Book Review

In Civic Ideals, Rogers Smith takes aim against the "misleading orthodoxy on American civic identity" perpetuated not only by popular culture but also by major political thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and later historians, most notably, Louis Hartz, who emphasize the United States' "equality of condition" as the prime determinant of American democratic political culture. According to this view, American citizenship is distinctively liberal in basing membership on consent and allegiance to political principles rather than on race, religion, gender, or national origins.	1
Smith undertakes his comprehensive history of citizenship in the United States to show that while at certain points in American history—the Revolutionary period, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s—liberal democratic principles have triumphed for a time, competing and less admirable "civic traditions" have often had more sway over American law and policy. "Through most of U.S. history," Smith argues, "lawmakers pervasively and unapologetically structured U.S. citizenship in terms of illiberal and undemocratic racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies, for reasons rooted in basic, enduring imperatives of political life" (1). Smith sees political elites playing a crucial role in the creation of civic identity as leaders need "a population that imagines itself to be a 'people'; . . . they need a people that imagines itself in ways that make leadership by those aspirants appropriate" (6). All too often, political leaders have relied upon "civic myths" that rest on what Smith calls "inegalitarian, ascriptive" definitions of membership in their effort to build constituencies with a common identity. These more exclusive conceptions of American citizenship have shaped much of the law on American citizenship, as Smith dramatically points out: "For over 80 percent of U.S. history, American laws declared most people in the world ineligible to become full U.S. citizens, solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender" (15).	2
Smith bases his argument upon an overview of the history of American citizenship between 1798 and 1912, divided into chronological periods paralleling major shifts in political party control. In each period, he explores the competing civic ideologies advanced by political actors, the visions that succeed, and the resulting legal constructions of citizenship. Smith has ample evidence to support his major claim that U.S. citizenship law has been plagued by contradictions and irrationality as it responded to "a variety of political imperatives" (35). It has not been unusual for political parties to advance both liberal democratic and inegalitarian ascriptive arguments. Jeffersonian Republicans, for example, emphasized citizenship as a matter of mutual consent, yet also promoted an "aggressive civic racism"; Jacksonian Democrats were "more openly racist, but also more radically libertarian and more militantly republican than any [party] in U.S. history" (138, 201). The Jacksonian era witnessed the achievement of universal white male suffrage and the popularization of party politics and, at the same time, the disfranchisement of African Americans, the relegation of Indians to the status of dependent wards, and the denial of political rights to women. Smith also debunks the whiggish narratives that argue that the American polity has progressively shed its discriminatory policies and come to a more thorough realization of the liberal democratic principles first embraced by the nation's founders. Rather than a story of steady progress, Smith relates a history with significant fluctuations, each period of significant reform and liberalization of citizenship law being followed by a period of reaction and inegalitarianism.	3
While the story Smith tells will not come as a surprise to social and political historians, his primary purpose is to provide critical historical perspective to contemporary discussions about the present and future state of American civic identity. That object is most apparent in the last chapter of the book. Here Smith focuses on the limits and possibilities of liberal democratic theory, a theory he believes is worth bolstering as it offers "more potential than any other alternative to provide paths to greater human material prosperity, personal security and happiness, domestic and international peace, and intellectual and spiritual progress" (489). The essential problem of American liberalism, according to Smith, is that it has failed to acknowledge and address "the political imperatives that have structured U.S. civic identity and nation-building more broadly" (472). In particular, liberalism has been unable to provide Americans with a satisfying answer to central questions concerning American national identity: What makes Americans distinct? Who are we as a people? What is our shared identity? Answering those questions in a manner that affirms liberal democratic theory without slipping into claims of American exceptionalism or creating civic myths that exclude in discriminatory ways is tricky. Trying to find the foundation for a liberal democratic civic identity, Smith turns, as other recent thinkers have, to Americans' shared historical past. What makes the United States unique, Smith argues, is its existence as a "distinct historical entity, . . . with a linked set of compelling stories that are very much of its own, . . . that genuinely transcends any and all of the individuals who ever have or ever will participate in it" (497). Given the history related by Smith—one dominated by conflict, narrow-mindedness, and inegalitarianism—his choice of the past as a rallying point for American civic identity is curious. Smith does not believe that an emphasis on a shared past would necessarily degenerate into "inspirational history" and the creation of new civic myths. He wants us to look American history in the eye, with all of its warts and imperfections as well as its accomplishments, and to come away determined "to write a happy ending, or a least a better next chapter" (499).	4
Lucy Salyer University of New Hampshire

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