The Use and Abuse of History

“What is important for us?” asked a young Van Wyck Brooks in 1918, then still in the springtime of his long career as a historian and literary critic. “The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire.” Brooks made an impassioned plea for a form of history bound not by inert facts and impersonal scholarship but one driven by a creative impulse to revive the spiritual welfare of the nation. “For the spiritual past has no objective reality,” he reminded, “it yields only what we are able to look for in it.” What Brooks looked for—and what his generation of young intellectuals and progressive historians set about writing—was what he called a usable past.