essay on american pastoral

American Pastoral

47 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 2, Chapters 4-5

Part 2, Chapter 6-Part 3, Chapter 7

Part 3, Chapters 8-9

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Summary and Study Guide

American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth examines in detail one man’s quest for the American dream and the fragility of the entire enterprise. Roth, one of the most critically acclaimed novelists of the 20th century, focuses his narrative microscope through the eyes of Nathan Zuckerman , his literary alter ego from whose perspective he has written 10 other novels, including Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Human Stain (2000). Roth has won virtually every literary award, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. American Pastoral earned Roth the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and was adapted into a film in 2016.

This guide refers to the 1997 Vintage edition.

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Content Warning : This guide mentions rape, depression and suicidal ideation, and self-starvation in the name of religion.

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Author Nathan Zuckerman reflects on the life of a former classmate, Seymour “the Swede” Levov , a tall, blonde, athletically gifted youth and a local hero in Zuckerman’s Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Seymour’s father, Lou, owns a successful glove manufacturing business, and the Swede (as Zuckerman refers to Seymour throughout the narrative) foregoes a career in baseball to take over the family business. Zuckerman meets the Swede’s younger brother, Jerry, at a class reunion, and Jerry informs Zuckerman that his brother has died of cancer. Zuckerman embarks on a research mission to uncover the details behind the life of a man who appeared, on the surface, to be the embodiment of the American dream, a third-generation son of immigrants with a successful business, a beautiful home, and a (seemingly) happy family. What he finds below the surface is pain and tragedy , all carefully concealed behind the Swede’s stoic demeanor.

After taking over his father’s glove business, the Swede marries Dawn Dwyer, an Irish Catholic girl and former Miss New Jersey. They have one daughter, Meredith (Merry). They buy a stately old home in the upper-crust village of Old Rimrock. By most measures, the Swede’s life is an unqualified success, but problems emerge when Merry, always stubborn and feisty, develops a stutter. Despite all his and Dawn’s efforts, the stutter persists, and Merry grows into a frustrated, angry teenager. In the late 1960s, Merry becomes obsessed with the war in Vietnam—triggered perhaps by witnessing the self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thíc Quang Ðúc on the news. Repelled by the violence of the war, Merry turns her back on the American ideal of success that her father has built his life around. She becomes involved in the radical anti-war movement, and at 16, she bombs a local post office, killing an innocent bystander. She flees, going underground and traveling across the country under an assumed name. In Chicago, she is raped. She makes plans to travel to Cuba, but those plans never pan out.

Meanwhile, the Swede and Dawn, heartbroken and terrified for their daughter, exhaust every resource searching for her. One day, the Swede receives a visit from Rita Cohen , who claims to be a student at the Wharton School of Business doing research on the leather industry. The Swede gives her a detailed tour of the factory, but by the end, she reveals her true purpose: She has come on behalf of Merry, asking for some of Merry’s most beloved possessions. Since Rita is his only connection to his daughter, the Swede concedes to her increasingly bizarre demands, including a ransom payment of $5,000 and a demand that he sleep with her. Disgusted by Rita’s seduction, he flees, leaving the money behind.

As the country is gripped by sometimes violent protests against war and racial injustice—including the 1967 Newark Rebellion that led to 26 deaths and hundreds of injuries—the Swede fears that Merry is caught in the middle of it. He continues to imagine her as a young pawn duped by radical voices within the anti-war movement and thus not responsible for her actions. He reflects on Merry’s teen years, on the literature she’s read and the voices she’s listened to, desperately trying to reconcile the sweet child he remembers with the woman she’s become. After five years—during which time Dawn has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, had plastic surgery, and planned to build a new house—he receives a letter from Rita informing him that Merry (now Mary Stoltz) is back in Newark. The Swede seeks her out and finds her emaciated and filthy, living in squalor in a run-down, dangerous section of the city. She claims to be a devotee of Jainism, an Indian religion that preaches non-violence to all living things (including plants), the ultimate extension of which is self-starvation. The Swede pleads with Merry to come home, but she refuses. He finally leaves, defeated, keeping Merry’s existence a secret from Dawn.

Back at the office, he calls Jerry to tell him about Merry, but his brother is unsympathetic, arguing that if the Swede really loved his daughter, he would drag her home, kicking and screaming if necessary. He is brutally honest about his brother’s flaws, accusing him of sublimating his true self to the needs of everyone around him. That night, the Levovs host a dinner party. Before the meal, the Swede witnesses Bill Orcutt, the architect helping Dawn design the new house, making sexual overtures to his wife—the two are having an affair. Over dinner—which includes the Orcutts, the Swede’s parents, Sheila Salzman (Merry’s former speech therapist and, briefly, the Swede’s mistress) and her husband, and the Umanoffs (family friends)—they debate the state of the country, but all the while, the Swede is consumed with thoughts of Merry and Dawn. The Swede hears a commotion and imagines Merry suddenly appearing, announcing to Lou that she was involved in another bombing that killed three more people. In shock, Lou dies from heart failure. In reality, Orcutt has stabbed Lou with a fork, barely missing his eye. Zuckerman ends the novel asking if the Levovs’ life was so terrible to warrant such tragedy.

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White Men, Land, and Literature: The Making (and Unmaking) of an American Pastoral

Brad kessler on settler narratives and the violence that haunts american land and literature.

Twenty odd years ago I moved from New York City to a farmhouse in Vermont. The move from the one-room walk-up on the Lower East Side to southwestern Vermont meant an almost obscene increase in personal space. With the bank documents signed and the deed turned over I became overnight rich in land: seventy-five acres of it. An opalescent brook. An orchard. An opulence my ancestors could never imagine. My grandparents and their parents had always dwelled in cities. Diaspora Jews, they couldn’t own land in the countries they’d come from or hadn’t the money to try.

