roadside attraction
Everything old
A crumbling, putrid well
No fountain at all
Was de Leon as disappointed as I?

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You were Man, you who ran farther than our eyes can scan,
Man absurd, gigantic, eager for impossible Romance,
Overthrowing all Hell’s legions with one warped and broken lance.

On the highest steeps of Space he will have his dwelling-place,
In those far, terrific regions where the cold comes down like Death
Gleams the red glint of his pinions, smokes the vapor of his breath.

Floating downward, very clear, still the echoes reach the ear
Of a little tune he whistles and a little song he sings,
Mounting, mounting still, triumphant, on his torn and broken wings!

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I came upon the supposedly deceased recently as he strolled down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. I’d never met him—no one has—but I recognized him immediately, because I used to be a newspaperman.

“Mr. Frisbie,” I called to him, and he stopped and turned around, taking off his bowler hat and smiling as he shook my hand.

I got right to the point. “I’m trying to come up with a column for the dog days of summer,” I told him. “Something quick and fun but smart. But I’m stumped. Any ideas?”

Victor Frisbie, sportsman and philanthropist, paused for a moment and said, “Why don’t you write something about me?”

Why not indeed? The case of Victor Frisbie—a wholesale Los Angeles media invention, rumored to be a distant cousin of Harvey the Rabbit—feels suddenly relevant now.

This is, after all, the age of Carlos Danger.

To be sure, Mr. Frisbie was a far classier imaginary soul than Mr. Danger, the sexting alter ego of New York City mayoral wannabe Anthony Weiner. But they are both of a class that is on the rise. The imagined man is back. East Bay video gamers spend most of their lives as someone else in whatever game they prefer to reality. Hollywood celebrities have fake names (on top of their own stage names) to preserve privacy. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling managed to publish a book that, ever so briefly, wasn’t a bestseller—thanks to her use of a pseudonym. Avatar is our era’s biggest movie. Heck, we all might need our own avatars soon, just to shake the government’s surveillance.

For all these reasons, Victor Frisbie now seems like another California pioneer, an innovator ahead of his time.

Sources differ on Frisbie’s exact origins and even the spelling of his name (either Frisbee or Frisbie)—in part because he was invented by journalists, who can’t be trusted to stick to the facts. But the usual story is that he was conjured up by bored Los Angeles Examiner reporters in protest of excessive coverage of the annual Rose Parade. These journalists didn’t want to go to the trouble of interviewing actual parade-goers, so they found a fellow named Victor Frisbie to crack wise on the floats, bands, and weather.

Frisbie never missed a parade; he often made it to the Rose Bowl game as well. He so loved to be out and about that he found himself quoted in scores of stories, including a couple in the Los Angeles Times.

Despite Frisbie’s ubiquity, he could be an enigmatic figure. A man who had many careers and jobs before such multi-tasking became fashionable, he was variously described as a sportsman, a philanthropist, and a world traveler. He was usually from Bakersfield, except for when he was from Australia or Iowa.

And then, in January 1962, the Examiner ceased publication, reporting in a news item that “Victor Frisbie, well-known sportsman and traveler,” had died.

Of course, the report of Frisbie’s demise proved premature. Journalists couldn’t let such a character rest in peace. For decades, he has been revived anytime somebody needs a quick column, often in August. (The novelist Michael Connelly, a former reporter, even included a journalist named Victor Frizbe in one of his L.A. mysteries.)

The moral of the Remember-Victor-Frisbie Column is always that yesterday’s newspapers were less reputable—and more fun—than today’s fishwrap. Jack Smith, the late, great Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote that Frisbie (and another, lesser newspaper fictional character, a socialite named Phlange Welder) represented “the last gasp of the era of wonderful nonsense, when the world was ours. No respectable newspaper today would or should tolerate them.”

That may have been true, for a while. But these days, nonsense is back in a big way, even if it’s not always so wonderful. Newspapers and their professional norms are dying. Amateurs are in charge of the media (just ask them), and they are blogging, sometimes under names that aren’t their own. Even some newscasters, like actors, use stage names.

All of this makes the outrage over Carlos Danger more than a little bit perplexing, at least when it’s coming from today’s media. Why the anger at the sort of victimless fraud generations of reporters have indulged in? Shouldn’t we sometimes celebrate the freewheeling madness of fake personas?

“The bad old days weren’t that,” Frisbie told me, as he finished his story and walked with me back to his car.

He had a long drive back to Bakersfield still ahead of him, but he had one more bit of wisdom to share. “You should dash that column off right quick and go have some fun,” he said. “It’s summer.”

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Halloween began life as a Celtic holiday called “Samhain” (pronounced “sow-in”), celebrated on the eve of October 31. It was one of the two biggest celebrations of the year for the Irish Celts—their New Year’s (“Samhain,” by the way, means “Summer’s End”), when they brought in the harvest and hunkered down for the long dark winter. Celtic mythology is filled with eerie tales of malicious sidh, or fairies, invading their kingdoms and wreaking havoc on Samhain. Heroes who could kill particularly cruel fairies would be granted favors by the Celtic King, and a mortal who happened to venture into the fairy realm on that night would find that time moved differently there (in one story a hero returns from a Samhain trip to the otherworld with spring flowers).

