American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth CenturyPrinceton University Press, 2001 - 454 pages This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society. After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt's vision of a hybrid and superior "American race," strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in "Anglo-Saxon" culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance. Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan's and Clinton's attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading. |
Contents
Theodore Roosevelts Racialized Nation 18901900 | 14 |
A History of the American Race | 17 |
War Renewal and the Problem of the Smoked Yankee | 25 |
Civic Nationalism and Its Contradictions 18901917 | 44 |
True Americanism | 47 |
Racial Dilemmas | 59 |
The New Nationalism | 65 |
Hardening the Boundaries of the Nation 19171929 | 81 |
Combat and White Male Comradeship | 220 |
The Cold War Anticommunism and a Nation in Flux 19461960 | 238 |
War Repression and Nation Building | 241 |
The Red Scare and the Decline of Racial Nationalism | 246 |
The Case of Immigration Reform | 256 |
Civil Rights White Resistance and Black Nationalism 19601968 | 268 |
Civil Rights and Civic Nationalism | 270 |
The Crisis in Atlantic City | 286 |
War and Discipline | 83 |
Keeping Pure the Blood of America | 95 |
Civic Nationalism in the New Racial Regime | 115 |
Aborting the New Nationalism | 122 |
The Rooseveltian Nation Ascendant 19301940 | 128 |
A Kinder and Gender Nation Builder | 131 |
Radicalizing the Civic Nationalist Creed | 139 |
Conservative Counterattack | 156 |
The Survival of Racialized Nationalism | 162 |
Good War Race War 19411945 | 187 |
The Good War | 189 |
Race War | 201 |
The Militarys Hidden Race War | 210 |
Speaking as a Victim of This American System | 295 |
Vietnam Cultural Revolt and the Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation 19681975 | 311 |
A Catastrophic War | 313 |
The Spread of AntiAmericanism and the Revolt against Assimilation | 327 |
The Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation | 342 |
Beyond the Rooseveltian Nation 19752000 | 347 |
Varieties of Multiculturalism | 349 |
Ronald Reagan and the Nationalist Renaissance | 357 |
Reviving the Liberal Nation | 365 |
Notes | 375 |
439 | |