August 2020
Part I The Glue and the Fuel
Almost every country in the developed world put its economy on ice for a few months this year. But none has seen its unemployment rate rise as high as America’s.
Almost every country saw some form of protests against shelter-in-place orders, but no nation saw anything quite like the perverse pageantry of heavily armed men demanding their freedom like we did in America. Likewise, while plenty of people across the globe resisted and resented having to wear masks to ward off the coronavirus, nowhere was the resistance to them as virulent as it has been in the United States.
It’s been hard to watch the combination of hyper-individualism and intergovernmental infighting during this pandemic without thinking of the structural weaknesses in America’s culture and design.
With the overweening power of King George III in mind, the Framers of the Constitution wanted to make sure that no single person or governmental body could amass too much power. To preserve people’s freedom, they thought, government had to be limited, curtailed, and fragmented. They designed the separation of powers coupled with federalism to make it difficult for any single branch at any level of government to presume to speak on behalf of the people.
As the pandemic’s death count rose, the nation’s elected officials seemed so thoroughly at odds over who was responsible—and for what—that Americans could clearly see that the solid wooden floor they thought was beneath them is actually more like latticework with plenty of open space within its grid.
Then the nationwide antiracism protests and riots brought attention to America’s history of white supremacy. Suddenly, the mechanics of white privilege became apparent to even the most resistant observers.
But what has still not been widely understood is how much whiteness has always been used to cover the gaps in America’s latticework, to hold together a nation built on the fundamentally chaotic idea that citizens should be free to pursue their happiness.
Of course, America’s woeful response to the coronavirus has been an object lesson in the importance of presidential leadership. But more significant, it has also revealed the extent to which whiteness has devolved into a force that threatens the common good. Despite the fact that masks have been shown to slow the pandemic, several national surveys have shown that whites are significantly less likely to wear them in public than are nonwhites. Does partisanship play a part in this behavior? Absolutely. But there’s a deeper and longer story about the meaning of America that explains this and other antisocial behaviors a whole lot better.
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In 1994, theologian William Dean called on public intellectuals to engage in questions of the meaning of America. Like so many others, Dean was worried about the growing nihilism in the country. He believed that the absence of any transcendent myth or ritual in U.S. life made it “difficult for Americans to understand their identity and their task.” Not only does our system of government “institutionalize a kind of vacancy,” he wrote, but a slew of social forces conspired to “ward off the establishment of a strong tradition” that could fill that void. “At the base of the American experience,” he concluded, “is an emptiness, a primordial absence of structures, leaving only contingencies.”1
Dean’s observation wasn’t a criticism. He understood that a people adept at navigating contingencies forged a remarkable culture of improvisation. But he feared that over time so much vacancy had become untenable, even hurtful to growing numbers of Americans. Americans, he insisted, had “to recognize and respond to the openness of their situation” and construct a viable national myth that could give us a new sense of purpose.2 I wholeheartedly agree. But first we have to understand the nature of the emptiness.
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“To be an American,” political theorist Carl Friedrich once said, “is an ideal; while to be a Frenchman is a fact.”3 The gap between ideal and reality is a central theme in American life. Political scientist Samuel Huntington thought that this tension was particularly salient in our political culture. He argued that major social movements in America are generally born of efforts to close the gap between reality and ideal. The system’s failure to live up to its promise, he wrote, does not make it a lie, but merely a disappointment. “But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”4
That aspirational formulation—the idea that we are defined more by who we hope to be than by who we actually are, that our task is to strive to match our ideals—is a legacy of a remarkably educated sect of radical Calvinists who landed in Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century. The Puritans were, in a phrase, the Protestants’ Protestants, who had sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be its remnants of Catholicism. Having failed to purify the Church, they abandoned England and set sail for America, where they intended to establish their version of what they thought was a genuinely reformed Christian community, one they hoped would serve as a model to the world.
We’ve all heard of Puritan leader John Winthrop’s singular phrase “a city upon a hill.” It’s generally trotted out to promote American exceptionalism for one purpose or another. But we rarely hear it within the context of the sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” which Winthrop gave to the group of settlers either just before or on the ship Arbella in the spring of 1630. Winthrop believed thatin creating their settlements, the Puritans were entering into a covenant with God. While they believed they were ordained to establish God’s kingdom in uncharted territory, success was in no way assured. “The eyes of all people are upon us;” he told them. “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” In other words, if they pleased the Lord, the Almighty would bless them. If they did not, Winthrop further warned, “We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into Curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land where we are going.”5
This covenant with God was a community contract, and the community was obliged to uphold it or else suffer the kind of punishment the Israelites of old had suffered when they broke their covenant. Central to the Puritan notion of covenants was the principle of free choice. Even being born into a Puritan family didn’t automatically secure anyone full membership in a village church. In the colony’s early decades, churches required that prospective members have a conversion experience before they could join a congregation. As historians Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster wrote, “The individual voluntarily promised to obey civil and scriptural law, for the seventeenth-century Puritans believed that meaningful obedience could only grow out of voluntary consent, never out of coercion.”6
The Puritans saw themselves as spiritual migrants. In 1670, Boston minister Samuel Danforth delivered a jeremiad—a sermon lamenting the declining morals of Puritan society—reminding the Massachusetts colony’s leaders that they had all “solemnly professed before God, angels, and men” that they had chosen to leave their country to embark on “an errand into the wilderness.”7 By “errand,” he meant migration, not simply from England to America, but also from a corrupted old world to a new promised land. But whether or not they ultimately arrived in the New Canaan depended on their ability to live righteously.
