What Newport, Rhode Island Can Teach Us about the Myth of American Origin Stories
"Touro Synagogue - Newport, Rhode Island" by Eric Gross Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
We are excited to share the following essay and podcast (both audio and transcript) from a student who worked with Professor Tara Bynum to develop this podcast as part of their collaborative research on early American literature and the history of Newport, Rhode Island. Melina Hegelheimer recently graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and ethics & public policy. They are currently pursuing a master’s degree in library sciences at the University of Illinois, and hope to one day work in public libraries. Melina’s essay and podcast represents one example of how undergraduate student public history writing can be adapted for a publication like Insurrect!, and we hope their post inspires more students to submit their writing to online magazines.
One fall afternoon in a Zoom meeting with my research professor, Dr. Tara Bynum, we began to discuss, as we often did, the connections, realizations, and new understandings we were gaining as we delved into the meat and potatoes of our research on early American literature and Newport, Rhode Island. Throughout a year and a half of work, I was continually surprised about the way my conception of the Northern colonies expanded. Though history curriculums are notoriously poor in U. S. high schools, I was lucky to have a teacher who strayed where many do not (thanks, Mr. Mooney). I thought—and only now do I recognize how silly this sounds—that I pretty much got the gist.
The early American history I remember learning from high school goes something like this: born leaders, white men who stood taller than the rest (your George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons) led a moral charge against the British. It’s a classic underdog story: years of subjugation and disrespect at the hands of King George and the British Parliament lead to sufficient public dissent and widespread agitation that eventually escalated into an all-out war. Through an alliance with the French and their own cunning and wit, they outsmarted the enemy and won the war. With their newfound freedom, they forged a new kind of country, one based on immutable moral rules and protections for states and their citizens. Of course, there are some inconsistencies in the moral flavor of the story: namely, the systems of slavery, settler colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession.
The American origin story starts and ends with these so-called born leaders. It’s a great story, but it’s not the truth. The main problem, I think, is its singularity. By framing individuals as herculean forces and flattening the planes of reality, it fails to adequately acknowledge the varied stories of the people that made the very achievements possible in the first place.
This essay/podcast is the culmination of a year and a half of research on Newport, Rhode Island. It focuses largely on disrupting the ubiquitous origin story that frames our understanding of the United States today. I wanted to connect it to the present in order to draw attention to the idea that our familiarity with segregation (from redlining to the racial wealth gap) is projected onto the past in a way that doesn’t actually reflect the truth. We expect history to mirror segregation as it exists in America’s largest cities today, but geographically and socially, this sort of isolation makes no sense in the colonial urban American North. Our collective imagination places these cities as white spaces, but integration and diversity were necessary pieces for functionality.
Allowing this conception of early America to persist does a disservice to history, for both our sake and our ancestors’. This is merely one example of the way that history gets misconstrued. In Dr. Bynum’s newest book, Reading Pleasures, she explores what it might mean for our modern understanding if we recognize that one of the ways that Black early Americans experienced joy was through their membership in literary communities. Perhaps, if the varied and diverse cultural makeup of the urban north was one of the essential features taught about colonial America, we wouldn’t currently be having this national conversation in which there is a clear and vested interest in deemphasizing race in higher education.
During my time working on this project, I have continued to ask myself what it might look like if the forgotten stories of American history became a part of our collective understanding of our origin. Perhaps we would find that Black folks could host pig roasts, and Portuguese Jewish merchants could be the wealthiest men in the city. Certainly, we would broaden our conception of the lives people lived back then. In turn, we could gain access to new stories today. The following podcast is about Aaron Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish merchant who has been neglected in American history due to the over-simplification of the American origin story. In the following audio and transcription, I explore the complexity of his life in Newport Rhode Island, his role as a merchant, a slave trader, and the white washed narratives of American history.
Podcast script:
What does it mean to be venerated? Remembered, celebrated, adored. To be known. To be clear, what I’m talking about is more than just Regina George level notoriety or Kardashian-level celebrity. No, I’m talking [about] something more persistent and steadfast – I'm talking about tradition– about legacy.
Hi, my name is Melina Hegelheimer, and to begin this pod, I’m going to walk you through a little thought experiment.
