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

• Author: Feeney, Mark

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...