Next American Nation

The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution

Michael Lind

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780684825038
• eBook ISBN: 9781451603095
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Are we now, or have we ever been, a nation? As this century comes to a close, debates over immigration policy, racial preferences, and multiculturalism challenge the consensus that formerly grounded our national culture. The question of our national identity is as urgent as it has ever been in our history. Is our society disintegrating into a collection of separate ethnic enclaves, or is there a way that we can forge a coherent, unified identity as we enter the 21st century?In this "marvelously written, wide-ranging and thought-provoking"* book, Michael Lind provides a comprehensive revisionist view of the American past and offers a concrete proposal for nation-building reforms to strengthen the American future. He shows that the forces of nationalism and the ideal of a trans-racial melting pot need not be in conflict with each other, and he provides a practical agenda for a liberal nationalist revolution that would combine a new color-blind liberalism in civil rights with practical measures for reducing class-based barriers to racial integration.A stimulating critique of every kind of orthodox opinion as well as a vision of a new "Trans-American" majority, The Next American Nation may forever change the way we think and talk about American identity.* New York Newsday

CHAPTER ONE

The First Republic

Anglo-America

Picture North America in the year 2000 A.D., as Thomas Jefferson might have imagined it in 1800. As the twenty-first century dawns, the American ethnic nation—defined as Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, with infusions from closely related Western European groups—accounts for the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean. In 1801 Jefferson had foreseen the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself … and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws”—for this reason, Jefferson had opposed allowing emancipated blacks to settle in the west.¹

Although they form a single cultural nation, united by common race, language, and Protestant religion, the 500 million Anglo-Saxons of North America, in Jefferson’s vision, are divided among a number of friendly sister republics. In addition to the United States of America, which retains the dimensions it acquired during Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, there is the Republic of Canada, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of California, and the Republic of Oregon (Jefferson told John Jacob Astor that his Columbia river settlement was “the germ of a great, free, and independent empire on that side of our continent.”)² Other North American countries retain their former names—Mexico, Cuba—but they have been thoroughly Anglicized, with predominantly Anglo-American populations, with English as the official language, and with common-law institutions in place of the Hispanic heritage.^*

Despite their great geographic diversity, the Anglo-American republics all have a family resemblance. If you take a slow-moving balloon-schooner from Mexico City to Oregon, you will see similar patterns in very different landscapes—the small, square fields of yeoman farmers, cultivated by simple and yet ingenious labor-saving devices, spread like quilts around the small towns, each the capitol of a ward, or a section of a county, modeled on the ancient Anglo-Saxon “hundreds.” If you fly low enough, you might even see the militia drilling in the parks; none of the republics has significant standing armies, in this quartersphere of democracy, liberty, and peace. Each hamlet has its neoclassical town hall, in the Greek Revival style introduced by Thomas Jefferson, and its cluster of churches and temples—Congregationalist, Deist, Masonic and Unitarian. To one correspondent Jefferson had written in 1822: “The pure and simple unity of the creator of the universe is now all but ascendant in the Eastern states; it is dawning in the West, and advancing towards the South; and I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.” In the same year he wrote to another: “I trust there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”³

Continuing your northward journey, you might join the pilgrimage of tourists to the spiritual capital of Anglo-America—Washington, D.C. (District of Cherronesus). The District of Cherronesus is the peninsula between Lakes Huron and Michigan. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson proposed to give this region its name to commemorate the original Cherronesus, the region (now encompassing Danish Jutland and German Schleswig-Holstein) from which he believed the Saxon ancestors of the American people migrated to Britain after the fall of Rome.⁴

The gleaming neoclassical city of Washington, D.C., buffeted by the cold winds from Lake Michigan, is full of monuments to Anglo-American ideals and history. One of them is American University, with its curriculum modeled on the one that Jefferson provided for the University of Virginia. Here, the “natural aristocracy” of North America, students from all classes selected by rigorous examination and admitted without any reference to family income, study in the hope of becoming leaders of their respective republics in the Pacific northwest, the California coast, the Canadian prairie. Their curriculum includes study of natural history, the hierarchy of races (with special emphasis on the hereditary mental and moral superiority of the Germanic peoples), the secular ethical philosophy of Jesus (in the edition of the Gospels prepared by Jefferson, with the miracles removed), and Anglo-Saxon laws and institutions, ancient and modern. Every graduate must be proficient in Anglo-Saxon, which, since its revival by Jefferson in the United States, has replaced Latin and Greek as the New World’s learned tongue.

Many of the details in this vision are peculiar to Thomas Jefferson. However, the basic conception of the American people as a branch of the Anglo-Saxon tribe, whose members remained part of a single “race” no matter how many governments they were divided among, was the conception of American identity shared by most of the Founding Fathers of the United States and generations of later American leaders. Until the early twentieth century, for example, the major school of American history was devoted to the germ theory, which traced the evolution of American institutions through British roots to the customs of the ancient Germans. The idea that the United States is or should be “a nation of immigrants,” not only non-Germanic but nonwhite, would have struck most Americans before World War II as bizarre. They would also have been puzzled by the idea that the American people was created in 1776. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans would not have confused the mere establishment of the American government in 1776 with the creation of the American nation (that is to say, the American branch of the millennia-old Anglo-Saxon race), and they would have been baffled by the mention of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” because everyone knew that the American nation was not only Christian but Protestant.

Such a way of thinking about American identity seems as alien to us today as the ideals and mores of a remote civilization. Indeed, in many ways, we modern Americans live in a new and different country. The United States of the 1990s differs far more from the United States of the 1790s than today’s France does from that of Robespierre and Napoleon (for a start, the borders of France, and the composition of its population, have been far more stable than those of the United States). The continuities in the history of the French nation are disguised by the discontinuities in French constitutional history; since 1789, France has had five republics, several empires and constitutional monarchies, a directory and a fascist dictatorship (Vichy).^* Americans are governed, at least on paper, under the same federal constitution that went into effect in 1789, and the name of the country has not changed since 1776. Constitutional continuity in America disguises the discontinuities in national history between what can be described as the three “republics” of the United States. We cannot understand our America, Multinational America, the Third Republic of the United States, without understanding its predecessors.

The First Republic of the United States (1789-1860) might be called Anglo-America. National identity in Anglo-America was a compound of three elements: an Anglo-Saxon national community, a common ethic of Protestant Christianity, and a federal-republican national political creed. These definitions of Americanness did not go unchallenged. Black Americans argued for a nonracial or multiracial conception of American identity. Irish immigrants and Catholic immigrants of varying ethnicities contested the equation of Americanness with Anglo-Saxon heritage and Protestant religion. The political creed of federal republicanism, particularly in its extreme Jeffersonian and Jacksonian variants, was challenged by Hamiltonian statesmen and intellectuals in the Federalist-National Republican-Whig tradition who emphasized a powerful central government actively promoting industrial and financial development. Although rivals of the prevailing formula sometimes won limited victories, the conception of the United States as a federal republic based on an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation generally prevailed. Behind immigration law, Indian removal, black colonization, and annexation policy lay the ideal of the United States as a nation-state with a homogeneous population of Anglo-American Protestants.

THE ORIGINS OF ANGLO-AMERICA

The ultimate origins of the American nation are found in sixteenth-century England. The colonization of eastern North America by the English was a project pushed by a small circle of courtiers, businessmen and intellectuals around Sir Walter Raleigh, many of whom were also involved in the colonization of Ireland by Protestants. In his “Discourse of Western Planting” (1584) one of the leading members of this group, Richard Hakluyt, argued that colonization would increase England’s military and commercial strength, as well as permit the English to unload their paupers and convert the North American Indians to true (that is, Protestant) Christianity. The visionary Hakluyt called for the settlement in eastern North America of “infinite nombers of the english nation.”⁵ Attempts in 1584 and 1587 by Raleigh and his associates to found colonies in the Carolina Banks and the Chesapeake failed (the latter, cut off by Spanish-English war and presumably destroyed by Indians, passed into legend as the lost colony of Roanoke). The Raleigh circle turned to other projects, including colonization in Ireland after the 1585 Munster rebellion and a doomed effort to colonize Guiana.

The Virginia Company managed to found a permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, but the outpost, plagued by war with the local Powhatan Indians, starvation, internal dissent, and disease, was always on the verge of collapse. The Crown assumed responsibility from the Virginia Company in 1624, making Virginia a royal province; not until late in the century, when it was reorganized as a tobacco-exporting plantation economy relying on black slave labor, did Virginia become more than a miserable wilderness outpost. (Virginia’s future was shadowed in its beginning, when colonist John Rolfe, who married Powhatan’s daughter Pocahantas, introduced the planting of tobacco, a Caribbean crop—and noted the arrival, in 1619, of a Dutch warship bearing twenty African slaves).^* Despite the glowing propaganda of colonization proponents, conditions were so miserable in the New World that ordinary Europeans preferred to stay at home. The Puritans of New England, who established the most successful colonies in the seventeenth century, succeeded in large part because they were motivated by religious fervor.

