Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock

Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. By John Seelye. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xv, 699. Illustrations. $39.95.) Forefathers' Day is a holiday no longer observed by the vast numbers of individuals calling themselves Americans. For a good portion of New England's years of hegemony in national political culture, however, the annual observation of the much-disputed landing at Plymouth Rock attracted erudite orators-ministers, statesmen, writers, and historians-whose task of the day was to interpret the Pilgrims' errand to those gathered in this Cape Cod town. These yearly orations-some two centuries' worth-form the chief body of evidence collected and analyzed by author John Seelye, whose eloquently wrought Memory's Nation provides ample-even daunting-evidence that he be considered the latest celebrant of Forefathers' Day. Seelye's task is to interpret those orations, amongst other visual, material, and textual evidence, to reveal the historical meanings of the Rock. This Seelye does, in exhaustive detail. Memory's Nation is a weighty tome, and those readers expecting the publisher's standard of 350 pages with abbreviated notes, select bibliography, and scanty index will be surprised, even dismayed. More is the pity. Gentle reader, where is your courage? Seelye provides an occasion for the reader to share-indeed, indulge-in the type of investigation, rumination, and curiosity-sating that all scholars desire. Seelye's is a meticulous and subtly witty style. Once the reader surrenders to the pleasure of reading the author's divagation into personalities, literary criticism, and other seemingly incidental and accidental asides, Plymouth Rock becomes less a symbol or myth and more a touchstone by which to chart the ambiguities and the authenticity of politics and patriotism, evidence and anecdote, history and memory. Memory's nation is New England, and Memory's Nation chronologically charts the fate of the region from its early, liberty-seeking political and moral hegemony in defining first revolutionary and then national culture to its conservative denouement in the early twentieth century. By 1769, Plymouth inhabitants had created an Old Colony Club through which improvement and ancestor worship could be achieved. Meeting annually on the (erroneous, it turns out) anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing, club members ate a meal that supposedly reenacted the plain foodways of the Forefathers and toasted ancestors and contemporaries. Quickly, members settled into a yearly ritual that added a military parade followed by an address celebrating the ideals and suffering of the small band. Just as quickly, the Old Colony Club disbanded; by 1773, the majority of members were Loyalists, and the few Patriots amongst them left. The next year, with Lexington and Concord already in memory, Forefathers' Day became an exercise in patriotism. Although Benedict Anderson, in his oft-invoked Imagined Communities (rev. ed., 1991), asserts, "the Declaration of Independence in 1776 makes absolutely no reference to Christopher Columbus, Roanoke, or the Pilgrim Fathers, nor are the grounds put forward to justify independence in any way `historical,' in the sense of highlighting the antiquity of the American people" (193), Seelye implies that the significance of New England need not have been stated. The Patriots' genealogy of liberty already had been established through rituals such as those at Plymouth. The majority of the book's twenty-five chapters are dedicated to antebellum political and religious leaders, writers, and reformers who took Plymouth Rock as a symbol of their various causes. …