American Myth 101

By Richard Stengel

Historiographers (an ugly-sounding word for historians of history) are coming round to the view that history consists of little more than a series of consensual myths. It is not a nation's past that shapes its mythology but a nation's mythology that determines its past. History becomes a minstrel show glimpsed through a musty lens distorted by tradition, popular culture and wishful thinking.

In his fascinating and magisterial book Mystic Chords of Memory (Knopf; 864 pages; $40), Michael Kammen explores the complicated relationship between history and memory that has existed since America began. What Kammen sets out to do is both modern and old-fashioned: through a careful mustering of detail and theory, he explains that throughout American history, facts have been transformed into myths and myths transformed into beliefs. From the time the Pilgrims may or may not have celebrated Thanksgiving to the "grotesque distortions" of Western history in TV shows like Gunsmoke, Kammen shows how America has reconstructed its past to conform with the needs of its present.

Mystic Chords of Memory suggests that we think of ourselves as a people who honor the past but are not imprisoned by it. Kammen claims that Americans have always believed they knew more about their own history than they actually did. Although we prefer to regard ourselves as a forward-looking people striding into the future, we tend to be happier sitting around the cozy fireplace of nostalgia.

Kammen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1972 book, People of Paradox, focuses on three periods: the half-century after the Civil War; the years between the First and Second World Wars; the decades since World War II. At the risk -- or rather with the certainty -- of distorting Kammen's subtle and teeming narrative, one can say that America has evolved from a society that repudiated the past to a culture ambivalent about it, to a nation that has turned wistful and retrospective.

By the middle of the 19th century, Americans thought they had outgrown the past. History was the Old World; America was too young to have a usable past. The great American tradition, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, was to trample on tradition. In the 1880s the house where Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence had become a hot-dog emporium. For most of the 19th century, American history was rarely included in the standard school curriculum.

! Diversity, Kammen suggests, was one reason why Americans were indifferent to their history. A young, pluralistic nation is united by its future rather than its past. Americans had their eyes focused on the horizon, and history was an impediment to progress. Americans, Abraham Lincoln once said, have "a perfect rage for the new."

Beginning in the late 1800s, however, people seemed to hanker for history and tradition. Statues of Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant rose in every town and hamlet. In 1907, 20,000 spectators came to see a Jefferson Davis monument dedicated in Richmond. The first of many colonial revivals in design was under way. Historical pageants flourished.

Immigrants to America had a different relationship with the past. Most had come to escape it. The irony is that once they settled in America, they could not live without it. Kammen suggests a kind of ethnic American syllogism: the first generation zealously preserves; the second generation zealously forgets; the third generation zealously rediscovers. The idea of the melting pot, he points out, was a comforting myth to Americans of older stock and a frightening one to those just off the boat. The idea of assimilation is always more congenial when you are the one being imitated.

The period after World War I was a time of both modernism and nostalgia. Americans were exhilarated by a sense of the new but also yearned for the traditional. In the '20s newly minted products were routinely labeled STRICTLY AMERICAN. Collecting Americana -- "antiqueering," as it was known -- become a national hobby. Henry Ford filled warehouses with what he called "American stuff": Duncan Phyfe tables, endless volumes of McGuffey Readers and Thomas Edison memorabilia. John D. Rockefeller Jr. set about restoring colonial Williamsburg, Va., in the painstaking detail that only a billionaire could afford. In the '30s the New Deal was sponsoring research into folk art and folk songs. For the first time the government, not the private sector, became the main custodian of history.

For nearly two decades after World War II, Kammen suggests, patriotism served as the American civil religion. The 1960s turned into a decade of questioning, while the 1970s ushered in an era of nostalgia. And what is nostalgia, he says, but "history without guilt"? During the past 25 years, history has become a growth industry. Memory has been commercialized. Ask Ralph Lauren. In the Reagan years, public history was privatized, so that it was Coca-Cola, not the U.S. government, that "brought you" the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. The 1980s, Kammen says, inculcated "a selective memory and a soothing amnesia."

Mystic Chords of Memory trails off with a sense that America is not moving forward but pensively looking back. Kammen asserts that we have shown an increased interest in the past but a decreased knowledge of it. In the 1930s Lewis Mumford wrote, "Our past still lies ahead of us." The feeling one is left with after reading Kammen's dense and masterly work is that our future lies behind us.