Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America Author(s): Rogers M. Smith Reviewed work(s): Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 549-566 Published by: American Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2938735 . Accessed: 25/07/2012 10:28

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http://www.jstor.org ,A, I" American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3 September 1993

BEYONDTOCQUEVILLE, MYRDAL, AND HARTZ: THEMULTIPLE TRADITIONS INAMERICA ROGERSM. SMITHYale University

A nalystsof Americanpolitics since Tocqueville have seen thenation as a paradigmatic"liberal democratic"society, shapedmost by the comparativelyfree and equalconditions and the Enlightenmentideals said to haveprevailed at its founding.These accounts must be severely revisedto recognizethe inegalitarian ideologies and institutionsof ascriptivehierarchy that defined the politicalstatus of racialand ethnicminorities and womenthrough most of U.S. history.A study of the period1870-1920 illustratesthat Americanpolitical culture is betterunderstood as the often conflictualand contradictoryproduct of multiple politicaltraditions, than as the expressionof hegemonicliberal or democraticpolitical traditions.

Since the nation's inception, analysts have de- The Tocquevillianstory is thus deceptive because it scribed American political culture as the preem- is too narrow. It is centered on relationships among a inent example of modern liberal democracy, of minority of Americans (white men, largely of north- government by popular consent with respect for the ern European ancestry) analyzed via reference to equal rights of all. They have portrayed American categories derived from the hierarchyof political and political development as the working out of liberal economic statuses men have held in Europe: mon- democratic or republican principles, via both "liber- archs and aristocrats,commercial burghers, farmers, alizing" and "democratizing"socioeconomic changes industrial and rural laborers, and indigents. Because and political efforts to cope with tensions inherent in most European observers and British American men these principles. Illiberal, undemocratic beliefs and have regarded these categories as politically funda- practices have usually been seen only as expressions mental, it is understandable that they have always of ignorance and prejudice, destined to marginality found the most striking fact about the new nation to by their lack of rationaldefenses. A distinguished line be its lack of one type of ascriptive hierarchy. There of writers, from Hector St. John Crevecoeur in the was no hereditary monarchy or nobility native to eighteenth century and Harriet Martineau and Lord BritishAmerica, and the revolutionariesrejected both Bryce in the nineteenth century to Gunnar Myrdal the authority of the British king and aristocracyand and Louis Hartz in the twentieth century serves as the creation of any new American substitutes. Those authority for this view. Today, leading social scien- features of American political life made the United tists such as Samuel P. Huntington, Walter Dean States appear remarkablyegalitarian by comparison Burnham, and Ira Katznelson, legal scholars, histori- with Europe. But the ans, and cultural analysts such as Kenneth Karst, comparative moral, material, and political egalitarianismthat prevailed at the and Sacvan Bercovitch, and many founding among John Diggins, moderately propertiedwhite men was surroundedby others still structure their accounts on these pre- an arrayof other fixed, ascriptive systems of unequal mises. Virtually all appeal to the classic analysis of status, all largely unchallenged by the American Americanpolitics, Tocqueville'sDemocracy in America. revolutionaries.2Men were thought naturally suited Tocqueville's thesis-that America has been most to rule over women, within both the family and the shaped by the unusually free and egalitarian ideas polity. White northern Europeans were thought su- and material conditions that prevailed at its found- perior culturally-and probablybiologically-to black ing-captures important truths. Nonetheless, the Africans, bronze Native Americans, and indeed all purpose of this essay is to challenge that thesis by other races and civilizations. Many BritishAmericans showing that its adherents fail to give due weight to also treated religion as an inherited condition and inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have regarded Protestants as created by God to be morally shaped the participantsand the substance of Ameri- and politically, as well as theologically, superior to can politics just as deeply. For over 80% of U.S. Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others. history, its laws declared most of the world's popu- These beliefs were not merely emotional prejudices lation to be ineligible for full American citizenship or "attitudes." Over time, American intellectual and solely because of their race, original nationality, or political elites elaborated distinctive justifications for gender. For at least two-thirds of American history, these ascriptive systems, including inegalitarian the majority of the domestic adult population was scriptural readings, the scientific racism of the also ineligible for full citizenship for the same rea- "American school" of ethnology, racial and sexual sons. Contrary to Tocquevillian views of American Darwinism, and the romanticcult of Anglo-Saxonism civic identity, it did not matterhow "liberal,""demo- in American historiography. All these discourses cratic,"or "republican"those persons' beliefs were.' identified the true meaning of Americanismwith par-

549 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 ticular forms of cultural, religious, ethnic, and espe- have frequently lost to forces favoring new forms of cially racialand gender hierarchies.3Many adherents racialand gender hierarchy.Those forces have some- of ascriptive Americanist outlooks insisted that the times negated majorliberal victories, especially in the nation's political and economic structures should half-centuryfollowing Reconstruction;and the fate of formallyreflect naturaland culturalinequalities, even that era may be finding echoes today. at the cost of violating doctrines of universal rights. My chief aim here is to persuade readers that many Although these views never entirely prevailed, their leading accounts of American political culture are impact has been wide and deep. inadequate. I will also suggest briefly how analyses Thus to approach a truer picture of America's with greater descriptive and explanatory power can political culture and its characteristicconflicts, we be achieved by replacing the Tocquevillian thesis must consider more than the familiar categories of with a multiple-traditionsview of America. This argu- (absent) feudalism*and socialism and (pervasive) ment is relevant to contemporary politics in two bourgeois liberalism and republicanism. The nation ways. First, it raises the possibility that novel intel- has also been deeply constituted by the ideologies lectual, political, and legal systems reinforcingracial, and practices that defined the relationships of the ethnic, and gender inequalities might be rebuilt in white male minority with subordinate groups, and America in the years ahead. That prospect does not the relationships of these groups with each other. seem plausible if the United States has always been When these elements are kept in view, the flat plain essentially liberal democratic, with all exceptions of American egalitarianism mapped by Tocqueville marginaland steadily eliminated. It seems quite real, and others suddenly looks quite different.We instead however, if liberal democratic traditions have been perceive America's initial conditions as exhibiting but contested parts of American culture, with inegal- only a rather small, recently leveled valley of relative itarian ideologies and practices often resurging even equality nestled amid steep mountains of hierarchy. after major enhancements of liberal democracy. Sec- And though we can see forces working to erode those ond, the political implications of the view that Amer- mountains over time, broadening the valley, many of ica has never been completely liberal, and that the peaks also prove to be volcanic, frequently re- changes have come only through difficult struggles sponding to seismic pressures with outbursts that and then have often not been sustained, are very harden into substantial peaks once again. different from the complacency-sometimes des- To be sure, America's ascriptive, unequal statuses, pair-engendered by beliefs that liberal democracy and the ideologies by which they have been defended has always been hegemonic. have always been heavily conditioned and con- I shall review and critiqueTocqueville's account of strained by the presence of liberal democraticvalues the sources and dynamics shaping democracy in and institutions. The reverse, however, is also true. America, along with two of the most influential Although liberal democraticideas and practiceshave extensions of Tocquevilliananalysis in modern social been more potent in America than elsewhere, Amer- science, Gunnar Myrdal's (1944) AmericanDilemma ican politics is best seen as expressing the interaction and Louis Hartz's (1955)Liberal Tradition in America.I of multiple political traditions, including liberalism, argue that Tocqueville himself was much more per- republicanism,and ascriptiveforms of Americanism, ceptive than his modem "Tocquevillian"followers, which have collectively comprised American political though not free from the problems identified here. I culture, without any constituting it as a whole.4 shall note how Tocquevillian premises continue to Though Americans have often struggled over contra- flaw recent scholarship, especially general works on dictions among these traditions, almost all have tried American political identity and citizenship. Finally, I to embracewhat they saw as the best featuresof each. shall illustrate the merits of a multiple-traditions Ascriptive outlooks have had such a hold in Amer- approachby showing how it offers more insight into ica because they have provided something that nei- the qualifiedbut extensive creationof new systems of ther liberalism nor republicanism has done so well. ascriptive inequality during the post-Reconstruction They have offered creditableintellectual and psycho- and Progressive eras. logical reasons for many Americans to believe that their social roles and personal characteristicsexpress an identity that has inherent and transcendentworth, THE TOCQUEVILLIANTHESIS thanks to nature, history, and God. Those rationales have obviously aided those who sat atop the nation's Tocqueville began Democracyin Americaby calling political, economic, and social hierarchies. But many attention to the immense influence of one "basicfact" Americans besides elites have felt that they have that was the creative element from which each par- gained meaning, as well as material and political ticular fact-and, indeed, the whole course-of benefits, from their nation's traditional structures of American society is derived, namely, "the equality of ascribed places and destinies. conditions." This "fact"absorbed Tocqueville'sinter- Conventional narratives, preoccupied with the ab- est because he saw a democratic revolution taking sence of aristocracyand socialism, usually stress the place in Europe, especially in France, breaking down liberal and democratic elements in the rhetoric of the power of nobles and kings. In the United States even America's dissenters (Hartog 1987). These ac- this revolution seemed "almost to have reached its counts fail to explain how and why liberalizingefforts natural limits." Thus, by studying America, Toc-