When my grandmother and great-grandparents arrived at Ellis Island, they were eager to shed their old identities and memories as quickly as the clothes they emigrated in. It was hard to even extract from them later the names of towns where they’d once lived: Lemberg. Vilna Gubernia, Brisk. Cities that had since been renamed as if they were mythic sites that had never truly existed but were merely staging points on their slow march to a safer haven—the New World. Once they’d crossed the ocean they didn’t look back. They didn’t talk about the shtetl or pogrom. And though all 48 states in theory awaited their arrival in America they settled like most of their peers in the archipelago around Manhattan. Most took up residence on the Lower East Side.

I grew up in the near suburbs and lived too as an adult on the Lower East Side but never felt at home in the city. For as long as I could remember I wanted to flee the five boroughs and find a place in the mountains— any mountains—and grow my own food. I’d devoured Thoreau’s Walden as a teen and the poetry of Robert Frost and somehow their invented landscapes and pastoral lives, their blending of culture with agriculture, grafted themselves onto my growing skin. At thirty-two, having searched for a home in rural America in six states in as many years, I left the Lower East Side for the house on a hill in a narrow valley in southwestern Vermont. Verdant in summer. White in winter. For the first time in my life, I felt grounded and at home.

“We begin with the land,” writes Joy Harjo. “We emerge from the earth of our mother and our bodies will be returned to earth. We are the land.” And so it began for me, with the land, when I moved to that part of Vermont on the border of upstate New York. I was a writer who made my living with paper but wanted to make it with earth as well. I knew the two were intimately connected—land and literature—but unsure how. I understood only that inside unpopulated places, in the woods and mountains, I found a kind of sanctuary I could only otherwise find inside the pages of a book. Landscape and literature: both were safe places, untroubled by actual people.

We were going to raise dairy goats in Vermont, so we fenced in part of the land. Made an enclosure of welded wire and posts. Little did I know I was unconsciously imitating that old European dream of the pastoral. I’d inherited the impulse from countless myths and biblical stories, poems and musical compositions; from the Roman alphabet itself whose letters contained, in their inverted shapes, vestiges of a collective human herding past, i.e.:  The letter “A” from the Hebrew alef, “the bull” reveals its pictographic origin when upturned on its head: “. C, Gimmel, from the Hebrew “camel” shows its hump when tipped upon its side: C. H, from the Hebrew heth for “fence,” reveals its posts and crossbars when strung together: HHHHH. The letter I, from the Hebrew Lamed , makes and means a “shepherds’ staff”: u. Each time we read a sentence we’re herding words across the page.

The pastoral dream dates back at least to Ur. The word “paradise” comes from the Old Persian for a “fenced place” filled, usually, with friendly animals. In Vermont we were girding in our own “paradise,” making a gated community, pounding posts and stretching wire. The work was rewarding and hard, but when the land was enclosed and the new pasture penned, a certain discomfort began to creep in. What was this indwelling melancholy, this titer of pain, alongside the gratitude? Was it an unconscious acknowledgement (or attempt not to acknowledge, to look away) that our new enclosure, our sanctuary, came with a whiff of shame, a subterranean guilt lurking beneath the false bravado of self-sufficiency? Did every American farmer feel this way (then quickly bury the notion) that beneath their own hard labor, under the topsoil and humus, lay the intractable knowledge, however hidden, that their land was stolen?

What haunts American land haunts its literature. Every pastoral, like every paradise, implies exclusion, the things left out of Eden. How can any outgrowth from American soil not be touched by the two elements underlying its culture: genocide and slavery?  Who inherits the land (and who doesn’t) and how it will be used is the subtext of America’s earliest literature. Benjamin Franklin, America’s “first writer,” sold thousands of broadsides and books while at the same time encouraging the extermination and replacement of America’s native people with White people—“cultivators of the soil.” The “penny saved is a penny earned” author believed America’s unmeasured real estate ripe for exploitation. In his 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” he rallied the British people to come to the colonies so that “the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side of the Water.”

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) reads as much as a literary land brochure as a map of Jefferson’s mind. His detailed queries on climate, rivers, flora and fauna, iron mines and gold lead to his views on race. Aboriginal Americans are noble and barbaric (and removable). Black people need less sleep than Whites, can’t comprehend beauty or tenderness, forethought or grief; are unable, notably, to compose poetry (or create literature). “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry,” Jefferson writes in Query XIV. But what of his published contemporary African American poet, Phyllis Wheatley? “ The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Or the writer and former slave Ignatius Sancho? “ His letters do more honor to the heart than to the head .” Jefferson’s contempt and evasions underscore his literary-agrarian vision. America’s literature, like its land, is already foreclosed to anyone who isn’t White.

The career and books of James Fenimore Cooper best illustrate the expansion of American territory and letters in the nineteenth century. Melville called him “America’s national novelist” and Cooper’s novels were the most widely read at the time. Born in New Jersey in 1789, Cooper grew up in upstate New York in what was considered then the frontier west of Albany. His father was a land speculator who purchased 100,000 acres of First Nations land, making for himself and his family a large fortune off stolen Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) land. What had been an Iroquois village at the foot of Otsego Lake, Coopers father renamed after himself—Cooperstown, New York.

There Cooper sketched his stories, inscribing narratives across the lakes and hills and woods. His plots proved as lucrative as his father’s and became the foundation of American fiction. His cycle of five novels, The Leatherstocking Tales , fantasized the founding and expansion of the settler nation by reimagining the period between 1740-1804 as seen through the lens of a single man: Nathaniel “Natty” Bumpo.  In the course of the Tales , Bumpo transitions from a British settler-trapper to an adopted “native” to a pioneer on the western prairie.

The most pivotal moment in the cycle occurs when Bumpo becomes the adopted son of Chingachgook, a fictional First Nations chief of a fictional “Mohican” tribe. Having earned the blessing of the vanishing chief and obtaining a new “native” name—“Hawkeye”—the White settler becomes in a sense indigenized. When Chingachgook’s biological son and Bumpo’s companion dies at the hands of a Huron warrior, Bumpo becomes, by extension, the “rightful” heir to all the native lands. The Last of the Mohicans and the first of the New White Americans.

