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Reviewing the Bicentennial
by Christopher Zinn
| AS THE COMMEMORATION of the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition draws to a close, we have an opportunity to examine the legacy of the Bicentennial with the same curiosity with which we consider the legacy of the Expedition itself. What has the Bicentennial contributed to our community? What have Lewis and Clark brought to us this time? |
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A look on the shelves of our local bookstores and libraries could lead us to conclude that one purpose of the Bicentennial must have been to foster and organize a collective research project into an important, insufficiently understood period of American history. Many scholars and cultural and educational institutions have contributed new knowledge about Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, their expedition, and its historical and cultural meaning. There is Gary Moulton's authoritative edition of the Journals, Steven Dow Beckham's exhaustive essays about the written materials relating to the Expedition, and an array of books and articles reflecting a vast range of topics and interpretive approaches—including titles as different as Thomas Slaughter's weirdly penetrating Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness and Clay Jenkinson's meticulous A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota, 1804–1806. |
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William Clark
Woodcut by Jim Todd, Missoula, Montana. Used by permission of the artist
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Publications by scholars in our own region, such as William L. Lang and Carl Abbott's Two Centuries of Lewis And Clark: Reflections on the Voyage of Discovery and Mark Spence and Kris Fresonke's Lewis & Clark Legacies, Memories, and New Perspectives, along with special editions of journals such as the Oregon Historical Quarterly and Oregon Humanities have proposed new ways of thinking about the relevance of the Expedition to the development of the Northwest. Scholars have also participated in outstanding public programs, such as the series of annual symposia at Lewis & Clark College, designed to bring people together for a sustained, critical examination of topics relating to the Expedition and its Bicentennial. |
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Two public exhibitions were impressive works of scholarship in their own right. Lewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition gathered together most of the significant artifacts from the Expedition as well as other historical materials and presented them in a way that invited people to explore the different perspectives of the Exhibition's protagonists including President Thomas Jefferson, the members of the Corps of Discovery, and the native peoples who met them along the way. The exhibit opened in St. Louis in 2004 and traveled to four other museums, including the Oregon Historical Society, providing one of the signature Bicentennial events for our region. In a feat of scholarship and organization, Lewis & Clark College developed an exhibit on The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which traveled to more than a dozen libraries around the country. Superbly curated by historian Steven Dow Beckham, the exhibition included items from Lewis and Clark's traveling library and early editions of the Journals, and it traveled to more than a dozen libraries around the country. |
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It is also striking how extensively scholars brought issues and concerns developed in other research settings to their work on the Expedition. By introducing issues of ethnicity, race, and gender, Native American history and culture, historical geography, and emerging notions of Northwest or Plains history, these scholars refreshed and enriched our understanding of the Expedition, and they raised questions about how to organize the public observance of the Bicentennial. While contributing to a public conversation about the meaning of the Expedition and the Bicentennial, they also advanced a new area of interdisciplinary research in a relatively short period of time. Their work implied, though, that there was no simple or single path "back" to Lewis and Clark. They maintained that any real understanding of the Expedition required a critical awareness of the complexity of the past and its difference from our own time; a recognition that the received and prevailing story needed critique, supplementing, and enlargement to be aligned with contemporary methods and knowledge; and a willingness to closely scrutinize artifacts and writings (such as the Journals). And even if these principles were derived from the scholars' own professional training and practice, their insights often seemed compelling and relevant. Historian Mark Spence, for instance, questioned whether it was possible for contemporary enthusiasts to actually "relive" the experiences of the explorers, and he suggested that their zeal for plein-air history had more to do with the technology of modern outdoor recreation than with the woodland craft of eighteenth-century explorers. |
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Popular sentiments persisted in the face of such academic skepticism. As Bill Lang has pointed out, by identifying physical courage and leadership as essential elements, Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage transformed the Expedition into yet another "greatest generation" saga, one destined to be popular with a society still yearning for morally simpler, if no less eventful times. No matter how often scholars exposed the limitations of this approach, the popularity of this story remained essentially intact. |
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Perhaps it should have been no surprise, then, when one of the teachers in a weeklong workshop I was conducting showed up on the final day in full historical costume. Our program for the week — sponsored by the Oregon Council for the Humanities and the Graduate School at Lewis & Clark College — emphasized a series of critical issues around the interpretation of the Expedition, with special focus on reading and analyzing the Journals. At week's end, this teacher, having put up with our intellectualized promptings for several days, declared where he really stood on the matter of how best to interpret Lewis and Clark. The institute co-director turned to me and whispered, "We have failed—failed utterly!" But both of us should have recognized that we were also, in a manner of speaking, outfitted in period costume. After all, insofar as we had approached the Expedition and its aftermath as an intellectual enterprise — an Enlightenment project — we were simply choosing to follow the example of Jefferson himself. |
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This divergence between scholarly and popular interests in Lewis and Clark did not diminish the positive impact of the Bicentennial, at least according to the assessment offered by the public agency responsible for planning the Bicentennial in our region—the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Organization (LCBO). The LCBO's final report on the Bicentennial is well worth study. For one thing, it expresses how seriously the planners took their responsibility to lead, organize and fund a public commemoration, one that would draw public attention away from routine distractions and toward a momentous regional anniversary. In its tone and message, it pays tribute to the interest, energy, and goodwill that people from various communities brought to the Bicentennial commemoration, and it recognizes the relevance of historical and cultural considerations to the public observance of this anniversary. In their introductory letter, Governor Ted Kulongoski and LCBO Executive Director Barbara Allen commend the "thousands of interested individuals and organizations" who implemented and participated in programs that "highlight not only the historic aspects of the Corps of Discovery's journey, but also the Native American cultures they encountered along their route ... and their impact on our life today." The report celebrates the work of volunteers along the trail who promoted public events "to engage Oregonians and visitors about this important piece of our history." Above all, the report commends the participation of ordinary citizens: "Tens of thousands took tours to museums, read a book, paddled a section of the Columbia, and attended a symposium or a concert or a play that enlightened us about the tribes, the Corps, and what occurred as a result of their exploration." |
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The LCBO report recognizes three distinct legacies of the Bicentennial. First, it notes that the engagement of the "trail tribes" in planning and conducting the commemoration was a historic step forward, especially when compared with the Christopher Columbus quincentenary. Second, it salutes the rebuilding of the Lewis and Clark Trail, including the addition of interpretive signs and markers, as a lasting benefit for visitors and residents of the region. Third, in perhaps its most revealing claim, the report states that the "exhibitions, plays, musicals, hands-on projects, symposia, lectures, and interpretive literature of both the Corps and the tribes they encountered have forever enhanced the nation's understanding of every aspect of the expedition and its impact on our culture." |
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This last conclusion makes the important claim that scholars and academics were not the only ones who hoped to change the way we understand the Expedition. The planners of the commemoration clearly aimed to create new forms and patterns of public memory that would last "forever." Public memory, they seem to be saying, is not created in the archive or the study; it is made from the involvement and experience of people engaged in commemorative activities. But how successful can these efforts be? Bruce Cole, the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has criticized the nation's current propensity toward "historical amnesia." Yet, the obstacles to creating public memory in the United States are as long-standing as the nation itself. |
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In 1838, Abraham Lincoln spoke to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, about "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions." Lincoln was worried that the memory of the American Revolution was fading from people's minds: "The scenes of the revolution are [not] now [nor] ever will be entirely forgotten; but . . . like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time." The reason, Lincoln deduced, was that public memory depended on personal experience:
At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family — a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related — a history, too, that could be read alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever.
Lincoln's solution to this post-Revolutionary conundrum was to substitute another process for those irreplaceable experiences:
They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendents, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason ... must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and its laws.... Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis....
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For Lincoln, cultural memory was essential to the republic, but if it was to last and be effective it had to be created intentionally through the processes of Reason rather than simply absorbed as a result of circumstances. As we leave the Bicentennial, we should consider whether Lincoln was right to think that only through Reason's efforts can the memory of distant but significant national events be crated and preserved. We should ask ourselves whether the public exercise of Reason in our planning for the Bicentennial has been sufficient to revise and create cultural memory and whether our efforts to commemorate Lewis and Clark aptly display our "general intelligence" (to say nothing of our "sound morality"). And we should consider whether Lincoln was right to think that only through Reason's efforts can the memory of distant but significant national events be created and preserved.
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| AFTER REVIEWING the positive LCBO report, after recognizing the ways in which public scholars engaged with the Bicentennial, the possibility is real that the Expedition and all we have collectively thought about it will fade away, enduring perhaps in the marks on the landscape — the raised profile of native peoples and communities, and the familiarity with the iconography of the peace medal and the air rifle — but otherwise drained from public consciousness and memory. Should we regard this as yet another sign of the enduring disconnect between public culture and the work of the humanities scholars and thinkers? Should we regard it as an eerie echo of the Expedition's descent into irrelevance following its successful completion? As scholars and educators, we have to remain curious and open-minded about what can and should be accomplished in the public sphere. Perhaps the lesson we can take from the Bicentennial is that we are still learning what public knowledge and imagination really are. "What thou lovest well remains," Ezra Pound wrote in The Pisan Cantos. "What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage." Maybe the first step toward assisting the development of public memory is to think more about what it is that people love. We need to keep this in mind as we evaluate our public commemorations and prepare for the next round of anniversaries. |
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