This sense of errand or pilgrimage, literary and cultural critic Sacvan Bercovitch argued, was one of the chief ways the Puritans instilled order in a colony of militant dissidents. Not only were individual identities linked to a forward-looking social enterprise, but New England itself was considered less a destination than a potential pathway to the future. Perfectionist striving was inherently incompatible with a sense of rootedness. As such, New England’s institutions, wrote Bercovitch, “were geared not so much to maintain stability as to sustain process and growth. Problems of order were characteristically framed in such questions as ‘How far have we come?’ and ‘Where are we headed?”8 Instead of urging colonists to conform to a past or to a beloved tradition, New England Puritanism asked them to dedicate themselves to constant improvement. This explains the shrill jeremiads warning colonists of the consequences of backpedaling. “The Puritans’ vision,” wrote Bercovitch, “fed on the distance between fact and promise. Anxiety became their chief means of establishing control. The errand, after all, was a state of unfulfillment, and only a sense of crisis, properly directed and controlled, could guarantee the outcome.”9
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By the early 1700s, Puritanism had lost its control over New England, but its ideological thrust, its notions of covenanted community and sacred mission, lived on, not only through the elite colleges the Puritans had established, but also through their Yankee descendants who over the next two centuries would spread out over the northern half of the country. In the eighteenth century, the heirs of the Puritans played an essential role in the American Revolution and instilled their brand of moralistic republicanism into the emerging national narrative. When times get tough or inspiration is called for, American political leaders still borrow the language of the Puritans to scold, to uplift, or both. They call upon a prophetic language that is not found anywhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln called Americans an “almost chosen people.”10 Franklin Roosevelt spoke of the nation’s “rendezvous with destiny.”11 Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed that African Americans would win their freedom “because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands.”12 The Puritans bequeathed us an unimaginably large national vision with sacred and moralistic overtones. Over the centuries, the errand into the wilderness would morph into other grand, open-ended national narratives like Manifest Destiny and even the American Dream.
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The creation of the United States gave citizens of the new country an ideology, a liberation story, historic battles, heroes to worship, founding documents, and a flag to salute, but, lacking a single ethnic tradition within which to root itself, the contours of an emerging American culture were still difficult to identify. From the start, the belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was a peculiarly ephemeral patrimony. The young nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum, codified its fundamental tension between unity and multiplicity. Add growing ethnic (European) and racial (African) diversity, relent- less geographic mobility, and an obsession with novelty, and Americans did not have a recipe for creating a cozy sense of national belonging. And then there was the inherent tension between the liberal ideal of the rights of individuals and the realities of white supremacy.
From the beginning, foreign-born observers struggled to define what Americans were, and what kept them together. In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote that the American was an entirely new type of man, a product of the mixture of a variety of European ethnicities whose emerging culture would act on new principles, self-interest chief among them. (Needless to say, African and Native Americans were not considered part of the American polity, but subject to the mastery of whites.) A half-century later, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that in a democracy like America’s where men are all “very small and very much alike.”13 As elements of past cultures mixed together, traditions were lost, and caste distinctions buried, citizens of the new country clung to a combination of restless activity, materialism, and grand idealism.
Two years after Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Bohemia-born Francis J. Grund came out with his own book on the American character. In it he argued that America was merely a vessel through which its citizens expressed themselves. “An American,” wrote Grund, “does not love his country as a Frenchman loves France, or an Englishman England: America is to him but a physical means of establishing a moral power—the medium through which his mind operates—‘the local habitation’ of his political doctrines.”14 He went on to add that, to the extent that Americans did love their country, they loved it not as it was, but as they hoped it would one day be.
And it wasn’t only Europeans who had a hard time grasping what America was in the here and now. Steeped as they were in ideas of freedom and promise and success, Americans themselves sometimes expressed a desire to make whatever it is that America meant more tangible, something they could literally grasp on to. Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William H. Seward, liked to tell a story about a man who insisted on planting a liberty pole—a makeshift flagstaff symbolizing resistance to British rule—just after the American Revolution had been won. When the man’s neighbors asked whether he wasn’t already free enough, he’d respond, “What is liberty without a pole?”15 Similarly, in 1845, when the North and South were becoming further estranged, a three-member commission set up by the New-York Historical Society recommended that the nation’s name— the United States of America—be changed to make it less abstract. They recommended the Republic of Allegania, after the rugged cord that connected north and south, grounding the name in a recognizable yet symbolic stretch of earth.
As it was, however, abstractions held “remarkable power” in the American mind. That’s what Congregationalist theologian Horace Bushnell concluded in 1864. By applying their “practical energy” to their “great principles,” Americans, he thought, lived on a “much higher plane of history.” But like anything else, there was a downside. “In one view, there is something ungracious in our American spirit. We are nearly as ignorant of the loyal feeling as a tribe of wild animals—unrespectful often to worth and true precedence.”16 A decade earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne was grappling with similar ideas about the American character. Having served four years in Liverpool as the U.S. consul, his observations were informed by contrasting America with England. American patriotism, according to Hawthorne, seemed “as cold and hard . . . as the steel spring that puts in motion a powerful machinery.” The English, however, had managed to bring a beating human heart to their national sentiment by clothing “bare abstraction in flesh and blood.”17
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It’s hard to overstate the dynamism of nineteenth-century America. In 1800, the population was a little over 5 million people. A century later, it was more than 67 million. Nineteen million immigrants arrived on these shores in that period. And not only was the population expanding, it was on the move. The U.S. tripled in size in the 1800s, from less than one million square miles to more than three million. The geographic distribution of the population also shifted, from about 7 percent living in the West to “roughly 60 percent.”18
In many ways, the abstract nature of American identity served an expanding heterogeneous society well. While the national ideology was supposed to forge common cause, it was, in the words of historian John Higham, “beset with contradiction because its basic task of building solidarity was not compatible with the competitive, acquisitive values the ideology also legitimized.”19 That means the mass of isolated individuals were more focused on asserting their personal independence and equality than on building a healthy, cohesive national community.
America during the nineteenth century increasingly became a society of what one scholar called “island communities.”20 As the country moved west, poor communication limited cooperation between islands. The federal government was weak—by design—and had too few employees to effectively enact uniform public policy, let alone impose its will on a rapidly growing nation. The essence of American life and democracy was local.
Abundant land made it possible for individuals who didn’t feel they fit into one community to pack up and move to another. As immigration began to diversify in the mid-nineteenth century, ethnic groups could cluster at a good distance from one another. If any group predominated in any particular place, the decentralized nature of American government allowed them to take the reins locally. The ability to control the fate of their local communities encouraged loyalty to the nation at large, even as cultural and linguistic assimilation moved slowly. One study of the 1910 census, for instance, found that more than fifty years after large-scale German immigration to the United States had ceased, a sizable minority of German Americans in Wisconsin—many U.S.-born— still spoke only German.21 Parallel local institutions and widespread ethnic diversity were still understood to be typically American, because it was understood that they all existed under one canopy of the abstract political ideals that defined the nation.
