The Power of Memory: Mnemonics Training and Democratization in Nineteenth-Century America

Daniel J. McInerney

Most scholarship on the construction of memory examines how communities produce, express, and contest their recollections of the past. My paper moves in a different direction, exploring programs to develop the capacity for recollection. Rather than focusing on the contents of memory, I look at proposed techniques of memory -- and the “democratic” potential contained within these programs.

The presentation explores the changing nature of mnemonics training in nineteenth-century America, examining the categories in which advocates conceived of memory, the powers they identified with recollection, and the roles they believed memory played in their world. In particular, the paper focuses on a shift in the way advocates promoted memory skills. Before the Civil War, mnemonics training gained support from a community of reformers who viewed the enhancement of human recollection as part of a wider effort to expand the powers of the mind over the conditions of the world. Those with a powerful memory could presumably serve as agents of democratic transformation and uplift. After the Civil War, however, the language and purpose of memory training underwent a considerable change. Adapting classes and manuals on memory to an emerging corporate order, sponsors of newer programs promoted their efforts in far more individualistic terms, portraying a powerful memory as a “democratic” strategy to win fame, income, and power. The transformation or uplift that successful students might realize would be achieved in the realm of prestige and reputation. Mnemonics training earlier promised to open paths of political and social improvement; it came to focus on opening doors of personal advancement.