Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture (review)

John Higham. Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.

In her preface to this volume's essay, "Pluralistic Integration as an American Model," Olivier Zunz characterizes John Higham as a "radical of the center" (110). Six of the fourteen essays that constitute this collection by the distinguished John Martin Vincent Professor Emeritus of History at Johns Hopkins University, and past president of the Organization of American Historians, can be usefully described as setting out a middle ground in feverishly heated discourses ranging from multiculturalism and integration, to national versus subgroup history, to the definition of ideology, to the comparative value of the history of ideas versus the history of society. Inasmuch as these essays range over a quarter century of experience, Higham's views can be seen to stretch as they embrace empirical data as diverse as Jennifer Lopez, Roger Sanjek's experiments in Elmhurst-Corona and Rodney King, but remain stubbornly, steadfastly fixed on what he calls "wholeness." "From the outset I have aimed at an apprehension of the wholeness of history: an apprehension attainable now and then by arranging some of history's fragments into a richer design than they used to have, one that opens outward" (x).

John Higham's apprehensions of wholeness can offer literary scholars the useful trope of a "wholeness" underlying American intellectual history, and nuanced interpretive schemata for apprehending cultural events and energies within literary representation. Among other things, his imaginative centrism comprises a map for critics engaged in multicultural discourse to avoid the Scylla of separation and the Charybdis of integration.

In "Pluralistic Integration," one of several masterful essays focused on the contending discourses surrounding American exceptionalism or American universalism, Higham's precritical grasp of an essential, cultural synthesis leads him to repudiate what he calls the simplifications of opposing platforms.

"Assimilationism falsely assumes that ethnic ties dissolve fairly easily in an open society. On this score the melting pot idea—the standard metaphor of assimilation—presents the same weakness that vitiated Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. Just as Turner underestimated the toughness of the entire social heritage that pioneers carried westward, so the melting-pot theory fails to appreciate the durability of their ethnic allegiances . . . No ethnic group, once established in the United States, has ever entirely disappeared; none seems about to do so. People are not as pliant as assimilationists have supposed" (113).

Higham rejects the absolutization of social identities with similar asperity, since it assumes a rigid group devotion that American life, he notes, continually erodes. Indeed, ethnic groups do perpetuate themselves, but none escapes change. Its corrosive effect on ethnic difference is amply documented in American history. The American Dutch belonged in the nineteenth century to three different churches, many distinct speech communities (Higham lists twelve), and two unrelated waves of immigration. In "Integrating America," he notes that African slaves originally possessed a sense of allegiance to particular autonomous tribes, but "partly because certain common themes in West African cultures facilitated their amalgamation in spite of disparate languages and customs, the Afro-Americans gradually became a single people" (86). In American history, this process of ethnicization unceasingly churns group solidarity, and, although ethnic and regional groups may emerge from the process, this in itself "cannot disguise a long-term tendency for primordial ties to come apart" (7). In other words, methodologies grounded in valorizing or perpetuating historical modalities of racial or ethnic identity, or that project current modalities backwards into earlier historical realities, fail to understand the element of change.

Higham also argues that not only do assimilationism and pluralism work against and misrepresent the flow of American life, but both are indefensible ethically. "While assimilation sacrifices the group for the sake of the individual, pluralism would put the individual at the mercy of the group" (115).

In contrast to pluralism or integration, or pluralism/integration, Higham offers—in the 1975 version, whose optimism he somewhat...