After Nationalism

Being American in an Age of Division

Samuel Goldman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780812251647
  9780812251647
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812296457
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nationalism is on the rise across the Western world, serving as a rallying cry for voters angry at the unacknowledged failures of globalization that has dominated politics and economics since the end of the Cold War. In After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman trains a sympathetic but skeptical eye on the trend, highlighting the deep challenges that face any contemporary effort to revive social cohesion at the national level.Noting the obstacles standing in the way of basing any unifying political project on a singular vision of national identity, Goldman highlights three pillars of mid-twentieth-century nationalism, all of which are absent today: the social dominance of Protestant Christianity, the absorption of European immigrants in a broader white identity, and the defense of democracy abroad. Most of today's nationalists fail to recognize these necessary underpinnings of any renewed nationalism, or the potentially troubling consequences that they would engender.To secure the general welfare in a new century, the future of American unity lies not in monolithic nationalism. Rather, Goldman suggests we move in the opposite direction: go small, embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and support political projects grounded in local communities.

CHAPTER 1

The New English Covenant

The Declaration of Independence begins with an assertion of national self-determination. The famous second paragraph emphasizes the rights of individuals, but the opening statement considers relations among nations. The “thirteen United States of America,” the signatories insist, constitute “one people.” As such, they are entitled to a “separate and equal station” among “the powers of the earth.”

What are the defining features of this people? The Declaration does not say. A subsequent passage appeals to “our British brethren,” suggesting an ancestral connection with the mother country. But the document gives few additional clues concerning their ethnic characteristics.

References to religion, another source of national identity, are equivocal. The statement of national autonomy is founded on a vaguely deistic appeal to “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” Subsequent passages invoke a more conventional deity: a “Creator” who is also “Supreme Judge of the World.” There is no direct association, however, with the God of the Bible, let alone the person of Jesus.

Even the title of the new nation is vague. Unlike England or Deutschland, the United States does not derive its name from the people who live there. In the twentieth century, pluralist theorist Horace Kallen noted that “the United States of America” refers to an arrangement of political institutions—United States—in just one part of a larger continent. Canadians and Mexicans, after all, are also (North) Americans.¹

Political reasons may have encouraged this “peculiar anonymity.”² While the outcome of the Revolution remained uncertain, it would have been unwise to alienate potential supporters by defining the nation too narrowly. Many American patriots also entertained hopes that parts of Canada could be induced to join their cause. In fact, an invasion of Quebec was already under way when the Declaration of Independence was promulgated.

After the war, the task shifted from sustaining a military alliance to determining relations among now independent states. To make the case for a closer union than the wartime Articles of Confederation provided, some advocates of the Constitution appealed to preexisting homogeneity. In Federalist No. 2, John Jay presented an epitome of this argument. According to Jay, “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”³

Jay was exaggerating the ethnic and cultural unity of the American population. To modern eyes, it is glaringly obvious that he excluded people of African descent and Native Americans living under the jurisdiction of the United States. Even among whites, moreover, not all were descended from “the same ancestors.” Jay’s home state of New York, for example, included large Dutch and Huguenot populations. Some were members of his extended family.

But exaggeration is not fabrication. Sociologist Eric Kaufmann estimates that the citizen body was more than 60 percent English, almost 90 percent British, and 98 percent Protestant.⁴ Proto-WASPs did not make up the whole of the American population. But they were politically and culturally dominant at the time of independence and for at least a century thereafter.

So was America essentially an Anglo-Protestant country? Some analysts argue that it was. According to political scientist Samuel Huntington, “Nation building in America differed from that in Europe, where political leaders created a state and then tried to create a nation out of the people they attempted to rule.”⁵ Instead, a community united by common descent “fought for and won their independence,” then went to on to establish institutions to safeguard it. Legal scholar Sanford Levinson describes adherents of this view as “Federalist-2 Publians.”⁶ Moving from historical interpretation to cultural politics, Federalist-2 Publians believe continuing success of the United States requires the preservation of British, Christian traditions embraced by much of the white settler population in the eighteenth century.

