Suffragette Gertrude Weil produced this broadside to persuade North Carolina’s skeptical white and male lawmakers to give women the right to vote. North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources
Bishop Cheshire went on to lead the Roanoke Colony Memorial Association. In 1926, a state lawmaker at the annual Virginia Dare birthday celebration that he oversaw praised her “purest Anglo-Saxon blood” and read a message from President Calvin Coolidge commending the early settlers’ “indomitable and fearless spirit.” The British ambassador strayed off message in his talk, warning against that “most fallacious of all modern premises in politics, the general superiority of the Nordic races.” Adolf Hitler had just published Mein Kampf, in which he predicted the “Germanic” people of North America would remain masters of the continent so long as they do “not yield to blood pollution by mixing with lesser races.”
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In the middle of the Roaring Twenties, women could buy Virginia Dare dresses made of crepe de chine silk with a scarf collar and rows of shoulder buttons—“as beautiful and refined as their name.” Virginia Dare clubs organized by society women sprang up around the country, including in Brooklyn. The Virginia Dare Duo played in clubs, while children, ferries, steamers, and schooners were christened in her name. This was, not coincidentally, also the decade when the Ku Klux Klan membership peaked at six million.
The Virginia Dare craze was primarily but not completely a white phenomenon. “Blackberry cordial, / Virginia Dare wine— / All those sweet colors / Flavor Harlem of mine!” wrote African American poet Langston Hughes in a 1927 paean to the beauty of black women’s skin. Cotten would not have been amused.
Virginia Dare Wine, however, suffered from Prohibition, which came into force the same year women got the vote. “De-alcoholized,” it quickly lost its profitable luster, but the fermented sugary beverage bounced back after 1933 repeal. The Garrett Company created one of the first advertising radio jingles (“Virginia Dare—say it again”) that made the spirit once again a hit.
One of the children who heard the snappy tune was a young Italian American named Francis Ford Coppola. “My parents wouldn’t drink it, since it wasn’t to the taste of Italians—it was too sweet,” recalled the film director. “But as a kid I was attracted to this beautiful blond Cinderella-type girl on the label,” he told me. “She seemed like she was from a fairy tale.”
By then, deep in the Depression, the spiteful Anglo-Saxon huntress had lost her hard racial edge. At Virginia Dare’s 350th birthday celebration on Roanoke Island on August 18, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt made no mention of a full-grown white woman stalking the forest with her trusty bow. Instead, he criticized England for its aristocratic ways and rejected domestic worries that either dictatorship or anarchy threatened the United States.
The Protestant Madonna once again became an infant; when Roosevelt himself designed her commemorative stamp, she was swaddled in Eleanor’s arms. He even signed her birth certificate, belatedly issued that day by the State of North Carolina. Her father’s occupation was listed as “Assistant to Governor John White,” while her mother was a “Housekeeper.”
Virginia Dare after World War II provided either a titillating tale for adults or a child’s fantasy. The 1954 novel Roanoke Renegade is, one historian says, “a hair’s breadth this side of pornography,” with the other Roanoke babe, the Harvie child born just after her, having all the fun. Dare also softened into a charming story for teenage girls in illustrated books: a pretty child lost in the woods who learns to survive and has many adventures (Virginia Dare: Mystery Girl was popular in the late 1950s). Her wine soon vanished from the shelves even as her story receded from popular culture. Her name, however, retains a talismanic power. “It represents a challenge, a new start, and a mysterious destination,” explained Virginia Dare lead guitarist Brad Johnson, when I asked why his San Francisco band chose that moniker.
In 2013, Coppola was casting about for a new name for a Sonoma winery that he had purchased. On a tour of Italian Swiss Colony, another classic old label, he wondered what happened to Virginia Dare Wine. His fascination revived, he bought the rights to revive the trademark. “It was part of America that was gone,” he told me. “The notion that I could bring something back intrigued me. Being a young country, we don’t have many myths. And I like to put things back together.” Given that the Roanoke voyages got their start thanks to the wine licenses doled out by Raleigh, there is historical justice in this beverage carrying on the legacy of John White’s granddaughter.
