| Book Review | Law and History Review, 26.2

Book Review

Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 300. $39.95 (ISBN 0-19-514348-5).

Carol Horton's Race and the Making of American Liberalism is a valuable attempt to analyze the politics of race in America in ways that can guide future policies. Her focus is on the policy ideas and broader political visions that political actors engaged in coalition-building and operating America's governing institutions have deployed and by which, at least in part, they have been motivated. Though political scientists often shrink from focusing on ideas, they are particularly important for matters like race, which Horton plausibly views as a "complex social construct" built to respond to peoples' "innate need to locate themselves in a meaningful structure of individual identity and social relations" (7–8).

Her thesis is that Americans have constructed racial identities in ways that have "severely constrained the development of class as a meaningful social category in the United States," thereby contributing to unjust systems of both race and class inequality (8). She focuses throughout on the historical interactions of "identity" and "economic" concerns, and her analyses culminate in a call for "creating and sustaining more unifying understandings of these primary political identities" (229).

Let me note a minor disagreement. For my tastes, Horton's book would have been better entitled Race and the Making of American Politics. Like her mentor, David Greenstone, Horton strives to see American "liberalism" as providing bounds to American political discourse, though she also terms it "radically plastic" (232n5). She defines "liberalism" as prioritizing "the value of individual rights and liberties, limited and representative government, private property and free markets, and constitutionalism and the rule of law" (5). Horton does not say how she reached this definition. It omits Louis Hartz's contentions that if persons are considered human at all, liberalism demands that they "receive full equality." So her liberalism has lots of room for inequality, though not unlimited room: "white nationalism," which is not committed to "political individualism, free-market capitalism, or constitutional government" for all races, "cannot be considered part of an even broadly defined liberalism." Still, Horton avers that it and other "nonliberal" positions, right and left, "have generally occupied a relatively small corner of the American political landscape" (5).

Her evidence says otherwise. Horton identifies "multiple liberalisms" in America, including late nineteenth-century "Darwinian liberalism," whose adherents believed in superior and inferior races. They remain "liberals" in Horton's view because they believed inferior races should receive free market economic rights and basic citizenship rights (37–38). But where in Horton's definition of "liberalism" are the sources of their beliefs in higher and lower races? As her quotations show, the ideological roots are in fact in nineteenth-century religious and scientific doctrines that have no necessary connection with any of her defining features of liberalism (39, 47). Thus she correctly defines her Darwinian position as actually combining "two ideological currents," the "paired ideologies of white supremacism and laissez-faire liberalism" (44–46). But she insists this combination is still "liberal" because it, unlike white nationalism, "extended the rights of citizenship to all individuals regardless of race" (51).

Yet Horton also concedes that her Darwinian liberals "were usually willing to violate these minimal guarantees" of black rights when "political expediency demanded" (38). She notes that in any case, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this Darwinian position "was largely eclipsed by the even more violent politics of white nationalism and racial terrorism" (57). And she now concedes that this white nationalism "was not ... a marginal phenomenon, in either ideological or practical terms" (54). Indeed, Horton says that by the mid-1890s, "the idea of actually enforcing the amendments" that guaranteed blacks basic economic and citizenship rights "was no longer seriously entertained by anybody in a position of power" (57). What's more, Chinese also "were deemed inherently incapable of assuming the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship" (81). Yet even though she shows that views denying non-whites minimal "individual rights and liberties," "free markets," "constitutionalism and the rule of law" had come to power in ways that would endure in some respects up until the 1960s, Horton avers only that "liberalism" had become wholly "racially exclusive," so "claims of common American citizenship no longer had to be honored even in theory, let alone in practice" (59). If we are to heed her definitions, these triumphant positions have to be called versions of non-liberal white nationalism.

What difference does all this make? Not a lot, because Horton admits that her "liberalism" has not set impervious outer boundaries to political action in America. Her story is one of contingent political contests in which reform-minded American actors repeatedly take paths of short-term convenience, decoupling struggles against racial and economic injustices from each other. Radical or "anti-caste" Republicans in Reconstruction abandoned land redistribution in favor of more conservative economic positions (16, 19, 29, 35). Neither agrarian Populists nor radical labor movements "consistently pursued interracial organizing," believing it too difficult (63–64, 67). New Dealers committed to social democratic policies compromised with powerful white southerners, while many white civil rights leaders in the 1950s championed anti-Communism and neglected "the more economic dimensions of racial inequality" (122, 127, 130–38). Most African American leaders of the modern civil rights movement favored "a broader set of social democratic policies" (139). But, Horton contends, Republicans have since used racial controversies to rise to prominence, stalling most efforts to pursue egalitarian reforms (191, 194, 219, 221). All these arguments have force however one chooses to define "liberalism."

And overall, Horton gives historically specific, compelling content to her crucial claim about "the development of the American polity": that champions of racial and class inequality in the U.S. have repeatedly succeeded in thwarting egalitarian reform alliances. If her presentation of both race and class identities as politically constructed in intertwined ways throughout U.S. history has one clear lesson, it is that it remains risky to seek to promote class or race equality one-sidedly, to the exclusion of the other. Instead Americans must seek policies that consciously aim to lessen entrenched forms of racial hierarchy as integral components of regulatory and redistributive efforts aimed at improving educational and economic opportunities for all. In an era when labor unions uphold affirmative action and immigrants rights, while Republicans have made funding for education contingent on showing progress among all racial and ethnic groups, this formula may not be so politically unrealistic as it has been in the nation's past.

Rogers M. Smith

University of Pennsylvania

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.