Those who deplored nostalgia attributed its appeal to a crisis of nerve, an inability to face up to the realities of modern life. In 1948, Richard Hofstadter introduced his American Political Tradition—a book that left a deep imprint on postwar political and cultural debate—with a diatribe against Americans' escapist absorption in the past:

Since Americans have recently found it more comfortable to see where they have been than to think of where they are going, their state of mind has become increasingly passive and spectatorial. Historical novels, fictionalized biographies, collections of pictures and cartoons, books on American regions and rivers, have poured forth to satisfy a ravenous appetite for Americana. This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis. An awareness of history is always a part of any culturally alert national life; but I believe that what underlies the overpowering nostalgia of the last fifteen years is a keen feeling of insecurity. The two world wars, unstable booms, and the abysmal depression of our time have profoundly shaken national confidence in the future.... If the future seems dark, the past by contrast looks rosier than ever; but it is used far less to locate and guide the present than to give reassurance.

Hofstadter had good reason to complain of the "ravenous appetite for Americana." A more discriminating appraisal of the cultural preoccupations of the thirties and early forties, however, might have distinguished between the sentimental Americanism of the Popular Front, say, and the introspective mood of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; between Margaret Mitchell's sentimentalized version of the old South and the more critical appreciation by Allen Tate; between the celebration of nineteenth-century literary history in the later writings of Van Wyck Brooks and the more astringent but still respectful treatment of the subject by Mumford, Waldo Frank, and F. O. Matthiessen; between the cloying treatment of regional themes by Carl Sandburg and their more probing treatment by Robert Frost; between the lifeless restorations at Williamsburg and the indigenous architectural style developed by Frank Lloyd Wright or Bernard Maybeck; between Appalachian Spring and Okla

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