The vintages from his reinvigorated Virginia Dare Winery include the White Doe—Chenin Blanc and Viognier. There is also a red blend called Manteo. Though the grapes today are Californian and the wine more in tune with modern American taste buds, it is the same smiling blonde with blue eyes on the label.
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The child of Ananias and Eleanor Dare has made another, less innocent comeback in recent years. Weeks before the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, she appeared in national news stories following a Washington meeting sponsored by the National Policy Institute, dedicated to “the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”
One of the speakers, Peter Brimelow, runs a website called VDARE.com, named for John White’s famous granddaughter, that uses the image of a white doe as its logo. The website, “America’s voice on patriotic immigration reform,” urges tight restrictions on those from non-European countries. It has been widely denounced by hate-tracking groups for providing a platform for white nationalists and supremacists.
In a November 16 letter to the president-elect, 169 members of Congress urged Trump to reconsider his appointment of Steve Bannon as White House chief strategist. They noted that “leading white nationalists,” including VDARE’s Brimelow, backed Bannon, who resigned in August 2017 amid an outcry following a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to violence. News reports cited links between Brimelow and White House political adviser Stephen Miller. As an undergraduate at Duke University in North Carolina, Miller organized an antiterrorist group “for the defense of America and the civilization of the West” and warned in meetings that non-Europeans were not assimilating.
Brimelow is himself an immigrant. A former financial journalist, he was born in Britain and settled in Canada before moving to the United States. After publishing his 1995 book, Alien Nation, which lambasted American immigration policy, he launched the website “dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century.” In 2007, he created the VDARE Foundation to support its efforts. Trump’s election brought him into the national spotlight as a spokesman for the alt-right movement. At a conference prior to the Republican’s victory, he told the audience, “You need to have everybody in the country voting the way that Southern whites vote.”
He told me that he had been fascinated with Virginia Dare since studying American history in Britain in the 1960s. Brimelow, who declined to meet with me in person, chose her as the inspiration for his website after the birth of his daughter, which came late in his life, during a second marriage. “I empathized with John White,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I picked the name because I wanted to focus attention on the very specific cultural origins of America, at a time when mass non-traditional immigration is threatening to swamp it.”
For Brimelow, the most important lesson of Roanoke and its aftermath is that the Native Americans allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by outsiders with devastating consequences. “They simply found themselves out-voted, which is going to happen to us if we are not careful,” he noted in a website post. When an Iowa congressman in 2017 said “we can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies,” Brimelow tweeted, “This shouldn’t even be debatable, let alone controversial. It’s just a truism.” When Virginia Dare’s birthday approached
in August, the website recommended a donation to the VDARE Foundation as a birthday present, “to enable us to continue to defend American national identity and fight for patriotic immigration reform.”
The VDARE founder’s views would have been familiar to Cotten and members of the Manteo White Supremacy Club a century earlier, who perceived the nation as locked in a battle between European civilization and foreign barbarism. That view is as old as the legend of the Roanoke settlers. “It is in the name of Virginia Dare herself that we defend the traditional American community and give it voice,” Brimelow writes. “We cannot allow the Lost Colony to prove analogous to America itself.”
But Virginia Dare is agile enough to span both sides of the nation’s contemporary political and cultural divide. While Brimelow echoes the triumphal march of white progress in “The White Doe,” modern feminists like writer Marjorie Hudson emphasize the poet’s vision of a brave woman who adapts to a harsh reality.
As Cotten did, Hudson lives in rural North Carolina. After losing an unborn child, she struggled with depression in the tragedy’s aftermath and first encountered Cotten’s poem while working on an essay for an anthology. She knew dimly of the Lost Colony but quickly immersed herself in the tale. Interest turned to passion and a two-decade-long personal journey, summed up in her book Searching for Virginia Dare.
Hudson is tall with brown bangs and black glasses. When I visited her at her home in the woods, the dining room table was cluttered with children’s books from the 1950s and 1960s about Virginia Dare, along with old bottles of wine, brandy, and crème de menthe bearing the name of the infant of Roanoke. At the time when she was growing up in Washington, D.C., “history was large marble buildings.” But John White’s story hit her hard. The artist-governor’s anguished and fruitless hunt for his family and the other colonists enchanted and appalled her.
She found the stories surrounding Virginia Dare even more intriguing. “She is the archetypal mother, a source, like a great river, of strength and blood for descendants of a convergence of two great peoples,” Hudson writes in her book, part travelogue and part memoir. “I begin to see that for some, especially the ‘just folks’ I talk to, Virginia is an emblem of grace—a blood sacrifice to atone for European sins against Native peoples. If we are all one, all descended from her image as English and Native American, then whatever divides us is inconsequential.” Once a sacrifice to ensure Anglo-American dominance, the Roanoke child had now transformed into an amends for the wrongs done by generations of whites against Indians.
I asked her why the story has had such an enduring appeal to female audiences, at least white ones. “Women took on this story looking for inner strength,” Hudson said. “That was certainly the case with Sallie Cotten. Virginia Dare was a symbol of a young woman surviving difficult circumstances. She tells us that we can be brave.” The legend also puts Native Americans in a central role while underscoring how immigrants adapt and prosper. “A truism hiding in the story is that new Americans step up to become the most American. My sister-in-law is from Brazil, and she loves this country.”
Hudson is uncomfortable with the more racist aspects of Cotten’s poem, and she frowned when I mentioned Brimelow’s website. “It is time to let go of some of the childish thoughts about how this country was formed,” she told me. “Our minds are drawn to the shiny—the gold signet ring, the pretty side of things—but our country’s past is no more pretty than any other country’s wayward history.”
I asked her how a child who vanished one week after her birth could have played so many conflicting roles in service of the deepest hopes and trepidations of Americans. “Virginia Dare is a blank slate that people can project on,” she responded. In her book, Hudson says that the Roanoke babe, “born and baptized then lost to history, has been reinvented by the imagination for centuries, taking the form most congruent with the imaginer’s vision.”
It dawned on me that Virginia Dare legends weave together the American desire to assimilate and our anxiety about doing just that. Despite the racism woven into the story, Hudson isn’t willing to jettison her; she is unwilling to concede the field to Brimelow and his views of racial superiority. And like Cushing, who invented the Virginia Dare romantic genre long ago, Hudson is frustrated by the dearth of female characters in early American history. “Eleanor got on a ship four to five months pregnant on a cockamamy scheme to live in a new world,” she said. “Maybe she’s the one we should honor.”
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At least since the 1880s, the people of Roanoke Island have celebrated Virginia Dare’s birthday with speeches and a picnic. These days, the National Park Service and the Roanoke Island Historical Association throw a family-friendly party with help from the costumed cast in the outdoor drama The Lost Colony. The event takes place at Fort Raleigh, in the vicinity of where she was born.
Curious as to how this icon of early America is commemorated in the twenty-first century, I arrived at the park one steamy late August morning. Minivans and SUVs already crowded the few shady parking spots. On the lawn next to the park’s low-slung administration building, a few dozen children darted through clusters of slower-moving adults. Among them were women in long skirts and white ruffs and men in leather loincloths. I left the car’s air-conditioning reluctantly, opening my door to a bath of humid air and the piercing sound of cicadas.
