You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric

1. The Riddle of the “American People”

 ,  
CHAPTER 1 The Riddle of the “American People” A merica is truly a shock to the stranger,” Gunnar Myrdal wrote knowingly in . “The bewildering impression it gives of dissimilarity throughout and of chaotic unrest is indicated by the fact that few outside observers—and indeed, few native Americans—have been able to avoid the intellectual escape of speaking about America as ‘paradoxical.’”1 Even in the early s, long before the social movements of the s or the culture wars of the s, the United States already seemed wildly diverse and perplexing to this Swedish observer. And why not? Nowhere in the European world did so many different types of people consider themselves part of the same demos, and yet there was perhaps nowhere else where the contradictions implicit in a people’s union were so apparent. In a nation founded on principles of equality, for example, everyday practices of institutionalized inequality were all too obvious to Myrdal. In , while touring the South to research race relations in the United States, he admitted to a benefactor that he was not prepared for what he saw. “I didn’t realize,” Myrdal reportedly confided, “what a terrible problem you have put me into. I mean we are horrified.”2 As Myrdal would soon discover, such horrible truths were not limited to the southern states alone. In , the year his work An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy was published, hundreds of race riots broke out in more than fifty different U.S. cities. That same year, Lawrence Fuchs has reported, the University of Denver’s National Opinion Research Center “found that a majority of whites thought that white people should have the first chance at any kind of job over Negroes.”3 The nation’s internal tensions were not limited to black-white relations. The American people were especially fearful of their own religious and ethnic diversity The Riddle of the “American People”  throughout the s and s, when, for example, Protestant clergy were publicly warning their congregations that American Catholics would eventually overturn the U.S. Constitution.4 Likewise, public opinion polls during the early s regularly reported widespread agreement with the notion that “Jews were more of a threat to the nation than Blacks, Catholics, Germans, and Japanese,” with  being the only year that the latter two groups were considered more dangerous than Jews.5 Indeed, the United States’ involvement in World War II only exacerbated an already-budding nativism among its residents, as more than , Japanese Americans were legally interned in the early s and Mexican Americans were targeted in race riots throughout the United States. Amidst all of this discord, however, Myrdal also heard a surprising yet unmistakable harmony. “Still there is evidently a strong unity in this nation and a basic homogeneity and stability in its valuations,” he reported, his economist’s terse style perhaps belying his actual astonishment. “Americans of all national origins, classes, regions, creeds, and colors have something in common : a social ethos, a political creed. It is difficult to avoid the judgment that this ‘American Creed’ is the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation.”6 Myrdal’s assessment is now famous, of course, not necessarily because he said anything new—observers had been commenting on Americans’ unique yet conflicting beliefs since the eighteenth century—and certainly not because his words solved the problems they were meant to diagnose. In fact, in recent years, as the American people have once again become troubled by their own diversity, some observers have wondered if the problems that so disconcerted Myrdal have only gotten worse. Nevertheless, the Swedish observer’s initial appraisal remains attractive because it puts in simple terms two of the most baffling conditions of American nationalism. First, most thinkers have agreed with Myrdal’s observation that the United States is simultaneously divided and unified, a country somehow filled with both “chaotic unrest” and “a basic homogeneity and stability.” This fundamental paradox has vexed observers for more than two centuries.7 Many have asked how the American people can possibly attend to both pluribus and unum.8 How can the United States remain sufficiently multicultural and monocultural ? Long before anyone was worried about ethnic and racial diversity per se, the founders wrestled with remarkably similar questions of factionalism and federalism as they devised the new nation’s government. Even hundreds of years after these debates, Myrdal’s description reminds us that to discuss American...