Reading Richard Slotkin's "Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier" and came across this quote:

"A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions. The antimythologists of the American Age of Reason believed in the imminence of a rational republic of yeoman farmers and enlightened leaders, living amicably in the light of natural law and the Constitution. they were thereby left unprepared when the Jeffersonian republic was overcome by the Jacksonian Democracy of the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker; when racist irrationalism and and a falsely conceived economics prolonged and intensified slavery in the teeth of American democratic idealism; and when men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust."