The identity of a nation is based on the accretion of texts over time that become embedded in the national story. Some stories have greater prominence and influence than others. Stories that emphasize national greatness, virtue, and idealism tend to be embodied in the State as the primary repository of national memory. The stories that are dominant in mainstream historical narratives of the American experience constitute the ‘legal briefs’ that are available and brought to bear, often unconsciously or unreflectively, in defining and justifying actions, events, and policies that, on various grounds, may seem unjustified, illogical, counterintuitive, or even immoral to millions of people who hold different mental models of the American story. These counter stories that question the claims of American virtue and idealism have often led to strong political opposition to state policies and actions, resulting in varying degrees of violence and repression by the State to reaffirm the status quo narrative. In the case of the American Civil War, the State opposed a violent insurrection by the Confederacy in order to save the Constitutional republic; but the Confederacy believed it had every right to revolt against the United States because, the Confederacy argued, the United States lacked the consent of the governed in the secessionist states, and, following the words of the Declaration of Independence, argued that “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it [the government], and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The Confederacy saw themselves as patriotic Americans.

Over the nearly 250-year history of the United States,Footnote ¹ there have been many moments of political and social discord that have tested the strength and depth of the American character, and such crises have often led to positive social changes that have expanded the American community through the passage of constitutional amendments and laws that expanded voting rights, defined and expanded citizenship, codified racial and gender equality, protected workers’ rights, increased economic opportunity, and provided greater access to equal educational opportunities, among many other advances. Yet, it is also the case that the American past never fully recedes from the body politic; there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between forces seeking to overturn social and economic progress and those forces working to solidify and expand rights that have often been rights in name only. What has occurred in the past is never excised from national memory and can reappear in virulent forms that make many wonder whether the United States can ever overcome the darkest moments of its complex history, or even overcome the manifest shortcomings in the Founders’ Constitution that, for example, provided legal and political protections for the institution of slavery and that had nothing to say about social and political equality because the founders understood the polity to be comprised of men like them – insiders – whose individual rights needed no further protection or enhancement. For political ‘outsiders’ it would take decades and centuries to attain many of the rights that the white, mostly British-origin, propertied men took for granted and arrogated to themselves at the time of the founding of the republic.

The trope of a beneficent American exceptionalismFootnote ² has justified policies and actions that have often run counter to purported American ideals, American constitutional principles, and widely accepted institutional principles and constraints. For example, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was based on flimsy ‘evidence’ that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, was opposed and condemned by many Americans prior to and after the invasion. Although the absence of weapons of mass destruction proved to be embarrassing, even grounds for a war crime, the invasion was nonetheless justified by the George W. Bush administration and many politicians of both major political parties because aggressive American force in the conduct of foreign policy is generally accepted, justified by the trope of American exceptionalism which entails the right of American power to go where it wants when it wants, regardless of obvious violations of international treaties and conventions to which the United States is a signatory. As Fintan O’Toole noted in the case of the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq, “The neoconservatives who dominated the Bush administration openly repudiated the idea that the US should be bound by international laws and institutions.”Footnote ³ The idea (trope) that the United States is an invincible nation has roots in American providentialism, amplified by the success of the colonists against Great Britain in the American Revolution (against all odds) and validated with each successful military and colonial encroachment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, facing military defeat only in the American War in Vietnam. Rooted in the experience and retelling of the American Revolution and the heroic deeds of the ‘band of brethren,’ the trope has evolved that America is always justified in military aggression because it is the greatest, most moral, and most powerful nation that has ever existed; any threat to that power – real or imagined, as in the case of Iraq – must be confronted and completely defeated, regardless of the motives of American aggression, because American motives are always above suspicion.Footnote ⁴ Further, the essential ‘goodness’ and unquestioned Christian ‘morality’ of the American people and nation are assumed to be beyond reproach.

Supporters of American exceptionalism will often say that ‘mistakes’ are sometimes made, but that such ‘mistakes’ (such as slavery) do not in any way undermine the essential trope of American ‘goodness,’ ‘virtue,’ and ‘exceptionalism’ rooted in the character of the exceptional ‘Christian’ men who founded the nation and who led the conquest of the American continent and expansionism beyond US borders, from the colonial period to the present day.Footnote ⁵ By presenting itself as a ‘moral force’ for good in the world, the US claims for itself the absolute right to disregard and blatantly violate existing treaties and to undermine and subvert governments in countries that fail to play by the rules dictated by the United States, rules that the US Government claims are based on America’s superior ability and the exceptional character of the people who constitute the nation.