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If the Puritans bequeathed America their anxiety, then successive waves of immigrants have imbued in us another condition: alienation. Over the past two centuries, the U.S. has received more immigrants—and more continuously—than any other nation on earth. In a fundamental sense, our country is built on so many broken families, homesick relatives, disrupted lives, and the all-encompassing feeling of not belonging. This disruption and its emotional and psychological consequences generally lasted for many years, and its effects have reached down to generations beyond it.
Beginning with Jamestown, the immigrant experience of coming to America, whether by force or by choice, meant enduring the painful process of leaving behind the systems of meaning and connection that defined and gave purpose to peoples’ lives. The act of departure is most certainly the central experience of many lives. It also serves as a genesis story for millions of American families. But, as the great historian Oscar Handlin once wrote, the history of immigration is also “a history of alienation and its consequences.”22
In his 1957 book, Race and Nationality in American Life, Handlin expanded on the idea of immigrant alienation to include the experience of nineteenth-century domestic mobility. One did not have to uproot oneself from a foreign land to feel estranged in America’s vast and expanding landscape. Melancholy was the pioneers’ constant companion. Handlin writes:
The ties, once severed, could never be replaced. The lonely man gazing out into the darkness of the forest or upon the empty prairies or down the endless corridors of the city streets saw never a monument of his belonging. Detached from his past, he could hardly be sure of his own identity. And as he regarded that posterity for which he was ever making some sacrifice, he knew in his heart that his children would desert him, as he had deserted his parents. That was the horror. All the emotions once safely embedded by tradition and communal custom in the family had now no stable foundation in reality.23
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When Alexis de Tocqueville worried about the corrosive influence of individualism on America, he wasn’t worried about Americans. His concern was for the nation’s young democracy. As he argued, democracy creates equality, which in turn creates individualism, which can lead to a kind of social vacuum in which despotism can take hold. Fortunately, the young French aristocrat put his finger on the solution to the problem he identified. Individualism was reined in by the Americans’ habit of solving many of their problems through voluntary associations—groups of individuals who come together on the basis of mutual interest or shared objective. “When citizens are forced to be occupied with public affairs,” he wrote, “they are necessarily drawn from the midst of their individual interests, and from time to time, torn away from the sight of themselves.”24 The need to tackle community problems made men realize that they were not as independent from others as they might have thought and that, on occasion, it was in their best interest to cooperate with others.
Voluntary associations, particularly churches, also offered people a means with which to negotiate the alienation of American life. The nineteenth century saw millions of Americans joining social clubs, lecture societies, fraternities, ethnic clubs, and Protestant congregations, the quintessential voluntary associations. While in 1800, the vast majority of Americans did not belong to any type of church, by 1900 most did. Churches provided opportunities for social connections and to anchor families in a new or rapidly changing community. Particularly in rural America, many people joined churches to meet friends and prospective spouses, as well as to discuss problems in the community and to hear the latest news. This was also true—and perhaps even more so—for immigrants who arrived in both urban and rural areas.
American religious historian Timothy L. Smith once described migration as a “theologizing experience,” meaning that the process of uprooting and transplan- ting one’s self often led newcomers to turn to faith when reorienting themselves in a new environment. “Once in America,” he wrote, “immigrants uniformly felt that learning new patterns of correct behavior was crucial to their sense of well-being. Everything was new: the shape and detail of houses, stairways, windows, and stoves; the whir of engines, trolleys, furnaces, and machines; the language, facial expressions, dress, table manners, and forms of both public and private courtesy.” Freed from the constraints of tradition, newcomers had to figure out how to behave in their new surroundings. What complicated matters was that in a diversifying nation, the foreign born weren’t merely obliged to adapt to one “dominant ‘host’ culture but to a dozen completing subcultures, all of which were in the process of adjustment to the mate- rialism and the pragmatism that stemmed from the rush of both newcomers and oldtimers to get ahead.”25
Americans generally assume that immigrants arrived in the U.S. and merely re-created the identities and institutions they left behind in their home countries. But most nineteenth-century newcomers had very little sense of national identity. Instead, they tended to think of themselves as residents of a village or maybe a province. Rather than Italians, they were Calabrians or Neapolitans or Sicilians. Instead of Germans, they were Westphalians or Württembergers or Saxons. More often than not, these subgroups were divided by distinct dialects, traditions, and, in the case of Germans, religion. Only as members of these groups faced adversity in America and—at times—the inability of outsiders to even comprehend the nature of their narrow Old World loyalties did they begin to submerge their hometown identities into broader ethnic groupings. This process of ethnicization was part of adapting to life in America and improving one’s chances of survival. Creating ethnicity—with all its associational ties and benefits—was also a way both to negotiate the abstract nature of American identity and to keep at bay the alienation so prevalent in their new land.
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In a country that would derive much of its energy from immigration, determining who could and who could not become American served a critical role in nation-building. The Naturalization Act of 1790 not only determined who could settle in the new country, but it also set the conditions for membership in the national polity. The law, which was passed with little debate, stipulated that only “free white person(s)” could become U.S. citizens. Africans were not part of the national community. Native Americans had no rights with which to resist being expelled from the rapidly expanding boundaries of a burgeoning nation. Only Europeans were considered suitable for citizenship. From the beginning, the ideas of white- ness and American citizenship were intertwined.
While ethnic groups were taking shape in the nineteenth century, they also lost their more highly mobile members to ambition or to the frontier or both. These folks would gradually shed some or all of their older customs and identities as they mixed with other native-born whites from different backgrounds. Diversity among European Americans had long been a fact of life. As such, there was no real certainty about what constituted an American culturally. While Americans of English ancestry thought they had every right to define national culture, the absence of a strong central government left them without the means of persuading anyone that they were anything but one of many groups in the United States. By the mid-nineteenth century, white Americans who had detached themselves from both geographic and ethnic communities increasingly found themselves dependent on the nation’s abstract political ideology for their sense of identity. According to John Higham, “Travelers noticed that truculent, gasconading patriotism was especially characteristic of newly settled parts of the country, but everywhere ideological commitment compensated to some extent for the weakness of local ties.”26
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While America’s political system served as a point of pride, it didn’t build a strong sense of community. For that, European Americans could turn to race, which conferred upon them more than just the rights of citizenship. White- ness was initially defined in contradistinction to the individuals of many African ethnicities who were thrown together in servitude and by necessity forged an amalgamated people who became referred to as black. And as European Americans fanned out westward, whiteness was reinforced by confrontations with Native Americans.