Critics Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call the Tales a classic “settler adoption novel” in which the act of adopting indigenous ways makes Bumpo deserving of being adopted by the Indigenous. The settler adoption fantasy, played out in numerous stories since, alleviated the European settlers’ anxiety of unbelonging and assuaged any lingering remorse or guilt over the killing and theft caused by their settlement. It’s starkly clarifying to see the connection between Cooper the father and Cooper the son, how the hard power of real estate transaction and removal is eased and concealed by the “soft power” of published fiction. Cooper’s portrait of Indigenous America—the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” the willful looking away, the premature nostalgia—further served frontier settlement propaganda and violence against the figures in the landscape who never left.

Cooper’s Tales formed an indelible imprint on the American imagination. The Last of the Mohicans has been remade into countless films and TV, radio, comic book, and Marvel Illustrated series adaptations. Yet its most consequential legacy may be in its construction of what Tuck and Wayne call the “pivotal triad of archetypes” that forms the basis of an American national literature, the settler-native-slave triad: “The resourceful Frontiersman, the vanishing Indian, and the degenerate Negro.”

Enslaved Africans arrived on American soil as early as 1619. As Toni Morrison observed thirty years ago, this “Africanist Presence” predated the arrival of any and every American author who came after. Try as subsequent White settler authors might to ignore this pre-existing “Africanist Presence,” that very presence helped shape “the nature and even the cause of literary whiteness.” Through her close reading of the American canon (Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Cather, Hemingway), Morrison showed how a White identity was invented against the shadow of an equally invented Black identity. An “unsettled and unsettling population” (the “not-free” and “not-me”) defined those who could settle and spread: Whites. More recently the writer Jess Row, following Morrison’s lead, explored the racial subtext of White American post-war fiction through its various movements (modernism, minimalism, post-modernism, etc.).

Row’s surgical reading of writers as diverse (stylistically at least) as Annie Dillard, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, David Foster Wallace, Raymond Carver, and Marilynne Robinson, reveal to him glaring evasions, silences and lacunae regarding race. Row maintains the heart of White American fiction is located in avoidance and shame and how White writers have responded stylistically to their own isolation. His theory is this: if White people sealed themselves off in segregated suburbs in the fifties and sixties and seventies, an equal escapism occurred in American literature.

A movement on the land—supported by government subsidies and redlining—mirrored a movement in American letters. White people gained entry into new territory (once again) that displaced or excluded people of color. The psychic costs of that ongoing segregation continues to inform and de form American fiction. Only recently, often reluctantly, White American writers have begun to acknowledge that the same type of redlining occurred in American literature’s related places of power: the academy and the publishing world.

Publishing is always a form of occupation. Occupying the page, the available space, taking up room, not just metaphorically, but literally: shelf space, library catalogs, bookstores, print columns, bandwidth. I’ve long been interested in books as space, texts as tracts; the Manifest Destiny an empty notebook implies. The loss of land and the inheritance of “The Book”—trading the land for letters—is the allegory of the Jewish Diaspora (and maybe every diaspora since). Land and literature; how does occupying one reconstruct the other? Every pastoral since Theocritus depends on the elimination of the native and replacement of what came before. The shepherd and sheep don’t arrive on the scene until all the native fauna are killed or kept at bay. Writing itself is a kind of displacement, words stand in for the real, the autochthonous. We can never gain what was lost through letters. We can only fill empty spaces with words.

What does it mean that as a White American man, a writer and farmer, I am a direct heir to Cooper’s fictions and Jefferson’s agrarian policies? What does it say that some of my favorite literary forebears, from Walt Whitman to Wallace Stevens, were racist? How does one step into their tradition and not reinscribe the same narrative on the page (or on the land)? Wasn’t I doing just that in my rural isolation? I’d imbibed the celebrated qualities of the American character Toni Morrison describes so well in Playing in the Dark : the rugged individualism, the imagined autonomy, the self-sufficiency.

Thoreau’s “Solitude,” Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” Melville “containing multitudes” (while isolating himself at Arrowhead, his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts). Even Emily Dickinson’s cloistering in nearby Amherst had at its core a querencia, a defensive posture. A misanthropic hiding away. Robert Frost, who farmed just minutes down the road from where I live, advised: “ Make yourself up a cheering song ” and “ pull in your ladder road behind you and put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. ” Hadn’t I done the same by following his “Directive”? Why the defensive posture? What were all these writers defending against ? What imminent violence, humiliation, pain?

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and poet, the novelist and environmental activist, intuited early on that American racism infected not only its people but its art. “A work of art that grows out of a diseased culture,” he wrote in The Hidden Wound , “has not only the limits of the disease—if it is not an affirmation of the disease, it is a reaction against it.” Berry also understood how brutality against Indigenous and Black people was linked to brutality against the land, that cultural and ecological annihilation, undertaken by Europeans, dated back to the conquistadors, and continued to this day.

There are places in rural America where the weight of the past hangs so powerfully over the land you can feel the heaviness in the air. Places that feel violently unsettled, that shout: Run Away! Sites of unrecorded massacres or a region where mountain-top removal has left the land poisoned, the soil dead.  Call it the “spirit of the place,” or psychic energy, or the ghosts of lives cut short. Like all bodies, the land keeps the score. One reason it took so long to find a home in rural America, is that we looked for places unpolluted by America’s past. We started looking in West Virginia and worked our way all the way north for a clean slate. A blank page. It was a fool’s errand, of course, for no such place exists. There are no blank pages anymore, only ones less than more defiled.

