Book Review

Two "powerful and contradictory ideals"—civic nationalism and racial nationalism—have shaped the history of the American nation in the twentieth century, Gary Gerstle argues in his ambitious and provocative synthetic study. The first, a political perspective that others have called the "American Creed," was embraced by the century's most important liberal thinkers and politicians. Civic nationalism encompassed a belief in "democratic universalism" and in "political and social equality for all, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or nationality, and a regulated economy that would place economic opportunity and security within the reach of everyone." Competing with that tradition, racial nationalism conceived of America in "ethnoracial terms," and its definition of precisely who was, or could become, an American was racially charged. Appreciating the "power of civil ideals," Gerstle takes civic nationalism seriously, refusing to see "race at the root of every expression of American nationalism." But race is never far from the surface, and Gerstle repeatedly and often perceptively explores the manifold ways in which civic nationalist ideals were themselves influenced by or reflective of racial nationalism.

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Gerstle's narrative and analytical strategies are structured around the figure of Theodore Roosevelt, who exhibited in unambiguous terms both civic and racial nationalist creeds. Race and the conflict between races were of paramount importance to TR. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, he advocated a racialized nation that offered membership, not exclusion, to Catholics and Jews and to new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Gerstle does not explore how and why TR came to differ so radically from so many other patricians in their belief in the inferiority of new immigrants. Accepting prevailing white notions of black inferiority, TR nonetheless expounded a belief in "controlled hybridity" in which new immigrants could be Americanized through voluntary efforts or through coercive Americanization campaigns. If he advocated "discipline" and Americanization, TR himself engaged in little by way of actual coercion, talking tough but taking no action.

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