Although it has become controversial, this argument cannot be entirely dismissed. What conservative theorist Russell Kirk called “British patrimony” remains important even for Americans who do not share British ancestry.⁷ The enduring influence of the original mother country is not limited to the English language. It also includes a voluntarist approach to religion, enthusiasm for commerce, and a history of participatory politics.

Yet projection of a coherent Anglo-Protestant identity onto colonial and early republican periods obscures important sources of variation and conflict. Historian David Hackett Fischer drew attention to intra-British sources of diversity in his classic study Albion’s Seed. Tracing patterns of settlement, Fischer argued that early America was characterized by four distinct regional cultures: Puritans from southeast England who settled New England; Quakers from the Midlands who flocked to Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic; the Anglican gentry that ruled the Tidewater South; and northern English and Scots-Irish “borderers” who populated the backcountry.⁸

Religious categories were also more fragmented than they appear in retrospect. Differences among Protestants were almost as deeply felt as those between Protestants and Catholics—or even between Christians and non-Christians. “Ties of blood, religion, and soil are not sufficient to hold us together as Americans, and they never have been,” concludes historian Wilfred McClay. “We are forever in the business of making a workable unity out of our unruly plurality.”⁹

The pattern of ideas and institutions that I place under the symbol of the covenant was one early project in the business of creating national unity. Emerging from New England, it ultimately sought to constitute all of America as an offshoot of the Puritan experience. Elements of this project survive in the celebration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. When we commemorate the survival of the Mayflower passengers, we symbolically place ourselves in that lineage.

But the religious, cultural, and political constraints of the New England covenant were already too narrow to define the newly independent people. They became even less fitting as that nation grew larger and more diverse. Initially a concrete program of government and culture, the New English covenant retreated through the nineteenth century into social snobbery and academic fixation. It is in these diminished forms that it survives today.

* * *

The case that early America was essentially Anglo-Protestant misses the extent of ethnic diversity even before the beginnings of mass European immigration in the 1840s. In addition to Native Americans, slaves, and free blacks, at least a third of the total white population was not of English descent. In some regions, English speakers were not even a majority. By 1751, Benjamin Franklin already wondered, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs.”¹⁰

The number of non-Anglophones in Pennsylvania was unusual among the original thirteen colonies, although North Carolina also held large German and Swiss cohorts. But the predominance of British populations was no guarantee of cohesion. Reviewing the approaches to religion, family life, and social order that characterized different colonies, regions, and sects, libertarian scholar Charles Murray concludes that “the differences separating Yankees, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish at the Founding were at least as many and as divisive as those that separate different ethnic groups in America today.”¹¹

Such distinctions were moderated by the passage of time, geographic distance from their British sources, and the shared struggle for independence. Even so, many observers of the American revolution doubted whether the several states belonged together as a single nation. In a popular 1781 pamphlet, the Welsh economist Josiah Tucker argued that “there is nothing in the Genius of the people, the Situation of their Country, or the nature of their different Climates, which tends to countenance such a Proposition.” According to Tucker, “Every Prognostic that can be formed from a Contemplation of their mutual Antipathies, and clashing Interests, their Difference of Governments, Habitudes, and Manners,—plainly indicates, that the Americans will have no Center of Union among them, and Common Interest to pursue, when the Power and Government of England are finally removed.”¹²

Looking backward, disagreements involving slavery seem fundamental. Knowing how the Civil War broke out, we are inclined to see tensions between the North and South as latent sources of disunion. In addition to academic discussions, this retrospective assessment features prominently in popular culture. The musical 1776 highlights friction between the South Carolina statesman Edward Rutledge, who objects to a clause criticizing the slave trade in drafts for the Declaration of Independence, and Massachusetts’s John Adams, who supports it. The clause was eventually deleted, encouraging debates about the moral legitimacy of the Declaration that continue to this day.

