Is There Such a Thing as the American Character? Or, Is It American Caricature? A Roundup

Ca. 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Terry Eagleton, "No Self-Mockery, Please, We're American," Chronicle of Higher Ed, July 1, 2013

Can one even speak of Americans and Europeans in this grandly generalizing way? Is this not the sin of stereotyping, which all high-minded liberals have learned to abhor? Nobody falls into a general category. Everyone is his or her own elite. As a character in one of James's novels proudly puts it,

In The American Scene, [Henry] James writes of the country's disastrous disregard for appearances. For the Calvinist, a delight in anything for its own sake is sinful. Pleasure must be instrumental to some more worthy goal, such as procreation, rather as play on children's television in America must be tied to some grimly didactic purpose. It can rarely be an end in itself. The fact that there is no social reality without its admixture of artifice, that truth works in terms of masks and conventions, is fatally overlooked.>>>

Jason Bailey, "Nashville in Paris: The Quintessential American Film, as Seen Abroad. On July 4, in France, I felt just how well Robert Altman captured our national character," Atlantic, July 4, 2013

Watching Nashville from outside of that country puts Altman's intentions to the test. Perhaps critics like Greil Marcus and Robert Mazzocco were right; maybe he is, in fact, judging these people, pointing and laughing at them, as we snicker when Haven Hamilton sings his insipid ballad "For the Sake of the Children," or when Barbara Jean tees up another down-home chestnut. But I don't think so--I didn't before, and I certainly didn't in Paris, where the French audience seemed just as willing to accept Altman's 24 characters, with all of their faults and flaws, into their open arms. They are with these people, and with the film, and they gasp at its ending (despite all of its broad foreshadowing). When Haven Hamilton picks up the microphone and implores the crowd, "This is Nashville! You show 'em what we're made of," the gooseflesh rises, and it continues through the heartbreaking sing-along of "It Don't Worry Me," as good a choice for an alternate national anthem as any.>>>
"We are all princes here." . . .

Matthew Frye Jacobson on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

Matthew Frye Jacobson, interviewed in the video posted here, is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.  He is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.  He's also the

author of What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2005); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (University of California Press, 1995).

Jacobson was one of the keynote speakers at the Nordic Association for American Studies conference I attended this past weekend at Karlstad University in Sweden. Jacobson's talk dealt with a fascinating website cum archive he and others have developed called the Historian's Eye. This expansive visual and oral history project is described on the site:

Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the "Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 3000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, the escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide and the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

I caught up with Jacobson in Karlstad to discuss his work and how he became a historian.  In the interview above he speaks about his interest in cultural history, his early understanding of the possibilities of historical study, and describes how he chose to work in the field.

For other interviews in this ongoing series, click here.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Economic Policy

Heather Cox Richardson

On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law theChinese Exclusion Act. This hotly contested law was the first in American history to prevent voluntary immigration to the United States. It was also the formal rejection of one of the founding principles of the Republican Party: that the immigration of workers to the U.S. was fundamental to the country’s strength.

An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT.
Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must
draw the line somewhere, you know."
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Chinese immigration to America began with the Gold Rush. Its flood tide in 1849 coincided with the economic catastrophe left in China by the Opium Wars, and young Chinese men came to “Gold Mountain” to earn money to feed their families back home. Chinese miners did well financially in California, but quickly came under fire from native-born Americans, who first passed a “Foreign Miners’ Tax” targeting Chinese miners and then tried to prevent Chinese immigrants from testifying in court.

The attempts to create a legal caste system bothered budding Republicans like William Henry Seward and Abraham Lincoln. The idea that men were not equal in America, but rather could be divided by legal status, echoed the beliefs of the southern Democrats that Republicans opposed. When Republicans took over the national government, they stood firm against that theory. They not only ended slavery, but also promoted immigration. Immigrants, their 1864 platform declared: had “added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations,” that immigration “should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.” Immigrants worked hard, made products that created value, and helped to fuel a rising spiral of economic prosperity. Republicans believed that the more immigrants a country attracted, the more its economy would expand.

