Puffery is an art form in the United States. This is for two reasons in particular: (1) it is a civilization of immigrants and their descendants who like to think they control not only their own destiny but their own identity, and (2) Americans are hypermobile, continually reintroducing themselves to others, often succumbing to the temptation to re-create their past in the process. Opportunities to touch up a self-portrait arise every time Americans move, as one in five do every year, and half do every five years. “For much of his life,” memoirist Cyra McFadden wrote of her itinerant father, rodeo announcer Cy Taillon, “he was engaged in the game of inventing himself—adding to what was true and what was desirable, stirring counter-clockwise and serving up the mix.”
Obviously, deception about the self (and lots of other things) is not limited to Americans, or to our era. The wish to seem better than real is eternal and universal. Jacob, after all, wanted to be more like Esau. Odysseus made up a new identity for himself whenever an opportunity arose. The context of American life makes it easier to engage in this type of flimflam, however. It could hardly be otherwise in a country populated primarily by immigrants and their descendants. Excepting those who were already here and the ones brought in chains, America was settled by those shaking off Old World restrictions. Along with their previous lives, they left behind anyone who had known them in that life. Those who arrived in this country were in a position to wipe the slate clean. They felt free—duty-bound even—to re-create themselves, shedding inconvenient facts along the way like a snake molting old skin. Here Albert Einstein, a cold husband and indifferent father in Europe, could reintroduce himself as a warm humanitarian after arriving alone in New York. Occidental Petroleum founder Armand Hammer made up a personal past doing relief work with starving peasants and initiating business projects in Russia. Meg Greenfield’s father successfully transformed himself from a first-generation son of Russian immigrants who grew up in a Philadelphia slum to something resembling a well-bred English gentleman. In her book Washington, Greenfield observed that “at least since Yankee Doodle tried his scam, Americans have been engaged in the business of personally reinventing themselves—enthusiastically, with varying degrees of fraudulence (or ingenuity, if you prefer), and often to perfectly good purpose.”
Their penchant for mythmaking, and receptivity to each other’s tall tales, doesn’t make Americans less moral than those they left behind, simply more opportunistic. If no one around you knows your actual history, why be candid about it? Who was going to blow your cover? From the moment when immigrants Americanized their names at a port of entry, or had this done for them, how could it not occur to them that this was a whole new ball game. Gorodetsky a little hard to pronounce? How about Gordon? Shakishavili a bit of a mouthful? Try Shaw. If names could be changed that easily, what else might be changed as well? Age? Occupation? Family origins? America was a land of unlimited possibilities, in many senses of the word.
