With the turn of the century approaching, America waxes retrospective once again, catching the fin-de-siecle mood of past centuries. This glance back naturally uses memory -- our collective memory -- as a tool of interpreting the past. Kammen's book Mystic Chords of Memory adequately hooks onto this wagon, surveying the period of 1870-1990 for historical, literary, and artistic remnants of American devotion to memory. Kammen has devoted an immense amount of historical fact to the study, chronicling the growth and development of historical societies, erections of historical monuments, government funding for preservation, and academic and popular sentiment through documented testimonies, public lectures, and private letters. He wisely chooses to document the sentiments of highly visible officials -- presidents, historians, elite academia, wealthy patrons -- as well as the "common man's" sentiments and actions.

His findings, however, are less than conclusive. Collective memory has become a catch-all term in recent academia as well as popular culture, but it remains an elusive category of thought. As we commonly discuss memory, it can be personal, familial, local, or national. Kammen's book deals with national historic memory and the interplay of memory with tradition and myth. The exact boundaries of memory, myth, and tradition are hazy, and in Mystic Chords the terms are interchangeable. The terms need more clarification to serve their purpose more effectively. Kammen chooses not to provide a definitive meaning to these terms, but rather chronicles their appearance in common parlance. He demonstrates America's pragmatic approach to memory -- the things we choose to remember and the things we choose to forget. A pattern of cultural amnesia and cultural re-remembering takes shape out of the material Kammen lays before us.

Starting around 1870, Kammen tracks America's lack of historical interest. The general trend was to view democracy as inherently uninterested in the past -- as forward reaching. Only for the cultural elite (Hawthorn, and later Henry Adams and Henry James) was America's lack of history disgraceful. However, American interest grew as the turn of the century approached, with a marked increase in the number of historical societies and interest in American literature. This growth occurred separately from any government intervention -- rather, the nation strongly held that it was the private sector's duty to protect our history, not the government's. Hence the expatriates of earlier decades returned home, investing their money in Americana. Kammen closely investigates magnates such as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the role they played as benefactors of collective memory. Both men's zeal for preservation of the past resulted in "living" museums such as Colonial Williamsburg and The Wayside Inn. Characteristic of the first two decades of the twentieth century, it was the wealthy who collected Americana for its "folk" appeal. Later, in the war and interwar period, collection of American antiques became a popular pastime in almost all circles, as well as the construction of colonial style buildings (from Hollywood to New York), and genealogy. There was an attempt to reach an "authentic" past, directly through the products of colonial life. Kammen notes that at times this "authenticity" takes on farcical and political aspects.

Yet at this time a counter trend developed of "debunking" our cultural myths about the past. Cultural elites, personified by the likes of Henry Adams, Charles Francis Adams, John Dos Passos, and Edith Wharton, argued for the demythification of our history. Forefather worship, common with the average man, lacked grounding in actual historical fact. This elite urged American schools to provide more in the way of American history, and less in the way of jingoism and nationalistic propaganda.

A major theme of Kammen's study is the ways in which America has utilized the past in order to construct an adequate national identity. American memory, far from maintaining any sort of cohesion, has changed its nature throughout the course of Kammen's study. Post Civil War sectionalism was fought against by a nationalist tradition of memory -- ignoring the recent past in order to smooth over recent hostility, and instead focusing on revolutionary heroes as landmarks of American solidarity. Later, with the influx of immigrants, national cohesion was provided by ignoring the many textured history of immigration, and substituting multiplicity and heterogeneity with the common theme of democracy and the melting pot. Once again, cultural amnesia allowed for national cohesion.

From the inter-war through the post war period, Kammen follows the expanding role of the government in the cultural production of memory. F.D.R.'s W.P.A programs helped to support the fledgling role of the government in protection of the past, as thousands of paid civilians built access roads to national parks, restored national landmarks, wrote guidebooks, and placed markers of historic sights along the highways. These programs lost support during and after the war, but the continued growth of the national park service, as well as the growth of the Smithsonian and the construction of the national archives, testifies to the expanded role of the federal government in historical preservation. It is interesting that America, unlike its European counterparts, felt that our national memory and history was best preserved by "the people" rather than the government until the very recent past.

The closing chapters of the book focus on the growing commercialism of history through the mass media. History, according to Kammen, has been dislocated from the actual past, functioning as a sort of panacea of continuity in a nation which feels disjointed and fractured. In typical post-modern fashion, Kammen discusses the growth of history as a depthless tool of cohesion, rather than a meaningful discourse. From the material that he gives, however, I judge that this is not a recent phenomena. History has always been the raw material which memory uses for its own national, political, and personal projects. The mass media has aided this project, but it is not the culprit. The many testaments to memory recorded in this book attest to the fact that history has always been at our disposal -- from Disney World to Mount Rushmore.