To put it bluntly, European Americans could always choose to rally around whiteness whenever they wanted to come together and advance their economic interests. If slavery was legalized for its economic benefits in all the American colonies by the mid-seventeenth century, the ongoing removal of Indians was accomplished for similar reasons, liberty and the rights of individuals be damned. In 1832, two years after the Indian Removal Act was approved by Congress, Chickasaw leader Levi Colbert wrote a letter to Andrew Jackson in which he asked the president whether the “spirit of liberality and equality which distinguishes the United States from all the Empires” was merely a “jealousy and defence of their own particular rights, an unwillingness to be oppressed themselves?”27
As the country moved westward and more traditional ties faded away, all the emotions and sense of belonging that European Americans may have once experienced through ethnicity were now funneled into race, which, again, was inseparable from their notions of citizenship. Since whiteness existed only in contradistinction to those considered nonwhite, the bonds of whiteness were felt most intensely during conflict. It was particularly in times of strife that European Americans came to feel part of a community, and when the many distinctions among them further melted. As Oscar Handlin wrote: “It was as if only by creating an antagonist upon whom all the hatred and fear within them, could be expended could they find a communion of the unexcluded that would summon up their capacities and longings for love.”28
By the middle of the nineteenth century, white Americans rallied less around their belief in their superior form of government than they did around their growing sense of racial superiority. In dealing with Native Americans, they began to solidify their rationale for expansion. Race not only provided whites a social ballast in a time of constant dislocation, it also helped them justify their depredations against blacks, Native Americans, and, by the 1840s, Mexicans. If white Americans were to continue to believe they were citizens of a chosen nation, they had to place fault for the suffering they inflicted on nonwhites on the victims’ racial inferiority. The assumption of white supremacy that had existed since the country’s founding had now become an aggressive ideology that was used both to bring new immigrants into the fold and to justify expansion. While Americans still believed their nation had a special destiny to fulfill, whiteness had become both the social glue and the fuel to push it forward.
Part II
The Unmaking of America
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the United States experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization, and a sharp increase in the number of new immigrants. The transcontinental railroad had been built, distances were shrinking, communication was improving, and Manifest Destiny was, well, becoming manifest. North and South were forging their post–Civil War detente first while collectively fighting Native Americans on the western frontier and then in the Spanish-American War. What had been a loose-knit sense of national community and a willingness to live among multiple identities was now giving way to a growing awareness of interdependence and demands for a consistent, all-encompassing definition of what it meant to be American. The contraction of the nation’s identity would involve a new evaluation of which groups were in and which were out.
In the post-Reconstruction South, a resurgent white supremacy was instituting Jim Crow laws. In the North, the new immigrants who were not from the older sending countries in Northern or Western Europe were facing greater obstacles on arrival. Nationally, the disdain whites felt for blacks was now being projected onto non–Northern European immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. The anti-Catholic nativism that had emerged in mid-century against the Irish now took on a more clearly racial bent against immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. With the upsurge in nativism came cries for greater restrictions on immigration.
The Progressive movement emerged in the 1890s as a response to these and other massive changes in American society. The belief that the U.S. needed to forge a more cohesive form of nationalism was a core element of the movement’s reform efforts. Its de facto spokesperson, two-time president Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), did more to shape how Americans came to understand the role of ethnicity in American life than perhaps anyone in the twentieth century.
Roosevelt was a racist who lauded the “domineering masterful spirit” of nineteenth-century white pioneers and considered blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese incapable of living in a democratic society.29 At the same time, however, he rejected the rising nativism of his day against Catholics and Jews arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe. While whiteness had always been a flexible concept, Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to prop the door open a bit farther. Like Crèvecoeur before him, Roosevelt believed American whites were made stronger through the process of mixing. His understanding of the melting pot, however, was that it purified newcomers of their foreignness, i.e., ethnicity, rather than blending them together. Not content with seeing America merely as a set of ideals, he insisted that it also needed to become a shared culture to which all citizens should unfailingly adhere. In his mind, any hint of ethnicity was a threat to national cohesion. In a 1915 address to the Knights of Columbus, Roosevelt argued, “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”30
Roosevelt had been shaping these ideas for a while. In 1894, he published an essay titled “What ‘Americanism’ Means,” in which he articulated the idea that Americanization was as much a process of subtraction as addition, a rejection of the past as much as an embrace of the future. He called on newcomers to shed their native customs, ways of life, and languages. In a particularly extreme passage, he even insisted that the Irish immigrant must learn to celebrate “the Fourth of July instead of St. Patrick’s Day.” Above all, he concluded, “the immigrant must learn to talk and think and be United States.”31
Roosevelt believed that the federal government should assume greater authority to take on the problems the nation faced. That new authority, he figured, would require an equal amount of unified national identity to undergird it. As he saw it, ethnicities didn’t enrich the nation, they threatened it. America would never achieve “true great- ness” unless all its citizens were “Americans in heart and soul.”32 In Roosevelt’s mind, the citizen existed to uphold the government, rather than the other way around. He saw any hint of loyalty or nostalgia or affection that wasn’t focused on America as a threat. “We do not wish, in politics, in literature, or in art,” he wrote, “to develop that unwholesome parochial spirit, that over-exaltation of the little community at the expense of the great nation, which produces what has been described as the patriotism of the village, the patriotism of the belfry.”33
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Roosevelt’s understanding of ethnicity as an enemy of nationalism was not, of course, the only interpretation that the U.S. embraced in the twentieth century. But given the laissez-faire attitudes of the nineteenth century, it was pivotal and became a widely held belief in some segments of society for the next century. In other words, whether or not Roosevelt’s version of nationalism was dominant or not in the decades to come, it was still a bias with which ethnic Americans had to contend. This ver- sion of nationalism had the most impact on the lives of the millions of immigrants and their families who arrived in the U.S. at the turn of the twentieth century.