In the period between 1607 and 1689, when the major British colonies were established, different colonies tended to be peopled by refugees from this or that side in English struggles—Puritan refugees fleeing from Tudor absolutism populated New England, and a little later royalist gentry escaping from Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship founded some of the great dynasties of the Chesapeake. The English Americans also came from different parts of the British Isles—the Puritans tended to come from East Anglia, the Southern gentry from the southern counties of England, the Quakers of the Delaware Valley emigrated from the British midlands, and the Scotch-Irish who populated the Southern backcountry in the early eighteenth century originated in Ulster, Scotland, and North Britain. In the New World, these different immigrant groups tended to preserve the dialects, customs, and folkways of the parts of Britain from which they had come; their subcultures formed the basis of American regional cultures that persist to this day and are shared by millions of Americans with no English ancestors.⁶

The diverse mainland colonies of seventeenth-century English America began to be knit together into a greater unity only in the era that followed the Glorious Revolution. When William of Orange deposed James II in 1688-89, colonists in Boston, New York, and Maryland overthrew their proprietary governments as well. Under the new rule of William and Mary, all of the colonies became royal colonies with elected assemblies, except for Connecticut and Rhode Island (which retained their corporate constitutions) and Pennsylvania and Maryland (which remained proprietary).

This standardization of colonial government, combining royal control with a high degree of colonial self-rule, was part of a general reorganization of the British empire by the Whig oligarchy that had come to power in the Glorious Revolution. The Whigs created Great Britain by incorporating Scotland in the Act of Union of 1701; a few years later, Ireland lost its independence from the jurisdiction of the London Parliament. The attitude of London toward the colonies tended to be one of benign neglect, an attitude the colonists elevated into a principle.

Throughout the seventeenth century, it never occurred to the Anglo-American majority in the colonies that they were anything other than Britons in America. In the first half of the eighteenth century, too, the American colonists for the most part identified themselves proudly as British Americans. In 1760, when Britain won the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) with France, Benjamin Franklin declared, “No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do, on the reduction of Canada; and this is not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton.”⁷ He favored the annexation of French America, so that “all the country from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people.”⁸ Colonial Americans like Franklin considered themselves part of the English nation, the freest people in the world, living under an enlightened Whig constitution characterized by the proper mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, antipapist Protestantism, and a kind of de facto imperial federalism. Political and religious evil was represented for them by the Catholic absolutism of France and Spain, in which they saw the pattern of the despotism that the Stuarts had tried to impose on the freedom-loving British.

The sharp regional differences between the Anglo-American colonies declined in the eighteenth century. The recurrent wars against the French and Spanish and the Indians, economic integration, migration between colonies, and the standardization of legal and governmental procedures tended to create a common Anglo-American identity, notwithstanding persistent localism. Zealous Puritans and fiery royalist cavaliers were succeeded by Northern and Southern elites whose members shared common economic interests and often a common education at colleges like Princeton.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Anglo-American leaders had come to share a common Whig ideology, absorbed from English Whig writers like John Locke, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato’s Letters, and Catherine Macaulay. Whig theory held that freedom and self-government originated in the tribal customs of ancient German tribes. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who migrated from Germany and present-day Denmark to England (formerly inhabited by licentious Celts and despotic Romans) brought free institutions with them. Under wise kings like Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxons perfected the institutions treasured by later Anglo-Americans: the representative assembly, the jury system, the militia. When William the Bastard conquered England in 1066, however, he imposed “the Norman yoke,” consisting of the twin evils of continental feudalism and Roman Catholic Christianity. The promulgation of Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, and the overthrow of the Stuart monarchs brought about the restoration of Anglo-Saxon liberty in England. This view of the past was challenged from the right, as it were, by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, who knew it was historical mythology, and from the relative left by radical Real Whigs or Commonwealthmen who argued that the Glorious Revolution had not gone far enough toward restoring the ancient Saxon constitution. (Mainstream Whigs and Real Whig dissidents agreed that the Dark Ages in England had been in fact a Golden Age.)

Since war tends to promote centralization, a collision between British imperial statecraft and extreme Whig ideology as a result of geopolitical struggles was perhaps inevitable. The English colonists in North America were swept up in the four great wars against French hegemony fought by Britain and its European allies—the War of the League of Augsburg (known in America as King William’s War), 1689-1697; the War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War), 1702-1713; the War of the Austrian Succession (King George’s War), 1745-1748; and the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War), 1756-1763. The latter was a major struggle. More Americans died in the Seven Years’ War, as a proportion of the population, than in any struggle apart from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War; the Seven Years’ War saw the fourth-highest rate of mobilization, after World War II, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War.⁹ In the 1763 Peace of Paris, Britain gained control over all of the continent east of the Mississippi except for New Orleans, which the French transferred temporarily to their ally, Spain, along with Louisiana (then the name for the territory west of the Mississippi).

“With the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian John Richard Green, noting that the American War of Independence grew indirectly out of the Seven Years’ War.¹⁰ The French fore...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Are We a Nation?
• 1. The First Republic: Anglo-America
• 2. The Second Republic: Euro-America
• 3. The Third Republic: The Making of Multicultural America
• 4. The White Overclass and the Racial Spoils System
• 5. The Revolution of the Rich
• 6. Alternative Americas: Democratic Universalism, Cultural Pluralism, and the New Nativism
• 7. Liberal Nationalism: The Trans-American Melting Pot
• 8. National Democracy and the Fourth Republic of the United States
• 9. The National Story
• Notes
• Index