550 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3 queville could draw lessons for the future of his own of equality and liberty, but with evident approval, nation and all of European culture (1969, 9-12, 18). Myrdalsaw egalitarianvalues as having "triumphed" America was so advanced in this democraticrevo- in most respects. The persistent refusal to follow lution, Tocqueville argued, because of several ele- American egalitarianideals in matters of race was, he ments that conspired to produce its egalitarianpoint thought, most characteristicof "poor and uneducated of departure. The vast stretches of land "inhabited white" people in "isolated and backwardrural" areas only by wandering tribes who had not thought of of the deep South. Thus, his analysis offered hope exploiting" the soil enabled European immigrants to that these inequalities, too, would in the end be spread out and make their fortune-as opposed to dissolved (Myrdal1944, lxxi-iii, 6-9; see also Jackson, nations where most lands formed parts of large 1990, 199 and Southern 1987, 295). hereditary estates. Settlers came chiefly from Eng- If Myrdal stressed Tocqueville's argument that land, where they had unusual "acquaintance with early Americans were shaped by egalitarianEnlight- notions of rights and principles of true liberty," enment ideals, Louis Hartz (1955) emphasized Toc- reinforced in New England particularlyby "demo- queville's account of America's relatively egalitarian cratic and republican" Protestant beliefs. They also and free economic and social conditions. Americans' came without any "idea of any superiority of some lack of feudal institutions, classes, and their lived over others," because great lords did not relocate to experience of "atomistic social freedom" made the the colonies and because the large landowners who U.S. a liberal society. Hartz viewed the presence of did lacked aristocraticprivileges. Instead, a "middle- "the liberal idea" among early Americans as impor- class and democratic freedom" flourished almost tant, but he did not think it was consciousness of a from the outset. This combination of comparatively specific ideological heritage that made Americans equal and open economic and social conditions and liberal. Most were instinctive-even "irrational"- an ideological legacy conducive to republicanismand Lockeans, all the more so because they had no real personal liberties made America the perfect labora- awareness of any alternatives. Their comparatively tory to study the tendencies of a society that from the nonascriptive, nonhierarchical conditions led most start was decisively free, egalitarian, and democratic Americansto regardliberal beliefs in individual rights in theory and practice (1969, 33-36, 50-51, 280-81). and liberties, petit bourgeois democracy, and Horatio The impact of Tocqueville's thesis on modem Alger myths of economic mobility as self-evident. Far American scholarship was magnified by two among more than Myrdal and even more than Tocqueville, many works applying his ideas to twentieth-century Hartz bemoaned the fixed, dogmatic characterof this politics, though in ways that compounded his defi- liberalismborn "of a liberal way of life," seeing it as ciencies.5 Each stressed one aspect of Tocqueville's a tyranny of unanimity that went much deeper than account of America's point of departure. First, Gun- mere tyranny of the majority. He believed the ab- nar Myrdal's (1944) study of American race relations sence of any real sense of class and the wide regard of emphasized the ideals of Enlightenment"humanistic middle-class values as natural supported McCarthy- liberalism." Elaborated by revolutionary leaders to ite antisocialistpolicies in domestic and foreign affairs define and justify their cause, these beliefs became, in the early 1950s (pp. 6-23, 35-36, 46, 51, 58, 62-63, in Myrdal's view, the tenets of the American Creed 66, 284-309). and represented to Americans the essential meaning Hartz saw conflicts in American history, but in his of their struggle for independence. It thus served as view they were all conflicts within liberal bound- the cement of the nation, written into all the basic aries-between majority rule and individual or mi- documents comprising the highest law of the land. nority rights and specificallybetween democracyand This democratic creed proclaimed the worth and property rights. Slavery (not true feudalism) also had moral equality of all individual human beings and to be eliminated. Yet to Hartz, these conflicts were their "inalienablerights to freedom, justice, and a fair never as deeply problematicas the stifling consensus opportunity." It also denounced "differences made born of lived experience from which they stemmed, on account of 'race, creed or color"' (pp. 3-4, 7-8, 25, "the secret root" of all that was most distinctive and 52). fundamental about America (1955, 9, 21-22, 63, 75, Since Myrdal's subject was the "Negro problem," 89, 91, 128-29, 140, 147). he knew that Americans' fidelity to such beliefs was Thus, Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz differed questionable. But he explained that the creed repre- mildly in their accounts of just why American politi- sented "valuations preserved on the general plane," cal culture was pervasively liberal democratic and which Americans knew to be morallyhigher than their more significantly in their assessments of the desir- discriminatory valuations. The latter were merely ability of that culture. But collectively, their argu- expressions of interests, jealousies, prejudices-im- ments powerfully reinforced beliefs that the United pulses known to be "irrational"even by many who States' core values should be so described. Yet all harbored them. Discriminationswere defended, if at wrote at times when the nation was still denying all, only "in terms of tradition, expediency, or utili- most persons access to full standing within the Amer- ty." In Myrdal'saccount, then, it was this ideological ican political community on racial, ethnic, or gender inheritance, the equalitarian creed forming the na- grounds. Their ability to stress the democraticnature tional ethos, that drove American development. of American values despite these facts is vivid testi- There was a dynamic tension between creedal values mony to how their focus on the absence of a Euro-