In the early years of the United States, however, would-be national leaders were also concerned about relations between the old settlements along the Atlantic Seaboard and the western frontier. If Americans could claim to be a separate people from the British despite their many connections, westerners could do the same with regard to their eastern brethren. Thomas Jefferson worried that “if [Westerners] declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them.”¹³ James Madison expressed the Virginia gentry’s suspicion of backwoods folk, fearing that “the country beyond the mountains” would be filled by “white savages … more formidable than the tawny ones” already there.¹⁴

Along with continuing regional and religious variation, statements like these make it difficult to sustain the “Federalists Publian” view of the Constitutional founding. Rather than a realistic account of who the American people actually were, Jay’s statement is better understood as an argument about who they should be: a relatively homogeneous nation comparable to the great peoples of Europe. The New English covenant designates a version of this argument that stressed a strand of Christianity descended from Calvinism, relatively egalitarian social structure, and the political priority of the original states to the additions established in the West. Let us consider where it came from—and where it went.

* * *

Although it attracted adherents in different places, most advocates of covenantal accounts of American identity were from New England. A prosperous state with a mercantile economy and powerful established church, Connecticut stood out as an early bastion of conservative nationalism. The centerpiece of this politics was a distinctive vision of the American future. Timothy Dwight, who would go on to serve as Yale University’s president, outlined the goal in Greenfield Hill, an epic poem dedicated to John Adams:

One blood, one kindred, reach from sea to sea;

One language spread; one tide of manners run;

One scheme of science, and of morals one;

And, GOD’s own Word the structure, and the base,

One faith extend, one worship, and one praise.¹⁵

Like Jay, Dwight offered a strikingly homogenous account of national unity. Americans were not merely fellow citizens. They were “one blood, one kindred.” Dwight also envisioned continuing territorial growth. At some point, the American nation would extend from one ocean to the other.

Yet the “much lov’d native land” Dwight presented as the source of American expansion was not New York, Pennsylvania, or Virginia—let alone California. It was “New Albion” of the northern Atlantic Coast.¹⁶ Along with allies like Joel Barlow and Noah Webster, Dwight strove to establish New England as America’s heartland, extending its distinctive manners, morals, and faith through the rest of the country. In order to do that, they had to reach into what was already the distant history of settlement.

The story begins in the 1610s when critics of the Church of England were subjected to increasing repression. Seeking a haven for true religion, Puritans and Separatists fled across the seas to the northern reaches of Britain’s American possessions. Between 1620 and 1640, they established settlements that became Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Propagated by what are still America’s leading educational institutions, the New England origin myth has become so familiar that it is easy to forget how partial it is. In addition to ignoring non-British colonization of North America, which began more than a century earlier, it minimized the contributions of other Anglophone communities. In the New English covenant, America’s decisive beginning was placed on the rocky shores of the North Atlantic rather than at Jamestown or St. Augustine. Alexis de Tocqueville, whose analysis of democracy was heavily influenced by New England informants, called Plymouth Rock America’s “point of departure.”¹⁷

Religious doctrine was essential to this interpretation of the national trajectory. In the Hebrew Bible, covenant designates God’s relationship with the people of Israel, who became a chosen nation entitled to populate and rule a specific piece of territory. An analogy to the biblical exodus obsessed Puritan leaders in tense relations with the British Crown and Church of England. In “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” a sermon preached in 1630 upon the departure of a fleet bound for Massachusetts, minister John Cotton assured his audience that “what [God] hath planted he will maintaine, every plantation his right hand hath not planted shall be rooted up, but his own plantation shall prosper, & flourish.”¹⁸ As God had protected and guided the Hebrews, so would he do for New England.

A special relationship with the Lord was not unconditional. In exchange for God’s favor, a chosen people had to demonstrate its worthiness by exemplifying virtue and piety. This task was a central theme of John Winthrop’s celebrated description of New Engl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The New English Covenant
• 2. Broken Crucible
• 3. A Warlike Creed
• 4. Memory, Nostalgia, Narrative
• 5. After Nationalism
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments