all along. But if nostalgia reflected the decline of progressive ideology, why had it flourished when the belief in progress was at its height? If it reflected a widespread resistance to change, why had Americans always welcomed and celebrated change? The incoherence of Dudden's position suggests that the critique of nostalgia, like nostalgia itself, served unavowed emotional needs. Beneath the structure of formal argument, here as in The American Political Tradition, we can reconstruct the following chain of associations. Americans in the middle of the twentieth century have taken refuge in nostalgia because they have lost faith in the future. But since closer examination shows that Americans have always pined for a lost golden age, we can dismiss fears about the future as an expression of "romantic pessimism," as Dudden called it. We do not have to consider the case for "pessimism" on its merits. While the future is uncertain today, it has always been uncertain. Without reviving the dogma of progress in its utopian form, we can assume that Americans will continue to manage as they have managed in the past, leaving the dead to bury the dead and the future to take care of itself.

Those who believed that hope always has to rest on the prospect of social improvement thus managed to salvage the appearance if not the substance of hope by deploring the nostalgic habit that allegedly made so many Americans afraid to face the future. By the early sixties, denunciation of nostalgia had become a ritual, performed, like all rituals, with a minimum of critical reflection. A collection of essays published by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1963, The Politics of Hope, contained an attack on conservatism (originally published in 1955) bearing the predictable title "The Politics of Nostalgia." In his 1965 study, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter referred repeatedly to the "nostalgia" of the American right and of the populist tradition from which it supposedly derived. But these skirmishes provided only a foretaste of the more comprehensive campaign that followed.

The "nostalgia wave of the seventies," so called, released an outpouring of analysis, documentation, and denunciation. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Saturday Review, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, and the New Yorker all published reports on the "great nostalgia kick." "How much nostalgia can America take?" asked Time in I97I. The British journalist Michael Wood, citing the revival of the popular music of the fifties, the commercial appeal of movies about World War II, and the saturation of the airwaves with historical dramas—"Upstairs,

-116-