551 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 pean class system led them to minimize the signifi- institutions, Tocqueville said nothing about women cance of other types of ascriptive inequality. Each of and their absence of equal political rights. That huge them did, however, take some notice of America's omission reinforcedthe sweeping quality of his initial exclusionarypractices and beliefs, again in influential descriptions of American equality. But he did con- ways. sider women in what, for him, was their proper place in his second volume, primarily concerned with American civil society. There, Tocqueville presented their status as an expression of democracy'stendency RACE, ETHNICITY, GENDER, AND THE to destroy or modify "those various inequalities TOCQUEVILLIAN THESIS which are in origin social," including relations such as master-servant and father-son. Tocqueville per- Tocquevilledealt with these issues most perceptively. ceived a corollary tendency to make women "more Despite some misleading passages in his early chap- nearly equal to men." He argued, however, that ters, he did not claim to have written an account of Americawas not essaying what he saw as the mistake American political identity in toto. In the last chapter of making men and women "creatureswho are, not of volume 1 of Democracyin America,he said he had equal only, but actually similar." Since nature had now finished his main task of describing democracy. "created such great differencesbetween the physical But he noted that there were other things in America and moral constitution of men and women," Ameri- besides an "immense and complete democracy"that cans traced "clearly distinct spheres of action for the were "like tangents to my subject, being American, two sexes," which both were required to keep to at but not democratic."Those things were the position all times. To attempt anything else, he stated, "de- of two races, the "Indians and the Negroes," within grades" both sexes (1969, 600-601). (not outside) the democraticnation (1969, 316). All of this allegedly meant benefits for American Thus Tocqueville distinguished being democratic women. They were viewed as competent to have from being American, though he led readers to major domestic responsibilities. Women were taught believe that America was essentially democraticapart to think for themselves, and their husbands showed from these two exceptions. He also did not assume respect for their judgment. They were also not sub- that racial conflicts would be swept away by the jected to a sexual double standard: male seducers, working out of the Revolution's egalitarian princi- Tocqueville claimed, were as much dishonored as ples. He thought it more likely that the "Indian race" their female victims. Women were also protected. would resist becoming "civilized," so that it was Not even those in poor families had to undertake "doomed." Tocqueville dryly underscored the inhu- "rough laborer'swork" or "hard physical exertion." manity that the rhetoric of American policies toward But men remained the heads of families, just as they the tribes thinly veiled; but he added that whatever exclusively possessed voting rights and other formal those policies might be, as Europeans filled the political powers. Tocqueville contended that Ameri- continent, Indians would "cease to exist" (1969, 326). can women themselves embraced these strictures;or Tocqueville believed that the presence of blacks at least "the best of them" did, and "the others keep was, in contrast, "the most formidable evil threaten- quiet" (1969, 590-92, 601-02). ing" the nation's future, because he was not optimis- These claims are familiar themes of "domestic tic that they would ever be included in America's sphere" ideology, though Tocqueville's statement of democracy, either. Anticipating Myrdal, Tocqueville them provided influential reinforcement. And it is treated racism as mere prejudice and slighted the correct to say that all societies must take account of burgeoning of scientific racist theories in Jacksonian the different reproductive roles of women and men, America. But he correctly saw racism as prevalent much more clearly than they need give weight to skin throughout the United States even though blacks color or national origins. Tocqueville'sbenign portrait were confined to a limited area, the South. There they of the condition of American women was highly largely lived in slavery. But that institution was, in romanticized, and his insistence that a social system Tocqueville'sview, uneconomic, as well as repulsive of "separatespheres" was an appropriateresponse to to northern Christian and Enlightenment values, so sexual differencesis no longer so widely shared. Still, its survival was improbable. Yet should it be elimi- nothing like a consensus exists on better answers. nated, Tocqueville only foresaw deepening white Even so, Tocqueville'sarguments emphaticallydid repugnance toward blacks. Doubting that the "white not establish that women were actuallycivic equals of and black races will ever be brought anywhere to live men. In their different ways, women and men might on a footing of equality," especially in the United have "equal worth." It might be true that American States, yet dubious of colonization efforts, he grimly arrangements were more beneficial to women than concluded that a massive violent conflict between European ones. But women were not regarded by American blacks and whites was "more or less dis- law as rulers in their homes, were legally denied the tant but inevitable" (1969, 340-63). Thus, Tocqueville franchise, and could not hope to occupy governmen- did not see nonwhites as members of America's tal and most professional offices. Even making public democracy, nor did he think they would become so. speeches on politicalissues was usually denied them. Instead, he expected prejudice-drivengenocides. Thus when Tocqueville appealed to "nature" to de- In his first volume, devoted chiefly to political fend all these political inequalities, as well as wom-

552 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3 en's dependent status in the domestic sphere, he was the American Creed's very dominance calls forth endorsing a slightly modified ascriptive hierarchy dogmas of racial inequality to legitimate what are at that denied American women full democraticcitizen- root prejudices. And he insisted that the "philosoph- ship. ical" basis for such racism was the same Enlighten- On close analysis, then, Tocqueville showed a rich ment outlook that had spawned liberalism. Ameri- awareness of how limited democracywas in America. cans favored scientific accounts of biological But like his successors, he still frequently wrote in differences to explain their hierarchiesbecause these unqualified terms about America's supposedly egali- accounts comported with Enlightenmentattachments tarian conditions; he relegated blacks and Native to rationalism(1944, 89). But those arguments hardly Americans to the status of "tangents," however im- proved that Americans were, at bottom, philosophi- portant; and he obscured the intellectual respectabil- cally liberal. If appeals to modem science are enough ity of racism, deeming it only prejudice. Worst of all, to show that an illiberal doctrine shares the philo- he claimed to reconcile the inferior civic status of sophical roots of the American Creed, then Hitler's women with democracy by accepting their confine- Germany and Stalin's Russia must also be held to be ment to domestic roles as natural. Hence he made grounded in the bedrock Enlightenment liberalism America seem much more fully a liberal democracy that is supposed to make America distinctive. than it was. The less comprehensive analyses of Furthermore,it is not true that all majordefenses of Myrdal and Hartz intensified all these failings. racial inequalities in the United States rested on Both were completely silent on women. His thor- Enlightenment rationalism. American racialjustifica- ough studies of race relations, however, led Myrdal tions also drew on other traditionalbeliefs that were to undermine many of his opening assertions about at least as intellectually influential, a point Myrdal what defines American political culture. He first again conceded (1944, 97). Racistreadings of the Bible made it seem that only blacks were outside the were immensely important. Only slight less so were American Creed, chiefly in the south and only as a doctrines of historical arndcultural identity spawned result of what most knew to be irrational biases, by the romantics' rebellion against Enlightenment characteristicof the poor and uneducated. Yet as An views of human nature and reason (Fredrickson1971; AmericanDilemma proceeded, readers could discover Horsman 1981). If the use of religious and romantic that up to the very time in which Myrdalwrote, many themes to oppose egalitarianism does not count as Americans had always imputed racial inferiority to illiberal, then writers such as Carlyle and Nietzsche lower classes of whites and non-Anglo-Saxon immi- may as well be placed in the liberal fold. grants, as well as blacks. Nor were those beliefs Louis Hartz's failure to discuss women in his two merely matters of bigoted ignorance; they were sup- major accounts of America as a "liberal society" is ported by the "long hegemony" of the biological more discreditable than Myrdal's, since Hartz sciences and medicine, "firmlyentrenched" in Amer- claimed to treat America comprehensively. He did, ican universities. Indeed, "scientific and popular however, address racist and nativist ideologies to writings with a strong racialisticbias" had "exploded some degree in TheLiberal Tradition (1955) and more in a cascade" in the years around World War I, extensively in The Foundingof New Societies(1964). feeding thereafter into immigration restriction. Each time, he attempted to minimize their impor- Myrdal contended that "a handful of social and tance in ways that partly differ from Myrdal. biological scientists" had, in the twentieth century, In his earlier work, Hartz largely ignored Native graduallycompelled "informed people"-but not the Americans, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and "ordinary man"-to give up "some of the most other targets of racial discrimination. He dealt with blatant"of racistbiological beliefs (1944, 37-38, 91-92, race chiefly by reference to defenses for slavery in the 99, 1189, n. 10, n. 12). South; and even then, he neglected theorists of racial Thus, far from being chiefly the prejudices of differences. Instead, he stressed two proslavery po- uneducated southern farmers, Myrdal showed hier- sitions that did not rely on claims of black inferiority: archical racial theories to have had great prestige the states' rights constitutional arguments of John C. through most of American society and history. In- Calhoun and (particularly)the effort to give a neofeu- deed, he eventually conceded that as political ideol- dal defense of the South made by George Fitzhugh. ogies go, white supremacy should "not be denied Hartz correctlypresented Fitzhugh as a "romantic high qualities of structural logic and consistency." nationalist,"but Fitzhugh was a misleading choice to And though he maintained that matters had been represent either proslavery views or American ro- better in the north, he admitted that, as a result of manticism. Fitzhugh elaborated an "organic," pater- these beliefs, "the North has kept much segregation nalistic view of society that exalted slavery as benefi- and discrimination."Far from being chiefly an excep- cial for workers of any race. He opposed doctrines of tion, moreover, Myrdal conceded that the nation's racialinequality until late in his career, when he was racial ordering affected virtually all aspects of Amer- struggling to retain an audience. Many other defend- ican life (1944, xxiii, 97, 99, 443, 529, 599). ers of slavery instead embraced the scientific and Myrdal did offer one answer to how academic religious docrines of racialhierachy (holding blacks fit doctrines of racial inequality squared with his claim only for subservient status) that pervaded antebellum that only liberal democraticvalues received "higher" America. Hartz paid little attention to their views or intellectual defenses in America. He contended that to the positions of the many Americanromantics who

