We can study the past but about the present there are times when we can only state our hope and our faith.
- John Dos Passos, “The Use of the Past” in The Ground We Stand On (1941)
I didn’t watch the inauguration of our 47th president today, nor have I been online at all except to share my brief thoughts on a fabulous book that advocates for the broader use of oral history by architectural historians from a fourth wave feminist perspective. (Neither here nor there here, but it’s called Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research edited by Jannina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, and Deborah van der Plaat and everyone should buy and read it right away). That should give you an idea about where I land on the political spectrum, but perhaps I can elaborate a little bit more.
I was raised Southern California Republican but have never really voted that way. I was briefly registered as an Independent while taking a couple years off of college to “find myself,” but never really voted that way either. I am currently a registered Democrat because it feels like I have to pick one, but I often don’t strictly vote the way a party faithful would appreciate. I can’t say with confidence what I am politically, but I can say with complete confidence that I am, through and through, an American—one who has studied American history and who still reads widely about how Americans feel about being American. I like learning about the past, it gives me context for the present and helps me feel less alone. This form of civic religion has helped me find meaning in…well…just about everything I encounter, but especially in times of transition as inauguration days always are in the best of times and in the worst of times.
So, I hit the books today. One of my new year’s resolutions, aside from miraculously becoming a gym person, is to read more widely and more deeply and to write about it. This is Joan Didion’s fault, as you would imagine if you ever met me and especially if you saw my mother. In a 1976 essay titled “Why I Write” originally published in the New York Times Book Review, she said “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” I, too, figure out what I’m thinking by writing, generally after reading and having longwinded discussions with myself in the shower. I finished out 2024 by finishing an epic look at how we think of ourselves as Americans by Michael Kammen called Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. The book’s title comes from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, which included the following excerpt:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.
I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angles of our nature.
Words to hold onto on this, an official holiday to remember the life and sacrifice of Martin Luther King, Jr. which is also the same day we inaugurated our 47th president who was also our 45th president. Lincoln might be the president everyone can get behind, unless you’re still a fervent believer in The Lost Cause and I do believe there are some holdouts down there in ye olde South. My personal favorite is Teddy Roosevelt, although he’s certainly not without his problems, but that’s probably best left for a future post. In any event…
I spent the last day of the 2024 fully enrapt by Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour translated by Emilie Moorhouse. Mansour described poetry as “a scream,” and that is exactly the kind of energy I find useful now, in a new year with new horizons and this shifting terrain. I began 2025 with Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, which undid me in so many ways and reenergized me, encouraged me to keep looking for connecting threads between unlikely things and weaving them together in ways that find relevance in the present. Reading the work of these women has been incredibly fortifying. There are other people out there who are not like me but are just like me. Onward.
In my active reading pile, I’m working through Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders edited by David B. Allison, which is a little repetitive but has some great takeaways, and Vandover and the Brute by Frank Norris, a fictionalized romp through 1890s San Francisco that does not turn out well; a couple of work reads. Where I go next is still up in the air. Maybe Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz, a Christmas gift from my husband (who has been absolutely on fire in terms of gifting books that change my life) or The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking by Hanneke Grootenboer. I picked up the Grootenboer book from City Lights Bookstore during a staycation day where we wandered around North Beach without agenda. It was the same day I also brought home Kammen and Mansour, a day that will live in infamy, if you will.
While I wait for the next book to pick me, because isn’t that the way it always happens? You buy them, you stash them on a shelf for days, months, sometimes years, and then these books, they find you whenever you’re meant to read them. Anyway, while I wait for the next one to reach out and grab me, I picked up a very old John Dos Passos that came home with me on one of my many Friends of the San Francisco Public Library hauls. In 1941, as American thinkers grappled with the failures of World War I and the legacies of our Founding Fathers in the same year that the United States finally formally entered World War II, John Dos Passos began his book The Ground We Stand On with an essay titled “The Use of the Past.” While this book has an “I drank the koolaid” tinge to it and is overtly chauvinistic (to use a word adored by Kammen), as many patriotic midcentury excursions into Jeffersonian democratic legacies do, I found parts of the introductory essay so very relevant to today. Charming, is it not, since it sought to explain how the 1770s could help his readers understand the 1940s? Here are some extended excerpts that resonated with me today, the day we inaugurated our next president.
EVERY generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from ourselves, their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it.
In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. This is why, in times like ours, when old institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.