How a Nation Reports its Grief

Glenn Alan Cheney*

 

Theatre box where Abraham Lincoln was
shot on April 14, 1865. Ford's Theatre,
Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the Library
of Congress.

When I started compiling How a Nation Grieves: Press Accounts of the Death of Lincoln, the Hunt for Booth, andAmerica in Mourning, I had little intention of pulling together a whole book. But I soon realized I was witnessing—not reading about but witnessing—the most traumatic moment in American history. The assassination of Lincoln had shocked North and South alike.

Except for the people at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, the American people witnessed the national trauma through newspapers. Journalism was a little different in those days. Its practitioners were not restricted to today’s dispassionate, professional voice. They were expected to provide details, and they were free to use language to connote the emotions that came with those details.

The Meaning of National Boundaries

Heather Cox Richardson

In a recent quest to explore American maritime history, I tumbled across Joshua M. Smith’s Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820. Smith tells the story of smuggling in Passamaquoddy Bay at the mouth of the St. Croix River between Maine and New Brunswick. As he explores what smuggling meant to those involved, he also investigates the attempts of different governments to enforce boundaries. That, in turn, got me to thinking about just how malleable national boundaries really are.

In retrospect, that seems like a no-brainer, and probably is for most historians. But I’m accustomed to thinking of national boundaries as lines that divide land, demarcations that are often as stark in reality as they are on a map. In The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, Beth LaDow explored the meaning of a hundred miles of border between Montana and Saskatchewan. She showed the power of national boundaries to change the fortunes of people escaping from the law on either side of the border. Most notably, perhaps, Sitting Bull and his people crossed that “medicine line” after the Battle of Little Bighorn, escaping to Canada to avoid the wrath of the U.S. soldiers sent to hunt them.

With examples like that in front of me, land boundaries have always seemed terribly clear.

Somehow, seeing Smith illustrate the concept of a boundary through water rather than land brought home just how hard it is to delineate a marker between nations. Men who smuggled in Passamaquoddy Bay spent very little time worrying about where the boundaries were, just as people who fish today often work hard not to notice when they “drift” into foreign waters. An artificial boundary dividing the bay had very little meaning for the everyday lives of people in Passamaquoddy, except when governments got involved.

That sudden realization—dawn breaks over Marblehead!—got me to thinking about national boundaries in general. To what extent are they entirely artificial, reflecting the wishes of a central state rather than the realities of life on a borderland? To what extent is the idea of a national boundary a modern concept? And if it is a recent idea, will it continue to be relevant as technology continues to break down borders?

Maybe I’m behind the curve on this idea, but it’s sure got me thinking . . .

A Seat at the Table of the Nation

Steven Cromack

Thanksgiving approaches. In schools across the country, students are learning about the Pilgrims with their black buckle hats, the Indians with their feathers, and a feast in which both groups came together in peace and harmony. At this first thanksgiving, both groups celebrated the bountiful blessings of company and friendship, while the Pilgrims gave thanks to their gracious God. Students learn of the first thanksgiving proclamation made by President Washington, and that, since then, Thanksgiving has become part of our national tradition.

The reality is that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it today, comes from Sara Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century journalist, who petitioned President Lincoln for a national day of thanks, and singlehandedly linked giving thanks with eating turkey and pies.

Although many attribute the first thanksgiving to the Pilgrims, that celebration was nothing more than a harvest festival. In his book, We Gather Together: The Story of Thanksgiving, anthropologist Ralph Linton outlined the harvest festivals celebrated in the Old World. In the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, English, and Slavic traditions, there appears an annual harvest festival of feasting and giving thanks. In the same way, the Pilgrims, who carried with them their Old World traditions, were naturally going to have harvest festivals and give thanks for their blessings.

In 1895, Reverend William DeLoss Love wrote a comprehensive history of the New England harvest festivals. He noted that the 1621 event, “was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts” (69). Reverend Love, instead, would have more realistically been familiar with the events of a few decades earlier and one prominent journalist.