Roosevelt’s contemporary and fellow Progressive, the intellectual Randolph S. Bourne, had a more nuanced approach to forging a unified culture in the face of mass immigration. In 1916 he wrote perhaps the greatest critique of Rooseveltian nation-building. “Let us face realistically the America we have around us,” he wrote. “Let us work with the forces that are at work. Let us make something of this trans-national spirit instead of outlawing it.”34 What America needed, he thought, was a more cosmopolitan view of itself. Bourne worried about the effects such an extreme notion of assimilation had on immigrants and their families. If newcomers were obliged to shed the customs and beliefs that had given their families meaning for generations—and perhaps centuries—what did that leave them? If ethnicities were to disintegrate, he feared, it would leave “hordes of men and women” without a spiritual home, “cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob.” The nation would be sentencing them “to live on the most rudimentary planes of American life.”35 While ethnicity, he argued, was a centripetal influence on people, the forces that lay beyond ethnic life were centrifugal, even anarchical. They made for “detached fragments of peoples,” who would become “the flotsam and jetsam of American life” and the “cultural wreckage of our time.”36 It turns out Bourne accurately predicted the future.
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The hypernationalism brought on by America’s entrance into World War I only intensified the attack on pluralism in U.S. life. In his 1919 postwar speech in Pueblo, Colorado, promoting the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson leveraged the distrust of ethnicity to silence German American critics. “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him,” he warned, “carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”37 By the early 1920s, the toxic combination of nativism, the faux science of eugenics, and racial segregation led Congress and the courts to harden the definition of whiteness and narrow the parameters of U.S. citizenship. Nativists and eugenicists were concerned that whiteness had become overly inclusive, that the arrival of so many Eastern and Southern Europeans would degrade America’s white racial stock. In 1924, Congress passed the National Origins Quota Act, which severely restricted immigration overall, specifically limiting entries from countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, and completely prohibited immigration from Asia. The law also contained a provision that barred entry to all migrants who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship. By 1924, only whites and blacks were eligible for citizenship. (In 1870, Congress ceremonially extended the right to naturalize to persons of African nativity and descent.)
Not surprisingly, given the nation’s racial hierarchy, new immigrants had no incentive to claim blackness when applying for citizenship. Instead, their eligibility revolved around their ability to prove that they were white. While whiteness had always been a vague category, everyone understood its internal hierarchy, that some people were considered more white than others. But how was whiteness determined?
Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the country’s courts had to decide on a case-by-case basis who could be considered white. In some cases, a person’s whiteness was determined by skin color, in others by ancestry, or culture, or national origin, or just plain popular opinion. By the 1920s, the judges weren’t just choosing who could join the ongoing mixture of peoples that made up American culture. Now they were determining who could participate in the forging of a pseudoscientific race called “Caucasians.” Over the next several decades, there was a marked decline in the cultural differences among the various groups who were allowed entry into this emerging race.
In 1927, white supremacist political scientist, historian, and journalist Lothrop Stoddard published a book titled Re-forging America, in which he hailed the passing of the 1924 National Origins Act as a moment to rebuild a nation that he felt had been roiled both by Reconstruction and by the mass arrival of what he considered to be less-than-desirable immigrants from Europe. In essence, Stoddard proposed that the South’s “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws be extended to the nation at large. A system of biracialism, as he called it, would allow new immigrants to be absorbed into the white part of America without encouraging mixing and thereby endangering the country’s social order. Because most European immi- grants “belong to some branch of the white racial group,” they could be successfully assimilated into white America over time. That “most emphatically does not apply to non-white immigrants, like the Chinese, Japanese, or Mexicans; neither does it apply to the large resident negro element which has been a tragic anomaly from our earliest times. Here, ethnic differences are so great that ‘assimilation’ in the racial sense is impossible.”38 As Stoddard saw it, America’s greatest problems were “mass-alienage and color.”39 Solving these would make for an “essentially homogeneous, like-minded people,”40 the very conditions he thought necessary to bring about an American cultural renaissance. Stoddard perfectly captured the cultural and racial zeitgeist of the times.
In the 1920s, white racial fears, Progressive reforms, and growing demands for national loyalty encouraged the emergence of a culture that promoted social con- formity over pluralism. While earlier nativist episodes had marginal effects on U.S. culture, this moment would fundamentally change how the country saw itself and its constituent parts. While immigration continued—particularly as demographic expansion of the West called for more Mexican labor—the understanding that newcomers could enrich their adopted home with traditional folkways would hibernate for forty years. The country that had once defined itself by abstract political ideals had now begun to see itself more in terms of a tangible culture and a unified people. No, Stoddard’s wishes did not come to fruition literally or legally—Jim Crow was not extended to the nation at large—but his vision of a binary America stuck, and to the immigrants of the early twentieth century, becoming American and becoming white were all but one and the same. Whiteness had the power to include and exclude.
***
The desire to be accepted as full citizens wasn’t the only reason immigrants and their children tolerated varying forms of coercive assimilation over the coming decades. Whether they knew it or not, immigrants were tapping into the Puritan narrative of becoming. They knew that what was most important was not what you are now, but what you—or your children and grandchildren—would become. The payoff for shedding one’s ethnicity wasn’t just status through whiteness, it was also a chance to see oneself as part of the nation’s arc of progress. Generally speaking, American culture always seemed to exist somewhere between origin and destination. Coercive assimilation may have been about preserving the racial and ethnic hierarchy, but it was also about nation-building. It was an immigrant family’s ticket to middle-class acceptability and success, and perhaps even beyond.
Southerners had never fully bought into the narrative of becoming. Nor had they ever fully adhered to the idea of America as abstraction. But most immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century arrived in the North, and they absorbed Yankee notions of progress, self-improvement, and constant change. Southerners, on the other hand, tended to see their Americanness differently. Poet and literary critic Robert Penn Warren once commented that Southerners exhibited a “fear of abstraction.”41 Novelist Eudora Welty put the same idea in more affirmative terms. As a writer, she said, a sense of rootedness opened up the doors of her imagination. She spoke of “the blessing of being located—contained.”42 This idea of America wasn’t an ideal that lay in the future, it was a very present reality rooted in past and place. Of course, the South was never immune to the Northern rhetoric of progress, just as the North sometimes envied the South’s culture of hearth and home.
