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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)

GARY GERSTLE's American Crucible is a fine and accessibly written study of race and nationalism in the United States after 1890. I hope readers will not begin by reading its back cover, however, where endorsers could raise their expectations to unrealistically high levels. Gerstle's intention was to write a work of synthesis, and he fully acknowledges his many debts to those whose ideas he has borrowed and, in some important ways, transformed. His book can be recommended to students and to specialists alike and can be read with considerable pleasure for its many insights. But can a work of synthesis ever provide the bold, original, imaginative, provocative, and rare interpretations that Gerstle's endorsers promise readers?	1
Civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism are well-worn terms in the US; we teach them every semester to beginning students in our western civilization and world history courses. They are terms familiar to most Americanists, too, and have become the foundation for extensive, if sometimes specialized, literatures on nationalism, race, and ethnicity. That Americans in the US have long prided themselves on their "American Creed" of inclusion and equality — civic nationalism — is no new insight . For twenty years and more, specialists on African Americans have also argued that the White Americans extolling civic nationalism — whether in the 1790s or the 1890s — were also simultaneously, and consciously, excluding from the American nation those with darker skins.	2
Rather than confirm the historical predominance of ethnic or civic nationalism, Gerstle's main contribution to this literature — and it is a major one — is his examination of the ever-shifting tensions and connections between civic nationalism and a variant of ethnic nationalism that he calls racial nationalism. Gerstle most effectively explores racial nationalism, and its tension with civic nationalism, in the lives of the great men and the great thinkers who provided political and intellectual leadership for the US in the 20th century. Thus, rather than bring the history of politics and the state into social and cultural historical analysis, Gerstle instead imports the insights of social and cultural historians into analysis of the state and the history of the country's governing élite. Especially in the first four chapters of the book, we watch the interplay of conflicting national ideals in the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, American legislators, leaders of political movements, and Franklin Roosevelt. In these chapters, readers will gain a much clearer understanding of the apparent anomaly of advocates of the American creed tolerating, and in some cases, extending, exclusion based on skin color in a wide variety of policies regulating immigration, schooling, labour, and military service.	3
As a synthesizer, Gerstle also draws on the scholarship of cultural and social historians of labour, immigration, and African Americans. And he adds some original analysis of national themes in selected Hollywood films, mainly dealing with combat, as well. In his account, the US labour movement appears as an active participant in linking race and nation through the 1930s and 1940s. As one would expect from a scholar who has focused on working-class Americanism in the middle years of the century, Gerstle's account of the emergence of what he rather inelegantly calls the "Rooseveltian nation" is a useful analysis of the interaction of class, racial, and national concerns. Thereafter, however, the labour movement slips from view in his account, perhaps because it no longer represents the excluded as it had in earlier decades. It is largely replaced in Gerstle's portrait of the postwar era by the Civil Rights Movement. It was activists in this movement who focused the nation's attention on those contradictions of racial exclusion and civic nationalism that had survived in New Deal liberalism.	4
Finally, Gerstle's most original contribution to the existing literatures on race and nationalism is undoubtedly the importance he attributes to wars — hot and cold — and to international conflicts in sustaining, transforming, and finally reversing the racially exclusive trajectory of American nation-building. Most historians of the 20th century already understand the significance of the integration of the US military in the years just after World War II, but Gerstle succeeds in placing that important policy change in broader perspective by beginning his book with careful attention to the racial dynamics of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and by extending his analysis of race and nation to the Cold War Army of volunteers and of draftees later sent to Vietnam. Ironically, according to Gerstle, the Vietnam War left many Americans unwilling to embrace civic nationalism wholeheartedly even as the country abandoned racial discrimination after 1965. His analysis of this controversial war, that pitted White Americans against Asian combatants, is key to both his critique of multi-culturalism and his pessimism about reviving civic nationalism by freeing it from its long association with racial exclusion. Gerstle's final chapter and epilogue, where he discusses these issues, will surely provoke debate among specialists and students alike.	5
Having joined many others in offering high praise to American Crucible, let me also, however, note several reservations about it. A scholar as intent as Gerstle on tracing the evolving linkages of racial and civic nationalism certainly should have alerted his readers to the significance of the periodization he chose for his book. Why does his history of the 20th century begin in 1890? As important as it was to the beginning of the US3 ascent to international power in that decade, ideas about and policies toward racial exclusion had arguably gone through earlier, and potentially more wrenching, transformations with the emancipation of slaves, the reconstruction of the nation, and the publications of Charles Darwin a few decades earlier. Sometimes, too, Gerstle's common-sense usage of terms proves confusing. He assumes too readily that readers grasp his own vision of the complex relationships among nation, nation-building, nationalism, and national identity. Yet theoreticians have often differed sharply among themselves in analyzing those linkages and most readers would benefit from more guidance. Observers have long disagreed over whether Americans even constitute a nation — let alone a "Rooseveltian" one. And what Gerstle calls "racial nationalism" seems sometimes an attribute of the nation or a dimension of national individual identity rather than an evolving political ideology comparable to liberalism or civic nationalism.	6
Finally Gerstle himself acknowledges in a footnote that his decision to explore racial nationalism rather than Rogers M. Smith's "ascriptive Americanism" (fn 8, 377) limited his ability to treat nationalism as a gendered concept. His attention to warfare, combat, and international conflicts as important forgers of nations is welcome, for it portrays men as gendered beings. Still, it also leaves readers with few clues as to how women found (or failed to find) inclusion in the nation. I would note further that by substituting "racial nationalism" for the more commonly used "ethnic nationalism" Gerstle foreclosed fruitful avenues of cultural analysis that would have reinforced his critique of multiculturalism. Civic nationalism is only one of a number of cultural values that are broadly enough shared by Americans, of all races, to distinguish them as a nation from Canadians, Mexicans, or Europeans. Among these other values are an intense commitment to individualism, an attachment to the English language, and expectations of religious faith (and expressions of religious fervor) that makes atheists — not Blacks, Jews, or women — the least attractive national leaders most Americans can imagine. As an unapologetic advocate of civic nationalism, Gerstle's limited treatment of these elements of ethnic, American nationalism forces him to cede unnecessary ground to the multi-culturalist vision of an American nation that too often denies the existence of shared values such as these.	7
Donna R. Gabaccia University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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