553 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 were antislavery Whigs. The latter were often nativ- were massive, Hartz admitted. If blacks were human ists who, unlike Fitzhugh, stressed doctrines of en- at all, liberalism demanded that they "receive full during cultural differences, again hierarchically or- equality." He thereforeclaimed that Americanscould dered. Thus by centering his discussion of blacks and oppose black equality only by consigning blacks to race on a writer often seen as exceptional in his the status of "property" or an "inhuman species," treatment of those issues (as Hartz admitted), Hartz rather than an inferiorhuman species. He had to illegitimately deprecated the place of overtly racialist admit that after the Civil War, "the spirit of separat- and nativist ideologies in America (Hartz 1955, 158- ism continued," so that the "South won the battle of 72; see also Ashworth 1983, 222-23; Beer 1984; Ellis Reconstruction."Blacks were assigned just the sort of 1991, 344-51; Fredrickson1971; Howe 1979, 234-36). second-class status Hartz insisted that liberalism did Yet not even Hartz could ignore those views en- not permit. But he claimed that the modem Civil tirely, and initially he conceded their illiberalcharac- Rights movement was proving that that status could ter. Indeed, he argued that racist theorists like Josiah not last (1964, 16-17, 49-50, 60-62, 102). Nott forged "one of the most vicious and antiliberal Hartz now also took notice of Indians, predictably doctrines of modem times," one existing "curiously stressing the (very real) influence of the Lockean enough, on a plane that was alien to liberalism and argument that they had not mixed their labor with feudalism alike." But Hartz did not pause to explore American soil enough to be able to claim it. He again this curiosity, so unaccounted for by his theory. treated the role of racialideologies with near silence. Instead, he suggested that these alien doctrines were And overall, Native Americans did not seem impor- necessary if slaveholders were to avoid embracing tant to him. Only the fate of blacks amounted to a feudalism for all and "keep democracy for the "majorimperfection that marred the American liber- whites." Hartz treated this desire as evidence of their al" society, having been "one of the centralconscious commitment to democracyamong whites, and so it is. preoccupations of our history" (1964, 94-9). But it is equally evidence of southern whites' insis- Hartz's mature answer, then, was closer to tence on confining democracy to whites, while they Myrdal's. Despite the contrary judgments in his assigned to blacks statuses that should not have earlierbook, it turned out that American defenses of existed in a liberal democratic society. racialinequality were structuredin liberal terms after Hartz also attempted to write off these ideologies, all. And on liberal premises, Americans could only saying they resulted only in confusion because of justify racialinequalities by denying the humanity of their conflicts with Fitzhugh's position. They were blacks. all, moreover, part of an evanescent "madhouse of This response remained wholly inadequate. It did Southern thought before the Civil War." Yet Hartz not begin to account for why, even after constitu- had to concede that a similar theory of racialsuprem- tional recognition of the humanity of blacks, Ameri- acy, specifically Anglo-Saxon superiority, also con- cans creatednew systems of racialinequality affecting tributed to late nineteenth-century American imperi- not only blacks but all nonwhite peoples and main- alism and Jim Crow segregation. Once more, Hartz tained them through much of the twentieth century. recognized these outlooks as "basically alien to the Hartz's appeal to recent civil rights struggles left too national liberalspirit." But he asserted that they, too, much history unexplained. That shortcoming re- had limited impact, disappearing like Josiah Nott, flected the deeper failure of his whole analysis: If amounting only to "the prejudice of loose elements" "European ideologies" such as liberalism did not amidst "the massive and uniform democratic faith" know race, where did the category of "race" come by which Americans lived (1955, 167-69, 291-92). from that they had to take into account?Why had this In light of the enduring harms they wrought on "unknown" (and biologically indefensible) classifica- millions, Hartz's minimization of these doctrines was tion been a "central conscious preoccupation" grotesque. The battle for civil rights in the 1960s and throughout U.S. history? The answer is that it had the scholarship that accompanied it eventually made been burned into American minds by prestigious it hard for him to dismiss American racist thought so intellectual traditions, most of them inarguably non- offhandedly. In 1964, he made a different argument. liberal, that defended subjugation of nonwhites by American racism was really just another form of contending that humanity was naturallydivided into liberalism. If we "go beneath the surface of the racial hierarchically arrayed "races." There had always attitudes," Hartz maintained, we will soon encounter been much in America's basic institutions, popular what his thesis insisted must be there: the familiar sentiments, and moral orthodoxies that rendered figures of early liberal thinkers like "Suarez and those traditions compelling. Locke." Hartz stated that "since the European ideol- ogies [did] not know race" and their "usual social categories" did not fit race, battles broke out within the adherents of those ideologies over their applica- THE TOCQUEVILLIANTHESIS tion to race. Nonetheless, actually both sides were TODAY: THE ORTHODOXYON seeking to apply the ideologies. In America's "liberal AMERICAN IDENTITY fragment" society, the only Europeanideology avail- able was liberalism, so racial hierarchies had to be In an era marked by controversies over multicultur- justified in liberal terms. The problems of doing so alism, one might expect the limitations of Toc-

554 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3 queville, Hartz, and Myrdal to have long since been of the real if partial truths grasped by the Tocquevil- superseded. But for many in the social sciences and lian orthodoxy, those who have done so have usually the humanities, these Tocquevillian arguments still tried to accommodate it, not to challenge it. provide the deep structurewithin which they debate Most important in this regard is the seminal study real but lesser differences.6For analyses of American of nativist and racist ideologies in modem American politics in political science, the influence of Hartz, scholarship, John Higham's Strangersin theLand, first especially, remains pervasive. Leading realignment published in 1955. Higham's book had many ingre- theorists like Walter Dean Burnham have repeatedly dients needed to correctthe Tocquevillianthesis. He insisted that Hartz's theory of American political correctly saw American nativism as a species of culture has "the greatest explanatory power" (Burn- modem nationalism. He also believed it was built on ham 1970, 176;Burnham 1982, 15, 95, 127-28). Schol- ethnocentric attitudes that were virtually always ars influenced by Marxianemphases on class conflict, present. But Higham stressed that only in certain like Ira Katznelson, also argue that the "direction, periods did American leaders elaborate those atti- ideological claims, and relative chances of success" of tudes into full-fledged ideologies (1966, 4). (Thus, he the "politics of class" in the U.S. have had their actually found several nativisms, though all shared "secret root" in the liberal national characterHartz an "ideological core.") discerned (Katznelson 1981, 14-16; see also Hartz This distinction between an elaborated ideology 1955, 125, 248-52). Along with many historians, a and more inarticulateethnocentric feelings has some number of political scientists now see the Progressive force, though Higham has acknowledged that it also Era as a more decisive turning point than Hartz presents difficulties(1986, 223; 1988, 343-44). But one allowed, involving basic shifts in American beliefs consequence was that for most readers Higham's and institutions. But they still present the changes of work did not compel any major reinterpretationof that era (toward pragmatic progressivism, corporate American politics. Nativist ideologies could still be liberalism, interest group liberalism, or some similar seen as occasional things, fitting the pattern of excep- label) as only a mutation within the liberal institu- tions to egalitarianbeliefs that Tocquevillianscholars tions, ideals, and practices dominating American continued to stitch. In contrast, liberal democratic politics (Ackerman1991; Ceaser 1979;Galambos 1970, ideology still seemed more constant and intellectually 1983;Hays 1957;Kloppenberg 1986; Lowi 1979;Lustig developed, as Myrdal had argued. 1982; Sklar 1991;Wiebe 1967). That contrast is not defensible. As Myrdal had to Historically minded students of American culture admit, sophisticated doctrines of racial inequality have often found Hartz too simplistic;but they have were dominant in American universities and public usually sought to add complexities without disputing opinion through much of U.S. history. And as Hartz the basic Tocquevillian framework. The one major recognized, Americans ordinarily have not held lib- effort to dethrone Hartz (but not Tocqueville) has eral democratic values in the form of full-fledged been the "republicansynthesis" identified with Ber- ideologies any more than they have racial values. nard Bailyn (1967), Gordon Wood (1969), and J. G. A. Liberal democratic norms have often been unreflec- Pocock (1975). But even proponents of republican tive if not irrationalsets of beliefs, just as deserving of historiography now concede that Americans have the label "prejudices"as racialvalues. It is, then, not more often blended liberalism and republicanism credible to distinguish nativistic Americanism from than opposed them and that at some point in U.S. liberalism and republicanism on the ground that history liberalism became predominant (Ackerman Americanism has usually been a set of ethnocentric 1991, 27-29, 327, n. 45). Many scholars (e.g., Sacvan attitudes while the latter have been articulatedideol- Bercovitch and John Diggins) have also argued that ogies. Insofar as Higham's presentation of nativist Hartzian accounts underplay the role of Protestant ideology as an occasional thing has permitted many values; but most present these religious strains as to believe that America has otherwise been liberal reaffirming the American liberal consensus despite democratic, it has been misleading. serving as sources of criticism (Bercovitch1978; Dig- Even so, Higham's work, along with the Civil gins 1984; Greenstone 1986). Hence, these writings Rights movement, has justly inspired many scholars pose significant debates within-but not challenges to analyze Americanattitudes and practicesinvolving to-interpretations explaining American evolution in blacks, women, Native Americans, Chinese, Japa- terms of liberal republican preconditions. nese, Jews, Mexicans, and the whole panoply of None of these mainstreamapproaches to American groups living in the United States. Perhaps if Higham politics has given prominence to the racial, ethnic, or had explicitly considered whether nativist ideologies gender makeup of the American citizenry, though really fit into Tocquevillian accounts of America, neither have they wholly avoided those issues. In the more writers might have addressed that issue. But as last three decades, however, many other scholars Martin Sklar has observed, most scholars today "es- have greatly enriched understanding of the ethno- sentially tell their stories within the framework" of cultural dimensions of American life. Much of this traditionalaccounts of American political culture "or research provides evidence for a multiple-traditions some mixture of them" (1991, 79). Many do so simply account of American politics. But few of these schol- by focusing on the experience of one "outsider" ars have addressed the significance of their findings group without exploring whether that group's expe- for general views of America. And, perhaps because rience raises questions about portraits of American

