American Crucible

This is going to be an interesting book.

It is a history of the clash between racial nationalism and civic nationalism in 20th century America. I’ve really enjoyed tuning out of current events and politics to focus on history and culture. I don’t think that I missed out on anything by not paying as much attention to the news cycle.

The following excerpt comes from Gary Gerstle’s book American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century:

“America is God’s Crucible, where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!” proclaims the protagonist in Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting-Pot. “Germans, Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” With these words, Zangwill articulated a central and enduring myth about the American nation – that the United States was a divine land where individuals from every part of the world could leave behind their troubles, start life anew, and forge a proud, accomplished, and unified people. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing eighty years later, endorsed the same myth, locating the transformative power of the United States not in God but in the nation’s core political ideals, in the American belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings, in every individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in a democratic government that derives its legitimacy from the people’s consent. These beliefs represent a kind of democratic universalism that can take root anywhere. But because they were enshrined in the American nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Schlesinger and others have argued that they marked something distinctive about the American people and their polity. In the 1940s Gunnar Myrdal bundled these civic rights and principles together into a political faith that he called the “American Creed.” Although I prefer to use the more generic term “civic nationalism,” which Michael Ignatieff and other students of the contemporary nation employ to denote these beliefs, it is clear that their role in promoting freedom and democracy in American history is indisputable.”

Israel Zangwill, of course, was Jewish.

The “Dickens of the Ghetto” was articulating a cosmopolitan Jewish vision of America. It wasn’t a vision that was shared by most Americans until the post-World War II era. As we have already seen, the “melting pot” mythology only entered American history textbooks in the 1940s and it was due to cosmopolitan modernists becoming historians in the 1930s. Previously, the national narrative had been that America was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation with liberal principles and a republican form of government. The idea that America is based on nothing but liberal abstractions only emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a universalist vision of America that suited the foreign policy needs of the Cold War era when the American Empire and the Soviet Union were competing in the Third World for global dominance. By the 1950s, the American intelligentsia was also half Jewish and this Jewish conception of national identity – America is a “Nation of Immigrants” – displaced the older WASP tradition.

“Throughout its history, however, American civic nationalism has contended with another potent ideological inheritance, a racial nationalism that conceives of America in ethnoracial terms, as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government. This ideal, too, was inscribed in the Constitution (although not in the Declaration of Independence), which endorsed the enslavement of Africans in the southern states, and it was encoded in a key 1790 law limiting naturalization to “free white persons.” Although modified in 1870, this 1790 law remained in force until 1952, evidence that America’s yearning to be a white republic survived African American emancipation by almost 100 years. As late as the 1920s, members of the House of Representatives felt no shame in declaring on the House floor that the American “pioneer race” was being replaced by “a mongrel one,” or in admiring a scientist who told them that Americans “had been so imbued with the idea of democracy … that we have left out of the consideration the matter of blood [and] … heredity. No man who breeds pedigreed plants and animals can afford to neglect this thing, as you know.” From the perspective of this racialized ideal, Africans, Asians, nonwhite Latin Americans, and, in the 1920s, southern and eastern Europeans did not belong in the republic and could never be accepted as full-fledged members. They had to be expelled, segregated, or subordinated. The hold that this tradition exercised over the national imagination helps us to understand the conviction that periodically has surfaced among racial minorities, and especially among African Americans, that America would never accept them as the equals of whites, that they would never be included in the crucible celebrated by Zangwill, and that the economic and political opportunities identified by Schlesinger would never be theirs to enjoy. In the words of Malcolm X, America was not a dream; it was a nightmare.”

From the Naturalization Act of 1790 until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, American nationalization law was based on whiteness. The federal courts repeatedly ruled on eligibility of non-Whites to become American citizens. Do Syrians qualify as Whites? How about the Japanese?

World War II was the turning point when America was transformed from being a nation that was anchored in race, culture and religion into a liberal universalist empire that was competing with the Nazis and Soviets.