The trope of the American as a virile, manly white male has a long history in the writings and speeches of political leaders and party activists, clearly revealed in many of the texts analyzed in this book. This trope is in full view in the Donald J. Trump administration.Footnote ⁶ Europe is viewed by MAGA (Make America Great Again) enthusiasts as ‘feminine’ and, therefore, an easy target for bullying, as seen in the imposition of unjustified punitive tariffs on one of the United States’ most important and reliable trading partners and bulwark against Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe. In contrast, Trump has friendly relations with countries led by ‘masculine’ dictators and authoritarians, such as Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Vladimir Putin of Russia.

The texts (spoken and written) examined in this book provide details on how long-standing tropes are constructed, maintained, enhanced, and applied to contemporaneous events in order to explain, for example, why particular social policies and actions were justified during the Americanization era (roughly 1900–1927), such as cutting off immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries, arresting and deporting ‘suspect’ types such as anarchists, socialists, labor organizers, and other ‘trouble makers’ in the World War I era, restricting the use of ‘foreign’ languages in schools, churches, and public places, and other repressive and illegal means of curtailing constitutionally protected speech, right of assembly, free expression of religion, and due process and equal protection under the law.

American Identity: Contradictions and Paradoxes

American historian Michael Kammen writes: “If there has been a cult of consensus in American history, that cult has developed both from the quest for legitimacy and from the desire to reconcile our restless pluralities.”Footnote ⁷ Consensus on the meaning of America has notably weakened in recent decades, with the fissures arguably greater than at any time since the Civil War. Today, there is disagreement about the nature of national identity and national character. What is America? Who are ‘real’ Americans? What values are entailed in the concept? Is Americanism a fixed or organic concept? I argue that there are no definitive answers to these questions because national identity is and has always been constructed and conveyed in discourse; a nation is a mental construct, an imaginary complex of ideas; the image is real to the extent that one is convinced of it, believes in it, and identifies with it emotionally.Footnote ⁸ There never was an ‘authentic’ America to rally around; there is no urtext that epitomizes the American people or the American character. Official documents of the United States, such as the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, and important commemorative speeches, such as the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, are source materials employed in the construction of an imagined nation; their status as ‘founding texts’ has evolved as part of a national narrative.Footnote ⁹ Historians and political actors play an important role in how these stories are conveyed, with their particular interpretations and (often) strategic purposes. These stories are represented in school textbooks consumed by millions of children every year in the United States and in other countries. Stories are dramatized in movies and other cultural artifacts that portray a broad range of American experiences. Perhaps as importantly, stories are embodied in political discourse associated with political movements and adopted by political parties across the political spectrum.

This process of the construction and contestation of American national history and identity has been ongoing from the earliest days of the republic and will never cease. In this sense, history is never static, never settled, always part of our politics, because the past is always central to political control of the present. As George Orwell wrote in his dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This is why control over the curriculum in American public schools is viewed as a political matter too important to be left solely to the expertise of professional educators. The fight over the curriculum has, in recent decades, extended to higher education and has focused on controversies about what topics, courses, and academic programs should be allowed that come under the rubric DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion),Footnote ¹⁰ and on controversies that relate to campus speech codes on volatile political issues, such as the status of Palestinians in Israel and continuing US military support for the State of Israel. In the current political climate, many conservative activists view the academy as too ‘liberal’ or ‘woke’ and are aggressively promoting changes in school and university curricula that better reflect their values, beliefs, ideologies, goals, and political agendas that, they claim, have been marginalized or threatened by DEI programs and policies, not only in academia but in the corporate world as well.Footnote ¹¹ The fight over the curriculum is, essentially, a proxy fight about American identity and American values, and how those values are represented in texts in a range of disciplines consumed by students and the general public.

