If you grew up in the house that I grew up in, you knew you weren’t likely to get away with very much. But one thing that you learned early was that you could easily con your way into staying up just a little bit later if you got dad to read Rudyard Kipling stories. The classic “Just So Stories,” a perennial favorite, provide fanciful explanations of how different things in the world came about. How the Camel Got His Hump. How The Leopard Got Hist Spots. How the First Letter was Written. All ably explained by Mr. Kipling and his pen.
None of these stories, of course, are meant to be taken seriously. They serve largely as a device by which parents entertain their children, and, as I learned from my father, for parents to entertain themselves. But these stories, silly though they may be, like so many stories, do serve a purpose. They teach children that reality has a structure, a rhythm, that things are the way they are for a reason. Effects have causes, and vice versa. Stories teach us from an early age that the world as we know it is not entirely random. We can, indeed, find meaning somewhere.
Children alone do not need stories to comprehend the world. Even as we mature, we structure our lives according to stories of our own composition, or try to make our lives fit a particular script. We were supposed to get that job at that particular time. If a certain relationship doesn’t work out, it just was not meant to be. We read cosmic significance into every going on precisely because we want them to have meaning. This is mostly in our heads, of course, but stories are powerful things, and they persist for good reasons.
Nations too need to tell themselves stories to grapple with their existence and with the challenges they face. And like the elephant and how he got his trunk, they are not entirely connected to reality. Whether or not we can actually find truth in them, though, seems rather beside the point. We believe in our national legends not because we have examined all of history and have found them true, but because we need to find truth in them for our own sanity.
Our Civil War, for example, has produced so much semi-historical myth-making that our collective memory of it appears at times rather warped. A common way of looking at the conflict is to cast the war as one giant misunderstanding. Everyone on both sides, on this view, was a good American in his own way. They were all patriots who believed in the principles of Washington and Jefferson, set apart by sorry divisions and the follies of a blundering generation of ineffective leaders. Lee and Grant, Sherman and Jackson, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb, can all equally claim for themselves the role of protagonist in the great American story.
Such a view, though, beggars belief when we look at the actual evidence. The whole point of secession, after all, was to no longer be part of the United States, and to cease playing a part in that story. Seriously thinking of the war in such terms really makes the whole thing a sick joke. Portraying everyone regardless of battle flag as a good American, whatever that means, actually presupposes the Union victory itself, making the Confederacy’s leaders into moral monsters. Had they won, they would be the ultimate villains, destroying the Great Experiment. In losing, they sent hundreds of thousands of their countrymen to their deaths. Say what you will about the tenets of pro-slavery separatism, but at least it’s an ethos.
But the importance of this story lies not in whether it is strictly true as a matter of history, for no national history is so, but in what it was intended to accomplish. The blunt facts of the thing are that the United States at the end of the 19th century had a national security interest in keeping white southerners from shooting up the joint. And thus, the War of the Rebellion became a Civil War, and Lee the Marble Man. Lincoln the western hayseed, or the abolitionist radical depending on which partisan you believe, became Lincoln the Great Emancipator and the conciliator whose untimely death left the Union in the hands of the Radicals. Crafting this mythos served the end of acknowledging the Union victory while simultaneously grafting in white southerns as full participants in that endeavor.
This compromise, though it fulfilled its function at the time, came at a tremendous cost, and we are still paying the interest on the mortgage we had to take out to cover it. The experience of black Americans as full participants in the American story was ignored or actively sidelined. From the end of military Reconstruction in 1877 to the adoption of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the message rang loud and clear: conciliation between white northerners and white southerners was paramount, and the status of black Americans at best a secondary concern. All men may have been created equal, but they certainly were not going to be treated as such.
We see this problem as well in how we teach history in this country and how we think about it. For all the bellyaching about Black History Month and the sometimes awkward, ham-fisted inclusion of sidebars on the contribution of women and different minority groups, these things exist for a very good reason. They abound not just because of a bunch of liberal busy-bodies, though they certainly have their hand in such things, but because American nationalism has never comfortably accommodated itself to the diversity of the American experience. If we are all united under one flag regardless of our ancestry or heritage, you would not know it based on how we tend to present our own history. While it remains true that many of the key decision-makers have been, and continue to be, people whose roots go back largely to the British Isles and the rest of northern Europe, you will find many other different kinds of people who can lay an equal claim to the label of American from sea to shining sea. If the incorporation of “diversity” in much of public history and history education seems so forced, it is because, I think, it reflects an oversight in how we have defined our own national identity.
What we witness now, from controversies over history curricula, to debates about memorialization, and even to the contentious 1619 Project, reflects serious growing pains in American national identity. Whether one agrees with them or not, there live in this country many people who do no see themselves in the way the American nation has told its own story. Suffice it to say, the America of the next generation will look quite different from the America of old, and the stories we will need to tell ourselves will have to change as well. If we have to add a few national holidays or observances to our civic religion, then I think I can live with that. Such a reevaluation will of course be much more expansive than that, but if national unity matters to us, we should be willing to pay a high price for it, though not at the cost of compromising key liberties.
The moment calls for serious reflection and reevaluation of American nationalism and American national identify. The old stories no longer work. It is time to write some new ones. Much like the older stories, they will not entirely reflect the historical reality. But like all stories, we tell our national stories not to relay every aspect of history as it actually happened, but to make sense of the present. Like children, and surely many adults, stories are what help us sleep at night. And if we want to feel better when we rise in the morning, we need to make sure that the story resonates with the audience that is actually going to hear it.