***
The assimilation of early-twentieth-century immigrants further ingrained the belief that separation and estrangement were the price of progress in America. Despite the drastic reduction in the number of new immigrants, mobility and its consequences continued to be a constant in U.S. life—it’s just that most of it was now domestic migration. In 1962, historian George W. Pierson pronounced that geographic mobility was the key to the American character. More important, he thought it was the reason that old ethnic hierarchies tended to weaken over time. If opportunities were limited for one’s group in one city, moving to another provided an opportunity to “get out from under” whoever or whatever was keeping them down. “Inside, the freedom to move remained,” he wrote, “and a man could get out of his cellar in town by building a one-story cabin upcountry, or he could come off his eroded acres into Chicago, where the rising buildings and professions had elevators in them.”43 Domestic migration also led to more ethnic mixing and intermarriage. It also made it incumbent on each generation to reevaluate the role their ethnicity played in their American lives. The Greek immigrant in Astoria, Queens, would tend to see his identity very differently than did his U.S.-born children, who may have harbored ambitions of moving to a decidedly not-very-Greek Long Island suburb. The third generation—the grandchildren of immigrants—may have had little understanding of their pappous’s native tongue and didn’t quite know where to place themselves vis-à-vis their ancestry, particularly if both of their parents were not Greek American. If the grandchildren had a Greek last name, then perhaps it served as a point of distinctiveness to their non-Greek friends. They may or may not take some pride in it. They may or may not have made annual visits to a Greek Orthodox church or to an old haunt of their grandparents’ in the old neighborhood in Queens. No matter the metaphor we use to describe it, for most of the twentieth century the generational process of becoming American was a process of progressive loss and a dramatic unmooring from the past. Particularly after the 1920s, it was understood to be America’s price of entry. It’s true that the language of nation-building became kinder and gentler under Franklin D. Roosevelt, meaning that his administration actually acknowledged the nation’s ethnic pluralism. But the impact of the coercive assimilation campaign and immigration restrictions of the 1920s could not be reversed for the millions of Americans whose families arrived in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. For European-origin Americans, ethnicity was largely understood as being a transitional stage between the immigrant generation’s arrival and the multigenerational goal of whiteness.
In 1942, anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that whatever our individual origins, the predominant cultural characteristics in the U.S. were those of a third-generation American. While the second-generation American—the first born in the U.S.—struggles to differentiate himself from his parents, the third-generation American was expected to go further, but without the benefit of foreign-born parents from whom he was expected to individuate. The third-generation would refuse to model himself after his father, but not because he was foreign—simply because he was “out of date” and “drove an old model car.”44 The world had changed. It’s always changing. The third-generation American was expected to move forward, but it wasn’t clear in which direction. As Mead saw it, they had to press forward without any precedent or markers of either what to avoid or what to look for. “It’s a bleak and lonely business looking into the future,” she wrote, “modeling one’s life on an undrawn blueprint.”45 Americans had to spend so much of their lives “measuring up to an unknown standard—learning to live in a world that did not exist for us yet, finding no clues where all other peoples have found clues—in the behavior of our parents. You must be a success. What does that mean? Doing what your father did? Certainly not.”46
In his 1948 book on the American character, Mead’s student, British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer, went a step further—and a tad bit more Freudian. To Gorer, it was the “break of continuity”47 between the immigrant gene- ration and their children that was the central influence on the development of the modern American personality. The immigrant’s break with the past grafted onto the nation’s founding revolution and the colonists’ rejec- tion of Britain. Each wave of immigrant families thereby reinforced the country’s original disdain for authority. Whatever the interpretation, by the middle of the twentieth century, writers and scholars were once again as- king what it meant to be American, and more than a few answers revolved around the process of assimilation and the rejection of ancestry and ethnicity.
Assimilation, of course, often went hand in hand with social and geographic mobility. Suburbanization hastened the process of unmooring from inherited identities. Historian of American suburbia Kenneth T. Jackson spoke of the “privatization” of social life, how millions of Americans came to center their lives on the home and nuclear family rather than on the neighborhood or broader community. “There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon,”48 he wrote. In 1954, in the midst of this mass migration out of the cities, historian Richard Hofstadter confessed that no one was yet quite sure what would remain of ethnic whites “when we have been melted down.”49
One thing the almost-melted did was turn to good old-fashioned American voluntarism, that habit of banding together in groups to socialize or solve problems that Tocqueville had so admired a century earlier. As the associational life so often tied to ethnicity faded away, newly minted white suburbanites sought new forms of connection and meaning. Over the centuries, growing egalitarianism in the U.S. only spread voluntarism more broadly, and it now included women and young people. Greater associational choice also required less commitment from the individual. More than one sociologist referred to associational ties of the mid-twentieth century as “communities of limited liability.”
While residential segregation locked large numbers of nonwhites within communities, whites, as sociologist Claude S. Fischer has written, “found it increasingly easy to both invest in and withdraw from their local communities as their needs dictated.”50 The emergence of antitraditional countercultural movements in the 1960s and early 1970s further loosened social connections. Whi- te Americans, in particular, had a growing sense of their need for individual fulfillment. This shift had an enormous impact on how they practiced religion. In the 1950s and before, an individual’s religious life was likely rooted in what sociologist Robert Wuthnow has called the spirituality of dwelling, meaning it was tied to a specific place of worship and community. Starting in the 1960s, more and more Americans—particularly whites—began to practice a spirituality of seeking, meaning their religious life was no longer rooted in a static community and was more an ongoing quest for meaning and sacred moments wherever they could be found. “At one time,” Wuthnow writes, “people identified their faith by membership; now they do so increasingly by the search for connections with various organizations, groups, and disciplines, all the while feeling marginal to any particular group or place.”51 The intimate neighborhood house of God gave way to the huge, impersonal megachurch miles away.