Consider this: when you close your eyes and imagine Americans in the 1770’s, what do they look like? If you’re like me, it’s a fairly homogenous group: White men with silly little tights, wearing ridiculous tailcoats and sporting terrible hairstyles. Okay, fair enough, but let's dig deeper. What are the assumptions we make about them? And I mean besides the fact that they smell bad. What do they do for work? What do their wives do? What do they eat, what do they drink, and who do they interact with? These are the small nuggets of assumption that frame how we think about American history: who it includes, what those people were like, and how we got to where we are today.
In fact, let’s consider one person who provides an easy answer to all the questions we just asked: George Washington. In American history class, we learn that he was a Virginian, a farmer, a politician, a soldier, a general. And because of the central position he holds in our mythos, we tend to believe that the earliest Americans were just like him: the people we imagine are generals, soldiers, politicians, planters, merchants. Their wives, if we even remember them, stayed home and ran the household. Their families ate porridge and fish, and drank ale, rum, and tea. And we have these specific assumptions about the people of the time because the mythic story of the birth of the national tells us that people like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton are the ones – the only ones – who built this country.
These founders are the people who embody history as presented to us throughout our schooling. They exist neatly in this narrative we wish to tell - one of the yeoman farmers fighting the good fight, the just fight, against the big bad British – and in that story there is extraordinarily little incentive to remember anyone who wasn’t one of our founding fathers. The American origin story is one of a very select group of white guys.
So, to put it more precisely, the overarching question we’re considering is this: Why is American history defined by so few? The short answer is this: There’s a reason the man is on our money! Doesn’t the adage go “Form follows function?” In this pod, we’ll consider what the function is of using folks like George Washington as a stand in for the myriad of people who made up this country’s true origin story.
If George Washington is the embodiment of who we mean when we talk about American history, then let me introduce you to another figure who might exemplify who gets left out when we decide that GW is in. Aaron Lopez might have lived in Newport, Rhode Island prior to and during the American revolution, but he does not get to be included in the American mythos. Have you ever heard of him? Probably not. He’s not on the dollar bill and he’s not included in many American history textbooks. He’s not a Viriginian farmer. Or a Protestant family man. Or a Revolutionary War veteran or government official. He is none of the things that make George Washington the quintessential colonial American.
But Aaron Lopez has a uniquely and undeniably American story– he made his mark on the fabric of this country. He lived in Newport, Rhode Island from 1752-1776. He was a merchant of spermaceti candles, ships, rum, chocolate, textiles, and more. He was a Jewish Portuguese immigrant. Lopez is not often a person (or type of person) who is incorporated into a historical account of America, because of these very identity markers.
The consequence of this, ironically, is a hyper-specific version of American history. It doesn’t really occur to most of us today that American history can and does, include 18th century Portuguese Jewish merchants. Utilizing the narrow version of American history - that of colonial America containing only George Washington types – succeeds in developing one central origin story at the expense of the bigger, truer, and more nuanced story. And this has tangible effects for us today – Origin stories are powerful tools that precipitate belonging and help define who is “us,” and who is “them.” There are countless examples of the ways in which history gets selected and refined, and how one ordinary person gets left out while another attains mythical status.
The American origin story relies on a foundation of yeoman farmers – of good Protestants tilling the land and taming the wilderness of the ‘untouched’ Americas –
Examples like Aaron Lopez - people who have been willfully left out of this doctored version of history - are rife in history if we look hard enough. Because unexpected people showing up in unexpected places, their lives telling a story that has long since been glossed over.
The American origin story doesn’t have the space to include a Portuguese Jew who escaped the Inquisition and eventually became the highest taxpayer in the 5th largest city in the colonies at the time – because if we remember people like Aaron Lopez, we are suddenly forced to reckon with the fact that this nation has always had a vested interest in consolidating power, wealth, and prestige among a small population of its constituents.
There is a reason that Aaron Lopez isn’t remembered – and it’s not only because he was Jewish – it's because the protestant white men in power would not look past religion – would not let him be naturalized in Rhode Island, would not let him vote, and would not let him run for office. In a country founded on ideals of freedoms of all kinds, using an American mythos that doesn’t acknowledge oppression allows us to pass over the fact that Aaron Lopez was a REALLY big deal.
He was the wealthiest man in Newport, [and] a huge player in global trade at the time. The taxes on the importation of enslaved folks on his ships paid for paving the very streets of Newport. Lopez was plenty rich and plenty powerful – but the power to create a legacy and be remembered was withheld from him, because of prejudice.