A small round Indian-style dwelling—made of what looked more like fiberglass than reeds—stood on the lawn next to a white folding table. A large block of dark clay sat on the middle of the table, melting in a plastic bag. “Would you like to make a pot, sir?” said a freckled blue-eyed young woman in a fringed deerskin. A single white feather dangled from her ear, and a sliver of white across her one visible shoulder revealed a tan line. I formed a badly lumpy clay vessel and then moved on past a man making balloon animals and a woman painting faces. The hula hoops and sacks for races lay untouched in the rising heat and glare. The one line was to shoot arrows. A curly-haired young man with black painted lines around his biceps and calves and wearing what looked like a fox-fur loincloth showed children how to aim at the homemade target. The only people of color seemed to be actors wearing makeup.
Several sharp claps pierced the thick air. “Gather round, gather round, and learn how to bow to the queen!” said a foppish figure in a feathered white hat. He wore a heavily embroidered puffy white doublet and white hose and spoke in a high-pitched and imperious imitation English accent. “When the queen comes forth we shall all bow,” he ordered. The children turned to stare. “And we shall say, ‘Long live the queen!’ We are also going to wave—go on, put it in the air and wave thus.” His right hand imitated the flapping wing of a small bird.
We dutifully practiced the cry and the wave. The children seemed dubious of the queen’s shrill master of ceremonies, and the adults looked uncomfortable at the idea of cheering a monarch. A gusty hot breeze swept across the lawn. “I believe the queen is approaching!” announced the fop. I turned to see a golf cart discreetly parked around the side of the building. A young woman wearing a heavy black-and-gold dress and an unnaturally red wig adorned with an elaborate crown swept into view. She also wore a wide smile and miles of pearls as a black-T-shirt-wearing attendant carried her lengthy train.
Elizabeth I fluttered her blue-silk gloves at the milling crowd. The master of ceremonies prompted our cry and wave, to which we halfheartedly responded. “You did such a smashing job, thank you!” he said as the queen continued to smile and wave, an impressive feat given the temperature was well over ninety and she was wearing an outfit that weighed nearly sixty pounds. A tall man with a beard and white ruff stepped up to a waiting microphone. “I am Sir Walter Raleigh! Thank you for coming! I’m glad my colony was so successful!”
There was an awkward pause, and the children drifted back to the games, and the adults retreated to the shade of the pine trees. There were no more speeches, no
message from the president or exhortations by a bishop. No governor was in attendance. Park rangers loaded sheet cake and ice cream onto a nearby table as parents maneuvered their children close to the queen and her retinue for pictures. The commemoration of Virginia Dare’s birthday, an event that once drew crowds and famous speakers and even a president, was now an anodyne children’s event, a welcome alternative to another hot day on a local beach.
I ducked out of the party and walked across the parking lot to the entrance of the Elizabethan Gardens. Carved out of the national park in the 1950s by the Garden Club of North Carolina, the ten-acre site mimics a sixteenth-century pleasure garden. At its dedication on Virginia Dare’s birthday in 1955, dignitaries planted a magnolia tree representing Mother England and another representing her daughter, the United States. Queen Elizabeth II sent a rosebush from Windsor Castle. The garden has lately struggled to survive and recently sold its rare portrait of Queen Elizabeth I at Sotheby’s to pay for a new garden shop roof.
“Today is Virginia Dare’s birthday!” said the woman at the cash register. The shop smelled of potpourri and soap. “The entrance fee is only $4.29,” she added. I must have looked blank. “That’s how old she is—429! And we always have a fried chicken southern lunch; it’s a tradition with us. There’s cake after.”
I entered the shade and quiet of the garden with relief. Camellias and lilies lined the walks. A towering bronze statue of Queen Elizabeth I—according to the brochure, the largest ever made of the Englishwoman who gave her name to Virginia—dominated a squat round brick plinth at the intersection of two paths. The hulking shape with a too-large head resembled more the nightmarish Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than the Elizabethan ruler.
Nearly hidden at the edge of the thick woods was a slightly sunken garden with a narrow pine-straw-strewn avenue lined with leafed-out azaleas. Water oaks, twisted by the relentless winds, stood as a backdrop to a cylindrical stone column at the end of the path. Perched on top was none other than Lander’s faithful companion, the statue she carved on the eve of the Civil War.
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