Do Americans Ignore the Patterns of History?

Source: Eli DeFaria Unsplash

The answer to the question posed in the title is reflected in the very earliest stages of the development of the American consciousness. As historian R. W. B. Lewis stated in his book, The American Adam, the earliest Europeans saw the New World as “existing in space, but outside of time.” If it was outside of time, then it was also outside of history.

Some of these early Europeans retained fond memories of the Old World, but most were ready to start their lives over again. To them, the Old World was the harbinger of corrupt and tyrannical monarchies. The New World was the future, not a past littered with the bodies of lower classes forced to work in abject poverty so a few privileged members of European royalty could live extravagantly. There was a lingering sense that Europe’s often sordid history was something not worth remembering in a new country far removed from a corrupt Old World.

Since one of my mentors, professor David Noble of the University of Minnesota, frequently demonstrated that literature is often the best teacher of the past, I will cite some of the authors who were concerned about America’s troubled relationship with history.

I still remember in one of Noble's classes when he commented on our nation’s short-term view of history. He said, “To Americans, history is often something that happened last week.” Peter Carroll, a Stanford University professor who wrote a book with Noble, recalled that the distinguished historian believed people either saw patterns in history, or they didn’t; and, “if you didn’t, you didn’t know what the hell you were talking about most of the time.”

William Shakespeare, one of the keenest observers of historical patterns and the flawed humans who create them, wrote his last play, The Tempest, in 1610 or 1611. The play, which was probably inspired by the founding of the Jamestown Colony in 1607, is often regarded as his commentary on both New World idealism and colonialism. In one respect, the play’s characters acknowledge a new phase in world history, one that would hopefully not repeat the mistakes of older nations. The counterpoint to this cautious optimism is expressed in the character Antonio’s declaration that the “past is prologue.” Antonio’s comments are deliberately ambiguous. However, he seems to be expressing a cautionary note that a new nation may be free of the burdens of history, but it could also be at great risk because it has fewer historical touchstones to steer it into the future.

As America developed its own culture and history, our writers often addressed how Americans should view the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the prophet of newness and father of American literature, encouraged his fellow citizens and artists to reject the past and build new artistic forms to express the American experience. His views were shaped by the spirit of 19th-century manifest destiny as the nation spread rapidly into the western territories. Later in his life, Emerson tempered his views and was more open to the idea that even a new country needed to understand the historical past that created it.

Other writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne had an even stronger view of the need to learn the lessons of history. In "The Custom House," which is the preface to The Scarlet Letter, he described what he claimed were Hester Prynne’s story and other relics he found in a second-story room. He reminds readers that these many memories of earlier generations are invaluable to understanding the past. He writes that “the past was not dead . . . and the brick-work and naked rafters have never been covered with paneling and plaster.” The room immediately becomes the symbol of a past that cannot be completed until it is fully understood by future historians and others. For Hawthorne, the past yields valuable lessons that must not be ignored less its more turbulent eras repeat themselves.

Herman Melville, author and a contemporary of Hawthorne, went even further and warned future Americans that they ignored the past at their own risk. His novel Moby Dick can be seen as a commentary on patterns that repeat themselves throughout history. This is especially true as they pertain to authoritarian characters like Captain Ahab.

Ahab, the wickedest king in Israel’s history, returns in the form of a megalomaniacal captain of a whaling vessel who puts his crew at great risk during his attempt to kill a white whale. Elijah, another biblical figure, warns the crew of the danger Ahab poses to the ship. And Ishmael, also based on a biblical figure, gradually realizes the events that lead to the destruction of the Pequod have played out before in earlier human history. Had the crew recognized the patterns of the Ahabs from earlier historical eras, they might have saved their ship, which symbolizes America itself. However, those historical patterns were ignored, and all except Ishmael perish due to Ahab’s madness.

Mark Twain, still one of the most quoted figures in America, articulated something very similar. He wrote, “The past doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Twain certainly understood that slavery and the political corruption that supported it were an essential part of America’s history. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a reminder that slavery should never be whitewashed to obfuscate the horrors earlier civilizations had foisted on entire races of people. For Twain, the fact that history “rhymes” but is often ignored for the truths it contains may be an even stronger indictment of entire nations that choose to remain willfully ignorant of past crimes against their own people.

Career Essential Reads

Why Should You Provide a Good Experience to Job Candidates?

A Surgeon Puts Down the Scalpel

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, articulates his own concerns about a nation that is unable to learn from its history. Most of the characters in the novel prefer to retreat into a highly romanticized, mythologized past, rather than address the real historical past and its relationship to the corrupt decade of the 1920s. Nick Carraway, the narrator, concludes that many Americans “beat on, boats against the current,” unable to develop a more mature view of life. In Nick’s final parting comments, he is passing judgment on the characters he met during his summer of depravity on East Egg. However, he is also issuing a warning to the American people that a nation unable to accept the realities of its history will remain forever in a state of perpetual adolescence and immaturity.

Sometimes, as we watch historical patterns reemerge and be dismissed in the modern world, it feels like we are being encouraged to think, as Noble suggested, that “history is something that happened last week.” Will a deeper knowledge of history enable us to avoid every obstacle we confront? Probably not. However, ignorance of history is certain to result in self-destructive patterns of behavior in the present and the future.

Knowledge of the real past, not the past created by those who benefit from the history they have created, is absolutely essential to building a more productive future.