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is nothing more than the kind of superiority
that future generations will have over us'
Whether our institutions are too deeply rooted in the past and thus incapable of coping with the fast-changing developments of the present is a question that has perenially troubled present-minded and future-oriented Americans, but today there is a new dimension of the problem. In vivid contrast with the uncritical boosterism of an earlier era, the tendency to focus on the shortcomings, failures and misadventures of America's past has dominated the historical agenda and prevailed so long in the classroom that it no longer seems a passing phase but rather an established trend. In these circumstances, we may well ask, is the current disposition to find fault with our past, to second-guess our forebears and downgrade their achievements, merely a corrective lurch, necessary to keeping our historical balance? Or is it the overture
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to a permanent reassessment of American history? Our answer to this question clearly bears on any consideration of the efficacy or efficiency of institutions rooted in the past. It is commonplace that American culture was shaped by an orientation toward the future. Tomorrow was always more important than Today for the reason that Tomorrow, in the traditional American reckoning, was bound to be better. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, analyzing American society in the 19th century with an acuity that still astonishes, was led to conclude: "Democratic nations care little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure." In the American vocabulary, "progress" has not just meant movement along a specific continuum but has been all but synonymous with "improvement," even as "new" and "modern" were not merely descriptive terms but were radiantly honorific. "America is a land of wonders," Tocqueville observed wryly, "in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration." |
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If looking to the future rather than the past has arguably been our glory as a culture, it may also be regarded as our curse. The relentless logic of futurism dictates that, regardless of what miracles or marvels have been wrought, we can never be satisfied. Neither do we tend to compare our situation with that of other countries and cultures. When we speak of something like poverty in America, we use a strictly American standard, and we measure it in contemporary terms. It affords us no comfort, for example, that the current official poverty level (the existence of which speaks volumes) would represent a degree of affluence in many other countries. We charitably regard the poor as deprived, but we forget that what is considered deprivation in contemporary America would not have been considered as such only 30 or 40 years ago. Obsessed with the idea of progress but constitutionally unimpressed by its results, Americans are caught in the position of constantly raising the ante. As Tocqueville realized, the effect of endless striving may entail a certain mindlessness and loss of perspective: "No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do."
The inevitable effect of all this is, not surprisingly, to minimize and obscure the achievements of the past. Though we may ask ourselves in the face of difficult decisions what Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln would do, we increasingly conclude that they have little or nothing to tell us, or worse, that they are themselves a culpable part of the problem we are trying to solve. What did
Lincoln think about gays in the military? Probably nothing. How would Jefferson confront the difficulties of a multiracial society? By separating the races. These are the kinds of questions we impatiently put to our history and the kind of profit-
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less answers we typically derive.
It seems unavoidable that our impatience with the past ultimately entails a misreading of history and a misapplication of its lessons. The observance during the past year of the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth proved the occasion for a celebration of his extraordinary talents and achievements but also for an arraignment for his purported legacy of racism. Mounted atop the pantheon of American heroes, Jefferson the slaveholder who wrote that "all men are created equal" made an irresistible target for the charge of hypocrisy, and worse. But those who sought to make Jefferson and his legacy bear a major share of the blame for 200 years of subsequent American racism were ably answered by Gordon S. Wood, a leading historian of the Early Republic period and the winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize in history. "We ought always to remember," Wood wrote in "Jefferson at Home" (New York Review of Books) "that Jefferson's eighteenth-century statements have been glossed, refracted, expanded, and developed by two centuries of subsequent historical experience that is just as important in sustaining our values as the original statements themselves. The legacies we have received from the past are not and could not be the products of a single man of the eighteenth century, or for that matter all the 'founding fathers' put together; instead, our legacies are the product of our entire accumulated historical experience."
Wood's admonition was meant to address more than historical distortion. The more serious price that we pay, according to Wood, is in the demoralization to which we subject ourselves. "We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing our so-called 'founding fathers'; we seriously err in canonizing, and making symbols of authentic historical figures who cannot and should not be ripped out of their own time and place. By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be, we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder."
Our peevishness about the past sometimes borders on the perverse. For example, it is fashionable nowadays to fault Abraham Lincoln for his failure to endorse abolitionism before the Civil War, for his cautious movement toward emancipation once the war began and for his halfway measures when emancipation was finally proclaimed. That these positions and actions enabled him to gain popular election, unite the Northern electorate behind a war for the Union and finally use these to do what the abolitionists could not — destroy slavery — is counted by his critics as less important, if granted at all. The fastest-rising historical theory of the last decade is that Lincoln had little to do with emancipation and that the slaves freed themselves. (James M. McPherson has ably described what is right and what is egregiously wrong with this theory in "Who Freed the Slaves?" Abraham Lincoln and the Crucible of War, edited by George L. Painter.)