Texts that deal with American history and society are not merely static receptacles or artifacts; rather, they represent beliefs about events and ideas that, in turn, help shape future events and ideas. They are windows into the lifeways of a culture and society. It is necessary and crucially important that the truth about the American past be told and that narratives and tropes that hide, distort, or ignore the truth, or that create altogether false stories, be identified and exposed. There are certain truths about the American story that many will find disturbing, such as the long history of the ideology of white supremacy that winds through American history from the colonial period to the present day. Other supposed truths – for example, that the United States was founded on Christian principles – are complete fabrications, as will be discussed in Chapter 1 of this book. In recent decades the white Christian nationalist movement has attained increased legitimacy and has found support in the Republican Party. The danger posed by this movement to secular democratic values upon which both the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution are based cannot be too strongly emphasized. The movement is not new; rather, it has been elevated in political discourse, and many of the goals of the white Christian nationalist movement are being implemented in policies and actions across the United States.Footnote ¹² White supremacy and Christian nationalism have attained legitimacy in corridors of power, including at the highest levels of government, damaging American secular democracy and reviving a ‘racial divide’ that has never receded from American memory and American life. It is as if the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, the Civil War amendments, and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s have been conveniently forgotten by millions of Americans, or else these events and institutions are seen as having occurred in historical ‘epochs’ that have little relevance or meaning in contemporary American life. There is a danger that the faults in the American system and character will no longer be seen, buried under a thick mass of propaganda and amnesia. In that event, it would be difficult – or impossible – to believe in a meaningful future for the United States as a democratic secular constitutional republic.

The Invention of American National Character

Today, as was true in the past, culture is often a surrogate for race in public debates on immigration and language matters, such as occurred with the “Ebonics” controversy in Oakland, California in December 1996.Footnote ¹³ Disapproval and outright hostility to deviations from so-called (and discursively constructed) American norms, whether viewed through the prism of race, language, country of origin, religion, culture, education, and so on, has been a feature of American society from colonial times to the present day, with peaks and valleys of intensity along the way. Much of the commentary on these ‘norms,’ analyzed in the writings of prominent American academics and public intellectuals to be discussed in this book, is straightforward in its denunciation of cultures and languages that are ‘different’ from the ‘norm,’ often stating in no uncertain terms who and what a ‘true’ American is, or should be. The pattern is also found in mainstream media publications and in the speeches and writings of political leaders, US presidents, and other prominent public figures. Two relatively recent examples suffice (one could fill a large book with similar examples just from the past decade); in an op-ed piece, columnist Don Feder (1997) wrote, “Over 90% of new immigrants are ‘non-white’. Many come from caudillo cultures where corruption is pervasive. Most have a mañana work ethic. Their customs and traditions are as alien to our own as sushi to kosher cuisine.”Footnote ¹⁴ Even political pundit William F. Buckley Jr. offered his rather banal but revealing explanation of why it is easier to assimilate British immigrants than African Zulus: the former “speak English … are by and large Christians … and they are white-skinned. The Zulus speak no English, know nothing of democracy, and are black-skinned.”Footnote ¹⁵ For Buckley, British means, de facto, ‘white’ despite the obvious cultural/racial diversity that exists in Britain. Such ‘commonsense’ ignorant and racist views are widespread and accepted by large percentages of the population and help explain the origins and persistence of the so-called birther movement that began during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign which called into question Obama’s place of birth and religion. Supporters of the birther movement argued that since Barack Obama was born in Africa (he wasn’t), he must be a fraud (he isn’t), since he couldn’t really be a Christian (he is), or legally run for president (he did), and he can’t really understand democracy (apparently enough to be elected to the US Senate in 2004 and president of the United States in 2008, and reelected to a second term in 2012). Today, such totalizing and demonstrably false claims are not only tolerated in public discourse but are actively promoted and disseminated by mainstream media personalities whose diatribes are available to millions of viewers and followers on a variety of social media networks and platforms. What is different today, compared to a hundred or more years ago, is the reach and saturation of such views in the national media ecosystem; the views themselves are not new. The false idea that America is a white, Christian nation that was built primarily by white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon men that must be protected from the bad effects of ‘others’ (i.e., non-Christian, non-white, and especially atheists and other ‘outsiders’) on the national character has a very long, complex, and contested history.

Who Are the American People?