Where I live in southwestern Vermont the old indigenous names have all been erased, substituted with Anglo ones (to the east), Dutch (to the west), and French (to the North). The rivers are called “kills” from the Dutch. Its easy to forget in a purely linguistic sense, in the daily usage of words, that the land used to be linked to a local language that limned its features and contours, its flats and brooks, its past events and confluences, that native names were a type of text or geographic novel that read from one end of the country to the other, in multiple tongues, not unlike the songlines of Aboriginal Australia. These are whole libraries lost. All our creeks have become “kills.”

Yet land still speaks. We’ve largely lost the ability to listen. It takes a long time to hear what a piece of land has to “say,” or perceive what it wants. There’s a whole consciousness in the woods outside my window I can barely access even when I’m immersed in it. Only now, after decades living on this same stamp of land, have I learned some basic grammar and can discern the faint furrows in the woods formed by past plows, or read a rock wall or the vanished race of an abandoned mill. Of the land’s older occupants—Abenaki to the east, Mohawk to the west—I know next to nothing.

What surprises still is my own ignorance of place and the stories right around me I’ve never learned. A few years ago, I met a woman in Italy who lives in the Pacific Northwest. When she learned where I lived, she assumed I knew the story of the Great Peacemaker, the First Nations prophet. I did not. The Great Peacemaker was an Onondaga a man who lived in the fifteenth (some say twelfth) century. He was said to be sent by the Creator to unite the warring “Six Nations” of the northeast—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—and form the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy. He set off as a young man from Lake Ontario in a canoe carved of pure white stone and paddled all the way east to the Mohawk people.

The Mohawk were impressed by the man’s sincerity and bravery but didn’t buy his message. Rejected, the Great Peacemaker scaled a towering pine that grew beside the raging falls of the Mohawk River where it meets the Hudson. He told the Mohawk people beneath to chop down the tree. The onlookers watched the falling pine plunge into the Kahon:ios Falls and the Great Peacemaker, riding on top, disappear into the rapids. Afterward, everyone assumed him dead. Yet the next morning they found him sitting unharmed by a campfire. His miraculous act convinced the Mohawk to join him and become the founding Nation of the Haudenosaunee.

Why had I never heard the story of the Great Peacemaker? I lived only an hour away from where he performed his miracle at Kahon:ios falls which is called Cohoes Falls today. I’d passed through the town of Cohoes, New York, hundreds of times on my way home from Albany (usually to buy gas). It was as if I lived near the Sea of Galilee and had never heard the name “Jesus.” One story gets erased, another inscribed on the land. That I’d never been taught the story of the Great Peacemaker was unsurprising. That I’d never made a point of learning felt shameful.

We who live in rural American have a lot of work to do, especially here in Vermont where we can hide behind our liberal politics. While some of us here can pride ourselves on Bernie Sanders and our stated commitment to social justice, we live in the whitest (if not the whitest) state in the country, a place where we can talk racial justice until blue in the face but never encounter a black one, or an immigrant, or any person of color. Our beliefs are rarely tested by reality. We live very much still in a gated community; even if the gates are invisible, they’re implied.

A few weeks ago, a neighbor stopped by to help cut down an old maple tree that had been dying for years in our yard. Jim—I’ll call him—is a white man in his sixties, a retired arborist and forest ranger who’d worked decades for the government in the nearby National Forest. Our valley is split down the middle politically between red and blue (but we’re all white) and Jim is a Democrat, on the progressive side of things. He’s also an avid outdoorsman, a turkey and deer hunter and skilled fisherman. Like most of my neighbors, he owns several guns. He also happens to be a casual reader, someone who borrows books routinely from the local library. The day he came over to cut down the dying tree, we talked afterward about books. What was he reading now? What interested him?  Science. Some science fiction. But what excited him the most that day was a novel he started rereading again, his favorite, one he returned to again and again every few years to give him solace or remind him of something.

What’s the novel? I asked.

He set his chainsaw on a log.

“James Fenimore Cooper,” he said. “ The Last of the Mohicans .”

___________________________________________________________

Brad Kessler’s novel North is available now via Overlook Press. 

Brad Kessler

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American Pastoral

November 19, 2009 issue

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Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a “puzzling form” and a “queer business” in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied “a beautiful relation between the rich and poor” by making “simple people express strong feelings…in learned and fashionable language.” From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare’s complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.

Library of Congress

‘Migrant Mother,’ Nipomo, California, 1936; photographs by Dorothea Lange. Her original caption for this photograph was ‘Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.’

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, “The Fenimore Cooper Indian” (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson’s sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

Empson noted the connection between traditional pastoral and Soviet propaganda, with its elevation of the worker to a “mythical cult-figure,” and something similar was going on during the New Deal when the Resettlement Administration (which later morphed into the Farm Security Administration) dispatched such figures from Manhattan’s Upper Bohemia as Walker Evans and Marion Post to photograph rural poverty in the southern states. Like a Tudor court poet contemplating a shepherd, the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers. Some, though not all, of the photographers were, like Evans, conscious artists; their federal patrons, like Roy Stryker, head of the information division of the FSA, were unabashed propagandists who judged each picture by its immediate affective power and took a severely practical approach to human tragedy.

Of all the many thousands of photographs that came out of this government-sponsored enterprise, none was more instantly affecting or has remained more famous than Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother . Taken in February 1936 at a pea pickers’ camp near Nipomo, seventy miles northwest of Santa Barbara, it was published in the San Francisco News the following month, when it resulted in $200,000 in donations from appalled readers. In 1998, it became a 32¢ stamp in the Celebrate the Century series, with the caption “America Survives the Depression.” For a long while now, I’ve tried to observe a self-imposed veto on the overworked words “icon” and “iconic,” but in the exceptional case of Migrant Mother it’s sorely tempting to lift it.

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one’s made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female artist from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It’s not the woman’s plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes.

Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman’s face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two elder children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It’s a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one’s first and last impressions are of the woman’s resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

Against all odds, she’s less a figure of pathos than of survival, as the inscription on the postage stamp accurately described her. In 1960, Lange said of the woman that she “seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it”—a nice instance of Empson’s “beautiful relation between the rich and poor”—which was not at all how her subject remembered the occasion.

