Americans are Unbecoming
by Akim Reinhardt
To study American history is to chart the paradox of e pluribus unum.
From
the outset, it is a story of conflict and compromise, of disparate and
increasingly antagonistic regions that somehow formed the wealthiest and
most powerful empire in human history. For even as North and South
grew further apart, their yawning divide was bridged by a dynamic
symbiosis that fed U.S. independence, enrichment, and expansion. The
new empire at once grew rapaciously and tore itself apart. It strode
from ocean to ocean and nearly consumed itself completely in the Civil
War, which all these years later, remains the deadliest chapter in
American history by far, two world wars not withstanding.
After
the bloody crucible, a series of historical forces began to homogenize
the American people, slowly drawing them together and developing a more
cohesive national culture. As has been pointed out before, Americans
began to say "the United States is" instead of "the United States are."
But
now, in the second decade of the 21st century, America is possibly
coming apart once more. That hard won but ever tenuous inclusion and
oneness is beginning to disintegrate. Yet there is no fear of
returning to a bygone era of balkanized sectional divides, of North
versus South. Instead, the increasingly polarized nation now seems to
be fracturing along ideological lines.
In this essay I would
like to briefly explore the history of how Americans came together under
a common definition "America," and how they may be coming apart again.
I don't wish to examine the rise and fall of an empire, but rather
its citizens' ever-shifting sense of who they are and what their nation
should be.
**
The earliest European colonies dotting the
North American coast were born amid rural isolation and international
competition. Commerce may have kept the new French, Dutch, Spanish, and
British outposts tenuously connected to the larger Atlantic world, but
imperial rivalries, mercantile restrictions, and the sheer expanse of
North America fostered barriers as well.
In what would eventually
become the United States, regional differences quickly sprouted up in
the Chesapeake, the mid-Atlantic, and New England. Even as Great
Britain squeezed first the Netherlands (1661) and then France (1763) out
of North America, its own colonies continued developing distinct local
and regional cultures, economies, and social orders.
That the
thirteen of them south of Canada came together to launch a revolution
was not because of a natural affinity among them, but despite the
differences between them. It took years and considerable begging,
wrangling, and finagling before largest of them (Virginia) found the
resolve to support the upstart problem-child among them (Massachusetts) in its
dispute with the crown. And at that, the rebellious colonies were less
interested in permanently coming together than in simply helping each other
escape the royal yoke.
After achieving independence, these
thirteen new states did not rush to throw their lots in with one another.
Rather, they kept a safe distance by constructing a threadbare
confederacy. It was something akin to a political friends-with-benefits
arrangements. Mutual obligations were minimal.
But like so many
intimate relationships among commitment-phobes with guarded
expectations, it wasn't long before what was once casual began to buckle
under the pressure of inevitable complications and entanglements.
Will you be my date to my sister's wedding? Will the new national government take on the thirteen states' aggregate war debt?
It's a slippery slope.
Not
long thereafter, the founders popped the question. On bended knee, they
offered a new constitution that would create a stronger central
government. But there was considerable resistance, trepidation, and
debate about whether this would be more like a marriage or simply a case
of moving in together to save on the rent.
The degree of
commitment would remain a fundamentally unsettled question until the
Civil War. Along the way, the United States continued to expand. And
in doing so, it continued replicating older regional divisions.
As
settlers made their was across the Appalachian mountains, into the Old
Southwest (the deep South) and Old Northwest (the Midwest), rural
isolation remained the dominant pattern. Throuhgo
ut 19th century, the United States would remain primarily a nation of
agricultural societies. On the surface it seemed a lot of Protestant
farmers. But scratch a bit beneath the surface and one finds an expanding
checkerboard of various religious denominations, economic models, and
social orders.
The most obvious divide was between North and
South, with slavery phasing out in the former and metastasizing in the latter,
particularly with the rise of the cotton economy. But beyond that,
each of the larger regions was sub-divided into various sub-regions.
The North featured not just small farmers but also nascent cities and
industry. And more than large slave plantations, the South was also
home to small yeoman homesteads, and a mass of impoverished whites,
particularly in those areas not suited for large scale agriculture.
The disparity of wealth that slave plantations created in the South was mirrored to some degree in the North as urbanization and industry steadily emerged. Semi- and unskilled labor was on the rise, and more and more independent skilled craftsman were losing out The new cities boasted slums, and excess farm labor was siphoned off into mind-numbing, back-breaking factory work.
By
the 1840s, new waves of European immigrants were coming by the
millions, especially Irish and Germans. Most of them avoided the South,
not wishing to compete with unpaid labor. Instead, they crowded into
the new Northern cities, contributing to new cultural diversity and
spurring a nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-catholic backlash. And for
its part, the South expanded its quasi-feudal socio/economic order of
rigid hierarchies and resource extraction.
As the American
population grew, demands for resource-rich Indian lands increased. The
rate of imperial expansion, at expense of Indian nations, sped up. And
the new farms, forests, and mines fed the growing industrial sector of
the booming cities.
However, imperial expansion could not ameliorate the ongoing regional tensions. Rather, it only exacerbated them.
Would
the new western territories purchased from France, ransacked from
Mexico, and all of it stolen in one way or another from Indians, be a
staging ground to replicate the Northern or Southern models of
development?
Competition in and over the West only worsened regional tensions and was arguably the biggest factor leading to the Civil War. Southern agitators did not orchestrate
secession and form the Confederacy because they feared the North was
going to change the South. They did so because they feared the North would
prevent them from expanding their
slave-based economy and social order
into the new territories. Free of the North, Southern planters eyed
not only lands to the West, but also to their South. They dreamed of annexing parts
of the Caribbean and even more of Mexico and beyond.
