Mystic Chords of Memory.

Michael Kammen has written invaluable books, almost a dozen all told, about early American thought and institutions and, more recently, about the ways in which Americans have understood their Constitution and their history. A pathfinder in the paradoxes of American culture, Kammen has an ear as sensitive to silence as to sound, a thoroughgoing appreciation of plurality and complexity. His erudition and his fidelity to detail can be a little daunting--no risk of overlooking the trees in Kammen's forest--but his writings are always warmed by his warts-and-all love for the place, and Mystic Chords of Memory has a lambency of its own.

In this book, Kammen is concerned with public memory, the ways m which Americans have remembered the past, a story in which myths and legends have as much place as history and high culture. Intellectuals and scholars claim Kammen's attention chiefly when they affect popular remembrance, as thinkers like Bancroft and Hawthorne did in that earlier time when serious reading counted for more than it does nowadays. In the 1920s and '30s, critics like H.L. Mencken and Stuart Sherman still have important roles in Kammen's account, but since 1945, intellectuals are lucky to get bit parts. Even so, Kammen may give contemporary culture a higher tone than it deserves: although Kammen recognizes the power of the visual media, his discussion of the impact of movies and television on public memory is relatively brief, focused on a few monuments like Gone with the Wind and "Roots," and on historical presentations, rather narrowly defined. And inevitably, even in a book as big as this one, some people and events get left out: I missed Helen Hunt Jackson, for example, and her wonderfully tacky Ramona. Yet all in all, this is a remarkable book, and Kammen weaves patriotic oratory and memorials, pageants and expositions, Charles Lummis and Zora Neale Hurston, Greenfield Village, Williamsburg, and Knott's Berry Farm into a grand tapestry of reminiscence.

In the United States, Kammen argues, the effort to define, preserve, and instill public memory has characteristically been decentralized, diffuse, ad hoc, relatively noncoercive and--for most of our history--in private hands. Diversity has been a hallmark; national traditions have been ranged against the particular traditions of locality, ethnicity, religion, and class. Similarly, American culture continues to be paradoxical, admiring success but cherishing the memory of noble defeats, remembering the Alamo better than San Jacinto.

Nevertheless, as Kammen recognizes, tradition and memory involve efforts to separate the essential from the accidental in the lives of individuals and peoples, implicit attempts to answer the question of identity, pursuits of the one that unites the many. If Kammen's comparisons to the experiences of other societies indicate that the United States is further from uniqueness than we sometimes imagine, he also reminds us that American traditions are at least unusual in the extent to which they are conscious constructions. Critical to the memory of most of us is the knowledge of having come from somewhere else, a difference which separates us from Native Americans--also immigrants, but so long ago that they lack the memory of it. Especially given our diversity, the construction of American life and politics demands the lessening of ethnic and religious rivalries and resentments, and hence the abandonment of much of our ancient heritages. In the beginning, as Kammen notes, Americans shared hopes more than memories, and many of our institutions aimed to depoliticize the past by deprecating memory.

Even then, Kammen observes, a vocal minority" argued that popular wisdom is empirical and retrospective, so that a democracy without memory is at the mercy of elites and of change. Fear of a "holocaust" of the past inspired Hawthorne's effort to create a distinctively American and republican mythology, along with the more whimsical attempt--by Longfellow and Cooper, for example--to assimilate the Indian to American myth in the hope of acquiring a shadow of autochthony. From 1870-1915, stimulated by the Civil War, the "party of memory" acquired ascendancy. History became a civil religion, a surrogate for older faith, inculcated through required classes in U.S. history and proclaiming the tradition of progress celebrated in the great expositions. From 1915-45, traditionalism, challenged by modernism, showed great vitality in new forms like the interest in folk culture. Since 1945, however, a sense of nostalgia and an obsession with "heritage" has been combined with "amnesia and historical ignorance" and an increase in both the role of government (a fairly constant tendency in Kammen's account) and commercialization. Kammen sees bright spots, but his vision of the present stresses the leveling of the hierarchies of memory, so that Graceland and Cooperstown become indistinguishable from Mt. Vernon and Independence Hall.

Recalling the teaching of the Ba'al Shem Tov--"remembrance is the secret of redemption"--Kammen argues that conflicting accounts of the past, competing in a marketplace of memories, are most conducive to true recollection. By contrast, the desire for reconciliation tempts us to leave the blood and folly in the attic, like the post-Civil War reunion of the Blue and the Gray at the expense of the black, or the portrait of Dr. King as the champion of civil rights and nonviolence, but not as the critic of rock music, economic inequality, and the Vietnam War. Reducing our history to one-dimensional commonalities, the yen for reconciliation takes away the light along with the dark comers, and Kammen, a partisan of memory against amnesia, wants to be sure we hear all of the counterpoint of American experience.

This emphasis on variations, however, can come close to drowning out the theme of the American composition. G.K. Chesterton remarked that the American project of "making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along" is incomprehensible without reference to the principle of equality, regarded not merely as one story among many, but as the human truth. Kammen takes his title from Lincoln, who understood that better than most. Yet in the text, Kammen claims that Lincoln "echoed" Madison's rhetoric in the fourteenth and fifty-first Federalist Papers. Now while Madison did speak of the "chords of affection," in these passages he made no mention of memory, and far from calling on the "better angels of our nature," as Lincoln did, Madison contended that angels are no model for human government. Far more than Madison, in other words, Lincoln turned to the past and to the spirit. In the same way, although Lincoln, as Kammen notes, did reject some of the "dogmas of the past" in proclaiming a "new birth of freedom," he revered the Declaration of Independence as the Union's indispensable foundation. The Declaration, in turn, rests on an appeal to meta-memory--to the Creator and to nature, the first principles of first things. These days, when American political identity seems more and more in question, lacking even the coherence of a common enemy, we have every need of that high remembrance.