Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture.

Tradition is a good thing. But to what extent is it an American thing? That sounds like a timely question, what with the ongoing debate over multiculturalism and the rewriting of history curricula. In fact, as Kammen makes plain, it's also an old question - one with a lengthy (and wonderfully tangled) provenance. From Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory to the huddled masses washing up on Ellis Island, America has been the great good place for escaping the dead hand of the past. Yet at the same time, it's hard to think of another country that has made such a fuss over its heritage and symbols - the red-white-and-blue hand of the past. (Remember the flag-burning amendment?) So, while Americans may not be prisoners of the past, we certainly have been cheerleaders for it. Like Ronald Reagan, the archetypal American traditionalist, we tend to cherish the past but rarely get our facts right. As Kammen ruefully notes, we are a people with "splendid memories and star-spangled anmesia."

How did Americans come to acquire a historical consciousness, and once acquired, how has it evolved? It wasn't until well into the 19th century that we gave much sign of putting a civic value on the "past." In 1816, for example, the Pennsylvania legislature wanted to help finance the new state capitol in Harrisburg by selling Independence Hall for $150,000. Even as late as 1904, the Alamo had to be purchased by a private citizen to protect it from destruction. Indeed, one of the central (and surprising) aspects of how we as a nation have responded to our national heritage is that not until the thirties did government - rather than individual citizens or private groups - emerge as the driving force in historic preservation. This was almost entirely owing to the New Deal.

FDR was fond of quoting a remark of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "We live by symbols." Those symbols could be as abstract as a national anthem (something America did not possess until 1931), as concrete as Colonial Williamsburg (the renovation and marketing of which Kammen devotes considerable space to), or as extended as the Civil War centennial ("one of the oddest, most prolonged, and often strained commemorations in American memory"). Yet Kammen surveys much more than such prominent instances of venerating (and sometimes ignoring) our past. He details, for example, the growth of tourism, as well as what tourism eroded: regionalism. The national mobility made possible by the automobile broadened people's horizons beyond the regional concerns that had previously dominated historical awareness. At the same time, as they were instructed to "See America First" (a slogan coined by California booster Charles Lummis), Americans created a demand for more to see. As a result, in the 60 years between 1895 and 1955, the number of historic houses increased from 20 to over 1,000

Kammen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who teaches at Cornell, brings great resources to his study. Mystic Chords of Memory draws on political, intellectual, and social history - even art history (the book is profusely illustrated). He clearly has great gusto for his subject, which is something he needs as he follows the intermittent course of American pastness from the early 19th century to the present. Yet that gusto cannot conceal certain shortcomings. Kammen's use of such argon and slang as "tradition orientation" and "people with clout" is jarring. More significantly, this book is both far too long and nowhere near long enough. It's far too long in that its central themes - how myth emerges from memory, the essential dualism of the way Americans view history, the ideological uses (and abuses) of myth and memory - get submerged in the many, often fascinating examples of how we have perceived our past. But Kammen's material is so rich that the three or four instances he may give of a particular trend or development seem almost arbitrary. That each chapter here might have inspired an entire book by itself is a tribute to Kammen's ambition - but it also lends an overall sketchiness to his work.

Kammen never raises the rousseauean question of a civil religion, but it's implicit in his entire enterprise. Today, neither polity nor piety is doing very well. One way to make people care - politically at least - is to help them understand the past. As Kammen reminds us, "History is not chronology for ordinary folk. It involves a sense of memorable individuals, of pivotal events that caused permanent alterations in a community, of the texture of human relationships where threads are broken and the fabric is subsequently restitched." "History" here isn't so much what happened as how we choose to remember what happened. It's the very fact of personal involvement that makes the perception of history on the individual level crucial. It comprises the mystic chords of memory (Lincoln's phrase) that bind us as a nation - what we know in our bones, if not in our heads. The astonishing response to something like Roots or Ken Burns's The Civil War reminds us how much the past can still galvanize us - and, more to the point, how fluid our sense of the past remains. "It is the perceptions of tradition and the uses of memory," Kammen writes, "not their mere existence, that ultimately matter."