555 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 politicalculture as otherwise inclusive and egalitarian racy, because people often operate for long periods (e.g., Bell 1987;Fredrickson 1971; Miller 1969). There while holding contradictorybeliefs. are, however, several ways in which many contribu- Feminist scholars have been especially concerned tors to the new scholarship of race, ethnicity, and to work out the relationship of liberalismto doctrines gender explicitly preserve the traditonalframework. of sexual inequality. But far from criticizing Toc- Some accounts employ versions of neo-Marxian- quevillian descriptions, most have striven to confirm usually Gramscian-premises stressing the presence that modern forms of patriarchyderive from liberal of an economically rooted liberalhegemony in Amer- ideas. Thus, Carole Pateman objects when other ica and treating racist and sexist ideologies as ap- feminists treat liberal capitalism and patriarchy as pended rationales for forms of economic exploitation two systems that are "intertwined" but "relatively that blatantly violate liberal democratic precepts autonomous." She insists that liberal thought has (Fields 1990;Takaki 1979). These scholars are right to always had a patriarchalstructure that is essential to see ideologies of racialand sexual inequality as social it. She agrees with Tocqueville that the subordinate constructions justifying systems of unequal power status of American women has been not only consis- and status, and the people privileged by those sys- tent with, but expressive of, liberal democraticprin- tems have also generally held lofty economic sta- ciples. tuses. The powerful tend to seek superiorityin every Yet Pateman acknowledges that the premise of social arena. But those facts do not render liberal classical liberal contract theory-that all people are democracy the basic American ideology and racial or "naturally free and equal"-is potentially "subver- sexual ideologies merely "an inconsistent after- sive of all authority relations, including conjugal thought," designed to explain the anomalous status relations." She contends, correctly, that early liberal of a minority of the population (Fields 1990, 114, 117). theorists like Locke responded by asserting women On this view, after all, these ideologies are all myths were not naturally equal to men. But she also ob- justifying economic exploitation. And even though serves, correctly, that these writers were "extremely economic supremacy is vital to those who enjoy it, it vague" on what capacities relevant to moral and is easy to see why belonging to a caste proclaimed political equality women lacked. Indeed, they some- intrinsically superior might have charms beyond its times conceded that women had sufficient capacities economic benefits. Why, then, should the ideologies to enter contractsas equals (Pateman1988, 38, 41, 54, and institutions of racial and gender hierarchies be 94). Pateman thus provides undeniable evidence that deemed "afterthoughts,"instead of key components liberal writers endorsed conventional beliefs in natu- of American political culture? Again, American law ral sexual inequality;but far from showing that their has denied rights of full citizenship much more often liberal precepts required or generated those beliefs, on these ascriptive grounds than because of class her citations indicate that theorists like Locke did not (though class has mattered greatly). really reconcile their inherited patriarchalbeliefs with Scholars also attempt to link racial and sexual their more novel, distinctively liberal arguments. inequalities with the concept of the United States as a Hence, it seems quite reasonable to view liberal liberal society by drawing on postmodernist argu- precepts and patriarchyas two intertwined but rela- ments. They hold that the discourses and practices tively autonomous systems of ideas and practicesthat dominant in Enlightenment liberal societies recur- contract theorists and many Americans have often ringly construct the identities of marginal groups as inconsistently endorsed (see Eisenstein 1981, 3-5, irrational, passionate, dangerous "others," both to 34-49; Mackinnon 1987, 14-16, 164-65; Okin 1979, defend their exploitation and to deny the presence of 199). such qualities in mainstream citizens (Karst 1989; Some writers (especially lawyers associated with Norton 1986;Rogin 1975). Even if we grant power to CriticalRace Studies) have criticizedhow other leftist these contentions, they do not justify claims like scholars treat all American institutions as expressive Michael Rogin's that "liberal egalitarian"values are of liberalism, instead of recognizing racism as an primary in America but have a "logical marriage"to often contrasting and "central ideological underpin- racist exploitation (Rogin 1975, 279). This argument ning of American society" (Crenshaw 1988, 1336). might be compelling if the United States really had These arguments move in the directionpursued here, begun as an essentially liberaldemocratic society and but they are still rare and do not yet extend to explicit had then generated racialand sexual inequalities out critiques of Tocquevillian frameworks or to any de- of that society's tensions. But colonial British Ameri- veloped alternatives. Despite the new scholarship of cans pursued practices of racial and gender domina- race, ethnicity, and gender, then, liberalism is still tion long before they embraced the types of liberal usually understood to have been both the chief republican ideologies and institutions that came to ideology of opposition to racism, nativism, and pa- play prominent roles in America. Hence once more it triarchy in America and the chief (or even sole) is plausible to see all these different practices and ideology supporting them. ideologies as central components in American politi- As a result, all recent major works addressing the cal development, rather than some as primary and general topics of American nationality and citizen- others as secondary. Their recurring admixture also ship endorse some version of this paradoxicalHartz- does not prove that ascriptive inegalitarianoutlooks ian position. Many quote Philip Gleason's summa- have been iogicaiiy compatiblewith liberaldemoc- tion of what has historicallybeen requiredto be fully