In 1958 the hitherto nameless woman surfaced as Florence Thompson, author of an angry letter, written in amateur legalese, to the magazine U.S. Camera , which had recently republished Migrant Mother :

…It was called to My attention…request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines…should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights…Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission…

Years later, Thompson’s grandson, Roger Sprague, who maintains a Web site called migrantgrandson.com, described what he believed to be her version of the encounter with Lange:

Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) pulled into the entrance, stopped some twenty yards in front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a large camera. She started taking Florence’s picture. With each picture the woman would step closer. Florence thought to herself, “Pay no mind. The woman thinks I’m quaint, and wants to take my picture.” The woman took the last picture not four feet away then spoke to Florence: “Hello, I’m Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the migrant worker. The photos will never be published, I promise.”

Some of these details ring false, and Sprague has his own interest in promoting a counternarrative, but the essence of the passage, with its insistence on the gulf of class and wealth between photographer and subject, sounds broadly right. “The woman thinks I’m quaint” might be the resentful observation of every goatherd, shepherd, and leech-gatherer faced with a well-heeled poet or documentarian on his or her turf.

It also emerged that Florence Thompson was not just a representative “Okie,” as Lange had thought, but a Cherokee Indian, born on an Oklahoma reservation. So, in retrospect, Migrant Mother can be read as intertwining two “mythical cult-figures”: that of the refugee sharecropper from the Dust Bowl (though Thompson had originally come to California with her first husband, a millworker, in 1924) and that of the Noble Red Man. There is a strikingly visible connection, however unnoticed by Lange, between her picture of Florence Thompson and Edward S. Curtis’s elaborately staged sepia portraits of dignified Native American women in tribal regalia in his extensive collection The North American Indian (1900–1930), perhaps the single most ambitious—and contentious—work of American pastoral ever created by a visual artist.

Gordonton, Person County, North Carolina, July 9, 1939. Lange wrote in her caption for this photograph, ‘Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon…. Note the kerosene pump on the right and gasoline pump on the left. Brother of store owner stands in doorway.’

Both Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange and Anne Whiston Spirn’s Daring to Look hew to the line that Lange suddenly became a documentary photographer in 1932, when she stepped out of her portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco’s fashionable Union Square and took her Rolleiflex out onto the streets of the Mission District, three miles away, where she began to photograph men on the ever-lengthening breadlines in the last year of Hoover’s presidency. But this is to underplay the importance of the pictures she took from 1920 onward when she accompanied her first husband, Maynard Dixon, on his months-long painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico.

Lange was twenty-four when they married in March 1920, Dixon twenty years older. She was still a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived there from New York in 1918; marrying Dixon, she also embraced his nostalgic and curmudgeonly vision of the Old West. A born westerner, from Fresno, California, he stubbornly portrayed the region as it had been before it was “ruined” by railroads, highways, cities, Hollywood, and tourism. In his paintings, the horse was still the primary means of power and transportation in a land of sunbleached rock and sand, enormous skies, cholla, and saguaro cacti, with adobe as its only architecture and Indians and cowboys its only rightful inhabitants. Although Lange had already established herself as an up-and-coming portrait photographer in San Francisco, her pictures on these trips to the desert were so faithful to her husband’s vision of the West that one might easily mistake many of them for Maynard Dixon paintings in black-and-white.

So she caught a group of Indian horsemen, seen from behind, riding close together across a sweep of empty tableland; a line of Hopi women and a boy, clad in traditional blankets, climbing a rough-hewn staircase trail through the pale rock of the mesa; a man teaching his son how to shoot a bow and arrow; families outside their adobe huts; and somber, unsmiling portraits of Indians whose faces show the same weary resignation to their fate as the faces that Lange would later photograph on the breadlines and in migrant labor camps. It was among the Hopi and the Navajo that she picked up the basic grammar of documentary, with its romantic alliance between the artist and the wretched of the earth.

One photograph stands out from her travels in the Southwest: a radically cropped print of the face of a Hopi man, in which much darkroom cookery clearly went into achieving Lange’s desired effect. At first sight, it looks like a grotesque ebony mask, its features splashed with silver as if by moonlight. Its skin is deeply creased, its eyes inscrutable black sockets. In its sculptural immobility, it appears as likely to be the face of a corpse as of a living being.

Seeing the finished picture, no one would guess the raw material from which Lange made the image as she focused her enlarger in the dark. There’s an uncropped photo of the same man, obviously shot within a minute or two of this one, to be seen in the Oakland Museum of California’s vast online archive of Lange’s work, in which he’s wearing a striped shirt and a bead necklace strung with Christian crosses, and has his hair tied with a knotted scarf around his forehead. His face looks humorous and easygoing; he seems amused to be having his picture taken.

This is not the negative that Lange used for her print, but it’s so close as to be very nearly identical. For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man’s nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race , or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race . There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.

Linda Gordon’s substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn’s careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange’s working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange’s work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness. Roy Stryker of the FSA, who worked closely with Lange from 1935 through 1939, repeatedly sacking then rehiring her, vastly admired her photographs but found her maddening to deal with, and readers of Gordon and Spirn are likely to find themselves similarly conflicted.

Gordon, a social historian at NYU, whose faculty bio says that she specializes in “gender and family issues,” is best at placing her subject within the context of the various milieus in which she moved. She is good on the artistic and photographic scene in New York in the Teens of the last century, where the young Lange discovered Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, and the luminaries of the Pleiades Club, and excellent on the rowdier bohemian coterie that she joined in San Francisco in the Twenties, where she met Dixon (in his customary urban uniform of Stetson and spurred cowboy boots), Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Gordon is reliably lucid on the aesthetic and political movements of the time, though Lange herself too often remains more cipher than character in an otherwise vivid picture of her place and period.