Whenever we hear politicians use the phrase ‘The American people…’ we should be prepared to discount what follows as propaganda, since there is no ‘American people’ and no consensus about the definition of ‘American’ or who constitutes ‘the people’ or what the ‘American people’ as a collective believe or want. Who, exactly, the American people are has always been a largely asserted and contested claim.Footnote ¹⁶ Thomas L. Hartshorne, writing in 1968, observed, “The American national character has become an American national obsession.”Footnote ¹⁷ Hartshorne makes no attempt to describe, define, or explain that character; his purpose (overlapping with mine) is “to determine what American intellectuals have offered in the way of descriptions, definitions, and explanations.” I also agree with Boyd Shafer that there is no such thing “as a constant or ever-present national character, unless it is invented by historians.”Footnote ¹⁸ Hartshorne argues that historians focus on national character because it is convenient; that may be so, but historians make choices – they decide which stories deserve to be told, what will be emphasized, whose perspective will be foregrounded (and whose perspective will be left out), how and why events happen, how they are explained (and justified), who ‘wins’ and who ‘loses’; and most importantly, historians, through the power of their narratives, create images and characters that become tropes that are woven into the national consciousness over time. The phrase ‘the American people…’ is nothing more than a rhetorical move designed to promote solidarity between the speaker using that phrase, their values, political views, and/or personal characteristics, and their audience. To be effective, speaker and audience must believe that they share, to some degree, and often subconsciously, certain tenets about American identity, including its core components, its essential character, usually with assumed shared understandings about the historical facts and interpretations that inform those tenets; whatever the beliefs expressed may be, a speaker using the phrase ‘the American people…’ invokes what they believe are mostly positive attributes, including the essential ‘goodness’ or ‘virtue’ or ‘exceptionalism’ of the nation, among other elements that include emotional identification tied to a deep sense of patriotism.Footnote ¹⁹ Politicians of the left and right generally agree with formulaic manifestations of how patriotism is (and should be) routinely expressed, even as they may vehemently disagree on why or how America is a ‘great country’: for example, ‘Patriotic Americans’ stand (not kneel) during the singing of the national anthem at sporting events (helmet/hat off, hand on heart); ‘Patriotic Americans’ celebrate the July 4th holiday in some fashion; ‘Patriotic Americans’ proudly display the American flag (not just on the 4th of July, but all the time); ‘Patriotic Americans’ observe Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and Presidents’ Day, and they pledge their support for the American military, and so on.Footnote ²⁰ These may be empty tokens of patriotismFootnote ²¹ for many Americans, but they are nonetheless important and widely understood manifestations of a ‘true’ and quasi-sacred Americanism, an idea that I (and others) have argued has been largely constructed over time, obscuring a far more complex and contested history.Footnote ²²

My goal in this book is to identify tropes and their historical roots that have been developed and naturalized in texts and that, over time, have become commonsense representations of the American character and American identity. I also provide examples of tropes that are alternative accounts of the American experience that undermine the assumptions that inform distorted, often rose-colored-glasses accounts of American character that tend to be dominant in corridors of power and influence in the American imaginary. My focus is on texts produced in the first two decades of the twentieth century during the Americanization movement. This book aims to question and problematize received wisdom on some of the most popular tropes of American identity, including that America is a Christian nation; that America is a nation of immigrants; that America was founded on principles of universal liberty and equality; that true Americans are predominately white, Protestant, and of northwest European provenance; that America is something ineffable, eternal, a spiritual idea that ‘lives in the heavens’; that all Americans have always enjoyed the full blessings of liberty; that national unity requires conformity to particular values, expressed in English, established by the founding generation; that throughout American history, ‘suspect alien peoples’ have brought ‘alien ideas’ to America that undermine American civilization; and that ‘wrong’ ideas and beliefs about the founding of the nation are un-American and should be suppressed and excised from mainstream public discourse and school textbooks, among other tropes discussed in the book. Tropes often persist regardless of how or when they originated and whether or not they have any basis in fact;Footnote ²³ exposing the bases of these and other constructed narratives of America and the American people is a challenge that scholars and activists committed to a vision of enhancing American democracy and equality continue to embrace and steadfastly pursue.

The Role of Texts in the Development of National Identity

The relative (and unequal) status of different social and ethnic groups in society is not made transparent merely by reading historical texts, or even by debating differing interpretations of those texts. What is as important to gain an understanding of social relations, and in particular why certain ideologies and groups have obtained – and maintained – dominance over other ideologies and groups, is the circumstances of text construction (who, when, where, and how) and a deeper analysis of the texts themselves, using techniques of critical discourse analysis (CDA).Footnote ²⁴ The central goal of CDA is to provide “an account of intricate relationships between text, talk, social cognition, power, society and culture.”Footnote ²⁵ Such an approach can help us understand, for example, the process by which coherent models of national identity are developed, given the complexity and inherent contradictions in such an abstract notion. An important goal of CDA is to uncover the often-implicit arguments and meanings in texts which tend to marginalize nondominant groups while justifying the values, beliefs, and ideologies of dominant groups. In my textual analyses, I use techniques commonly found in CDA-driven research; however, in order to offer a more accessible rendering of the texts I analyze in this book, I have chosen to omit the terminology and technical aspects of CDA methodology while providing a great deal of detail on the rhetorical and linguistic strategies authors used to construct their various arguments.