556 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3

American: "A person did not have to be of any sistency and only compliance with the creed's non- particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic liberal values constitutes hypocrisy. Nor does he background. All he had to do was commit himself to clarify why the exclusionary policies that have pre- the political ideology centered on the abstractideals vailed during most of U.S. history should be identi- of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the fied as "exceptions" (however "huge") to its ideals. universalist ideological characterof American nation- By failing even to raise these issues, Karst largely ality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to leaves the conventional narrativeof American mem- become an American" (1980, 62). Gleason adds that bership intact. "universalism had its limits from the beginning, Lawrence Fuchs's massive study of ethnicity and because it did not include either blacks or Indians, race in America defines the nation's civic cultureas and in time other racial and cultural groups were based essentially on three beliefs derived from the regarded as falling outside the range of American founders' understanding of republicanism:that "or- nationality." There was "a latent predisposition to- dinary men and women" are entitled to representa- ward an ethnically defined concept of nationality." tive self-governance, that "all who live in the political But this "exclusiveness ran contraryto the logic of the community" should be able to "participatein public defining principles, and the official commitment to life as equals," and that citizens should have freedom those principles has worked historicallyto overcome for different religious outlooks and other sorts of exclusions and to make the practicalboundaries of pursuits in their private lives (1990, 4-6). Fuchs Americanidentity more congruent with its theoretical structures his book around (1) a discussion of this universalism" (pp. 62-63). Despite the nation's civic culture, characterizedby the "voluntary plural- record of blatant, not latent, exclusions, then, Glea- ism" these principles support, and (2) three surveys son still suggests that the basic official requirement of those long kept "outside the civic culture" by for full membership in the American political com- coercion: Native Americans; African-Americans; munity has always been willingness to embrace lib- Asians and Mexicans. Next, Fuchs tells the story of eral republican principles and that those principles the "triumph of the civic culture," the movement of have inexorably delegitimated all inconsistent exclu- these peoples toward full inclusion. sions.7 His book is, in its details, quite free of factual As the 1990s began, two noted works reexamined illusions. Fuchs notes that "the Euro-American de- America's "civic culture" with explicit attention to termination to maintain a racially exclusive civic cul- race, ethnicity, and gender without truly modifying ture" was not abandoned until the 1960s to 1980s, these Tocquevillian claims: Kenneth Karst's (1989) making clear that such efforts have been powerful Belongingto America and Lawrence Fuchs's (1990) through the bulk of U.S. history (1990, 79). Yet in AmericanKaleidoscope.8 Karst's book is historically three ways, the design of Fuchs's analysis gives richly informed-but focuses on recent legal develop- unwarranted support to whiggish narratives of ments, for his main aim is to lay out the constitutional American progress toward full conformity with the implications of "the egalitarian strand in our civic nation's inclusive "core" principles. First and most culture." Karstasks readers whether these egalitarian obviously, Fuchs (like his teacher Hartz) does not values "ring true as part of what many Americans discuss the exclusion of women from full citizenship. today accept as our national tradition," without in- It is true that women were always said to be Ameri- sisting that most Americans always did so (1989, 33, can citizens, while many members of racialminorities 42, 217). Even so, he cites Gleason and concurs that were not; and it is hard for one book to cover all the American national ideology has led to the gradual topics. But Fuchs contends that the civic culture "enlargement of the national community." But Karst fostered by the founders trusts bothmen and women knows well that American policies have long voiced to elect representatives and that all in the political precepts-including "Protestant domination, white community should be able to participatein public life supremacy, and the dependency of women on as equals. Since women did not so participate men"-that are diametrically opposed to what he through most of U.S. history, Fuchs must add that terms the "centralvalues" of "today's American civic the founders extended this principle only to "white culture." He therefore takes a step Myrdal and Hartz adult males." There is then no reason why an account resisted. Karst states that the American Creed has of those outside his civic culture should not include had "self-contradictory"elements, and he holds that the struggles of women to participatein public life as Americans have been guilty of "hypocrisy," produc- equals. Such omissions or minimizations of excluded ing "huge exceptions" to our willingness to live up to groups characterizeevery author in the Tocquevillian our egalitarianideals (pp. 30-32, 40, 47, 62, 172, 179, tradition. Although many writers have had justifica- 181, 188, 210-11, 215, 228, 242). tions for their emphases, the cumulative effect of These accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy these persistent failures to lay out the full pattern of are significant concessions to the prevalence of ine- civic exclusions has been to make it all too easy for galitarian traditions; but they still presume that scholars to conclude that egalitarianinclusiveness has Americans' more liberal and democratic beliefs are been the norm. Once we recall that the exceptions their "real" ones. Karst does not explain why, given have often defined the status of over half the domes- the contradictory elements of our ideology, only tic adult population in the United States (a fact that conformity with the egalitarian ones counts as con- forces us to take note of the unequal civic status of

557 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 women), then the exceptions obviously have great combating invidious exclusions, as well as those claim to be ranked as rival norms. imposing them. Second, Fuchs's definition of his organizing cate- Above all, recognition of the strong attractions of gory, the civic culture, is questionable. Why should restrictive Americanist ideas does not imply any only the principles encompassed by "voluntary plu- denial that America's liberal and democratic tradi- ralism" count as parts of the civic culture? Why tions have had great normative and politicalpotency, should the principles officially employed to deny even if they have not been so hegemonic as some eligibility for full citizenship to so many others be claim.9 Instead, it sheds a new-and, in some re- treated as "outside" that culture? It is surely more spects, more flattering-light on the constitutive role appropriate to treat the nation's political culture as of liberal democratic values in American life. Al- including all American residents, and the rationales though some Americans have been willing to repu- for denying political equality to many. Fuchs's nar- diate notions of democracyand universal rights, most row use of "civic culture" provides illicit support for have not; and though many have tried to blend those his claim that the "core of the national community" commitments with exclusionaryascriptive views, the has been voluntaristic liberal values, despite the illogic of these mixes has repeatedly proven a major masses subjected to "coercive pluralisms." resource for successful reformers.But we obscure the Finally, Fuchs concludes that by the 1980s, the difficultyof those reforms (and thereby diminish their struggles against the various "old systems" of ascrip- significance) if we slight the ideological and political tive inequality "had succeeded" and that problems of appeal of contraryascriptive traditions by portraying "racial, religious, a nationality conflict" were no them as merely the shadowy side of a hegemonic longer so serious. Classbarriers to social progress had liberal republicanism. At the thesis holds now become the most difficult to overcome (1990, its heart, multiple-traditions that the definitive feature of American political cul- 492-93). Perhaps so. But Fuchs has structured his ture has been not its liberal,republican, or "ascriptive whole historical analysis in ways that minimize eth- Americanist" elements but, rather, this more com- nic and racialideologies, and he never explores why plex pattern of apparently inconsistent combinations such illiberal ideas and practices have had recurring of the traditions, accompaniedby recurringconflicts. power in American life. Thus his optimism that they Because standard accounts neglect this pattern, they have been laid to rest may not be justified. The do not explore how and why Americans have tried to contrasting lessons suggested by a multiple-tradi- uphold aspects of all three of these heterogeneous tions approach to American politics can be seen by traditionsin combinationsthat are longer on political analyzing the development of American laws of na- and psychological appeal than on intellectual coher- tionality and citizenship following Reconstruction-a ency. period in many ways parallel to our own. A focus on these questions generates an under- standing of American politics that differs from Toc- quevillian ones in four major respects. First, on this view, purely liberal and republican conceptions of THE MULTIPLE-TRADITIONSTHESIS civic identity are seen as frequently unsatisfying to OF AMERICAN CIVIC IDENTITY many Americans, because they contain elements that threaten, ratherthan affirm,sincere, reputablebeliefs It seems prudent to stress what is not proposed here. in the propriety of the privileged positions that This is not a call for analysts to minimize the signifi- whites, Christianity, Anglo-Saxon traditions, and cance of white male political actors or their conflicts patriarchyhave had in the United States. At the same with each other. Neither is it a call for accounts that time, even Americans deeply attached to those ine- assail "Eurocentric"white male oppressors on behalf galitarianarrangements have also had liberal demo- of diverse but always heroic subjugated groups. The cratic values. Second, it has therefore been typical, multiple-traditionsthesis holds that Americans share not aberrational,for Americans to embody strikingly a commonculture but one more complexly and multi- opposed beliefs in their institutions, such as doctrines ply constituted than is usually acknowledged. Most that blacks should and should not be full and equal members of all groups have shared and often helped citizens. But though American efforts to blend as- to shape all the ideologies and institutions that have pects of opposing views have often been remarkably structuredAmerican life, including ascriptiveones. A stable, the resulting tensions have still been impor- few have done so while resisting all subjugating tant sources of change. Third, when older types of practices. But members of every group have some- ascriptive inequality, such as slavery, have been times embraced essentialistt" ideologies valorizing rejected as unduly illiberal, it has been normal, not their own ascriptive traits and denigrating those of anomalous, for many Americans to embrace new others, to bleak effect. Cherokees enslaved blacks, doctrines and institutions that reinvigorate the hier- (Perdue, 1979), champions of women's rights dispar- archies they esteem in modified form. Changes to- aged blacks and immigrants, (DuBois 1978); and ward greater inequality and exclusion, as well as blacks have often been hostile toward Hispanics and toward greater equality and inclusiveness, thus can other new immigrants(Daniels 1990, 323, 376). White and do occur. Finally, the dynamics of American men, in turn, have been prominent among those development cannot simply be seen as a rising tide of

