American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

✍ Scribed by Gary Gerstle

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 543
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the right ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society.

After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt's vision of a hybrid and superior "American race," strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in "Anglo-Saxon" culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance.

Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X.

Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan's and Clinton's attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading.

Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic.

-- "Library Journal"

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Preface and Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 Theodore Roosevelt’s Racialized Nation, 1890–1900
A History of the American “Race”
War, Renewal, and the Problem of the “Smoked Yankee”
CHAPTER 2 Civic Nationalism and Its Contradictions, 1890–1917
“True Americanism”
Racial Dilemmas
The New Nationalism
CHAPTER 3 Hardening the Boundaries of the Nation, 1917–1929
War and Discipline
“Keeping Pure the Blood of America”
Civic Nationalism in the New Racial Regime
Aborting the New Nationalism
CHAPTER 4 The Rooseveltian Nation Ascendant, 1930–1940
A Kinder and Gentler Nation Builder
Radicalizing the Civic Nationalist Creed
Conservative Counterattack
The Survival of Racialized Nationalism
CHAPTER 5 Good War, Race War, 1941–1945
The Good War
Race War
“Something Drastic Should Be Done”: The Military’s Hidden Race War
Combat and White Male Comradeship
CHAPTER 6 The Cold War, Anticommunism, and a Nation in Flux, 1946–1960
War, Repression, and Nation Building
The Red Scare and the Decline of Racial Nationalism
Racial Nationalism Redux: The Case of Immigration Reform
CHAPTER 7 Civil Rights, White Resistance, and Black Nationalism, 1960–1968
Civil Rights and Civic Nationalism
“I Question America”: The Crisis in Atlantic City
“Speaking as a Victim of This American System”
CHAPTER 8 Vietnam, Cultural Revolt, and the Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation, 1968–1975
A Catastrophic War
The Spread of Anti-Americanism and the Revolt against Assimilation
The Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation
CHAPTER 9 Beyond the Rooseveltian Nation, 1975–2000
Varieties of Multiculturalism
“A Springtime of Hope”: Ronald Reagan and the Nationalist Renaissance
Reviving the Liberal Nation
CHAPTER 10 The Age of Obama, 2000–2016
Clinton, Bush, and Civic Nationalist Renewal
“The American Dream Come True Tonight”
Racial Nationalism Resurgent
Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, and the Fraying of Obama’s Dream
Notes
Index