Nineteenth-century journalist Sara Josepha Hale invented the thanksgiving that exists today. Hale was the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the nation’s premiere magazine for nineteenth-century women. In it, she published numerous editorials urging the nation to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanks. In the September 1860 edition of Godey, Hale wrote, “THANKSGIVING—the new National Holiday.—We must advert once more to this grand object of nationalizing Thanksgiving Day, by adopting, as a permanent rule, the last Thursday in November in all the States.” In addition to this one, she had published similar petitions in Godey’s since 1855. One reader wrote Hale in November of 1859, “DEAR MADAM: Your admirable suggestions in relation to the simultaneous observance of Thanksgiving Day over the whole Union have, before this, made a deep, and, let us trust, an abiding impression in the most influential and desirable quarters.” Hale also published a cookbook titled Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, with recipes for turkey and sweet potatoes. In an effort to make permanent her desire for a national holiday, she wrote over forty years worth of letters to governors and presidents.

Finally, in 1863, President Lincoln recognized the political advantage to having a national day of thanks. In 1863, he declared, “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” For Lincoln, appealing to the nation and God to give thanks was an attempt to start a healing process for a nation still embroiled in a bloody Civil War. In 1864, Lincoln made a similar proclamation. After Lincoln’s assassination, Hale wrote President Johnson and made the same request. As a result, every president following Lincoln, because of Hale’s letter writing, made thanksgiving proclamations in November. Thanksgiving, therefore, became a yearly tradition with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. Congress finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1941.

It is because of Sara Josepha Hale, not the Pilgrims, that we eat turkey on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving only became a yearly tradition in the mid nineteenth-century. Her four-decade campaign changed the nation, and yet, not one American history textbook even mentions her enormous contribution to our tradition. Hale used Thanksgiving to bring the nation together. She wrote in 1857, “Last year, nearly all States and Territories united on that day. This year, we trust, there will be no blank in this number, nor a seat left vacant at the Table of the Nation.”

Further Reading:

Excerpts of Hale’s editorials, as well as letters written to her by readers, are online:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/shtable/shtable-thanks.html

William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England. New York:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1895.

Holiday Hiatus

.
The HS blog is on a brief hiatus for the holiday. Enjoy these past posts on Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson, "The History of National Thanksgiving," November 25, 2010

Heather Cox Richardson, "Pre-Holiday Stress Relief," November 24, 2010

Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" November 24, 2009

The Berlin Wall 50 Years On: Symbol of Division, and of Hope

Philip White

This past weekend, German citizens turned out en masse to recognize the 50th anniversary of East German authorities putting up the Berlin Wall. Coming 15 years after Winston Churchill’s Sinews of Peace speech, this barrier was the embodiment of the Iron Curtain that the British Prime Minister (ex-PM at the time) had spoken of in March 1946. The Wall not only carved Berlin in twain, but also the political and philosophical world–with liberal democracies with capitalist economic models on the western side and the totalitarian Communist regimes on the eastern.

Many desperate souls from the east (at least 136 reported, with many other likely not counted) died trying to get over the wall and with each failed attempt, the dreams of families hoping for a different life in the west perished, too. The commemoration in Berlin was no celebration, but rather a somber affair marked by church bells pealing out and flags billowing in the breeze at half-mast on the Reichstag. In the spot where the wall stood is now a chapel, which held a memorial service for those who lost their lives during the Wall’s 28-year history.

Before the concrete monstrosity went up, more than 2.5 million Germans had gone to the Allied occupation zones in the west of the city, according to The Daily Telegraph. One of the reasons for constructing the wall was the fear that this flight would leave the eastern part of the city economically destitute. Yet it was also, in many ways, a barrier to keep things out, not least “dangerous” Western ideas about freedom of the ballot box, speech and expression. The 96 miles of guard-patrolled, barbed wire-topped fortification also served the purpose of keeping Western officials and journalists out of Communist Eastern Germany and the nations beyond, preventing them from exposing the continued abuses of power and suppression of individual rights there.

Though it seemed so intimidating and so permanent for so long, the Berlin Wall was only as strong as the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes that had conceived it. By the time Ronald Reagan famously issued his June 1987 plea at the Brandenburg to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, the bedrock of the U.S.S.R. was already cracking under the pressure of freedom movements in Eastern Europe, an unsustainable military budget, and a flagging economy, not to mention the flourishing of new political ideas within Moscow’s halls of power.