When Catholic missionaries arrived in Ireland, they tried to incorporate Celtic traditions into Christian frameworks. The Catholics took an existing celebration of the saints (which originally occurred on May 13), and moved it to November 1. All Saints’ Day was celebrated beginning at sundown on the 31st, and because “hallow” was another word for “saint,” the holiday eventually became known as “Halloween,” an abbreviated form of “Hallows’ Eve.” It remained a night for the telling of spooky stories.

Halloween had other influences, too. In the 16th century, when Scotland was holding witch trials, the Catholic Church had fallen out of favor, and the Protestants (who were led by King James VI, later King James I of England) were anxious to condemn anything they saw as continuing Catholic tradition, including a Catholic holiday like All Saints’. Protestant witch-hunters may have believed that October 31 was a sabbath day for witches.

If that wasn’t bad enough for Halloween’s reputation, there was also influence of an 18th-century British engineer named Charles Vallancey , who was dispatched to Ireland on a surveying mission. Vallancey, who fancied himself a historian, was smitten with Celtic language and culture, and in 1785 he published a massive six-volume collection of his studies in which he claimed, among many other things, that Samhain was a celebration of the “Lord of Death.” The only trouble was that Vallency was wrong—utterly, disastrously, wrong. He arbitrarily dismissed all previous Celtic studies showing that Samhain meant “Summer’s End” and applied his own fanciful interpretations. Nor did he seem perturbed by the fact that the Celts had no “Lord of Death”—much less a holiday dedicated to him. Although Vallancey was roundly mocked by most of his contemporaries, his studies had already found their way onto many library shelves.

Today, we tend to have different Halloween fears. Parents worry about the treats their costumed tots collect on October 31. Hospitals offer to X-ray candy on Halloween night, and experts warn about razor blades hidden in apples.

But here’s the truth: all of this is just as mythical as evil Halloween fairies.

In 1964, a housewife named Helen Pfeil grew irritated with over-aged trick-or-treaters and tossed steel wool pads and ant-poison buttons labeled “poison” into their bags. Although Helen seems to have felt her humorous intent was obvious, she was arrested for the offense. From then on, the notion of tampered treats became part of Halloween lore. In 1985, two sociologists (Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi) examined 76 cases of “Halloween sadism” and found that the only two cases that had led to a child’s death had both been perpetrated by a family member. (What better coverup than to blame a stranger for having passed out the poisoned candy?)

What about danger to black cats every Halloween? Aren’t they murdered or used in rituals on October 31? Again, there’s absolutely no evidence to support this. Numerous studies have debunked claims of “SRA” (Satanic Ritual Abuse), and have found no genuine cases of diabolical cults sacrificing American kitties. Shelter officials have confirmed that they have found no evidence of abuse to black cats on Halloween. It’s a good idea to keep your cat inside on Halloween night, but mainly because masses of parading children could easily frighten him or her.

Every Halloween, new urban legends pop up like stinky weeds in an abandoned yard. After 9/11, terrorists were supposed to attack Halloween flights. Almost every year, some costumed maniac is supposedly lying in wait at college campuses (this one’s been circulating since 1968, and in one spectacular version of this tale, the madman is costumed as Little Bo Peep). “Netlore”—in which urban legends are spread via the Internet—has given us stories like one from 2008 in which gangs were initiating new members by forcing them to commit random murders on Halloween night (in this case, the story was spread largely by a single individual, but not until after schools had taken his lies seriously enough to hire extra security).

All of this is not to say that Halloween is completely safe. With any festive holiday, things can get out of hand. The Irish and Scots brought their love of Halloween mischief with them when they came to America in the 19th century. Millions of dollars were lost in shattered light fixtures and burned buildings, and by 1933 prank-playing had become so costly that many cities considered banning the holiday altogether. Fortunately, cooler civic heads prevailed and the notion of buying off the prank-players with costumes and parties caught on—and gave rise to that most beloved of Halloween institutions: trick-or-treat.

So, why all this fear at Halloween?

The answer, of course, is built into the very pumpkin-patterned fabric of the holiday. Halloween is the time of year when we acknowledge, test, and mock our fears. We go to high-tech haunted houses and pay to have monsters leap out at us; we flock to theaters for horror movies; we decorate our yards with rubber corpses and make ourselves up as vampires. It’s inevitable that some of the fears we manifest on Halloween will be less than playful, but fortunately they’re no more real than spray-on cobwebs or plastic masks.

Let’s put it this way: What’s really scarier—the pretend zombies of The Walking Dead or the real toddler in the beauty pageants of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo? Go ahead and enjoy your Halloween, because real life will always be a lot scarier.

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