Fusing and Refusing American Nationalism

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. By Gary Gerstle. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 444 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

In the late 1980s, a period marked by culture wars and historiographical upheavals, Americanists in a variety of disciplines began calling urgently for what Thomas Bender called "a new synthesis" of American history. ¹ The explosion of scholarship on communities defined by—and divided by—race, ethnicity, gender, class, and ideology had resulted in a greatly expanded awareness of particular experiences in a diverse nation, but it left many scholars with the uneasy sense that something was missing—some overarching way of talking about the American past. The reading public bypassed shelves of books written by academic specialists in favor of popular—frequently military and political—histories and History Channel-style public programming, leading some to conclude that the kind of projects undertaken by academics had rendered them irrelevant in the public sphere. ² In spite of the mountains of journal articles, biographies, and monographs devoted to recovering and repositioning the lives, beliefs, and endeavors of men and women on the margins, undergraduates continued to identify the same traditional American heroes (mostly white and male) as the most important shapers of the nation's life. ³ Indeed, at all levels of education, battle lines were drawn over the appropriate content of American history.

In the following decade, a spate of works took up the challenge of constructing narratives that would address the felt need for synthesis and simultaneously incorporate the insights of this rich body of work. Ronald Takaki invited readers to peer into a "Different Mirror," and Priscilla Wald probed "cultural anxiety and narrative form" as critical aspects of the process by which Americans constituted themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David Roediger, George Lipsitz, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and others placed race at the center of their work as constitutive of American democracy and culture. ⁴ These broad efforts have neither obviated nor displaced particularistic studies, but they have provided valuable frameworks within which such studies can be contextualized.

Gary Gerstle's American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century offers another way of thinking about the relationship between "wholes and parts" by examining nationalist discourse in the century just concluded. It also sheds light on the reasons for the historiographical shift. Influenced by the work of scholars noted above plus Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Gerstle examines two streams of thought that "animated the nation's communal imagination" (5)—civic nationalism and racial nationalism. The civic nationalist stream, he argues, flows from founding ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence that affirm equality, fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and confidence in the people to govern themselves democratically. Racial nationalism, he insists, flows from an equally venerable tradition of thought embedded in the Constitution and the 1790 immigration law. This ideal imagines the American nation in racial and ethnic terms "as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government" (4). Gerstle shows how both nationalist conceptions shaped the thinking of twentieth-century leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton and consequently how both found expression in public policy and social reform movements. The result is a deeply textured and insightful reading of a complicated era in U.S. history.

One of the many virtues of this study is Gerstle's refusal to caricature either nationalist strain. The racial nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt, for example, bears little resemblance to the rabid white supremacist vision of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. TR believed racial hybridity—the mixing of diverse racial stocks—invigorated the United States, but his vision did not include all racial stocks. Indeed, he willfully diminished the role played by the black Ninth and Tenth Cavalries and Twenty-fourth Infantry in the battles for Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill in the 1898 war with Spain when...