Because it is impossible to study all texts produced by a society which, theoretically, could have some bearing on the construction of a national narrative, one must consider those sites which intersect with and influence the greatest number of people. The obvious candidates are texts produced by major social institutions, such as the media, education, government, business, and so on. The prominence and influence of these institutions is maintained, in part, by the selective way in which access to them is controlled. Not anyone can get published in the mainstream media, nor can just anyone hold forth on the floor of the US Congress to discuss their views about a particular issue. Van Dijk has pointed out that “social power is based on privileged access to socially valued resources, such as wealth, income, position, status, force, group membership, education or knowledge.” Footnote ²⁶ Those who have social power have greater access to the tools of persuasion (e.g., the media, political office) by which they can use strategies to “change the mind of others in one’s own interests.”Footnote ²⁷ The combination of (1) disproportionate access to the fora of social persuasion and (2) the use of techniques (linguistic, rhetorical) to advance the self-interests of individuals and groups with social power are key factors in the construction and maintenance of hegemony.Footnote ²⁸ As Herman and Chomsky demonstrated, one of the major functions of dominant discourse (that is, the discourse of dominant groups) is to manufacture consensus about and acceptance of their dominance.Footnote ²⁹ Therefore, in this book I concentrate on the texts of power elitesFootnote ³⁰ since it is they who command the most attention (by virtue of their privileged access to fora in which to air their views) and whose views are most influential in the construction of mainstream American identity.

We are living in a historical moment in which facts and truth are constantly under assault and political polarization shuts down debate and critical inquiry on important social issues that require honest engagement rather than cowardly subterfuge and name-calling. One thing seems to be clear: without an honest examination and robust discussion on the roots of American identity and the cultural and political development of those roots – both positive and negative – as portrayed in narratives and tropes constructed from the earliest days of British settlements in North America, it is likely that polarization will only increase and the possibility of any meaningful consensus on national identity and national purpose will only recede. Dealing with complex social and economic issues in a democracy requires a vision and commitment that derives from the majority of the population, not from powerful elites whose needs and wants are self-interested and transmitted in discourses designed to gain the consent of the people, whose needs and wants are nearly always irrelevant to the most powerful economic interests in society. Without a shared collective sense of national purpose informed and propelled by the needs and aspirations of a pluralistic participatory democratic electorate, the future of the United States as a secular democratic republic is by no means guaranteed.

The Americanization Movement

The Americanization movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century was the centerpiece of a transformative moment in American history. More than 20 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920; immigrants brought new languages, religions, and revolutionary ideas to the nation that were believed by many to threaten the established political, economic, and social order. Psychologists made astounding and unproven claims about the unsuitability of newer arrivals to become bona fide Americans. Politicians and intellectuals warned that American civilization faced imminent collapse unless and until drastic steps were taken to reduce or completely cut off immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. Largely in response to immigration, a movement evolved that eventually operated in every US state; the goal was to construct and reinforce a particular version of Americanism by controlling the language through which Americanism was conveyed. Control was to be achieved through (1) centralized curricula developed at the federal level; (2) establishment of Americanization speakers bureaus; (3) censorship of non-English immigrant newspapers; (4) publication of articles on Americanization in immigrant newspapers written by employees of the federal government or members of the National Security League; (5) the teaching of English and civics courses in factories and other places of employment; and (6) requiring adult education classes for adults, among other methods. There was considerable opposition to the goals, methods, and tactics of the Americanization movement, but the collective forces of Americanization were powerful and nearly unstoppable because of the political support the movement engendered. In the end, despite the general failure of Americanization policies and programs to improve labor market outcomes for immigrants or to effectively promote social integration,Footnote ³¹ the Americanization movement did succeed in stigmatizing cultural and linguistic diversity, a legacy that has persisted to the present day.

