TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122391/1223470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 78

American Myth 101


In a provocative book, historian Michael Kammen explores how
Americans reinvent their past to fit the present

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.