According to Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, usage of the word “swamp” in the English language can be traced back to colonial reports from New England in 1624. Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard whose accomplished career includes this recent appearance on the Colbert Report, explains that English colonists used the word to describe territory that was, for them, probably the most unfamiliar and threatening geographic feature of the New World (Lepore, 85). The term referred to watery, overgrown, treacherous areas that the colonists found inhospitable, but it was not just a neutral topographic label: facing constant uncertainty as they tried to build a society on a strange continent, early English settlers could be sure that, wherever they would find civilization in their new surroundings, it was emphatically not going to be in a swamp.
At the same time, Native Americans in the colonial imagination were so in tune with nature that they could practically disappear into the landscape, and nowhere was this more true than in the impenetrable, mysterious “swamps” of coastal New England. On the one hand, this view served as a justification for colonial conquest (if the Indians disappeared into the wilderness, then the land was empty and unsettled–and so it could be rightfully claimed by the English), but on the other hand, it made the enemy seem scarier in times of war (unlike the colonists, the Indians were at home in the swamp–they might emerge to attack at any time and then fade back into the shifting, savage mists). Interestingly, it was during one of these times of war that the word “swamp” first became a verb: New Englander Noah Newman, writing during King Philip’s War in the 1670s (which was possibly the deadliest war in American history in terms of fatalities per capita), described a group of Indians who “swamped them selves in a great Spruse swamp” in an attempt to evade colonial forces (Lepore, 86).
From this point forward in the American lexicon, the term “swamp” continued to accumulate negative connotations even as it referred to specific regions. David C. Miller suggests in Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture that a traditional, popular understanding of the American swamp in the early 1800s held that it was a place of “sin, death, and decay,” as well as “the habitat of weird and ferocious creatures” (Miller, 3). Miller’s book doesn’t explicitly tie this description to an evolution of colonial-era fears, but it’s not a stretch to see how earlier usage of the word might connect to nineteenth-century ideas of the swamp as infested, primitive, backwards, poisonous, dirty, inhuman, and irrevocably wild.
The binary at play here, suggested by Lepore and fleshed out (no pun intended) by Miller, is pretty clear: wrapped up in the civilization/swamp dichotomy are pairings like human/animal, cultivated/wild, pristine/diseased, order/chaos, Christian/pagan, truth/deception, advanced/primitive, dignified/savage, mind/body, safe/dangerous, righteous/immoral, stable/uncertain, valuable/worthless, present/absent, light/dark, the American history standby of North/South, and maybe even such timeless classics as masculine/feminine and good/evil. One interesting sidenote here: Miller’s book, first published in 1989, argues that changing American attitudes in the 1850s and ’60s led to an increased interest in swamp culture and swamp tourism. He notes that this was not because ideas about swamps changed, but because ideas about those ideas changed. Industrial growth helped create a consumer society with more leisure time and looser moral codes, and one result was that “swampy” qualities like chaos, primitiveness, and uncertainty became more desirable versions of themselves: creativity, exoticism, and freedom. A quick Google search seems to support this: historical usage of “swamp” saw a significant bump around 1860.
The reason this kind of historical examination of meaning is important is not just because it’s kind of cool to see how words are used differently at different times. It’s also not because the word “swamp” is secretly more significant than most people think, or that its meaning has changed as a result of conscious, calculated attempts to inject it with particular qualities. One of the biggest misconceptions about this kind of analysis is that it’s just an exercise in esoteric fantasy with no bearing on the real world, or that it’s trivia at best and mostly just politically-correct-relativist-mumbo-jumbo. The point is not that there are actually no such things as swamps, or that this sense of history means that it’s not okay to say “swamp” anymore, or that we should invent a new term for swampy topography that doesn’t carry so much baggage.
The point is that the historical process of identity formation leaves traces, and that by looking at examples of these traces (like “swamp”), we can better understand how our contemporary selves and societies are structured. Better yet, we can use this understanding to sustain or remake the characteristics that mark our identities; we can learn from the past to reshape names, words, ideas, and values in order to create our future. What might this look like, you ask? We don’t have to leave the swamp to find a great example: in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, a lovable character called Swamp Thing helped American society reinterpret the otherness of wild nature as a savior. (Maybe this savior role isn’t such a new one: without the Indians “swamp[ing] themselves” during the colonial period, the fledgling civilization of New England might have struggled to take shape in the absence of something to define itself against.)
Born as a comic book creation in the early 1970s, Swamp Thing found a wider audience with a feature film in 1982 (the trailer is pretty great, and it has a lot going on: it rests awkwardly but confidently in that sweet spot when Cold War-era suspicion about “government agents” and “scientists” could still drive a narrative but it wasn’t yet taboo to make fun of “midgets” or to link them to monsters). An animated series based on the character was broadcast in the early 1990s and, along with Captain Planet, it contributed to a golden age of militantly environmentalist children’s programming (see also this 1991 episode of ProStars, in which cartoon versions of Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Wayne Gretzky fight to protect the Brazilian rainforest). The intro sequence of Swamp Thing: The Series suggests an updated take on the relationship between swamp-dwellers and mainstream society: although he’s still a monster, this Swamp Thing “fight[s] everything nasty” and uses his powers to save the planet. Whether this reflects a perceived change in the swamp itself (its fundamental impenetrability and unchecked wildness has absorbed a more civilized moral code) or a shift in society’s relationship to it (we used to see the swamp as dangerous and unfamiliar, but now we realize that our very humanity depends on our appreciation of the power of the natural world) isn’t entirely clear, but neither possibility entirely escapes the shadow of 1624.
Even the theme song carries layers of confused meaning: it borrows pretty much directly from “Wild Thing,” a song that was made famous by The Troggs in 1966 but that was originally written by Chip Taylor, the brother of actor Jon Voight. Voight’s daughter, of course, is Angelina Jolie, whose wilderness preservation efforts are ongoing. If it wasn’t already clear, it is now: escape is impossible. We’re swamped.
GIF CREDITS:
“Earth Animated GIF” by sott.net via giphy.com: http://giphy.com/gifs/earth-times-12w1NOcLAoVAek
“Maleficent Animated GIF” by Disney via giphy.com: http://giphy.com/gifs/maleficent-disney-6WXbPwoelw8q4
Benjamin C. Kasten 