Gary Gerstle, American
Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001).
American Crucible provides a broad
synthetic interpretation of twentieth century American history with a focus on
nationalism. American history was driven
forward in this period by the interplay of two competing and contradictory
visions of American nationalism, an inclusive “civic nationalism” and an
exclusive “racial nationalism.” For
Gerstle the former nationalism was good while the latter was definitively
bad. Civic nationalism was a faith that
the common pursuit of democracy, freedom, and equality were not only the
founding ideals of the United States, but the principles around which American
identity continued to be constructed in the present. Racial nationalism, on the other hand, was
the ideology that only people possessing certain racial characteristics and
belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups were eligible for membership in
the American nation. During the
twentieth century these ideologies were in competition, often within the minds
of the era’s leading politicians and cultural icons. The events of the twentieth century
continually renewed both civic and racial nationalism, carrying them forth to
the 1960s when, according to Gerstle, they confronted each other in a final
showdown of which the remainder of the century was the uncertain epilogue.
Gerstle’s
book is a synthesis and like all syntheses it must simplify its subject matter
in some way. Gerstle’s simplifying
device is the idea of the United States as a “Rooseveltian Nation” in the
decades between World War I and the end of the Vietnam War. The Rooseveltian Nation made certain
provisions for its citizens by ensuring economic opportunity and political
equality, extracting from them conformity with largely “Anglo-Saxon” cultural
norms, loyalty and support in war, and a commitment to steer clear of radical
ideologies. Not surprisingly, the
founder of the Rooseveltian Nation was Theodore Roosevelt who, more fully than
any other character in Gerstle’s narrative embodies the conflicting ideals of
civic and racial nationalism. TR
combined looked at the world with an inclusive gaze, yet spoke in exclusive,
racialized terms. He felt sympathy with
individual members of excluded groups, such as black Americans, yet refused to
let that alter his opinions about those excluded groups as a whole. He combined a preference for government
enforcement of economic equality and fair play, yet distained radicals who he
was, at least in this regard, on the same page with. Additionally, Theodore Roosevelt placed a
great deal of faith in the power of war to foster unity between the (male)
members of the nation, a faith that was widely shared among Americans and which
received its ultimate test in World War II.
The
Rooseveltian Nation was carried closer to fruition not by TR’s Republican
Party, but by their Democratic opponents.
Democratic Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt presided
over great increases in degree to which the federal government managed the
economy and provided for citizens’ welfare.
At the same time, these Democrats remained linked to racial nationalism
through their ties to the segregationist regime of the Southern states and
which they enshrined in marquee state-building efforts such as the New
Deal. Indeed, the nation as a whole
seemed to embrace racial nationalism in the wake of World War I. The Russian Revolution provoked fears of
anarchism and communism which were linked in the minds of many Americans with
the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who had arrived in the country
by the hundreds of thousands. The
congress of the 1920s imposed severe immigration restrictions including
national origin quota that reflected a preference for “Nordic” or “Anglo-Saxon”
immigrants. Americans expressed this
pro-Nordic bias less dramatically after the restriction of immigration, but an
unspoken consensus remained, expressed in the labor movement’s idealized images
of workers and in Hollywood films.
Recent immigrants and their descendants may not have been considered as
American as their Nordic peers, but they were acutely aware of the potential
benefits of associating themselves with them.
Gerstle
argues that the boundaries between old Nordic immigrants and new immigrants
broke down in the course of World War II as multi-ethnic platoons had the
unifying effect Theodore Roosevelt had envisioned. After the war these men would come to see
themselves less as members of ethnic groups and more as members of a monolithic
“white” category. However the war did
not have the same unifying effect between white and black Americans. The military was rigidly segregated and in
many cases would be black soldiers were denied prestigious combat positions, or
even turned away from service altogether.
The cultural ideal that emerged from the war, the paradigmatic American
fighting man, remained white, even if he was no longer explicitly Nordic. Despite having melded together whites of
different ethnic backgrounds, the war regenerated racial nationalism through
its maintenance of the color line.
Like the
war that preceded it, World War II was followed by a period of reaction as the
Cold War settled in. According to
Gerstle, the civic nationalism that the war had stoked became more narrow and
constrained during the period postwar anticommunism. Chastened in their civic nationalism and
facing a communist foe, Americans found it increasingly difficult to critique
the prevailing economic system the way earlier nationalists such as the
Roosevelts had. Yet, postwar civic
nationalism also gave birth to a movement for African-American civil rights,
which successfully challenged the most virulent remnants of racial nationalism,
even as it failed to extirpate it entirely.
Racial nationalism remained in the Democratic Party, which turned its
back on the black Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 for fear of
losing the support of southern whites.
Many civil rights activists found this spurning hard to forgive and set
off to forge a racial nationalism of their own, Black Power.
At the same
time that black power was emerging from the civil rights movement the unifying
power of war began to falter. Since the
1950s the United States intervened in conflicts in the post-colonial “third
world,” fighting a war in Korea and aiding French colonials and a nominally
free government in Vietnam. In the early
1960s American leaders increased the scale of US involvement in Vietnam, which
quickly grew into a war. Few Americans
saw the connection between the war in Asia and their own national
interests. Additionally, many privileged
Americans evaded serving in the armed forces once the government began drafting
men. Out of the discontent over Vietnam
a New Left movement built around a radical critique of American government and
society emerged. The experience of
Vietnam for most Americans did not serve to endear them to their nation.
For Gerstle
Black Power and Vietnam broke the power of nationalism in the United
States. Unifying principles that emerged
in the wake of the 1960s, such as multiculturalism, further undermined
Americans’ nationalist sensibilities, pushing them towards identifying with
racial and ethnic groups rather than with the nation. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton
both tried to renew civic nationalism and, in the case of Reagan, racial
nationalism, but failed to recapture the old magic.
Gerstle’s
vision of the last century is a compelling one.
Unlike many authors who cordon off war and peace, foreign policy and
domestic policy, Gerstle elegantly integrates the two, demonstrating the
ramifications of war for American society in the twentieth century and vice
versa. His critical readings of the
ultimate twentieth century American medium, the Hollywood movie, from key
junctures in the period are illuminating as well as fun. Gerstle may overstate his case by referring
to the US in the middle decades of the century as a “Rooseveltian nation,” but
by doing so he forces the reader to think deeply about the appropriateness of
the term and to ponder better alternatives.
In the
years since the publication of American
Crucible books in the field of twentieth century US history have
proliferated, many of the most prominent of them focusing on the rise of conservatism,
a subject largely ignored by Gerstle. In
many ways the study of conservatism has become a monolithic entity beyond which
it is difficult, yet necessary, to see.
Gerstle’s emphasis on nationalism may provide a signpost to the route
beyond conservatism, as nationalism was certainly not parallel to any
conventional left-right axis in the twentieth century.
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