Some among us are old enough to remember walking to “the old fishin’ hole,” carrying what amounted to little more than a stick and a piece of string. Many of us can remember the days of our childhood when we spent most of our time outside, running, jumping, and playing games we often made up on the spot to suit ourselves.
I remember taking day trips with my parents, and rolling around in the far back of the station wagon in the days before seat belts were mandatory or even common. I remember watching Ed Sullivan and Jackie Gleason on a black-and-white television that we carried out to our small breezeway when the nights were warm. I remember dreaming of one day growing up to become a wealthy pioneer in the wide open spaces of the untamed West, just like the Cartwrights on their Ponderosa Ranch, even though that world was already 100 years in the past.
Nostalgia is a powerful force. We all feel some kind of sentimental longing or wistful affection for things from the past, whether something with happy personal associations, like those warm nights spent on the breezeway of my old family home, or some vision of the past we’ve acquired from others, as I did watching old episodes of Bonanza and Gunsmoke.
Matt Dillon’s version of Dodge City and Ben Cartwright’s Ponderosa were fictions, of course, but the dozens of television Westerns that dominated the airwaves in the years following World War II represented a dream of a simpler time, and helped America to define itself as a nation in the wake of its sudden rise to international prominence. The heroes of these Westerns never failed to stand up for honesty and integrity, hard work and determination, tolerance, and equal justice under the law – the set of core values we have come to refer to as “The American Way.”
American nostalgia comes in many flavors. Instead of a sleepy town in the Old West with a sidewalk of rough boards lining a sun-baked dirt street, imagine a small town in the Northeast in 1900, where everyone knows one other and can walk almost anywhere they need to go. In the center of town is a bandstand draped with red, white, and blue bunting. A barbershop quartet performs while townsfolk placidly stroll arm in arm, enjoying the cool evening air. Can you see it in your mind’s eye?
Or imagine twenty-five years earlier, family members gathered around a Midwest hearth while a snowstorm howls outside. Ma is cooking the turkey that Uncle Clay shot just that morning with the shotgun that now leans against the sod wall, and the eldest daughter plays songs that everyone knows on the out of tune piano the family brought with them on a wagon all the way from Maryland. Can you hear the snow pattering against the door?
Or picture a large house deep in the antebellum South, its facade adorned with thick columns, surrounded by a broad green lawn and several ancient oak trees dripping Spanish moss. The lady of the house sits in the shade of the largest oak, sipping a refreshing mint julep while rosy-cheeked children play happily nearby. A canopied horse-drawn buggy clatters into view, and a light breeze wafts the scent of magnolia over the scene. Can you see the dust rising from the buggy wheels?
It’s easy for us to visualize these idyllic scenarios, even without ever having experienced them ourselves. Their descriptions have been passed down to us in story, song, and image by our forebears, for some of whom they were reality.
The descriptions are incomplete, of course. That’s the nature of nostalgia; we treasure the good and discard the bad, like separating wheat from chaff. The reality of what we and our ancestors experienced in the past had negative aspects as well. As a trivial example, the picture quality on that television in our breezeway was quite poor, and just arranging the antenna to get a strong enough signal was always a struggle. More seriously, many lives were lost in the years before seat belts that would have been saved by their use, life on the streets of frontier towns in the Old West was harsh and dangerous, and ranches like the fictional Ponderosa spanned hundreds of thousands of acres of land that once had been home to native tribes.
The three nostalgic historical scenarios I’ve outlined above have their dark sides as well. Many in 1900 lived in fear of tuberculosis and influenza; together those illnesses took more lives per capita than both cancer and heart disease do today. In 1875, the largest locust swarm in recorded history (1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, equal to the area of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware combined) swept across the Great Plains, driving settlers from their sod houses. The mint julep being sipped in the shade by a Southern belle was prepared by a house slave, while elsewhere on the estate dozens more slaves, born into bondage as the children and grandchildren of kidnapped Africans, toiled all day in the fields without rest or water under the blazing sun and the overseer’s whip.
The nostalgic images we choose to cherish hold symbolic meaning for us and represent our aspirations. In them we can envision ourselves as the wisest and best versions of ourselves. We take pride in standing up for what’s right and just, like the principled heroes of old TV Westerns; we do not murder one another in the street over imagined slights like the outlaws of the Old West. We seek out a sense of community such as what we imagine existed in small-town 1900; we do not seek to spread a shadow of sickness and fear over our communities. We manage to pry our eyes away from our electronic devices and spend some family time together while at home on a snowy day; we do not swarm together like locusts to sweep others from the land. We daydream about spending some quiet leisure time in the shade, far from the daily grind of work; we do not proudly shout slogans and display symbols representing the dehumanization, demonization, disenfranchisement, or extinction of entire races and creeds.
We must find in ourselves the capacity and willingness, as Americans – truly, as human beings – to recognize and venerate the noble and nourishing wheat found in our history and heritage, separating and distinguishing that from the dishonorable and shameful chaff also found there. While we may justifiably live in hope of reclaiming or retaining the best aspects of our past, we must always refuse to allow any perpetuation of its worst.