The fall of the Wall two and a half years later, on November 9, 1989, did not solve Germany’s problems, and, in fact, the convergence of two radically different populations presented many new challenges. However, its demise was the symbolic nail in the coffin of the U.S.S.R. and thus, half a century after its creation, the Berlin Wall invokes thoughts of hope, as much as sorrow.

Earth Day: Who’s In, and Who’s Out?

Heather Cox Richardson

As anyone who has opened Google today knows, today is Earth Day. Historians can look at Earth Day from a variety of angles: from studying Rachel Carson’s paradigm-changing Silent Spring, which linked the destruction of the osprey population to the degradation of the food chain; to exploring how the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River caught the eye of a reporter; to uncovering the movement culture that nurtured the first Earth Day movements in 1970.

Another important way for historians to think about Earth Day, though, is through the lens of a crucially important article inspired by the increasing environmental awareness of the early 1970s. In 1972, a member of the faculty at the University of Southern California Law Center published an article in the Southern California Law Review titled: “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for National Objects.” In this piece, Christopher D. Stone was, as he put it, “quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.” Natural objects should have “legally recognized worth and dignity in its own right, and not merely to serve as a means to benefit ‘us’ (whoever the contemporary group of rights-holders may be).”

Stone anchored his suggestion in a brief overview of legal history. Societies began with a core group of families or kinship groups, he said. Everyone outside of that group was an outsider: frightening, suspect, alien. No one outside the core group had any rights. Even within a core group, some members had no rights. Children belonged to their fathers. They could be transferred, sold, even killed with impunity. Women, too, belonged to their men.

Gradually, Stone noted, societies began to expand the boundaries of those that enjoyed legal rights. Opponents greeted each expansion with resistance, fear, and ridicule, but gradually people outside that initial core group—men from other tribes, women, and children—won legal protections. In America, that protection eventually included legal standing for non-living entities, too, like corporations and estates.

Stone went on to argue that expanding legal rights to the natural world was not only logical, but also imperative to guarantee that the actual costs of industrial production were borne by the same entities that enjoyed the monetary benefits. More, though, the expansion of rights would herald a revolution in the way humans thought about and interacted with the environment. No longer would it be a resource for human exploitation; it would be an organism of which humans were a part.

Stone’s essay is justly famous in legal and environmental circles, and is well worth discussing for its legal and environmental implications. But is less well known among historians, and this is too bad. His brief overview of the contours of human society and the expansion of rights beautifully anticipated Reconstruction historians’ recent focus on what it means to be an American citizen—who was “in;” who was “out.” (And it is probably no accident that this Reconstruction historian was mesmerized by Stone’s article in college.) It also has anticipated the modern-day debate over the cultural meaning of “birtherism,” which political pundits from both sides of the aisle argue is a way to identify President Obama as “alien,” an “outsider.” The concepts Stone identified are central to historians’ understanding of our past, and of today’s Americans’ understanding of the present.

Earth Day 1970

Randall Stephens

Earth Day is 41 years old! The New York Times reminds us that:

Nearly 20 million Americans attended the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970, to this day among the most participatory political actions in the nation's history. In the decades since, Earth Day has spread across the globe with thousands of events in more than 180 countries.

In the beginning, the event influenced environmental politics, triggering such national legislation as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. "Earth Day is a commitment to make life better, not just bigger and faster," the organizers of the first celebration wrote in their manifesto. "It is a day to re-examine the ethic of individual progress at mankind's expense."

Watch part one of a 1970 CBS News report on the first Earth Day:

American Immigration in Historical Perspective

Randall Stephens

On Sunday, August 1, Peter O'Dowd reported on NPR that "Arizona's controversial immigration law went into effect this week, or at least parts of it." In a summary that looked at the reaction of church groups and religious leaders, O'Dowd noted "Despite significant support for the bill in the state, critics have been loud and organized." This comes on the heals of a Federal Judge's blocking of the more controversial aspects of the law last Wednesday. Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction on sections of the law that called for law enforcement officers to check a person's immigration status or require suspects to prove they were in the country legally.

