American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century [Paperback]

Gary Gerstle (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691102775 | ISBN-13: 978-0691102771 | Publication Date: August 5, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Is America a wonderful melting pot in which the world's ethnicities and races can come together to form a vibrant new nation, or has the American dream become, in the words of Malcolm X, the American nightmare? The ideal of the multiracial, multicultural society has always been influenced dynamically by the competing, very potent ideal of America as a white, Protestant country. In this engrossing, powerfully argued study, Gerstle (Working-Class Americanism) shows how this struggle has shaped the past 100 years of U.S. life, society and politics. With a meticulous eye for detail, he moves deftly from quoting Theodore Roosevelt's desire for "hyphenated Americans" to become "Americans pure and simple" to a telling exegesis on how Superman comics represented a unique moment in the conceptualization of "the immigrant," specifically the Jewish immigrant, in popular culture. This ability to draw on a wide range of cultural artifacts and events from Frank Capra films and the Rosenberg executions to the effect of the Black Power movement on African-American GIs in Vietnam is matched by his portrayals of telling moments in U.S. history, such as when FDR's Jewish advisers urged him not to meet with a group of Orthodox rabbis who came to Washington in 1943 to ask for an end to "the destruction of European Jewry." Gerstle balances his critique of how often the U.S. has failed to live up to its melting pot ideal with a strong sense of fairness and an even stronger sense of the possibility for change. This informed and well-argued study is a strong addition to the literature on race, multiculturalism and citizenship in the U.S.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Beginning with an analysis of Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Square Deal platforms, historian Gerstle examines how the concepts of race and nation influenced U.S. history in the 20th century. He compares and contrasts "civic nationalism" (defined here as the belief in the "fundamental equality of all human beings...their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...and in a government legitimized by the consent of the people") with "racial nationalism" (a belief in a people bound together by "common blood, skin color, and an inherited fitness for self-government"). The author details the interplay of these conflicting ideologies as they were expressed in important historical events, movements, popular culture genres, and historical documents. He ends on a cautionary note, predicting either a resurgence of racial exclusivity or a watering down of national cohesion resulting from divisive multiculturalism. This tightly argued historical synthesis is likely to be as influential to understanding the evolution of American nationalism in the past 100 years as John Higham's Strangers in the Land (Rutgers Univ., 1988) and Hans Kohn's American Nationalism (Greenwood, o.p.) were to understanding nationalism during earlier periods of U.S. history. For most academic libraries and large and middle-sized public libraries. Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib., CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 472 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (August 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691102775
• ISBN-13: 978-0691102771
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not exceptional, September 14, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. (Hardcover)

This book looks at two kinds of nationalism. The first is an exclusionary racial nationalism, the second is a more inclusive civic nationalism. This dichotomy has recently developed in the scholarship of nationalism. What Gary Gerstle valuably points out is that much of the genuinely "civic" nationalism also had strong "racial" restrictions. Gerstle looks at such examples as Theodore Roosevelt, the opponents of immigration restriction in the twenties, and many radicals and New Dealers in the thirties. He points out that while they wished to integrate Jews and Southern/Eastern Europeans, they were often contemptuous of African and Asian Americans. Most interesting here is his discussion of the thirties; on the one hand this was an era of considerable advancement for non-WASP whites given the Roosevelt patronage machine and the rise of the CIO. On the other hand Jews, Communists and many others anglicized their names, labor unions invoked images of native-born farmers as opposed to their foreign-born immigrant constituencies.

Gerstle does provide some more interesting examples to support his dichotomy. It is grimly interesting to learn that Martin Dies, the first Red Scare politician, called for the deportation of Japanese Americans. There is the story of Superman, created by two Jews, the story of an alien who passes as an ordinary Wasp. There are some interesting comments about Frank Capra and Dorothea Lange, and there is the interesting suggestion that the segregated army in the second world war isolated African-Americans from the general sense of male comraderie. It is interesting to point out that Italian American director Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Comes to Town portrays a New York inhabited entirely by Protestants. He is well aware of recent scholarship by people such ad David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen that asks why non-WASP Americans from Celtic, Eastern and Southern Europe are viewed as fellow "white" citizens when for much of American history they could have been denounced as Catholic proletarian scum.

