American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

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.

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