It’s in the gender and family issues department, her academic specialty, that Gordon is simultaneously confident and not entirely persuasive. Much is made of Lange’s childhood polio, which left her with a crippled right foot and permanent limp. Gordon calls her “a polio”—a grating phrase, which, according to Google, is rare but not without precedent. Further hurt was inflicted on Lange when her father moved out of the Hoboken house when she was twelve; and in writing of her as a wife and mother, prone to “hubris,” “irascibility,” “rages,” and “obsessive control,” Gordon portrays her as a damaged woman.

Lange acquired a stepdaughter, Consie, when she married Dixon, with whom she had two children of her own, Dan and John. In her second marriage, to the Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, she added three more stepchildren to her brood, in an age when women were expected to do all the work of parenting. Like so many people of their class and generation, the Dixons and the Taylors were in the habit of boarding out their kids whenever they threatened to interfere with their demanding work schedules. Not surprisingly, the children came to remember Lange as a domestic tyrant who neglected their needs and scarred them for life.

Autres temps, autres moeurs . Artists and writers were especially culpable in this regard, taking the line that their unique talents entitled them to days of concentrated silence and bibulous, grown-up, social evenings, undistracted by the barbaric yawps of the nursery. (Chief among Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was “the pram in the hall.”) Lange’s treatment of the children in her life was not egregiously different from that of others in her set in San Francisco and Taos, and Gordon’s nagging concern over her deficiencies as a parent tends to unbalance her book.

Although Gordon speculates freely about Lange’s thoughts and feelings, and surrounds her with an impressive mass of contingent details, one waits in vain to catch the pitch of her voice in conversation, her wit (did she have wit?), her personal demeanor and manners when at ease among friends. She emerges from the book more as a stack of interesting attributes than as a fully realized character in her own right.

Napa Valley, California, December 1938. Lange’s caption: ‘More than 25 years as a bindlestiff. Walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms. The type that formed the backbone of the IWW in California, before the war.Subject of Carleton Parker’s s

Where Gordon’s Dorothea Lange and Spirn’s Daring to Look coincide to happiest effect is on Lange’s marriage to Paul Schuster Taylor and her on-again-off-again work for Stryker at the FSA. Taylor, described by Gordon as “a stiff and slightly ponderous suit-and-tie professor” (she’s often sharper on her secondary characters than she is on her primary one), met Lange in 1934, shortly after her separation from Maynard Dixon, at an exhibition of her pictures of the San Francisco poor at a gallery in Oakland. Later that year, he hired her, at a typist’s salary, as the official photographer for the California Division of Rural Rehabilitation, of which he’d just been appointed field director. From January 1935, they were traveling together across California, visiting enormous, featureless agribusiness farms, worked by mostly Mexican migrant laborers. Taylor, who’d learned Spanish for the purpose, conducted interviews while she took photos. She took to calling him Pablo, he called her mi chaparrito (“my little shorty”). They were married in December.

Much as she’d learned to see the uncultivated West through Maynard Dixon’s eyes, and to frame her pictures like Dixon paintings, in Taylor’s company she acquired the mental habits of a painstaking social anthropologist. Taylor taught economics at Berkeley, but his avidity for human data took him far outside the usual confines of his discipline and into the “field,” where he transcribed the life stories of migrants. Lange copied him. A shy man, Taylor would introduce himself to groups of Mexicans by saying that he was lost and needed directions, a technique quickly adopted as her own by Lange. Soon after they’d met, she began to accompany her photographs with what she called “captions”—crisply detailed accounts, some running to essay length, of the circumstances that had led each subject to his or her present situation.

For Stryker at the FSA, the picture was the thing, and he spiked all, or nearly all, of her writing; in Daring to Look , Spirn reunites Lange’s 1939 photos with their original texts in a long-overdue act of restoration. The captions are rich in themselves, full of the dollars and cents of anguished household accounting, stories of escape from starved-out Dustbowl farms in rattletrap Fords, and snatches of talk, for which Lange had a fine ear; as a North Carolina woman told her, “All the white folks think a heap of me. Mr. Blank wouldn’t think about killing hogs unless I was there to help. You ought to see me killing hogs at Mr. Blank’s!” She was a patient listener, and relentlessly inquisitive. Photographing tobacco farmers, for instance, she became expert on how the plant was cultivated, harvested, cured, and sold, and her captions describe with great precision what was meant by such terms as “topping,” “worming,” “sliding,” “priming,” “saving,” “putting in,” “yellowing,” “killing out.”

Gathering this sort of information from her subjects changed the way she photographed them. Before 1935 and her collaboration with Taylor, she was a fly-on-the-wall observer in her pictures of Native Americans and the unemployed. After 1935, her photographs reflect an increasingly intimate relationship between the woman behind the camera and the person in front of it. One sees a new candor and engagement in her subjects’ faces, as if each shutter-click has momentarily interrupted an absorbing conversation. In this respect, Migrant Mother is quite atypical of Lange’s FSA work: she spent only a few minutes with Florence Thompson, and her caption is unusually brief (according to Thompson’s grandson, it was also riddled with errors of fact).

The deepening involvement in her subjects’ lives seems all the more impressive when one follows the hectic itinerary of her own life in Daring to Look . Between January and October 1939 she traveled far and wide through the states of California, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, spending weeks at a time in her car, documenting the trudging “bindlestiffs” and homeless families on Highway 99, the labor camps and mile-wide fields of factory farms in the California valleys, tobacco in North Carolina, “stump farms” on logged-over forest in the Pacific Northwest, the newly irrigated orchards and farms of the Columbia basin. Wherever she went, she attached individual faces and stories to the desolate social geography of American agriculture from coast to coast. Spirn’s book is redolent of the hot and dusty unpaved roads on which Lange drove by day, and of inadequately lit rooms in cheap motels, where she wrote up her captions in the evenings.