558 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3 liberalizingforces progressively submerging contrary cans, those groups grew in population, and no cata- beliefs and practices. The national course has been clysm loomed. Instead, intellectualand political elites more serpentine. The economic, political, and moral worked out the most elaborate theories of racial and forces propelling the United States toward liberal gender hierarchyin U.S. history and partiallyembod- democracy have often been heeded by American ied them in a staggering arrayof new laws governing leaders, especially since World War II. But the cur- naturalization, immigration, deportation, voting rents pulling toward fuller expression of alleged rights, electoral institutions, judicial procedures, and natural and cultural inequalities have also always economic rights-but only partially. The laws re- won victories. In some eras they have predominated, tained importantliberal and democraticfeatures, and appearing to define not only the path of safety but some were strengthened. They had enough purchase that of progress. In all eras, including our own, many on the moral and material interests of most Ameri- Americans have combined their allegiance to liberal cans to compel advocates of inequality to adopt democracy with beliefs that the presence of certain contrived, often clumsy means to achieve their ends. groups favored by history, nature, and God has made The considerable success of the proponents of Americans an intrinsically "special" people. Their inegalitarianideas reflects the power these traditions adherents have usually regarded such beliefs as be- have long had in America.10But after the Civil War, nign and intellectually well founded; yet they also Spencerian and Darwinian evolutionary theories have always had more or less harsh discriminatory enormously strengthened the intellectual prestige of corollaries. doctrines presenting the races and sexes as naturally To test these multiple-traditions claims, consider arrayedinto what historians have termed a "raciocul- the United States in 1870. By then the Civil War and tural hierarchy,"as well as a "hierarchyof sex." Until Reconstruction had produced dramatic advances in the end of the nineteenth century, most evolutionists the liberal and democratic character of America's were neo-Lamarckianswho thought acquiredcharac- laws. Slavery was abolished. All persons born in the teristics could be inherited. Thus beliefs in biological United States and subject to its jurisdiction were differences were easily merged with the Teutonist deemed citizens of the United States and the states in historians' views that peoples were the products of which they resided, regardless of their race, creed or historical and cultural forces. Both outlooks usually gender. None could be denied voting rights on racial presented the current traits of the races as fixed for grounds. The civil rights of all were newly protected the foreseeable future. Few intellectuals were shy through an array of national statutes. The 1790 ban about noting the implications of these views for on naturalizing Africans had been repealed, and public policy. Anthropologist Daniel G. Brintonmade expatriation declared a natural right. Over the past typical arguments in his 1895 presidential address to two decades women had become more politically the American Association for the Advancement of engaged and had begun to gain respect as political Science. He contended that the "black, brown and actors. red races" each had "a peculiar mental temperament Confronted with these developments, what would which has become hereditary," leaving them consti- Tocquevillian analysts have predicted for the next tutionally "recreant to the codes of civilization." half-century of American life? Louis Hartz would Brinton believed that this fact had not been ade- have insisted that so long as the humanity of blacks, quately appreciatedby American lawmakers. Hence- other races, and women was publicly acknowledged, forth, conceptions of "race, nations, tribes" had to the United States would have to grant them equal "supply the only sure foundations for legislation;not access to full citizenship. Myrdal, Karst, and Fuchs a prior notions of the rights of man" (1895, p. 249;see would have anticipated that surviving prejudices also Boller 1969, 180-85; Degler 1991, 15-16, 107, 397; might produce resistance to implementation of the Haller 1971, 11, 125-27; Ross 1991, 64-77; Russett new legal expressions of the American Creed; but 1989, 74-75, 204-5; Stocking 1968, 55, 122). they would expect this opposition to be gradually, if As Brintonknew, many politicians and judges had painfully, overcome. Tocqueville on the other hand, already begun to seize on such suggestions. In 1882, would have been too pessimistic. He would have for example, Californiasenator John Miller drew on deplored the intrusion of women into politics, ex- the Darwinian "law of the 'survival of the fittest' " to pected Native Americans to continue toward extinc- explain that "forty centuries of Chinese life" had tion, and foreseen deepening conflicts between "ground into" the Chinese race characteristicsthat whites and blacks that would probably end in some made them unbeatable competitors against the free sort of destructive cataclysm. white man. They were "automatic engines of flesh None would have had the intellectual resources to and blood," of "obtuse nerve," marked by degrada- explain what in fact occurred. Over the next fifty tion and demoralization, and thus far below the years, Americans did not make blacks, women, and Anglo-Saxon, but were still a threat to the latter's members of other races full and equal citizens, nor livelihood in a market economy. Hence, Miller ar- did racial and gender prejudices undergo major ero- gued, the immigration of Chinese laborers must be sion. Neither, however, were minorities and women banned. His bill prevailed, many expressing concern declared to be subhuman and outside the body that these Chinese would otherwise become Ameri- politic. And although white Americans engaged in can citizens (Miller1882, 1484-85, cf. 1548, 1583). The extensive violence against blacks and Native Ameni- Chinese Exclusion Act was not a vestige of the past

559 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 but something new, the first repudiationof America's tion of centuries of toil and conflict." These mental long history of open immigration;and it was justified and moral qualities constituted the "soul of a race," in terms of the postwar era's revivified racialtheories. an inheritance in which its members "blindly be- Yet although men like Millernot only sustained but lieve," and upon which learning had no effect. But expanded Chinese exclusions until they were made these qualities could be degraded if "a lower race virtually total in 1917 (and tight restrictions survived mixes with a higher"; thus, exclusion by race, not until 1965), they never managed to deny American reading ability, was the nation's proper goal (Lodge citizenship to all of the "Chinese race." Until 1917 1896, 2817-20). there were no restrictions on the immigration of When the literacy test finally passed in 1917 but upper-class Chinese, and in 1898 the Supreme Court proved ineffective in keeping out "lower races," declared that children born on U.S. soil to Chinese Congress moved to versions of an explicitly racist parents were American citizens (Daniels 1990, 278; national-originsquota system. It banned virtually all UnitedStates v. WongKim Ark 1898). Birthplaceciti- Asians and permitted European immigrationonly in zenship was a doctrine enshrined in common law, ratios preserving the northern European cast of the reinforced by the Fourteenth Amendment, and vital American citizenry. Congressman Albert Johnson, to citizenship for the children of all immigrantaliens. chief author of the most important quota act in 1924, Hence it had enough legal and political support to proclaimedthat through it, "the day of indiscriminate override the Court's recognition of Congress's exclu- acceptance of all races, has definitely ended." The sionary desires. Even so, in other cases the Court quota system, repealed only in 1965, was a novel, sustained bans on Chinese immigrationwhile admit- elaboratemonument to ideologies holding that access ting the racial animosities behind them, as in the to American citizenship should be subject to racial "Chinese Exclusion Case" (ChaeChan Ping v. United and ethnic limits. It also served as the prime model States1889); upheld requirementsfor Chinese-Amer- for similar systems in Europe and Latin America icans to have certificatesof citizenship not requiredof (Daniels 1990, 282-84; Dowty 1987, 90-91). whites (Fong Yue Ting v. United States 1893); and Lodge, the architect of racist immigration restric- permitted officials to deport even Chinese persons tions, was a Republicanwho in 1890 had barely failed who had later been judged by courts to be native- to push through a bill reviving enforcement of Recon- born U.S. citizens (UnitedStates v. Ju Toy 1905). struction civil rights statutes. In addition to partisan The upshot, then, was the sort of none-too-coher- motives, that effort had reflected Yankee beliefs that ent mix that the multiple-traditions thesis holds northern culture could lift up Americanblacks. Soon, likely. Chinese were excluded on racial grounds, but however, even Boston Brahmins like Lodge, along race did not bar citizenship to those born in the with religious leaders and scholars in almost every United States; yet Chinese ancestry could subject field, began admitting that their racial ideologies some American citizens to burdens, including depor- undercut the case for equal rights for all American tation, that others did not face. The mix was not people of color. Compulsion to do so came not only perfect from any ideological viewpoint, but it was from their advocacy of immigration restrictions but politically popular. It maintained a valued inclusive also from their support for America's new imperial- feature of Americanlaw (birthplacecitizenship) while ism. The nation's colonial acquisitions in the Pacific sharply reducing the resident Chinese population and the Caribbeanduring the late 1890s permitted its (Daniels 1990, 240). And it most fully satisfied the leaders to feel more comparableto the great powers increasingly powerful champions of Anglo-Saxon of Europe, who shared the "White Man's Burden." supremacy. And most leaders accepted, as the Nation wrote in From 1887 on, academic reformers and politicians 1898, that the "varied assortment of inferior races" sought to restrict immigration more generally by a inhabiting America's new possessions "of course, means that paid lip service to liberalnorms even as it could not be allowed to vote." Eventually, in 1917, aimed at racist results-the literacy test. On its face, Puerto Ricans were made U.S. citizens but, again, of this measure expressed concern only for the intellec- a lower grade. They were not granted votes in federal tual merits of imunigrants.But the test's true aims elections, nor did they receive all the constitutional were spelled out in 1896 by its sponsor, Senator rights of other citizens. The Supreme Court sustained Henry Cabot Lodge, a Harvard Ph.D. in history and these positions, holding that while Puerto Ricans politics. Committee research, he reported, showed were now citizens, Puerto Rico had not truly been that the test would exclude "the Italians, Russians, "incorporated"into the United States (Balzacv. Puerto Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics," thereby Rico1922; Higham 1966, 108-9; Painter1987, 142, 147, preserving "the quality of our race and citizenship." 152, 161; Woodward 1966, 72-74). Thus here, too, Citing "modem history" and "modern science," Americansconstructed a civic status that did not fully Thomas Carlyle and Gustave le Bon, Lodge con- satisfy either those who believed that all U.S. citizens tended that the need for racial exclusion arose from should have equal rights or those who thought that "something deeper and more fundamental than inferior races should be denied citizenship. It was anything which concerns the intellect." Race was another of the "anomalous" statuses that somehow above all constituted by moral characteristics, the encompassed the majority of all Americans. "stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of What Myrdal rightly termed the "explosion" of thought" that a people possessed as an "accumula- racist ideologies during these years also abetted the