In spite of the ritual invocation of the names of the Founding Fathers round election time, Americans as a people notably lack a sense of history…We have wasted and exploited our political heritage with the same childish lack of foresight that has wrecked our forests and eroded our farmlands and ruined the grazing on the great plains. Now that we are caught up short at the edge of the precipice, face to face with the crowded servitude from which our fathers fled to a new world, the question is how much is left; how much of their past achievement is still part of our lives? It is not a question of what we want; it is a question of what is. Our history, the successes and failures of the men who went before us, is only alive in so far as some seeds and shoots of it are still stirring and growing in us today.
The Americans of our time who have put their minds to work in this direction have come late, on the whole, to understanding the actuality of the American past. They had to get a lot of callow debunking off their chests first. Right from the beginning the line of American thinking has been twisted off the straight course by periods of backsliding…
…Election time and the Fourth of July they saw the old bunting brought out and tacked on the political booths the politicians operated with the open and cynical geniality of gamblers getting their shell-games and three-card tricks ready for the yokels at a country fair. It was inevitable that the first impulse of any fresh young intelligence was to throw the whole business overboard lock stock and barrel.
…
While we can’t get away from the fact that most everybody in the world today believes in his heart that life is more worth living for the average man in North America than anywhere else, we still don’t feel secure. Indeed we feel we lack that minimum of security necessary to keep a human institution a going concern. Too many Americans have let in among their basic and secret beliefs the sour postulate that American democracy is rotten. In spite of the ritual phases and the campaign slogans out of our national folklore, like the frogs in Aesop’s fable, many of us are croaking that we are sick of King Log and that we want to be ruled by King Stork…It won’t matter what name we call King Stork by, if we let him in he’ll eat us up just the same. Under the verbal pieties of democratic phraseology the state of. Mind of a good deal of the country is summed up by a man I heard cap a long irate political argument by shouting: ‘This man Roosevelt’s got too much power; what we need’s a dictator.’
How are these doubts answered? I myself believe that we are going to stick to our old King Log, that our peculiar institutions have a future, and that this country is getting to be a better place for men to live in instead of worse; but unfortunately just putting the statement down on paper does not make it true….How are going to reassure the great mob of secret subjects of King Stork? Are we sure that King Log isn’t as rotten as they say?
The answer is not in speeches or in popular songs, but in the nature of our political habits….[Americans] are heirs to the largest heritage of the habits and traditions and skills of selfgovernment [sic] there has ever been in the world. Politics is our whole history. If we fail to cope with the problem of adjusting the industrial machine to human needs it won’t be for lack of the political tradition.
By politics I mean simply the art of inducing people to behave in groups with a minimum of force and bloodshed. That was the purpose of the tribal traditions on which our Common Law is based: the patching up of private and public rows without violence by the opinion of a jury or the county of heads at a meeting.
Under the stresses of the last years we have seen nation after nation sink to its lowest common denominator…The question we have to face is: What is the content of our lowest common denominator?
If, in the bedrock habits of Americans, the selfgoverning tradition is dead or has been too much diluted by the demands of the industrial setup or the diverse habits of the stream of newcomers…, no amount of speechifying of politicians or of breastbeating by men of letters will bring it back to life…
What we can do is give that cantilever bridge into the future that we call hope a firm foundation in wehat has been. We can, without adding to the cloudy masses of unattached verbiage that makes any present moment in political life so difficult to see clear in, at least point out that, so far in our history, the habits of selfgovernment and the use of the art of politics towards increasing rather than decreasing the stature of each individual man, have survived.
Often its been nip and tuck. Our history has been a contest between the selfgoverning habits of the mass and various special groups that have sought to dominate it for their own purposes. So long as that contest continues the nation will remain a growing organism.
On the whole the struggle has been carried on thus far without destroying the fabric of society. In any cross section of our history you can find the political instinct running a binding thread through the welter of interests, inertias, impulses, greeds, fears, and heroisms that make up any event…
When we wake up in the night cold and sweating with nightmare fear for the future of our country we can settle back with the reassuring thought that…It is fairly easy to demonstrate that uncontrolled government of monopolized industry by irresponsible men is headed for ruin, and that that ruin might carry a good deal of the social fabric down with it; but it doesn’t follow that the selfgoverning republic, as a method of enabling people to live together in groups without conking each other on the head every minute, would necessarily go by the board too.
If all the monopolies folded up over night, or if their bosses converged on Washington and seized the government…the next morning we sould still face the problem of politics. Would the men who held power want to induce the others to behave in groups with a minimum rather than a maximum expenditure of force? At the minimum end of the scale would still be selfgovernment and the need to argue, cajole, and bribe their fellowcitizens into doing what they wanted them to…
…the continuance of selfgovernment will always depend on how much the people who exercise that liberty will be willing to sacrifice to retain it. A man in power will push his subjects around just as much as they’ll let him. But even in a riot the members of the mob and the members of the police force will behave as they have been brought up to behave.
