These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue (review)

These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present is a lively, readable, and up-to-date narrative history of the United States from 1890 through the election of Barack Obama. The book's title and framing device come from a remark by Franklin Delano Roosevelt made during a 1936 fireside chat: that "these United States" comprised a people and a nation "still in the making" (p. xv). The reader is thus primed for a story about process, contingency, and, in the authors' words, "individual lives … who join together to make history" (p. xxii). Award-winning scholars of African American history, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue would be well prepared to recast textbook nation-state history with the black experience at its center. Such is not the book they wrote, however, and in 625 pages of relatively familiar events, the authors instead try to chip away at the triumphalist construction of "the American century," which posits the United States as the synecdoche of twentieth-century history.

Chapter 1 crystallizes their effort. It is titled "Origins of the American Century" and purports to root Time magazine editor Henry Luce's 1941 statement in an earlier generation's assumptions and ambitions. Rather than parse the numerous debates about proliferating empire at the turn of the twentieth century, however, the authors mostly report on the rather shrugging consensus about the industrial power and abundance on display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They make some acute observations along the way, namely that "empire became a fact before most Americans had time to reckon with its implications," and that the entrenchment of and protests against Jim Crow segregation at the fair were harbingers of the era's discontents (p. 49). At this and other key junctures, however, the individuals whom Gilmore and Sugrue bring on stage mostly accommodated the overwhelming reality around them while attempting to turn it to their advantage. At the Chicago fair, for example, a young man named Friend Pitts Williams of New York remained hopeful that "industrial might" and "global greatness" could redound to individuals' benefit despite severe violence and social exclusion facing his fellow African Americans at the event and beyond (p. 7). During World War II, Stan Igawa enlisted in the military, nobly enthusiastic in his faith in the United States' ideal of democracy, even as protest quietly but firmly rolled out in the camps and in the courts against Japanese internment. With these voices the authors capture the steadfastness and commitment of everyday citizens as they weighed choices in daunting and often violent circumstances.

While imperialism was mortally wounded by Wilsonianism and killed off during World War II, this book offers no obituary. Some of imperialism's offspring, ideas like missionary capitalism (later called free enterprise), rarely made the newspapers per se or filtered into the reform and protest activities that did show up in the headlines. The authors flag telling ideas like "international humanitarianism" that were the postwar spawn of earlier imperialism, but it is the story of "militant anti-Communism" that gripped the nation's political parties and takes hold of Gilmore and Sugrue's narrative as the authors relate the Cold War maneuverings of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon administrations (p. 289).

The word imperialism does not appear in the book's index, and like most U.S. history textbooks, These United States traces the republican-flavored individualism by which most modern citizens locate and orient themselves but which consistently benefits the wealthy few. The text's chapter on the 1950s invokes the implicit bargain, tying the political structure of representative democracy to a highly unequal private economy. Paradigmatic among social movements are suffrage and school equality, stories well told by the authors through...