In Chapters 2 through 7, I provide the views of Americans who generally supported the goals and methods of Americanization, revealed in their writings and speeches in the period 1901–1927. I have chosen authors and texts based on various factors, including (1) the relevance of the texts to the general topics of Americanization and Americanism; (2) the reputation of the authors in the academic world and/or the public sphere – I consider the work of leading scholars at major academic institutions whose views were not outliers at the time of their publication; (3) the range of academic disciplines covered, including sociology, ethnology, psychology, history, and economics; (4) writers who at the time were often labeled as political progressives and interested in the improvement of American society and the general welfare of the American people; and (5) political and other public figures whose careers were forged during the so-called Progressive era, such as Franklin K. Lane (US secretary of the interior in the Woodrow Wilson administration). I have analyzed, in most cases, complete texts, whether articles, transcribed speeches, or portions of books; I did not cherry-pick passages that would provide nonrepresentative characterizations of the author’s views or beliefs on the subject being discussed. The people profiled in this book were not fringe figures outside the mainstream of academic thinking or public opinion, nor were their views generally seen as racist or controversial.

In a series of best-selling books published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, including The Rising Tide of Color (1920), The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (1922), and Racial Realities in Europe (1924), Lothrop Stoddard (PhD Harvard) (Chapter 2) argued that unless it did something about immigration, and soon, the United States would succumb to the inferior black and yellow races, and American civilization – indeed world civilization – would be doomed to extinction.Footnote ³² Someone who admired Stoddard’s views was President Warren G. Harding. In a speech in Birmingham, Alabama in 1921, Harding referred to Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color (1920) before a crowd of more than 100,000 people, Black and white; Harding said that segregation was essential to prevent “racial amalgamation,” and that social equality was thus a dream that Black people must give up. Harding added: “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on ‘The Rising Tide of Color’ … must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.”Footnote ³³ Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg was also in awe of the work of Lothrop Stoddard and fellow American white-supremacist Madison Grant. Rosenberg encouraged the United States to “proceed with youthful strength to set up the new idea of the racial states, such as some awakened Americans have already apprehended, like Grant and Stoddard.” Hitler cited passages of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916) in speeches and writings and owned a copy of the original German edition at the time of his suicide in his bunker in Berlin in 1945.Footnote ³⁴ Few Americans today are aware of the crucial impact American intellectuals and politicians had in supporting the ideology of Aryan white supremacy in the German National Socialist movement in the 1920s, leading up to Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. Many of these writers and intellectuals visited Germany, met with party leaders and officials, gave speeches at important conferences,Footnote ³⁵ and provided Nazi leaders with first German editions of their works. Hitler saw in the United States a kindred spirit in the war to rid Germany – and Europe – of ‘those people’ who needed to be removed and ultimately exterminated, especially Jews and other ‘defective’ people who were polluting the German bloodstream.Footnote ³⁶

Today, it would be difficult for any reasonable person not to label the views of Stoddard and Grant as those of an unapologetic white supremacist, but in the period in which these writers were active, their views were broadly seen as ‘commonsense’ and also ‘well-informed’ because of the high social status of the authors, based on their positions as academic and/or social elites whose credentials were unimpeachable and whose extreme views, therefore, required no justification or explanation. Their views were those of properly educated American (white) men. The same phenomenon is evident today in the United States with the plethora of books written by distinguished scholars such as Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996) and Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 2004), and popular best-selling authors such as Peter Brimelow (Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster [Harper Perennial, 1996]), among many other best-selling publications by famous and highly touted authors and intellectuals. While some of the language in these and other books has been toned down, the message is straightforward and substantially the same as it was 100 years ago: America is a white man’s country, founded on Anglo-Saxon values and principles, and the newer immigrants don’t share those values and, instead, want to impose their values, their languages, and their cultures on American society; unless we do something drastic, the future of the ‘great’ American nation is in doubt.

