“Mystic Chords of Memory”: Myth, Tradition, and the Making of American Nationalism

Is history just a memory of memories? The course will explore this question by looking at how Americans have remembered and mythologized important events and individuals in the nation’s history. One of the best-known such myths is the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. On being questioned by his father about who chopped down the cherry tree, Washington confessed that he had done it, telling his father, “I cannot tell a lie.” Ironically, however, this story was itself a fabrication. We must also not forget “Honest Abe,” where the theme of “honesty” recurs. Why have such myths been so important to the American national identity? For example, was Washington’s purported truthfulness a way of creating a sense of transparency and a bond of trust between the people and their democratically elected government? The course will address such questions by looking at the construction and function of tradition and myth, as well as the relationship between myth and tradition in American culture from the colonial period to World War II. We will examine some of the specific myths and traditions that Americans invented, beginning with the story of Pocahontas and John Smith and ending with the image of World War II as “The Good War.” The course will pay special attention to the mythologization of the American Revolution and the “Founding Fathers” and the myth of the self-made man, examining how figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln both contributed to and embodied these myths. We will consider how and why myths about these events and individuals were created and the extent to which they corresponded to social reality. The course will study how these myths both unified and divided Americans, as different groups used the same myths for conflicting social purposes. And finally, we will examine what these myths revealed about how Americans defined the nation’s identity. Was the United States a nation bound by “mystic chords of memory,” as Lincoln so poetically claimed, or were Americans ultimately a “present-minded people,” defined by their rejection of the past? More precisely, did Americans view the very notion of tradition as an impediment to the unlimited possibilities for growth and the actualization of their “manifest destiny”?