Some American Corn Gods 271 



Plums of green bent o'er his forehead, 

 And his hair was soft and golden . . . 



It is the maize god, Mondamin. He bids Hiawatha rise and 

 wrestle with him. 



"I, the friend of man, Mondamin, 

 Come to warn you and instruct you, 

 How by struggle and by labor 

 You shall gain what you have prayed for. . . ." 



The author of Hiawatha came from a New England which 

 still believed in gumption, if not in God. And in work. It is 

 work which will give the young man the freedom he craves. 

 Work will give him possession of himself. 



Longfellow's New England had lost its most virile sons to 

 the western cornlands. They had had to struggle to wrest those 

 lands from the Indians and from the forest. That struggle, 

 coming as it did after their overcoming authority in the form 

 of government by a power outside themselves, gave them their 

 freedom. That generation of Americans possessed themselves 

 in a very real sense. 



The real inspiration for Hiawatha, I believe, was not merely 

 a Chippewa legend, but what an American poet, born in Cam- 

 bridge, Massachusetts, had seen happen to his countrymen 

 living in the corn belt. 



The sons and the sons' sons of those conquerors of the 

 midwestern cornlands, born on the farms, have not had to 

 struggle in the same way. The fatness of the furrows their 

 fathers plowed fed them and made them rich. As their barns 

 filled to bursting, as their corn and their cattle increased, 

 they themselves lost something. The mother-goddess who fed 

 them so liberally robbed them of their maturity. 



Today, American youth, like Hiawatha, which is its symbol, 

 chafes under its bondage to the mother-image, which tends 

 to keep it childish. It, too, conceives of winning freedom by 

 conquering the Father-in-authority. Not an American "Papa." 

 He has never loomed as a power in our national firmament. 