But on the whole this book has some problems. Much of it has a padded feel as we have reasonable, somewhat conventional accounts of Progressivism, the first world war, Herbert Hoover, the New Deal, McCarthyism. There is little here that is actually new. (There is little new archival evidence, beyond some moving letters in which African-Americans almost beg an indifferent authority for the right to fight for their country). I agree with Gerstle's pessimistic conclusion that the civil rights era was bound to end in disappointment because white Americans were not willing to pay the price for integration. But simply discussing the story of the 1964 Democratic convention, and the ruminations of X and Carmichael do not take us far enough. Gerstle, better known as a social historian, should have used considerably more of that here. Over the past decade Gary Gerstle has published a number of articles which promises to take a new look at the acculturation of immigrants in American society and to look at such concepts as racism, multiculturalism and nationalism. Looking at this book one finds that there is to be a companion volume which looks at the political incorporation of immigrants. One can only hope that book shows more research and a greater profundity.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Can two nationalisms make the systhesis of American history?, November 23, 2003

By 

An Asian Reviewer (Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

In this book Gary Gerstle organizes his narrative of American history through two threads of nationalism: racial and civic. According to the author, Theodore Roosvelt established a prototype of American nation, the Rooseveltian nation (in Gerstle's phrase), in which racial nationalism excludes several manority groups such as Asians and African-Americans and at the same time includes them in the body politic. FDR encouraged the civic nationalism to radicalize itself to promote economic reforms. The Cold War enabled the nation to invite Jewish and Eastern European people by intensifying an anticommunistic version of the civic nationalism. Antiwar activism led by New Left, Black Power movements, and the ethnic revival resulted in collapse of the Rooseveltian nation.
Gerstle makes extensive research efforts and full use of recent fruits of social history such as whiteness studies. He defines the nature of civic and racial nationalisms as not rigid and fixed ideologies but as fluid sets of languages which could be used for various purpose of legitimation by diverse groups. For example, he argues that CIO and the early Civil Rights Movement used the rhetoric of civic nationalism in order to legitimate their claim for rights as American citizens. Gerstle insists that concepts of race in the racial nationalism also change by time and place. His treatment of the two nationalism is dynamic and inspiring.
This book, however, is not very exciting in comparison to his previous fascinating and inspiring book (Working-Class Americanism, 1989) and articles (for example, "The Protean Character of American Liberalism," American Historical Review, 1994, and "Liberty, Coercion,..." Journal of American History, 1997). This book reduces most events and phenomena in the twentieth-century American history into "either" civic or racial nationalism. As a result, it often loses historical complexities which were vividly described in the author's book on working-class people's various uses of Americanism rhetoric). Subtle, complicated, and sometimes contradictory aspects of working-class or African-American movements are interpreted only as either nationalistic or anti-American. I feel little difficulties in finding fresh and vivid analyses of multi-faceted historical phenomena which I could have found in his previous writings. His method in this book is a kind not of "from the bottom up" but of "from the top down" history.
I cannot think that his conceptualization of the two nationalisms could best describe American history. In most of his narrative Gerstle regards the racial nationalism as opposed to the civic one. The civic nationalism, however, not only opposes but also complements the racial. For example, antebellum nativists discriminated the Irish on a basis of patriotic language that they are loyal to the Pope rather than to the American republic. Anti-Affirmative Action arguments, disguising itself with a language of equal citizenship right, often depend on racistic premises (see, for instance, George Lipsitz' book The Posessive Investment in Whiteness, 1998). Moreover, the civic nationalism could promote interests of American citizens but could not embrace noncitizens in or out of the United States. Therefore, we can see that the civic nationalist discourse legitimate both exploiting immigrants---legal and undocumented---as low-wage labor and at the same time excluding them from benefits of citizenship rights. When we pay attention to the above-mentioned facets of the history of American nation, could we really conceptualize the civic ideal as a separate and distinct discourse from the racial nationalism? I think that Gerstle underestimates the complicated and intertwined nature of relations between the civic nationalism and the racial.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not perfect, but useful, November 5, 2006

By 

JOrth "0structure0" (San Luis Obispo) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

Ok, this is just a quick review. The other three reviews are all fair in their own way (even the negative one...). However, I wanted to add an important point. Students enjoy this book (for a class assigned book). The level of argument is high enough to challenge without being too difficult to follow (with some help). The author's bias is enough to keep it interesting without overwhelming. Best of all, the seemingly simple idea of "what it means to be an American" has an insidious way of seeping into everyone's thinking in a very destabilizing way. Can you be "un-Swedish, un-Czech, un-Chinese, un-Indian...?" but for some reason being "un-American" makes more sense. Scholars and teachers may be less than impressed with such a simple and un-nuanced division, but the typical 21 year old college student can generate some interesting conclusions when presented with it.