The Great Prop

Along with all the other things they like to say about the U.S., some Europeans insist that Americans have no sense of history. To Historian C. Vann Woodward of Johns Hopkins University, that notion is pure bunk. Says he, in the Johns Hopkins Magazine: Americans have such an exaggerated sense of history that they use it as a prop to explain or excuse every conceivable type of policy or position. The result: Americans can no longer "believe our own history."

This swollen sense of the past, says Woodward, comes partly from the fact that "history has had to serve Americans as a source of the folklore, myth and legend that seem essential to the spiritual comfort of a people in time of stress. Other nations were born to the heritage of a long and misty prehistoric past that proved a limitless source of myth and legend. But the American past belonged entirely within the historic era. After celebrating their independence, Americans . . . discovered that having banished King George they had lost King Arthur, and along with him a host of patron saints and familiar deities ..."

Busy Gods. To compensate for the loss, Americans "set about peopling their wilderness with folk gods from their own history," and these gods have been constantly invoked and manipulated to suit present convenience. "Americans," says Woodward, "use their history as a substitute for political theory . . ." Instead of abstract principles, "we have sought our values, the meaning of our experience and a chart for the future in our history. The assumption has always been that there is in our past a sort of proto-American theory that, if properly understood, will prove adequate to all exigencies . . .

"The framers of our foreign policy have diligently consulted the past. Washington's Farewell Address and Monroe's Doctrine have been found to mean one thing at one time and another at another time. Sacred text has been found to sanction isolationism and, within a very brief interval, interventionism and internationalism as well . . ." Meanwhile, the Lincoln legend has been bent to accommodate almost every shade of opinion. "At the same time [that] the Communists were claiming him, Lincoln was also hailed as patron saint by the Vegetarians, the Socialists, the Prohibitionists, and a proponent of Union Now--not to mention the Republicans and Democrats ... As Senator Everett Dirksen once said, the first task of the politician is 'to get right with . . . Lincoln.' "

Elastic Oracle. The danger of all this, says Woodward, is that Americans not only try to use the past, they also try to control it. Recently, "among the professors, there was a flurry of revising the textbooks and lectures, of 'bringing the material up to date,' of 'cleaning up the new revision.' " Though this is a far cry from the attempts of dictatorships :to "obliterate from memory public figures, heroes, events and policies that are inconvenient," it nevertheless smacks of manipulation--the false idea that history must be "an oracle that has an answer appropriate to every occasion."

It is high time, concludes Woodward, that the historian reassert himself as the guardian of the integrity of American history. "The historian must never concede that the past is alterable to conform with present convenience, with the party line, with mass prejudice, or with the ambitions of powerful popular leaders."

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