Of course, nationalism has really outlived its usefulness in a country as world oriented as ours, and its continued existence reflects one of the major culture lags of the twentieth century United States. Yet nationalism has lost few of its charms for the historian, writer or man in the street. It is an understandable paradox that most American history and most American literature is today written from an essentially egocentric and isolationistic point of view at the very time America is spreading her dominion over palm and pine. After all, the average American as he lies and waits for the enemy in Korea or as she scans the newspaper in some vain hope of personal contact with the front is unconcerned that his or her plight is the result of a complex of personal, economic and governmental actions far beyond the normal citizen's comprehension and control. Anyone's identification with an international struggle, whether warlike or peaceful, requires absurd oversimplification and intense emotional involvement. Such identification comes for each group in each crisis by rewriting history into legend and developing appropriate national heroes.

In America, such self-deception has served a particularly useful purpose. A heterogeneous people have needed it to attain an element of cultural and political cohesion in a new and ever changing land. But we must never forget, most of the appropriate heroes and their legends were created overnight, to answer immediate needs, almost always with conscious aims and ends. Parson Weems's George Washington became the symbol of honesty and the father image of the uniting States. Abraham Lincoln emerged as an incarnation of the national Constitution. Robert E. Lee represented the dignity needed by a rebelling confederacy. And their roles are paralleled by those of Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Theodore Roosevelt and many, many more.