In Chapter 1 (The Doctrine of Discovery and Natural Liberty) I turn to the role of religion, and especially the Calvinist theology of the Puritan leadership in New England, in the establishment of a colonial world that was built, in part, on the dispossession of Native American land, and the knock on effects of religion in all aspects of American society and especially on American identity through the centuries. The Doctrine of Discovery, based on a Papal bull (Dum diversas) issued on June 18, 1452, provided the legal framework that informed the US colonial system of controlling Indigenous nations.Footnote ³⁷ Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the Doctrine of Discovery was one of the first principles of international law that Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to non-Christian peoples outside Europe. It was used to justify the occupation of Native American lands Puritans in America claimed to have found unoccupied and unimproved by the earnest labors of men. The doctrine was simple: lands not cultivated or “improved” in the English fashion were free for the taking. Puritans assumed that once the Native Americans came to understand that the “gifts” of civility and Christianity would free them from what missionary John Elliot called an “unfixed, confused and ungoverned life, uncivilized and subdued to labor and order,” they would gladly submit to English political authority;Footnote ³⁸ and if they “refused” those “gifts,” their inevitable demise would rest entirely on their shoulders. That darker aspect of the role of religion in the founding of America is generally ignored or glossed over in most mainstream histories; it is left to critical scholars, such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, to set the record straight. Today, most Americans believe the Puritans came to the New World seeking freedom to practice their religion and to establish communities organized according to their religious beliefs. Yet, their Christian theology gave them an unwavering belief, and self-assuredness, that they had every right and duty to possess the land occupied by other non-Christian people because God had ordained the sacredness and righteousness of their mission to create a city on a hill that would usher in God’s kingdom on earth.Footnote ³⁹ Their conviction in their right to claim sovereignty over lands already occupied was absolute. There is little discussion in mainstream American history of the role played by the Catholic Church (or Protestant Church, or the British monarchy) in sanctioning the theft of land Native Americans had occupied for at least 12,000 years prior to the arrival of the first British colonists. Nor is sufficient attention paid to how the colonists benefitted from Indian agricultural techniques of hilling, fertilizing by annual burning, and co-planting with nitrogen-fixing beans to reduce soil depletion; without the knowledge and help provided by Native American prisoners (as at Jamestown) or by allies like Squanto at Plymouth, the colonists would have lacked a secure livelihood, especially in the early years before traditional European cereal crops had been adapted to American climate and soils.Footnote ⁴⁰

Many of the Americanizers discussed in this book dwell on the spiritual nature of Americanism; references to God abound in the speeches of US Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, 1913–1920 (Chapter 7), who describes Americanism as something ineffable “in the heavens”; “Americanism is the most advanced spirit that has come to man’s spirit from above”; “God is great … we are to conquer this land in that spirit, and in our spirit we are to conquer other lands because our spirit is one that, like a living flame, goes abroad.” The providentialism expressed in the words of Lane harken back to the sermons of John Winthrop and John Cotton prior to the departure of the ship Arabella to America from England on March 20, 1630.Footnote ⁴¹ The Protestant eschatology carried over from England and Holland to America is deeply embedded in American identity to the point that it is hardly noticed anymore; America is ‘destined’ for great things because America is part of a divine plan. America may lose battles, but in the end, nothing on earth can stop the march toward ultimate redemption and the salvation of Christians. Christianity was a potent force in support of chattel slavery, in support of male domination over women, and in the duty of ‘right-thinking’ white male clergy to rule absolutely over their ‘subjects’ to advance particular versions of Protestant Christianity over all other religions. Calvinists soon faced competition for Christian souls from Quakers, Shakers, Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, among other sects, rendering colonial America and the early decades of the United States a smorgasbord of (mostly) Christian faiths (although historian Richard Hofstadter claims that “perhaps as many as ninety per cent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790”Footnote ⁴²), often with strongly contrasting views on Christian theology, human nature, politics, and the role of religion in government and society.Footnote ⁴³ Yet despite this variety and competition among (mostly) Christian sects in the colonial era, the idea of the United States as a Christian nation gained traction, with important consequences in social and political life. In the twentieth century, the idea of “Christian America” was promoted by the business community and religious activists who opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, arguing that it was a program of “pagan statism” that threatened individual freedom.Footnote ⁴⁴ The false notion that the United States government was founded on a Protestant religious worldview,Footnote ⁴⁵ a claim made by white Christian nationalists today, or that Americans are a religious people,Footnote ⁴⁶ a claim made by both Republican and Democratic politicians, persists in the face of overwhelming and indisputable evidence to the contrary. Although the role Christianity (or any religion) ought to play in politics and civic society has been contested and fraught throughout American history, its purported central relevance to the establishment of the United States as a democratic constitutional republic has been clearly demonstrated to be false;Footnote ⁴⁷ yet, the centrality of religion, particularly varieties of Protestant evangelicalism, and the claim that American identity is spiritual in nature have never been seriously questioned by the dominant political establishment because to do so would be politically risky, even fatal, for a career in elective politics. As a result, the myth persists that America is a deeply religious country, and this myth has become an essential feature of the nation’s self-image, to itself and to the world, despite data that show that regular church attendance continues to decline and Americans who claim “other,” refuse to answer questions about their religious identification, or claim to be agnostic or atheist when asked about their religious affiliation is at an all-time high.Footnote ⁴⁸

