Founding legends

Posted by Marc Hodak on June 12, 2007 under History | Comments are off for this article

Light blogging this last week because I’ve been in Switzerland. We’ve basically driven across the country, from Geneva to St. Gallen. The proximate reasons for this trip were a lecture I gave at the University of St. Gallen and our annual meeting with my partners in Lucerne.

Our Swiss partner took us on a boat ride on beautiful Lake Lucerne today to the place where Switzerland was born. He pointed out the area where the William Tell legend occured. William Tell is a Swiss hero on the order of Paul Revere or Patrick Henry in the U.S. After hearing our host retell Tell’s story, I cheekily asked him, “So, how much of that story do you think is true?” He said, “Of course it’s true,” with the kind of smile that belied his assertion. I suggested that it was probably as true as our Paul Revere story.

Questioning legends is a much less popular pastime than propogating them. It almost seems unpatriotic to embrace the truth, suggesting that the first casualty of war never really recovers. Nevertheless, questioning the legends a significant part of my upcoming series on the History of Scandal, starting with the Enron Story. (I didn’t intend to segue that harshly into self-promotion. Really.)