The Perils of Searching for Leadership and Discovery: The Case of Jamestown and John Smith

Abstract

Americans have a love-hate relationship with anniversaries. Consider just two relatively recent and prominent examples, America’s bicentennial and the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America. On July 4, 1976, the nation reveled in fireworks and tall ships. School children had spent the year preparing for a celebration that marked more than independence from Britain. We celebrated all that we perceived ourselves to be, manifest in that haunting and elusive phrase from the Declaration: the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even after-or perhaps because of-Vietnam and Watergate, and the cultural fallout of the 1960s, these somehow still were our birthright, or at least we had to imagine them to be so even as we redefined what these ideals meant in a period of cultural flux.¹ Sixteen years later, such sentiments, however na, seemed misplaced. In 1992, protesters staged “die-ins” at Columbus Circle in New York, alerting all to the legacy of death and destruction that followed in the wake of what had been seen as Columbus’s “discovery” but was now recast as invasion. Films appeared showcasing the rape of paradise. Columbus epitomized all that was wrong with Western society, but especially the American variation. His mantle was death, disease, displacement.² This is all understandable. Anniversaries offer opportunities to take stock, not only of who people such as the Founders and Columbus were and what they did, but more importantly, who we are and what we do.