Monday, March 4, 2019

History, Nationalism, and Politics


One tends to think of history as a collection of facts and dates answering the questions “what happened and when.”  But history is more than that; a historian tells a tale of what happened and why in the past, but he/she tells it from the perspective of someone living in the present.  And since the historian can pick and choose what is deemed important, the historian is assembling an opinion, one which is intended to teach a lesson to the modern reader.  History thus becomes critical in politics.  There is no more vigorous political dispute than that over who gets to say what is included in the history textbooks provided to our children.  Jill Lepore provides a discussion of the issues relating a nation and its nationalism to its view of its history.  She provided A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story as the opening article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a volume focused on “The New Nationalism.”

Lepore provides us with some terminology and a perspective.

“The United States is different from other nations—every nation is different from every other—and its nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, ‘the French nation’ had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, ‘Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state’.”

Lepore attributes the first serious history of the nation to George Bancroft, and his effort provides an example of the role a history plays in creating viable politics.

“One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history. The first substantial history of the American nation, Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874. Bancroft wasn’t only a historian; he was also a politician who served in the administrations of three U.S. presidents, including as secretary of war in the age of American continental expansion. An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world…”

Assembling a “national story” for the United States is complicated because it does not have a common past for its people to refer to—at least not one whose inventions can be masked by resorting to ancient happenings.  The United States was not formally constructed as a nation-state.  Rather, it was a federation, one that must be recognized as such no matter what the intentions of the founders might be.  And it also carried within its origins the issue that would constantly contradict the notion that we are a single people with a single national story.  When slavery was legalized, it created two distinct regions, two distinct classes of people, and a minority population whose story could never be consistent with that of a proud nation.  The need to justify the enslavement of African Americans required an assumption of white supremacy.  This “truth” would inform attitudes toward all nonwhite peoples.  People in non-slave states might also believe in white supremacy, but their societies, livelihoods, and consciences did not demand it.  Within the non-slave states would arise a movement of abolitionists determined to end slavery.  Ultimately, the Civil War would bring it to an end, but the “nation” was left with two major stories to tell.

“…the nationalism of the North and that of the South were in fact different, and much of U.S. history has been a battle between them.”

“In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution ‘rested upon the assumption of the equality of races’—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that ‘our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition’.” 

“The North won the war. But the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens.”

Frederick Douglass would become an effective spokesperson for a view that would support a liberal history and a liberal future for the nation.

“The most significant statement in this debate was made by a man born into slavery who had sought his own freedom and fought for decades for emancipation, citizenship, and equal rights. In 1869, in front of audiences across the country, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the most important and least read speeches in American political history, urging the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the spirit of establishing a ‘composite nation.’ He spoke, he said, ‘to the question of whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of men.’ If nations, which are essential for progress, form from similarity, what of nations like the United States, which are formed out of difference, Native American, African, European, Asian, and every possible mixture, ‘the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world’?”

But there would be no victory over the southern viewpoint.  Instead, whites from both north and south would conspire to agree to disagree.

“Emancipation and Reconstruction, the historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois would write in 1935, was ‘the finest effort to achieve democracy . . . this world had ever seen.’ But that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. ‘We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,’ Du Bois wrote bitterly. Douglass’ new Americanism was thus forgotten. So was Du Bois’ reckoning with American history.”

Instead of coming to terms with the evil of slavery, the South was left free to exercise its policies of white supremacy for almost another century.  And the story told by the United States was that African Americans were not capable of governing themselves.  This view and its resultant treatment of African Americans served as justification for the colonial powers who needed to oppress native, darker-skinned populations in Africa and Asia.  Hitler recognized the Jim Crow reign in our South as just the example he needed in order to begin his oppression of Jews.  Lepore provides this curiously familiar observation.

“Hitler, for his part, expressed admiration for the Confederacy and regret that ‘the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.’ As one arm of a campaign to widen divisions in the United States and weaken American resolve, Nazi propaganda distributed in the Jim Crow South called for the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments.”

There were, of course, historians who would write histories of the postwar Reconstruction Era that would support southern attitudes about racial inequality, and political scientists who would propagate tales of racial inequality to support national oppression of other peoples.  But it was mostly tales of liberal consensus that would emerge from white male historians.

“In the wake of World War II, American historians wrote the history of the United States as a story of consensus, an unvarying ‘liberal tradition in America,’ according to the political scientist Louis Hartz, that appeared to stretch forward in time into an unvarying liberal future. Schlesinger, writing in 1949, argued that liberals occupied ‘the vital center’ of American politics. These historians had plenty of blind spots—they were especially blind to the forces of conservatism and fundamentalism—but they nevertheless offered an expansive, liberal account of the history of the American nation and the American people.”

It was not only people of color who needed liberation, there were the women also.

“Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions. Historical scholarship exploded, and got immeasurably richer and more sophisticated.”

Emerging from Lepore’s criticism of the profession, is one notable hero: Carl Degler.

“In a there-goes-the-neighborhood moment, many older historians questioned the value of this scholarship. Degler did not; instead, he contributed to it. Most historians who wrote about race were not white and most historians who wrote about women were not men, but Degler, a white man, was one of two male co-founders of the National Organization for Women and won a Pulitzer in 1972 for a book called Neither Black nor White. Still, he shared the concern expressed by Higham that most new American historical scholarship was ‘not about the United States but merely in the United States’.”

She credits Degler with lecturing his profession on the reality of nationalism and the need for historians to provide a story that will deal with the two versions of the nation’s history that have been propagated.

“In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history. Instead, Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.”

“’We can write history that implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,’ Degler said that night in Chicago. He issued a warning: ‘If we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us’.”

Parts of our nation have already become the “composite nation” touted by Douglass—and that version of the nation works.  And it is a composite nation towards which economics, politics, and climate change are driving us.  There is no escape—for us or any other country.  Somehow, a heroic story must emerge that reconciles this composite world with that of people raised with a tradition of white supremacy.  Lepore believes it is the duty of historians to create the necessary story.

“’The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,’ Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned.”

And as Lepore points out, they have.

“They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament ‘American carnage.’ They’ll call immigrants ‘animals’ and other states ‘shithole countries.’ They’ll adopt the slogan ‘America first.’ They’ll say they can ‘make America great again.’ They’ll call themselves ‘nationalists.’ Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.”

Lepore’s faith in historical writing may be misplaced in this instance.  Clearly, the nation would be in better shape now if historians had done a better job years ago.  However, there is another perspective that suggests a more drastic chain of events is in our future.  It took the tragedy of the Civil War to eliminate explicit slavery.  It took blacks forging a revolution in the South to finally eliminate Jim Crow and explicit racial discrimination.  This also involved sending troops into the South to enforce the law a second time—Civil War Part II?  Will it take a Civil War Part III (or more) to finally reconcile our two nations?


Jill Lepore is a Professor of American History at Harvard University, and has recently produced a comprehensive history of her own: These Truths: A History of the United States.


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