It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that observers really started to evaluate the human costs of post-1920s assimilation. Until then, few had actually considered what full whiteness would look like. In 1971, in an introduction to a collection of essays on the anguish of becoming America, writer Thomas C. Wheeler lamented that the American immigrant experience had left in its wake “an American vacancy.”52 He theorized that the growing cross-ethnic ex- perimentation and faddishness of the era were attempts to fill the vacancy left by the death of ethnicity. His baroque description carries with it the flavor of the times:
Witness youth today, of varying ethnic backgrounds parading in the beards and paraphernalia of frontiersmen, of gold prospectors, electricity providing a geiger-counter music. While old cultures fade, a cross-pollination of cultures breaks through. The physical freedom and tempo of blacks is a romantic influence on the behavior of white youth. Yet without a sense of one’s own identity, America reels off endlessly on fads and is now in search of life-styles.53
This quest for meaning in alternative identities took on many forms, but it often revolved around a perceived need for authentic experience. Many newly post-ethnic whites of all classes tried to adopt aspects of nonwhite identities—namely, Native American, Latin American, African American—as a way to give their lives the kind of texture and specificity that their whiteness didn’t give them. Presumably, these identities were understood to be more authentic because racism didn’t allow the people born into them to shed them as whites could theirs. The civil rights movement and the landmark immigration law of 1965 sparked a new debate over the meaning of assimilation, whether earlier generations of European immigrants had really been fully melted, and whether a more pluralistic way of managing diversity would be healthier for both new immigrants and the country at large.
Inspired by the emergence of nonwhite ethnic pride movements, whites experienced their own type of ethnic revival in the 1970s. After decades of seeking to shed signs of their ethnicity, their immigrant origins all of a sudden became badges of pride rather than shame. The more cynical scholars dismissed this newfound embrace of immigrant origins as little more than the purchasing of “dime-store” ethnicities. “Many attributes of a multitu- de of ethnic cultures are offered for consumption,” wro- te authors Howard Stein and Robert Hill. “One selects, tries, likes or dislikes, and returns for the same ‘pur- chase’ or an alternate.”54 Particularly after the success of Alex Haley’s Roots—both the book and the television series—later-generation American whites were showing signs of buyer’s remorse.
On the one hand, there had been an irreversible decli- ne in objective ethnic differences among European-origin Americans as seen through their places of residence, levels of education, and professional achievements. On the other, there was an intensified subjective attachment to ethnic identities. But while one’s immigrant ancestors were born into and tied to an ethnic family and community that helped determine their life’s choices and chances, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren likely married outside of their ethnicity, were ethnically mixed themselves, and lived in a white ethnically mixed neighborhood. The new—or renewed—ethnicity didn’t translate into any real communal form of solidarity or membership in ethnically based churches or associations. It was largely an individual’s choice and therefore symbolic in nature. “The privatization of ethnic identity,” as socio- logist Richard D. Alba called it, was largely a personal or, at most, a family affair.55 In 1977, literary and social critic Irving Howe published an essay in The New Republic in which he wondered aloud whether “the famous melting pot” had grown “too hot” for those being melted. “We are all aware that our ties with the European past grow increasingly feeble,” he wrote. “Yet we feel uneasy be- fore the prospect of becoming ‘just Americans.’ We feel uneasy before the prospect of becoming as indistingui- shable from one another as our motel rooms are, or as fla- vorless and mass-produced as the bread many of us eat.”56
***
Howe’s observation was plaintive and honest enough, but it was also incomplete. The melted people he was referring to weren’t simply “becoming just Americans,” they were becoming white Americans. But what was so scary about finally transcending ethnicity, identities that had brought discrimination and shame to so many in earlier years? Wasn’t becoming securely white the objective? Hadn’t their families complied with the requirements of early-twentieth-century American nationalism? In 1990, sociologist Mary Waters published the findings of an extraordinary ethnographic study of later-generation whites that answered those questions. What she found was that symbolic ethnicity gives whites “a feeling of community and special status as an interesting or unique individual,”57 and “not just ‘vanilla.’”58 The idea of being just white doesn’t give people a sense of membership in one large family, “the way that being French does for people in France.”59 Many of her respondents implicitly understood that American was a political or national identity and not a cultural or ethnic one. They tend to see ethnicity as family writ large, and when they want to feel part of an intimate community they conjure up their symbolic ethnicity. Because these identities don’t involve an actual living community, they don’t come with any costs, inhibitions on behavior, or lack of access to opportunities. In fact, they don’t interfere at all with an individual’s movements or choices, no traditional grandmothers wagging their fingers or nosy uncles asking when they’re getting married. Symbolic ethnicity, then, is the perfect compromise for white Americans, the feelings of warmth and specialness without any constraints on their sense of individual freedom.
***
In her study, Waters also found that symbolically ethnic whites routinely ascribe the social behaviors they’re proud of to their chosen ethnicity. If they were hard workers, they’d say it was because they were Italian. If they were family-oriented, they’d say it was because they were German. The most treasured values were pretty much the same across ethnicities, and there’s no reason to believe that they derived from those particular groups. What’s important is that she concludes that Americans “have very little conceptual terminology that allows them to link their nuclear families to institutions beyond them.”60 Their whiteness doesn’t serve that function, given that it says little to nothing about a family’s history or values. If anything, it’s more of an anti-heritage.
***
In 1985, a team of scholars led by sociologist of religion Robert Bellah concluded that Americans have more than one language with which to speak of their moral lives. The first is the national language of individualism that derives from the country’s political origins. Given its primary emphasis on the rights of the individual, this language isn’t always equipped to discuss either the trials and tribulations of human relations or the quest for the common good. For such discussions, Americans will often resort to “second languages” that derive from “communities of memory,” ethnic or religious groups with traditions and histories that inform the present.61 “The stories that make up a tradition,” Bellah and his colleagues wrote in their book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, “contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such character.” Communal notions of moral values and good character can help individuals healthily engage with the diverse society around them. “They carry a context of meaning that can allow us to connect our aspirations for ourselves and those closest to us with the aspirations of a larger whole.”62 Conversely, they can protect them against the imper- sonal forces of the political and economic worlds. They can help cushion the individual from the alienation and anxiety of American life.
