The Search For A Usable Past (February 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 2)

The Search For A Usable Past

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Authors: Henry Steele Commager

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February 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 2

The United States was the first of the “new” nations. As the American colonies were the first to rebel against a European “mother country,” so the American states were the first to create—we can use Lincoln’s term, to bring forth—a new nation. Modern nationalism was inaugurated by the American, not the French, Revolution. But the new United States faced problems unknown to the new nations of nineteenth-century Europe—and twentieth. For in the Old World the nation came before the state; in America the state came before the nation. In the Old World nations grew out of well-prepared soil, built upon a foundation of history and traditions; in America the foundations were still to be laid, the seeds still to be planted, the traditions still to be formed.

The problem which confronted the new United States then was radically different from that which confronted, let us say, Belgium, Italy, Greece, or Germany in the nineteenth century, or Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Israel in the twentieth. These “new” states were already amply equipped with history, tradition, and memory—as well as with many of the other essential ingredients of nationalism except political independence. Of them it can be said that the nation was a product of history. But with the United States, history was rather a creation of the nation, and it is suggestive that in the New World the self-made nation was as familiar as the self-made man.

It is unnecessary to emphasize anything as familiar as the importance of history, tradition, and memory to successful nationalism. On this matter statesmen, historians, and philosophers of nationalism are all agreed. It was the very core of Edmund Burke’s philosophy: the nation—society itself—is a partnership of past, present, and future; we (the English) “derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.” It is indeed not merely the course of history but of nature itself. Thus Friedrich von Schlegel, trying to quicken a sense of nationalism in the Germans, urged that “nothing is so important as that the Germans … return to the course of their own language and poetry, and liberate from the old documents of their ancestral past that power of old, that noble spirit which … is sleeping in them.” And Mazzini, in his struggle for the unification of Italy, was ever conscious that “the most important inspiration lor nationalism is the awareness ol past glories and past siifleriiigs.”

 
 

So, too, with the philosophers of nationalism, and the historians as well. Listen to Ernest Renan. In that famous leclure ”What Is a Nation?” he emphasized “the common memories, sacrifices, glories, afflictions, and regrets,” and submitted that the worthiest of all cults was “the cull of ancestors.” So, too, with the hard-headed John Stuart Mill, across the Channel. “The strongest cause [for the feeling of nationality] is identity of political antecedents, the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections, collective pride and humiliation,