The North's
victory ended Southern political secession. But cultural cohesion and a unified American identity would take another
century.
After the war, Northern efforts to reconstruct the
South were mixed and temporary. Early efforts by Radical Republicans to
ensure legal and political equality for African Americans faced stiff
resistence. By the mid-1870s, Northern will was teetering, and by
decade's end, blacks had been forced back into a state of coerced labor,
political exclusion, social persecution, and abject poverty.
Sharecroppers and tenant farmers instead of slaves, they were routinely
denied basic political rights and economic opportunities. The old
Southern elite was able to re-establish itself and the old aristocratic
social order. More and more white small farmers lost their land and
voting rights as well. Northern industrialists were happy to keep
cotton and other resources flowing.
Amid these conditions, the first step-towards
building a unified American identity after the Civil War came
at the expense of African Americans and other minorities. By the latter
part of the 19th century, Northern and Southern whites found common
ground in a new brand of virulent, pseudo-scientific racism. It
infected American culture as whites put aside their former differences,
elevated themselves above all of the "colored races," and defined
themselves as the true Americans.
While regional differences
remained sharp, the turn-of-the-century emphasis on a racialized
whiteness allowed white Americans to cast a new national identity, often
at the expense of minorities.
In the South, African Americans
remained extremely marginalized. In the North, "non-white" Jewish,
Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox immigrants, whose numbers swelled
beginning in 1900, were labeled as the Other. In the West, a
kaleidoscope of bigotry proliferated across the vast region. Hatred of
blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Indians each grabbed the spotlight in
various locales from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast.
Those
groups thought to be redeemable, such as Indians and some European
immigrants, were pressured to assimilate, to adopt White Anglo Saxon
Protestant norms. At the same time, groups marked irreconcilably
foreign or inferior, such as blacks and Asians, were completely
shunned. Asian immigration was banned in the 1880s. Shortly thereafter,
blacks were subjected to Jim Crow apartheid in the South and parts of
the West, and more de facto form but still very strict forms of
segregation elsewhere.
By 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt was
warning the nation that white people were in danger of would committing "race suicide." That "white" women had a duty to produce more white babies, lest the non-white population (including southern and eastern Europeans) outpace them.
But
other, more neutral forces also helped smooth out regional differences
and establish a unified sense of what it meant to be "American."
Developments in transportation, particularly the railroad, increased
contact. So too did the new communications infrastructure such as
the telephone. Also important was the new mass media. First national
magazines and then radio and movies presented people all across the
American empire with consistent cultural messages.
Homogenization was underway.
The
pivotal event that began to move the United States past a racialized
conception of what it means to be American was World War II.
The
war's exigencies demanded sacrifices from the whole of society.
Under this pressure, racial institutions and programs began to crack.
For example, black and white often worked side by side in defense
plants. And there was almost instant blowback.
In the summer of 1943, approximately 250 race riots erupted in 47 cities across America.
But
there was no turning back. You couldn't put the genie back in the
bottle. After the war, the Civil Rights movements waged by blacks,
Latinos, Indians, women, gays, and others, challenged the exclusivist
definition of "American."
At the same time, mass communication
and popular culture furthered the grand homogenizing process, with TV at
center stage. And in the political arena, the Cold War continued
WWII's function of binding Americans together through fear of a common
enemy.
As Americans reconceptualized their whites-only version
identity during the post-war era, the Melting Pot emerged as an
alternative: all the different cultures blending together into a
distinctly American stew, though with WASP as the dominant flavor. And by
the 1980s, multiculturalism began to assert itself. The
Melting Pot metaphor was replaced by the Salad Bowl, in which all the
different ingredients are still distinct.
That's not to say that
racism and sectionalism had been completely erased from the American
psyche by the end of the 20th century. Far from it. But both had faded
greatly compared to earlier eras. And
indeed, by the dawn of the 21st
century, the popular definition of what it meant to be "American" had
broadened considerably.
Yet here we stand, in the 2013,
staggered by divisions among Americans so deep that we wonder aloud if
the national political system can remain functional. We are nearly drowning in a
cacophony of shouting matches.
But the new fractures aren't the
result of provincial sectionalism, or even debased racism. Rather, the nation is segmented by a new spider web of ideological differences
Of
course there have always ideological differences. And in a nation that
now boasts well over 300 million people, there always will be. But
those differences are on the verge of rupturing the common ground upon
which Americans stand.
Many of the forces that helped homogenized the American people are either radically transformed or now absent.
The Cold War is over; Iraq wars and Al Qaeda attacks can no longer stand in.
Multiculturalism
maybe superior to the mid-century melting pot motif in many ways, but
it offers no unifying vision for what it means to be "American."
And
communication technologies have exploded. What Ma Bell and Hollywood
helped bring together, cable and the world wide web have helped tear
asunder. The cultural monoliths that once bound Americans together
through a common experience, have been eclipsed by the new
multipiplicity of fractured and individualized media. Those
homogenizing forces that helped to moderate American opinion have been
honeycombed, creating ideological and cultural cells into which
Americans are now free to descend.
**
This is not a
moralistic polemic. I am not in league with the 1990s social critics
who decried multiculturalism as a divisive force and pined to maintain
whatever degree of homogeneity they could.
Or as Arthur Schlesinger put it, there was too much pluribus and not enough unum.
Pish posh to that. I'm not pie-eyed. Change brings both good and bad.
I don't know where this change will lead America, good bad or otherwise. And I'm a historian by trade, which means I appreciate how foolhardy it is to predict the future. But indeed, the change is unfolding before us.
Americans, it seems, are unbecoming.
--
Akim Reinhardt's website is The Public Professor.
Posted by Akim Reinhardt at 12:30 AM | Permalink
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