A usable past

Can it be useful if it isn't true?

In 1918 the historian and critic Van Wyck Brooks wrote an essay called “On Creating a Usable Past.” Like many American intellectuals, Brooks thought Americans suffered from a kind of cultural infantilism. Compared with their European counterparts, they hadn't figured out what their country meant. The American past was a jumble of curiosities and folk tales. Historians needed to sort it out and develop themes appropriate to the ongoing contest of democracy against its foes.

Brooks didn't invent the idea of employing the past in the service of the present. The origin stories of most cultures had some connection to real events and weaved them into narratives that typically supported the contemporary ruling structures. The idea was that today's status quo hadn't happened by accident. It had been ordained by God or evolved through long struggle. So don't mess with it.

More closely connected with facts were branches of science that predicted the future. Astronomers in Babylonia, Egypt, China and Central America recorded patterns in the heavens and projected them forward. The Egyptians watched for the appearance of Sirius to anticipate the annual flood of the Nile. Mayan astronomers forecast eclipses of the sun and moon. Agricultural societies pegged average last frosts, and hence planting dates, to the positions of the rising and setting sun.

But the idea of a usable past really took hold in America in the 20th century. Brooks's generation of progressives was followed by the New Dealers of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s. Each group searched American history for evidence of a national predisposition toward greater democracy, equality and inclusivity, in the face of opposition from entrenched elites. Reform was inevitable but never easy.

Conservatives countered with their own version of the past. The secret of America's success, the conservatives said, was the country’s adherence to received values in politics, religion and culture. America was a republic rather than a democracy. It was a Christian nation albeit one that tolerated other religions. America welcomed immigrants so long as they assimilated into existing American habits and mores.

The search for a usable past brings benefits and detriments to the study of history. It causes people to examine history who otherwise wouldn’t be interested. But they come with a presentist agenda that can corrupt their examination of the past.

The study of history can always profit from fresh eyes and minds. Yet if those eyes have a narrow focus and those minds are already made up, the arrivals won't learn much. And they’ll inflict their present political battles on the past. The Civil War has been refought a dozen times, as bitterly if not as fatally as the first time.

The job of the historian is to channel the energy of those who bring presentist motives to the study of the past, and to pry open those closed minds. It's not that hard, so long as the historian himself or herself doesn't get swept into the presentist battles. History is always more interesting, because more complicated, than ever supposed by those who want to use it to bludgeon their political enemies. Historical figures are neither heroes nor villains but ordinary people who sometimes do heroic and sometimes villainous things. They’re not a species apart but men and women like you and me, chasing similar dreams and struggling with similar challenges.

The searchers for a usable past, if enticed into an open-minded and honest-hearted engagement with history, will find the past more useful than they imagined — not for scoring partisan points but for broadening their understanding of what it means to be human.