Too often we put the onus on those who are oppressed to overcome their oppression. Their religion is the problem – their gender, their Blackness, their religion; whatever makes them “other.” But the crux of the problem isn’t on the people who are discriminated against. It’s on those who do this discriminating. But the American mythos functions to make sure people like Aaron Lopez aren’t included in American histories, which allows us to conveniently forget the discrimination they faced as well.
What I’m advocating for here is something radically different. Instead of relying on the mythos to be exclusionary and narrow, I imagine a world in which the American mythos accurately represents numerous mistakes that were made along the way. A mythos that includes groups whose contributions have been forgotten – a structured refocusing on the incredible diversity in identity, religion, color, and creed that the people in this nation have had since the very beginning, and the resilience of those communities who have been continuously oppressed. A reimagination like this could catalyze accountability, managed expectations, responsible politics, and an entirely new cultural outlook and attitude.
To thoroughly understand the possibilities that reimagining the story of American history might allow us to access, we can use Aaron Lopez’ quest for naturalization as an example. After nine years of living in Newport, Lopez applied for naturalization alongside Isaac Elizer, another prominent Jew. Initially, the legislature voted to approve the applications if the men took an oath of allegiance, but then opted to go in another direction:“Inasmuch as the said Aaron Lopez hath declared himself by religion a Jew, this Assembly doth not admit himself or any other of that religion to the full freedom of this Colony. So that the said Aaron Lopez nor any other of said religion is not liable to be chosen into any office in this colony nor allowed to give vote as a free man in choosing others. “Elizer quit there, but Lopez wouldn’t give in. After making inquiries about how to become a citizen in the colony of Massachusetts, the entire Lopez family moved to Swansea, MA for seven months in order to achieve naturalization. After officially becoming a citizen, Lopez finally returned to Newport.
This short story is one we’re familiar with today. We imagine American identity as a privilege, and those who wield it gain considerable benefits. Aaron Lopez is literally not allowed to be part of colonial America – and whether or not the consequences were intended, history was being shaped in his present to exclude people like him from being a part of the common American identity . We think about America’s origin story as one of yeoman farmers because everyone else was being actively erased.
One thing I want to make clear, however, is that the title of ‘American’ only matters for the sake of attribution. Lopez was already an American – naturalization does not capture the crux of this story – it doesn’t express the relationships he had, the value he brought to his community, and the wealth he put back into the city. The contributions he made and the business he conducted had a tangible effect on the country, and whether or not we remember it as such, it was the doing of Aaron Lopez. It's time to start recognizing that the wealth of the United States is derived from diverse populations – at the expense of some and to the credit of others.
Our specific expectation for this Portuguese Jewish merchant in colonial America is to not exist. In our current mythology, we don’t have the space to include him. The nonexistence of anyone other than white Christian men is emblematic of this doctored version of American history. But I believe we can imagine the American mythos differently to include the diverse populations that have always been here AND we can include the discrimination they faced from the privileged few who excluded them from the narrative. What would it look like to tell a story about those who have, in different time periods and in different iterations, been understood as “other?” What would be the cultural impact of this?
Maybe this change would just look like considering and holding space for communities that are systematically forgotten. Maybe, it looks like thinking about the origin story of the US in a fantastically different and much more varied way. No matter what, stories shape our expectations for ourselves and others. And continually expanding access to options for stories might allow us to imagine new ways of being today.
The American mythos teaches us to or not to see ourselves in the history. It frames how Black people are consistently imagined, how Jews are consistently imagined, how women are consistently imagined, and many more. And by enlarging the possibilities for the past, we enlarge the possibilities for the present and the future.
Lopez can’t participate in politics but affects the landscape in this myriad of other ways that don’t get noted in the history books – his mercantile activities pave the streets, he helps cultivate a healthy Jewish community (note that he funds the building of the nation’s first synagogue), he influences industry, and makes an immeasurable difference in the lives of the people around him. Lopez was forgotten because he exists at an uncomfortable spot for us in the present – he’s not part of the narrative we like to peddle – and that’s what history is – a big complex narrative that gets squeezed, squished, refined, and peddled to us through history class, yes, but also, and more importantly, through the common body of cultural knowledge.
The effects of understanding American history in this new way and amending our cultural mythology are yet to be determined. These are tough questions with no obvious answers, but it is clear to me that it is the wrestling with these ideas which creates room for bigger, bolder, and better ways of thinking and being in our present.