All but overlooked, though even more important and more relevant to our current dilemmas, is Lincoln's masterstroke of redefining Jefferson's natural-rights axiom that "all men are created equal." As Garry Wills has recently shown in his Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln's memorable pronouncement at Gettysburg effectively recast Jefferson's relatively narrow dictum, laying out a broader interpretation of human equality and, in decisive language, proclaiming it fundamental to the national purpose. Particularly at a time when we are searching for ways to make difficult transitions, to make American institutions more responsive and more inclusive, it is hard to conceive of a more instructive example. Its being first recognized and articulated here and now must be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times.
That Jefferson and Lincoln should be the subjects of our peevishness and impatience is perhaps not so surprising, given the revisionist tenor of the times. But its tendency is surely to point us in the unpromising direction remarked by Wood. If we insist on judging our great national figures by inappropriate standards, we will not only distort history but, Wood says, "we will end up stressing our deficiencies and ignoring just how far we have progressed since the eighteenth century."
Unfortunately, stressing our deficiencies and ignoring our progress are hallmarks of our current situation. And while these are distinguishable consequences, they are far from unrelated and appear to be direct results of the way we view the past. As such, they are perhaps irreducible parts of the complex equation of American democracy worked out by Tocque-ville 150 years ago and will presumably be with us as long as the original impulse, whatever name we give it, survives. Nonetheless, it may not be too much to hope that the worst effects of these unfortunate by-products might be mitigated to some degree, if not wholly mastered, by the application of some more or less self-evident truths.
The first of these is that the people of the historical past, whom we tend to regard as somehow benighted, were at least as honorable and well-meaning as people today. The arguments intended to reveal the ignominy and perfidy of our fore-bears are, after all, suspiciously self-serving, for their invariable effect is to suggest the superiority and wisdom of the present generation. But our only demonstrable superiority to our counterparts in the past is that we know something about their future. To use this against them comes with an ill grace, particularly when we consider that we know nothing of our own. Our superiority to people of the past is nothing more than the kind of superiority that future generations will have over us.
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Unless we are prepared to grant that our own good-faith efforts and intentions will some day deserve to be looked upon with contempt, we would do well to recognize the time-bound efforts and intentions of the past for what they were, and not for what they would be considered now.
Seen in this perspective, the problems of the past become more comparable to our own and thus more useful in thinking about mitigation and possible solutions. For example, when Abraham Lincoln was first elected to the Illinois state legislature, almost the first major issue he encountered was the widespread concern that the young frontier state have a viable system of education, with free common schools and state-supported higher education. But such were the disagreements over how it should be organized and funded, to say nothing of the tangle of other partisan considerations, that it was 20 years before a system of public education could even be initiated. Notoriously loath to impose the requisite taxes and eternally hopeful that the federal assistance might be forthcoming (in the form of public land grants), Lincoln and his well-intentioned colleagues allowed public schooling to languish, even as they proceeded literally to bankrupt the state with an ill-conceived scheme to finance large construction projects. Does any of this sound familiar? And can it be anything but our distaste for the past that keeps us from studying the instructive analogues it presents?
Another self-evident truth might be that our own perspectives are shaped by the present. In spite of the way it is often represented, the past in one important sense is not really static. It changes every time we have occasion to look at it, for the reason that we see it in the constantly shifting perspectives of the present, what Walt Whitman called the "swimming shapes of today." What formerly seemed marginal about our past may suddenly appear central, and what seemed puzzling and obscure may become brilliantly clear. There can be little doubt that this is the source of most revisionism. But while we are thus obliged to continually reinterpret the past, we need to do so with the full awareness that our new insights and understanding are directly related to Today.
What we deem new revelations about the past are always to some degree reflections of the concerns and preoccupations of the present. To carelessly or thoughtlessly reconvert them into judgments against the past would constitute an unwarranted instance of presentism. For example, a dramatic development of the last 25 years in America is the spectacular rise of participation in women's sports. While it seems obvious that the special conditions of the current era, however defined, have enabled and promoted such widespread participation, there is already a visible tendency to regard the current phenomenon as the historic norm, the way things were always supposed to be, and to view the past as a vast canvas of deprivation.
Americans, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, "have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow." Because America had such a brief history when Tocqueville took his soundings, unalloyed patriotism and pride of country prevailing everywhere, he did not foresee or predict the eventual discontent with our own past. Self-criticism and disillusionment flourish, it would seem, in a later stage of the cycle. And although these may turn out to have been the inevitable by-products of the positive and hopeful traits that Tocqueville observed and recorded, it remains to be seen how permanent and pervasive this development will be. Nonetheless, Tocqueville's example is doubly valuable today, for not only do his writings continue to shed light on our culture and traditions, but they also serve to remind us, in a world often darkened by unforeseen difficulties, that the past is still our most important source of illumination.
Douglas L. Wilson is George A. Lawrence professor of English at Knox College, Galesburg. He edited Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book for Princeton University Press. It was published in 1989 in the Second Series of The Jefferson Papers. With his colleague, Professor Rodney 0. Davis of the History Department at Knox, Wilson is editing the letters and interviews about Abraham Lincoln collected by William Herndon, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press.
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