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But the danger of these richly diverse but fragmented approaches to American history is that they degenerate into in coherence; historians thus are reproducing, with an eerie precision, the pattern of their own society. Just as the U.S. has grown balkanized, turned into a landscape of single-interest constituencies and conflicting tribes, so historians now seem to offer a scattered vision of America, full of fascinating minutiae and human detail, but lacking leadership, direction, plan or vision. "Surely," says Carl Degler, "the American people are more than a collection of diverse nationalities, classes and genders living between Canada and Mexico. We are right to have tossed aside the Wasp-centered idea of history, but we haven't created yet a new, equally holistic conception of history to replace it."
Last year, in America Revised, a study of American history school textbooks since 1833, Frances FitzGerald found that textbook publishers, eye on the profits, have learned to package a bland and pietistically harmless kind of book that dutifully records the point of view of every minority that raises its hand, or voice, but gives no coherent idea of American theme or direction. Says Pittsburgh's Hays: "We haven't had a new synthesis of American history since Charles and Mary Beard. Instead, we have had people going off in all these little directions and knowing more and more about less and less. To have somebody come along and put it all together is a rare thing."
The key to a coherent understanding of Americans may lie in knowing that from the beginning they have kept two sets of books: their history and their myth. The two have always intertwined, of course, but they differ radically in purpose and content. The myth has always been the engine of the future, a bright and energetic contraption that owed its efficiency to both American know-how and the hand of God. Except in its occasional celebrations of heroic legends, myth does not gaze backward; it is prospective, not retrospective. Being a creation of the Enlightenment, it is even inclined to be contemptuous of history. As Descartes said, historians are people who spend a lifetime attempting to discover facts about Roman life that any illiterate serving girl in Cicero's time knew well. History was dank with error, irrationality and the poisonous influences of Europe. The New World began afresh. The vast continent of America seemed an immense, wild Eden to be mastered.
The possibilities of such a massive gift of God seemed endless. In his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the country having "room enough for our descendants to the 100th and 1,000th generation." In 1839 the Democratic Review proclaimed with apostolic expansiveness: "Our national birth was the beginning of a new history. . .which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only." Americans have always carried their highly idealized beginning with them like a marmoreal totem. They invented themselves. That invention became their legitimizing idea, the germ of their justification.