We must never forget that men don’t make up much of their own behavior: they behave within limits laid down by their upbringing and group background. That is why individual men feel so helpless in the face of social changes. Modifications in the structure of any organization of men can’t ever really take effect till the next generation. A revolution can keep people from behaving in the old way but it can’t make them behave effectively in the new way. That is why a political system elastic enough to allow drastic changes inside of its fabric is one of the greatest boons any people can possess. Our occasionally selfgoverning republic has proved itself capable of bending without breaking under the terrific strains of the last ten years. The question is whether there is enough will to freedom in the country to make it keep on working. Social machinery, no matter how traditional, left to itself runs down; men have to work it.
Our history is full of answers to the question: How shall we make selfgovernment work? People like ourselves have been making it work with more or less success for centuries. And history is only dead when people think of the present in terms of the past instead of the other way around. The minute we get the idea that the records can be of use to us now, they become alive. They become the basis of a worldpicture into which we can fit our present lives, however painful they may be, and our hopes for the future…
…
In spite of the immense increase in complexity of organization, our problem is not so very different now: again in order to survive in a warring and hostile world we have to induce the weak and the powerful of all sections of our population to drop prejudices and bigotries and to pool their efforts in the common cause…In some ways the problem is more difficult, in some ways easier. What we must have in order to tackle it is…besides the selfgoverning habit: the will.
But will and energy cannot be directed without an aim…
…Our time has in common with theirs the many revolt that is behind the labor movement, the fanaticism of the Marxist and nationalist cults and the sullen hatred that people of property and privilege, who fear that everything they own is slipping out from under their feet, feel towards people without property…We too have seen men and women dying for righteousness’ sake. As they did, we live in a time of danger when life is cheap. Then as now a man who writes has to weigh his words. They had to train themselves not to be afraid of the scaffold and the brandingiron…The men of those times lived through and brought through with them the bundle of notions that is the culture of the western world; what has been done once can be done again.
…
The side they fought and worked and lived for hasn’t won by a long shot. Perhaps it never can win. But to let the other side win we know means death. It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general with their vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium. Sometimes one scale is up and sometimes another. Sometimes the conflict is acute and at other times barely visible under the prosperous surface of eras of good feeling. Now that we feel that the struggle is harp and violent, waged in the difficult and unfamiliar terrain of a new system of production, when we rack our brains for hope and understanding for the future, it does us good, I think, to remind ourselves that in spite of hell and high water men in the past managed to live for and to establish some few liberties.
These are just the bits that jumped out at me and, while I have thoughts about them all, I think I’ll just let them speak for themselves.
One thing I will say, however, is that I kept pushing aside a mental image of Tim Gunn from Project Runway saying “Make it work!” the entire time I read this essay. (I sincerely hope someone is using the internet to sell us “Americans, making it work since 1776” bumper stickers. If not, I hereby grant the three people reading this post permission to make these and sell them on Etsy just…please…send me one if you do.) The thing about living in a Democracy is that we always get what we deserve, even if our individual votes don’t seem to count, because we the people elect a president as a single body. It’s a flawed system—always has been, always will be—but, when it works, the freedom inherent in this system is a thing of beauty. I think John Dos Passos is asking us to have the courage to be hopeful when it isn’t working properly, or the way we want it to, and is encouraging us to stay vigilant, to do the work that will see this gamble of selfgovernance through to the next hand. And if we can survive the Civil War as a country, theoretically, the country can survive this uniquely violent era in American history, as well. Right?
This is not a thoroughly researched essay on the subject of American governance. Hell, it’s not even one I spent more than a few hours on today, on this day that is inaguration day but is also a holiday that celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m just writing to work through how I feel about things because Joan Didion gave me permission to, and because I’m trying to write more and share what I’m reading. So, you know, how do we appeal to the better angels of our nature in the modern era, how do we find the things we have in common as a country? I think…stay with me here…comedians might show us the way. Over the holidays, my husband and I watched CNN’s History of the Sitcom, which highlighted how the genre tackled heavy subjects that were polarizing the country like women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights. If you can make people laugh, you allow them to relax, and when people relax, they can listen better and hopefully better understand something that is challenging for them. Comedy is the valve that releases the pressure.
In this spirit, I want to share Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue that just aired on Saturday, January 18th. It’s 17 minutes long but I hope you’ll stick through the LA wildfire and Puffy jokes to hear him share a story about meeting former President Jimmy Carter in the Middle East, and end with a heartfelt plea to us as Americans. It made me, a woman who has read widely about what it means to be an American, cry. I hope it resonates with you too.
Nostos Algos 