American Crucible : Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

Rating:
Summary: Misuses evidence, overstates conclusions
Review: Gerstle's book examines the American nation in terms of nationalism through race from the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Much of Gerstle's book is very interesting and readable, however Gerstle begins to lose steam and starts overreaching to make his points in his chapter on the administrations of FDR. The first of these overreaches is his conclusion that American Jews, Poles and African Americans purchased the most war bonds during WW II. Gerstle admits that data on this information is not available in any form, but relies on "impressionistic evidience" to make this conclusion. In precise terms, "impressionistic evidence" is really no more than a scholar's opinion. Gerstle also concludes that Adm. William Halsey directed the soldiers and sailors under his command in the Pacific to commit war crimes with his "Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs" slogan. Nowhere in this slogan does Halsey advocate war crimes, the slogan while distasteful in the early 21st century simply states a truism of war also conveyed by Gen. George Patton. To paraphrase, "The object of war is not to die for your country it's to make the other guy die for his."
Gerstle also concludes that memoir literature written by former WW II servicemen illustrates the relationship between white and black soldiers during the war. However, Gerstle chooses to only cite William Manchester's "Goodbye, Darkness" as "especially instructive." Nowhere in Gerstle's text, notes or bibliography is there reference to any other WW II memoir literature, and certainly not of any systematical study of WW II memoir literature that would allow Gerstle to come to this conclusion.
Gerstle also reaches into the depths of a polemic in his discussion of the 1960s and 70s in the United States. Gerstle concludes that by the late 60s police forces in the US were doing "everything in their power" to defeat organizations that advocated black power, including trying to get into armed conflicts with these groups. Nowhere does Gerstle cite any source for this conclusion, so how is one to know if he's right?
However, Gerstle reserves his most virulent criticism for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Gerstle concludes on the same page that Reagan appointed several African Americans to positions high within the Federal government, but was "uncomfortable" with blacks. These two statements fly in the face of one another. He also completely misses the point of the Willie Horton advertisement in Bush's campaign against Dukakis. Gerstle chooses to look at race, while the point of the ad was that Dukakis stance on a Massachusettes bill allowed Horton out of jail.
Overall, this is a book that is determined to launch into a polemic regardless of the evidence.

Rating:
Summary: Can two nationalisms make the systhesis of American history?
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Good, but not exceptional
Review: 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.