Bad as her relations with Stryker were, she made her best pictures for the FSA. The current of indignant political feeling that flows through her work was in tune with the agency’s propagandist mission, and—more than Evans, Ben Shahn, Marion Post, and other FSA photographers—Lange had an increasingly deep knowledge and understanding of what she was seeing, as a result both of her own searching interviews with her subjects and of her husband’s work on the inequities of the agricultural economy. * Time and again, she struck a perfect balance between photographing a mass plight and honoring the dignity of each singular life—a balance she never quite recaptured again. Her 1942–1943 series on Japanese internment, for instance, has ample indignation, but lacks the active and visible rapport that she made with the farmworkers.

In 1954, Lange snagged a commission from Life magazine to do a photo-essay on Ireland, and around 2,500 negatives survive from this trip, which she made with her son Dan, then twenty-nine and an aspiring writer. Daniel Dixon was assigned the job of interviewing subjects and composing captions, leaving her free to concentrate entirely on photography. The results of this unwise division of labor are revealing.

Oakland Museum of California

County Clare, Ireland, 1954; photograph by Dorothea Lange

In County Clare, Lange was an enchanted tourist. After the barbed wire and vast flat landscapes of Californian agribusiness, she reveled in the small, irregular, hillocky Irish fields, their rainwashed drystone walls and ancient hedges. Instead of improvised shack-towns and government-built camps, she focused on stone bothies overhung with thatch and streets of single-storey terraced cottages with rickety horse-drawn traps parked at their doors. She stopped to take shots of ruined churches; placid, grazing cows; horses and haywains; old men with scythes; shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and driving them down narrow lanes. In Lange’s Ireland, almost everybody’s smiling, and her photographs form an archive of 1950s toothless, gap-toothed, and prosthetic Irish grins. Yet there’s little hint of two-way rapport in the faces of these people, who appear to be saying “Cheese” to deferentially oblige the lady-visitor from America, as she roamed the countryside picturing its happy peasantry.

She hardly seemed to notice that the clothes of her Irish subjects were as tattered and patched as those of the poorest Okies. If she questioned why the farms and fields were so small, or why there were so many horses and so few machines, it doesn’t show in her photographs. She was here to discover Arcadia—a land of simple folk, content with their lot, going about their time-hallowed rustic occupations, equipped with the same rudimentary technology that had served them for centuries. In Ireland, Lange reverted to pastoral in its most naive and sentimental form. It’s tantalizing to wonder how she would have handled this assignment had the commission come from a social activist like Stryker instead of Henry Luce’s Life . Her photos were in perfect harmony with the conservative politics of the magazine: they extol the tranquillity of a society under the law of Nature, and of God.

The magazine savagely cut Lange’s essay, rejected Daniel Dixon’s captions, and supplied its own, including “serenely they live in age old patterns” and “THE QUIET LIFE RICH IN FAITH AND A BIT OF FUN.”

In the last chapter of Daring to Look , Anne Whiston Spirn drives along the routes taken by Lange in 1939. By 2005 the roads were generally improved but the housing and social conditions of agricultural workers on industrial farms were little changed, and Spirn found new rural slums on the sites of the old New Deal labor camps. A caption written by Lange in 1939 still holds broadly true:

The richer the district in agricultural production, the more it has drawn the distressed who build its shacktowns. From the Salt River valley of Arizona to the Yakima valley of Washington, the richest valleys are dotted with the biggest slums.

This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.

In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by “brushpickers,” mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange’s photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.

November 19, 2009

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Jonathan Raban's books include Surveillance , My Holy War , Arabia , Old Glory , Hunting Mister Heartbreak , Bad Land , Passage to Juneau , and Waxwings . His most recent book is Driving Home: An American Journey , published in 2011. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the State of Washington. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , The Guardian, and The Independent . He lives in Seattle.

Taylor and Lange merged their talents in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion , published in 1939. The couple assembled her photographs, his text, and their captions, working together, as they wrote, “in every aspect of the form as a whole to the least detail of arrangement or phrase.”  ↩

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American Pastoral Summary Philip Roth

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American Pastoral (1997) is the twenty-second book by Philip Roth, one of the leading twentieth-century American writers. This long novel, which is almost mythic in scope, explores the course of American history from the late 1940s, which Roth's narrator and alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, regards as a golden period, to the social upheavals that marked the 1960s and early 1970s. The focal point of the story is a Jewish character called Swede Levov, an...

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Why is the Swede admired by the Jewish community?

The Jewish community sees the Swede as an Americanized version of their culture. They see him as the future where they will not be ostracized or belittled for their beliefs. They want to believe that the future will be better and less harsh for their children.

Why is the story told through the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, rather than by Swede Levov?

By having the story told by Nathan Zuckerman, the reader can see how the Swede was idolized by his community. Swede is proud and would not want any to see his life as anything other than perfect. To see his life for how it truly was, someone else needs to tell the story. Nathan Zuckerman as a writer seeks to know the truth of his childhood hero. The reader gets to see how Swede is viewed by his brother and what flaws he sees in his brother. By having the story told by an outsider, the reader gets a better view of the story.

How does the story use the changing of the country to compare to the change within the Levov family?

The United States becomes a country of rebellion during the Vietnam War. Activists protest against the war and the country is torn between the younger generation who rebels against the government and the older generation who were taught to respect the government. This is reflected in the Levov family. Merry is rebelling against the war that she feels her country should not be a part of and against a family who is not what they appear. The perfect family life that they demonstrate is a façade. Merry seeks to reveal the truth of her family and the country where she lives.

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Israel raids Gaza hospitals, as poll shows Americans disapprove of Israeli war conduct

Israeli forces are carrying out “an intelligence-based operation” at al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, the Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday, without giving further details. The IDF said forces are also continuing their raid on al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which began over a week ago. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urged Israel to abandon military plans for a ground offensive in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than 1 million Palestinians have crowded to escape fighting elsewhere in the enclave.

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Mr. Earle is the author of “Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over.”

In recent months, Donald Trump has been trying out a new routine. At rallies and town halls across the country, he compares himself to Al Capone. “He was seriously tough, right?” Mr. Trump told a rally in Iowa in October , in an early rendition of the act. But “he was only indicted one time; I’ve been indicted four times.” (Capone was, in fact, indicted at least six times.) The implication is not just that Mr. Trump is being unfairly persecuted but also that he is four times as tough as Capone. “If you looked at him in the wrong way,” Mr. Trump explained, “he blew your brains out."

Mr. Trump’s eagerness to invoke Capone reflects an important shift in the image he wants to project to the world. In 2016, Mr. Trump played the reality TV star and businessman who would shake up politics, shock and entertain. In 2020, Mr. Trump was the strongman, desperately trying to hold on to power by whatever means possible. In 2024, Mr. Trump is in his third act: the American gangster, heir to Al Capone — besieged by the authorities, charged with countless egregious felonies but surviving and thriving nonetheless, with an air of macho invincibility.

The evidence of Mr. Trump’s mobster pivot is everywhere. He rants endlessly about his legal cases in his stump speeches. On Truth Social, he boasts about having a bigger team of lawyers “than any human being in the history of our Country, including even the late great gangster, Alphonse Capone!” His team has used his mug shot — taken after he was indicted on a charge of racketeering in August — on T-shirts, mugs, Christmas wrapping, bumper stickers, beer coolers and even NFTs. They’ve sold off parts of the blue suit he was wearing in that now-infamous photo for more than $4,000 a piece (it came with a dinner with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort).

Commentators have long pointed out that Mr. Trump behaves like a mob boss: The way he demands loyalty from his followers, lashes out at rivals, bullies authorities and flaunts his impunity are all reminiscent of the wiseguys Americans know so well from movies and television. As a real-estate mogul in New York, he seems to have relished working with mobsters and learned their vernacular before bringing their methods into the White House: telling James Comey, “I expect loyalty”; imploring Volodymyr Zelensky, “Do us a favor”; and pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.” But before, he downplayed the mobster act in public. Now he actively courts the comparison.

Mr. Trump’s audacious embrace of a criminal persona flies in the face of conventional wisdom. When Richard Nixon told the American public, “I am not a crook,” the underlying assumption was that voters would not want a crook in the White House. Mr. Trump is testing this assumption. It’s a canny piece of marketing. A violent mobster and a self-mythologizing millionaire, Capone sanitized his crimes by cultivating an aura of celebrity and bravery, grounded in distrust of the state and a narrative of unfair persecution. The public lapped it up. “Everybody sympathizes with him,” Vanity Fair noted of Capone in 1931, as the authorities closed in on him. “Al has made murder a popular amusement.” In similar fashion, Mr. Trump tries to turn his indictments into amusement, inviting his supporters to play along. “They’re not after me, they’re after you — I’m just standing in the way!” he says, a line that greets visitors to his website, as well.

Mr. Trump clearly hopes that his Al Capone act will offer at least some cover from the four indictments he faces. And there is a twisted logic to what he is doing: By adopting the guise of the gangster, he is able to recast his lawbreaking as vigilante justice — a subversive attempt to preserve order and peace — and transform himself into a folk hero. Partly thanks to this framing, it seems unlikely that a criminal conviction will topple his candidacy: not only because Mr. Trump has already taken so many other scandals in his stride but also because, as Capone shows, the convicted criminal can be as much an American icon as the cowboy and the frontiersman. In this campaign, Mr. Trump’s mug shot is his message — and the repeated references to Al Capone are there for anyone who needs it spelled out.

In an essay from 1948, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” the critic Robert Warshow sought to explain the unique appeal of gangster fables in American life. He saw the gangster as a quintessentially American figure, the dark shadow of the country’s sunnier self-conception. “The gangster speaks for us,” Warshow wrote, “expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life.”

It is easy to see why gangster fables appeal to so many Republican voters today. They are stories of immigrant assimilation and success, laced with anti-immigrant sentiment and rivalry. Their heroes are creatures of the big city — those nests of Republican neuroses — who tame its excesses through force but never forget God or their family along the way. In many ways, minus the murder, they are ideal conservative citizens: enterprising, loyal, distrustful of government; prone to occasional ethical lapses, but who’s perfect?

Mr. Trump knows that in America, crooks can be the good guys. When the state is seen as corrupt, the crook becomes a kind of Everyman, bravely beating the system at its own game. This is the cynical logic that the gangster and the right-wing populist share: Everyone’s as bad as anyone else, so anything goes. “A crook is a crook,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”

It’s a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the prized institutions of liberal democracy — a free press, open elections, the rule of law — are fronts in the biggest racket of them all. This conceit has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones,” Hannah Arendt warned.

The gangster’s brutality also taps into what Warshow and others of his generation saw as the sadism in the American mind: the pleasure the public takes in seeing the gangster’s “unlimited possibility of aggression” inflicted upon others. The gangster is nothing without this license for violence, without the simple fact that, as Warshow put it, “he hurts people.” He intimidates his rivals and crushes his enemies. His cruelty is the point. The public can then enjoy “the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster himself.” “He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become,” Warshow wrote. Reverence and repulsion are all wrapped up.

Capone’s rise, demise and exalted afterlife don’t hold happy clues for Mr. Trump’s opponents. Dethroning a mob boss is never easy. “He was the 1920s version of the Teflon man; nothing stuck to him,” Deirdre Bair wrote in a 2016 biography of Capone. After he was arrested in 1931 for tax fraud, his mob continued to prosper for another half-century, and Capone himself, who was released after six and a half years in prison for health reasons and died from a stroke and pneumonia in 1947 at age 48, achieved a type of immortality. Mr. Trump will see in his story many reasons to be cheerful. “I often say Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time, if you like criminals,” Mr. Trump said in December. It was an interesting framing: “if you like criminals”? Mr. Trump has a hunch, and it’s more than just projection, that many Americans do.

Samuel Earle is the author of “Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over.”

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