While the shedding of ethnicity can be a liberating and successful transition for many, it can leave others with less social support and moral guidance in their lives. They’re more likely to fall prey to the temptations of the marketplace or to mistake electoral politics or the legal system for genuine sources of morality. Wor- se yet, once separated from communities of memory, it isn’t clear whose ethical or moral standards one should adopt. Once they are free of any moral restraints in their pursuits of happiness, it also isn’t clear what happiness means or how to assess it. To some it seems to simply mean freedom to reject whatever is asked of them. Still, as the Waters study suggests, people will continue to seek connection, but inevitably with shallower, less diverse communities built around transient shared identities, tastes, and lifestyles. In short, each individual is then obliged to choose his or her own value systems—or even facts—based on his or her chosen identities and preferences, which makes it extremely hard for society to reconcile conflicting notions of what constitutes the greater good. Likewise, it gets harder to instill a sense of national mission, let alone forge a Puritan-style covenant. There is also the danger to the individual. As Bellah and his colleagues warned, a life built entirely on the notion of individual fulfillment (as opposed to commu- nal commitment) often ends up lonely and empty. Think of the horrible death toll the opioid epidemic has taken over the past two decades. Ponder the number of men and women living on the streets. Consider this country’s obsession with individual rights and how it eclipses any concern for the common good. It starts to explain the disappearance of compromise in American politics as well as the glaring absence of grace, tenderness, or compassion in U.S. public life.
***
Once the glue to an imperfect type of social cohesion, whiteness now threatens to undermine the social contract altogether. The reluctance that we have witnessed over the past months both of millions of individuals to wear masks and for state and local governments to mandate it were just the most glaring examples of a trend that’s been building for decades. The massive loss of human life will do nothing to change this. The meaning of America, the role of race in it, and a peculiar brand of nation-building have allowed the emptiness of whiteness to even pass as nationalism. And once again, as whites continue to shed any semblance of communal tradition, they grab onto patriotic symbols and ideology in an attempt to anchor themselves. But neither symbolism nor the constant attempt to reignite white cohesion by demonizing nonwhites both at home and abroad will make unhyphenated whites feel more secure in the world. The usual talismans will do nothing to keep them from falling through the latticework that is America. Meanwhile, they’re pushing the entire nation ever closer to the void.
*****
1. William Dean, The Religious Critic in American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 178.
2. Ibid.
3. Carl Joachim Friedrich, “Responsible Government Service Under the American Constitution,” in Problems of the American Public Service (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1935), 12.
4. Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 262.
5. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 10.
6. Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “The Puritans’ Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeen- th-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of American History 60, no. 1 (1973): 12.
7. David D. Hall, Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 337–38.
8. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34.
9. Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Ideological Context of the American Renaissance,” in Forms and Functions of History in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Ursula Brumm (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1981), 4.
10. Abraham Lincoln, “Address to the New Jersey State Senate, Trenton, New Jersey, February 21, 1861,” in Lincoln Speeches (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 110.
11. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Speech to the Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, June 27, 1936,” in American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton, ed. Ted Widmer (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2006), 420.
12. Martin Luther King Jr., “Sermon at National Cathedral Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968,” in ibid., 680.
13. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 387.
14. Francis J. Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1837), 149.
15. Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America (New York: Scribner, 1972), 3.
16. Horace Bushnell, “The Founders Great in Their Unconsciousness,” in Work and Play; or, Literary Varieties (New York: Scribner, 1864), 158.
17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Civic Banquets,” in Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1876), 375.
18. Guillaume Vandenbroucke, “The U.S. Westward Expansion,” International Economic Review 49, no. 1 (2008): 81.
19. John Higham, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (1974): 17.
20. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), xiii.
21. Miranda E. Wilkerson and Joseph Salmons, “‘Good Old Immigrants of Yesteryear,’ Who Didn’t Learn English: Germans in Wisconsin,” American Speech 83, no. 3 (2008): 268.
22. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration That Made the American People, 2nd ed., (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 4.
23. Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), 164.
24. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 486.
25. Timothy L. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review 83, no. 5 (December 1978): 1175.
26. Higham, “Hanging Together,” 17.
27. Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 109.
28. Handlin, Race and Nationality, 164.
29. Theodore Roosevelt, “Thomas Hart Benton,” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Edition, vol. 8 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), 131.
30. Theodore Roosevelt, “Americanism,” The Works of Theo- dore Roosevelt Memorial Edition, vol. 20 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 457.
31. Theodore Roosevelt, “What ‘Americanism’ Means,” The Forum Magazine 17 (1894): 204–5.
32. Ibid., 198.
33. Ibid.
34. Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 96.
35. Ibid., 90.
36. Ibid., 91.
37. Woodrow Wilson, “Address at Pueblo, Colorado, September 25, 1919,” in Addresses of President Woodrow Wilson, Addresses Delivered by President Wilson on His Western Tour, September 4 to September 25, 1919 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 359.
38. Lothrop Stoddard, Re-Forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood (London: Scribner, 1927), 257.
39. Ibid., 326.
40. Ibid., 365.
41. Robert Penn Warren, Segregation, the Inner Conflict in the South (New York: Random House, 1956), 15.
42. Eudora Welty, “How I Write,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 31, no. 2 (1955): 243.
43. George W. Pierson, “The M-Factor in American History,” American Quarterly 14, no. 2 (Summer 1962): 280.
44. Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthro- pologist Looks at America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1942), 53.
45. Ibid., 74.
46. Ibid., 73.
47. Geoffrey Gorer, The Americans: A Study in National Character (London: Cresset Press, 1948), 15.
48. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 280.
49. Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” The American Scholar 24, no. 1 (1945): 17.
50. Claude S. Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 149.
51. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Sin- ce the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 7.
52. Thomas C. Wheeler, Introduction to The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American, ed. Thomas C. Wheeler (New York: The Dial Press, 1971), 14.
53. Ibid., 14.
54. Howard F. Stein and Robert F. Hill, The Ethnic Imperative: Examining the New White Ethnic Movement (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 22.
55. Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of Whi- te America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 300.
56. Irving Howe, “The Limits of Ethnicity,” New Republic 176 (June 25, 1977): 18.
57. Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 92.
58. Ibid., 151.
59. Ibid., 153.
60. Ibid., 134–35.
61. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1985), 154.
62. Ibid., 153.
