Decades ago, historians began to talk about the need for a usable national history. What makes a historical account usable depends, of course, on what it is one wants a people to do, where one wants the nation to go. Whether we are self-conscious about it or not, we are always telling stories about the past (history) with purposes for our own time. Something happens, however, when people set out to rewrite this story for new purposes. Typically, they have scores to settle, myths to debunk, victims to remember, and heroes to recover.
One of the most famous efforts came from a Marxist, Howard Zinn. His 1980 A People's History of the United States, however error-prone, turned out to be the pitch-perfect as a text for high school students who, abetted by radical teachers, loved to discover a sordid account of exploitation and abuse largely unknown to their parents. Iconoclasm was usable history for leftists because it disconnected young people from any obligation to the past or any recognition of authority that comes from experience and tradition.
Zinn's book was hardly the only or even the most important book in producing a “usable history” for the purpose of transformation. From college textbooks and academic histories to popular accounts of our past, historical storytelling became increasingly an activity in support of political and cultural purposes.
We do need a usable history of America. We need a truthful account that models the humane discipline of history and captures the excitement of discovering the past, and also that takes our most important moral questions seriously instead of turning the past into a cheap moral melodrama.
This we now have. Wilfred McClay's beautifully crafted American history bears the perfect title, Land of Hope. His subtitle, “An Invitation to the Great American Story,” might just as usefully be called “A History for Citizens.” McClay's account doesn't simply marble throughout the crucial themes necessary to understand one's participation in this story, but their interconnections form the bright threads that give McClay's entire historical tapestry a vivid complexity. This complexity, we will see, fosters in the reader an organic attachment to, and sense of participation in, this story.
From a Fractured History to a Shared Story
For as McClay says, “the best stories show us [that] simplicity and complexity are not mutually exclusive.” With history as it is currently done, we can get hopelessly lost in tangled thickets of narratives—the many voices of America as told by most academic historians—that leave the reader without a way of linking her life's history with this cacophonic record of the past. At its worst, this sort of account represents the most basic failure of historical writing, the inability to turn evidence from the past into a meaningful story for the present.
Because the multivocal account of American history necessarily undermines a meaningful single narrative, the ideological reader rejects the very idea that this national story can be meaningful except as iconoclasm. The only moral imperative left is to overcome the past in search of an abstract, clean, and universal ideal—social justice. Morally the idea is to step outside of history.
It is partially in response to this disordered state of historical understanding that McClay wrote Land of Hope. The theme of hope captures the blend of simplicity and complexity that makes this story relatable and useful, truthful and morally understandable, loving but unsparing. Most historians craft their story around an abstract ideal like equality or freedom as projected against a sordid account of power, privilege and, most of all, hypocrisy. Hope, by contrast, is not an ideal or an abstraction, but a constitutive part of the human experience, rich in meaning and complex in form. Christians have theological hope that girds them for hard times and tames their expectations in good times. Faith is, we recall, the substance of things hoped for; faith emerges from our experience of the unseen reality that frames and gives meaning to all that we do see.
Hope is as real as the catch in the breath of the eight-year-old boy who hears a noise downstairs on Christmas eve. Hope is the natural projection onto the future of one's expectations; the vision of a house and crops that the Irishman saw when he surveyed the hard and barren land of the 1889 Oklahoma land run. Hope explains the expectation that Fredrick Douglass, and later Martin Luther King, Jr., had for America in light of ideals not realized fully but tangibly a part of the spirit of the nation. It was this very hope that inspired their insistence that America as they experienced it become more fully itself. Hope suggests motion and action, not easy moralism.
Unlike optimism, hope does not promise success. America is, after all, also “a land of dashed hopes, of disappointment. This is unavoidable,” McClay notes, because “a nation that professes high ideals makes itself vulnerable to searing criticism when it falls sort of them.” But hope is a way of living with failures without either despair or rejection of the ideals. Hope allows continuous reaffirmation, and when hope is entwined in the cultural DNA of a people it has a way of reemerging as a useful, productive virtue during times when ideological despair is otherwise the only option.
Land of Hope seems written for such a time as this, when ideology, combined with a profound historical ignorance, has left several generations belonging to no internalized story larger than their own experiences. Here we encounter a habitable story that comes complete with the principles, obligations, and privileges of citizenship. The author stresses citizenship as a “vivid and enduring sense of one's full membership.” Belonging to this story supplies one with the richness of a great civilization even as it entangles one in the nation's failures and dashed hopes.
It provides a salutary barrier to the rather disagreeable tendency to loathe those who confronted realities we will never face.
In other words, to belong to this story, to have full membership in this civilization, combines the necessary rootedness of a good life with the cosmopolitan awareness that our own time gives us no Archimedean point from which to lob simplistic moral judgements. We belong to the story that our ancestors helped give us and we, as much as they, live and act in a reality that will never be exactly as we want. We live in hope.
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