Like abortion, gay marriage, or taxes, little divides Americans like the issue of immigration. And this historic conflict keeps repeating itself.

Unlike a variety of European nations, the US has had relatively open policies on citizenship. (Naturalization rates, as well, have remained high in Canada, the US, and Sweden.) Through much of the 19th century the new nation needed laborers and settlers. Still, the question of just who was or was not an American tended to exercise the masses and energize politicians. Sometimes the matter stirred up intense feelings.

Numerous Easterners in the 1850s and 1860s worried about the "wild Irish hordes" that descended on coastal cities. Millions would have agreed with English essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it--by heavens--squelch it." Nativism and the Know-Nothing Party made great political hay of the "Papist Menace." Samuel F. B. Morse--who helped invent the telegraph and a code for transmitting words over vast distances and also crafted his own brand of virulent xenophobia--was particularly adamant on the subject. In 1835 he wrote: "O there is no danger to the Democracy; for those most devoted to the Pope, the Roman Catholics, especially the Irish Catholics, are all on the side of Democracy. Yes; to be sure they are on the side of Democracy. They are just where I should look for them. Judas Iscariot joined with the true disciples. . . . They feel themselves so strong, as to organize themselves even as foreigners into foreign bands, and this for the purpose of influencing our elections. . . . That they are men who having professed to become Americans, by accepting our terms of naturalization, do yet, in direct contradiction to their professions, clan together as a separate interest, and retain their foreign appellation."

In the 1880s anti-Chinese legislation gained wide support in the American West and fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law read, in part: "That the master of any vessel who shall knowingly bring within the United States on such vessel, and land or permit to be landed, any Chinese laborer, from any foreign port or place, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars for each and every such Chinese laborer so brought, and maybe also imprisoned for a term not exceeding one year."

Most famously, though, the Immigration Act of 1924 raised the bar so that undesirable immigrants would have a difficult time entering the country. One stipulation ensured that old-stock white immigrants would receive special preference. "The annual quota of any nationality shall be 2 per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the Untied States census of 1890, but the minimum quota of any nationality shall be 100."

Many of the exclusionary policies were changed for good when President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, supported heavily by the late Senator Ted Kennedy. That landmark legislation did not end the debate or the ongoing contest over immigration.

The Arizona Law may or may by like or unlike earlier immigration laws. But it certainly lends itself to significant historical questions of legal matters, national identity, ethnicity, class, and more. Plenty for the general public and for students of history to consider.

For more on the history of immigration and the changing shape of the law, see the following helpful sites:

On the Arizona Law

Randal C. Archibold, "Judge Blocks Arizona’s Immigration Law," New York Times, July 28, 2010.

John Davis, "History Repeated: Arizona Immigration Law No Different from the Past," Texas Tech Today, June 4, 2010.

Chris Bray, "Light Tea, Heavy on the Milk," Cliopatria: A Group Blog, April 29, 2010.

Larry McMurtry, "The Trouble with Arizona," NYR Blog, June 24, 2010.

Immigration: General History, Legal History, Etc

Aspiration, Acculturation, and Impact: Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930. Harvard University Library Open Collections Program.

United States Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library.

Immigration Law: An Overview. Cornell University Law School.

Milestones: 1921-1936. The Office of the Historian, US State Department.

Immigration Legislation On-line, University of Washington-Bothell.

Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925-1927. History Matters, George Mason University.

American Character?

Sarah E. Igo reviews Claude S. Fischer's book Made in America in American Prospect, July 15, 2010. "A half-century ago," says Igo, "writing in the crucible of the early Cold War, American historians were convinced that something ran deep among U.S. citizens linking them to one another--a national personality or fundamental essence that made Americans American. . . ."

Igo isn't quite convinced. "Concerned as it is with the contours of American character as well as culture, it is hard to read Fischer's book as other than an argument for consensus history." Still she finds quite a bit to praise in this sprawling book.