In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898
  • Kathryn Lofton
Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898. By Edward J. Blum (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2005) 356 pp. $54.95

In Reforging the White Republic, Blum assembles an impressive array of material to rewrite the role of religion in the late nineteenth century. Rather than emphasize the work of the Social Gospel movement or immigrant diversification, Blum puts a spotlight on Protestant evangelicals, who formed the majority of American religious believers during this epoch. He argues persuasively that these Christians played a critical role in sectional reconciliation following the Civil War. However, this appeasement came at a cost: According to Blum, northern and southern Christians bonded over their racial self-categorization, using the language of white nationalism to ameliorate sectional discord.

Blum organizes his study chronologically, providing a timeline of ascendant whiteness. He begins with Abraham Lincoln's dream of postwar racial harmony, and concludes with William E. B. DuBois' gloomy appraisals of race relations. In between, Blum flits among intellectual and social-historical studies, evaluating key texts and movements, organizations and events. The effect is impressive. Blum's text brings the northern landscape that dominates his Gilded Era survey to life. On one corner stands revivalist Dwight Moody, commanding Christian men to abandon social work and join the national fraternity of stout-hearted, manly, compatriots to Christ. On another corner is a newsboy, shouting Horace Greeley's headlines goading citizens toward sectional peace. France Willard, national president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), endorses the Christian virtues of white southern womanhood and calls for African-American repatriation to Africa. In bookstores, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Palmetto Leaves (1872), Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood (1868), and Josiah Strong's Our Country (1885) describe a nation divided by race and Christian commitment, not by North and South. Perhaps most intriguing is Blum's chapter on the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, which portrays northern and southern whites finding national community through their common prayers and shared avoidance of African-American suffering.

By the close of the century, Blum observes a wide range of white American Protestant tropes used in defense of white nationalism. From the novels of Thomas Dixon, Jr., to the imperial dreams of Theodore Roosevelt, white America had constructed an Anglo-Saxon identity for its emergent status as a reigning world power. Not coincidentally, this era overlaps with the greatest expansion in foreign missions; the intersection between American imperialism and American missionary work are the subject of Blum's final chapter. Whiteness, godliness, and American nationalism were fused in an impenetrable shield, one which Blum believes has survived to the present day.

Imaginative, provocative, and expansively researched, Reforging the White Republic offers an important twist to surveys of Reconstruction-era [End Page 139] America. Rather than imagine religious belief as subservient to politics or industrial growth, Blum centers the Christian imagination as critical to the genesis of a national self-image. Like any book attempting such a large-scale revision of the American imagination, this one has a few documentary gaps. For example, although the WCTU clearly propagated a message of Christian righteousness alongside a vision of national cohesion, evidence that Willard and her compatriots summarily endorsed an exclusionary white identity is scarce. Likewise, Blum's chapter on the yellow fever epidemic provides ample proof of the sectional reconciliation accomplished during that tragedy; however, the materials supporting a thesis of triumphal whiteness are thinner. In short, perfect connections between Christian cohesion and white nationalism are not often available. When Blum describes "the vast majority of white Protestants" as "largely anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish, racist, commercially minded, and militant," he invites quick criticism and important conversation (226). The strongest virtue of Reforging the White Republic is its argumentative audacity despite occasional lapses in proof.

Kathryn Lofton
Reed College
...

pdf

Share