In Chapter 8 I examine the work of two American intellectuals, Isaac Berkson and Randolph S. Bourne, who characterized the Americanization movement and programs as contrary to American democratic values, founded on an idea of American society that was antiquated and implausible. For these and other similarly minded writers, intellectuals, and political activists, the melting pot meant forced assimilation into a particular preexisting ‘pot’ into which the immigrant is to be cast, and after a coerced ‘melting’ process, becomes – as much as possible – like the default ‘normal’ Anglo-Saxon/northern European, white, Christian, English-speaking ‘American.’ For these writers, such a process was incompatible with a future based on a transnational polity of complex diversity that is always evolving and open to change and improvement, and that includes cooperation with other nations in the furtherance of sustainable peace and the improvement of living standards in the United States and across the globe.

Berkson criticized the ‘Federation of Nationalities’ theory championed by Horace Kallen who, in an article that appeared in The Nation in 1915, wrote that “Self-hood … is ancestrally determined,” Footnote ⁴⁹ and later in his 1924 book Culture and Democracy in the United States, claimed that “intermarriage or no intermarriage, racial quality persists, and is identifiable … to the end of generations.” Footnote ⁵⁰ Berkson found Kallen’s argument to be contrary to the very foundational principle of democratic society; he wrote that the traditional tendency to “pass judgment on persons in accordance with some group in which they were classed” to be contrary to the democratic conception which “would insist that the character of each individual should be directly examined in order to ascertain what he [sic] is. A person is what he is because he is so, not because he belongs to a certain class.” At the same time, “to teach one to forget his ethnic connection as is proposed by the ‘Americanization’ theory is to make a breach in the moral foundation of one’s character.”Footnote ⁵¹

Randolph S. Bourne (1886–1918) was a progressive critic, a literary radical, who wrote essays on the American condition and American identity. In the period before and during America’s participation in the war in Europe (World War I), he wrote lengthy articles on the dangers the war posed for American society; for example, he opposed President Wilson’s argument that the United States was entering the war in Europe “to make the world safe for democracy,” refusing to invest the war with a holy mission, as some of his fellow intellectuals, such as John Dewey and Charles Beard, had. He regarded the League of Nations as an alliance of all against each, a means of petrifying the status quo. He was concerned that the war would stifle domestic reform and marginalize the role and influence of reformers and intellectuals in the post-war period.

Bourne was highly critical of the discourse of Americanization and offered a counternarrative of “transnationalism”Footnote ⁵² that challenged the ideas of 100 percent Americanism and cultural pluralism and that offered a new conception of American identity that was both ethnic and modern, American and cosmopolitan.Footnote ⁵³ In questioning the meaning of Americanism, Bourne wondered whether the time had come to assert a higher ideal than the ‘melting pot’:

Since we are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, distinctions, if they are to be made, should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness. Bourne summarizes his thesis:

Although the political repression of the early decades of the twentieth century (discussed in Chapter 3) had a lasting impact on the future direction of American identity and politics, so too did the work of dissidents such as Randolph S. Bourne. His vision for an America not based on one dominant culture (Anglo-Saxon) but rather on something that was greater than the sum of the individual cultural elements in the nation, something dynamic, forward-looking, and not based on a corporate liberalism backed by a militaristic approach to international affairs, is one that inspires scholars and political activists today, not just in the United States but around the world. The contributions of Isaac Berkson and Randolph S. Bourne are alternative narratives to those of Lothrop Stoddard, Gino Speranza, Henry Pratt Fairchild, Edward A. Ross, Wentworth Stewart, Franklin K. Lane, and others whose texts will be analyzed and discussed in this book. The degree to which the narratives of Berkson and Bourne influence American politics depends on the degree to which their narratives can gain greater traction in the public sphere, spurring activism and political movements that favor a “progressive democratic reconstruction of an America hospitable to difference.”Footnote ⁵⁶