560 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3 most famous example of such a mixed status-the Jim might even be allowed somewhat higher stations Crow system of "separate but equal" laws and prac- (Williamson 1984, 7, 28-29, 86, 122, 224; see also tices (Woodward 1966, 74). Sobering evidence in this Ashworth 1983, 222-23). regard is a speech by Charles Francis Adams, Jr. In the heyday of Jim Crow, Radical racist views (1908) to a Virginia audience. Adams was the great were most influential, far stronger than fading liberal grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Indepen- ones, but they were not powerful enough to generate dence, grandson of an antislavery congressman, and the violent elimination of blacks that Tocqueville a veteran of both the Union Army and liberal reform feared and many white racists sought. Instead, the movements. But he now said that the "'glittering result was a system closest to Conservative desires, generalities'of the Declarationof Independence" and one that kept blacks in their place, although that the beliefs in racial equality during Reconstruction place was structured more repressively than most seemed "strangely remote, archaiceven." The scien- Conservatives favored. And unlike the ineffective tific views of Darwin had superseded scripturalviews literacy test, here racialinegalitarians achieved much of the brotherhood of man, making it clear that the of what they wanted without explicitly violating Reconstructionpolicy of 1866 was a blunder that was liberal legal requirements. Complex registration sys- "worse than a crime." The solution to the "race tems, poll taxes, and civics tests appeared race- problem" now had to be "worked out in the South," neutral but were designed and administered to dis- without northern protests against segregation (pp. franchise blacks. This intent was little masked. Even 16-19). progressives like Carter Glass called openly for The renewed acceptance of doctrines of racialhier- achieving racial disfranchisementby indirect means. archy after 1870 is also visible in judicial rulings like He urged the 1901-2 VirginiaConstitutional Conven- that of Oregon district judge Matthew Deady, a rare tion to adopt every "discriminationwithin the letter champion of Chinese immigrant rights. In 1880 he of the law" that promised "the elimination of every ruled that a person of half Native American descent Negro voter who can be gotten rid of." These efforts could not be naturalized because he was neither succeeded. Most dramatically,in Louisiana 95.6% of white nor of African ancestry, as the 1870 naturaliza- blacks were registeredin 1896, and over half (130,000) tion statute required. Deady wrote that it might seem voted. After disfranchisingmeasures, black registra- strange that blacks could gain citizenship but that tion dropped by 90%and by 1904 totaled only 1,342. "the intermediate and much-better-qualifiedred and The Supreme Court found convoluted ways to close yellow races" could not. He explained that Africans its eyes to these tactics (Kousser 1974, 49, 262; were "not likely to emigrate," so that the 1870act was Schmidt 1982, 846-47; Woodward 1966, 90-92; and "merely a harmless piece of legislative buncombe" (In see, e.g., Gilesv. Harris1903 and Gilesv. Teasley1904). re Camille1880). Such disdain for Reconstructionlaws By similardevices, blacks were virtuallyeliminated hardly communicated to southern whites that those from juries in the south, where 90% of American measures had to be strictly observed. blacks lived, sharply limiting their ability to have But despite the new prevalence of such attitudes on their personal and economic rights protected by the the part of northern and western elites in the late courts (Schmidt 1983). "Separate but equal" educa- nineteenth century, the Reconstructionamendments tional and business laws and practicesalso stifled the and statutes were still on the books, and surviving capacities of blacks to participate in the nation's liberal sentiments made repealing them politically economy as equals, severely curtailed the occupa- difficult. Believers in racial inequality were, more- tions they could train for, and marked them-unof- over, undecided on just what to do about blacks. As ficiallybut clearly-as an inferiorcaste. Thus here, as Joel Williamson has shown, "Radical"racists (e.g., elsewhere, it was evident that the nation's laws and the nation's chief statistician, Cornell professor Wal- institutions were not meant to confer the equal civic ter Willcox)argued that blacks, like other lower races, status they proclaimed for all Americans;but neither should be excluded from American society and did they conform fully to doctrines favoring overt looked hopefully for evidence that they were dying racialhierarchy. They represented another asymmet- out. Their position was consistent with Hartz's claim rical compromise among the multiple ideologies vy- that Americanscould not tolerate permanentunequal ing to define American political culture. statuses; persons must either be equal citizens or So, too, did the policies governing two groups outsiders. But those whom Williamson terms "Con- whose civic status formally improved during these servatives" believed, like the antebellum Whigs, that years: Native Americans and women. In 1884, the blacks and other people of color might instead have a Supreme Court ruled that Native Americanswere not permanent "place" in America, so long as "placeness native-born U.S. citizens, even though they were included hierarchy." Some still thought that blacks, born on lands over which the United States claimed like the other "lower races," might one day be led by sovereignty (Elkv. Wilkins1884). They were "wards" whites to fully civilized status, but no one expected inhabiting "domestic dependent nations." Yet fed- progress in the near future. Thus blacks should eral policy in these years aimed at making them U.S. instead be segregated, largely disfranchised, and citizens, and eventually all were made so by the confined to menial occupations via inferioreducation Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. To U.S. officials, and discriminatory hiring practices-but not ex- preparing Native Americans for citizenship meant pelled, tortured, or killed. A few talented blacks "civilizing" them, that is, displacing their traditional

561 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993 religions, family structures, and systems of subsis- mained both officiallyequal citizens and legitimately tence, landholding, and tribalgovernance with Chris- subjectto special restrictionsbased on their perceived tianity, heterosexual monogamy, and self-sufficient biological and cultural weaknesses. farming on individually held lands, thereby ending This period also highlights how the influence of tribal existences. The 1887 Dawes General Allotment inegalitariandoctrines has not been confined to white Act was a keystone of this effort. It reassigned tribal male intellectuals, legislators, and judges. The lead- lands and extended U.S. citizenship to individual ing writer of the early twentieth-century women's Native Americans, subject to a 25-year period of movement, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was a thor- federal trusteeship before those individuals could oughgoing Darwinian who accepted that evolution assume full land rights (and hence full rights as had made women inferior to men in certain respects, citizens). Not incidentally, the act also made huge although she insisted that these differences were amounts of "surplus" triballands availableto whites. usually exaggeratedand that altered social conditions These assimilationist policies were defended by the could transform them (Gilman 1966, 99-145; Russett same racial theories that argued for tutelary Anglo- 1989, 13-14). And even as he attacked Booker T. Saxon governance of "lower races" abroad. Indeed, Washington for appearing to accept the "alleged many legislators not only supported but linked Na- inferiority of the Negro race," W. E. B. DuBois tive American assimilation and imperialist policies. embraced the widespread Lamarckianview that ra- And even after 1924, states subjected their new cial characteristicswere socially conditioned but then Native American citizens to disfranchising devices inherited as the "soul" of a race. He could thus accept and other forms of discrimination similar to those that most blacks were "primitive folk" in need of imposed on blacks. Hence although Native Ameri- tutelage, of an "emotional," mystical, "essentially cans became citizens in this era, the process was more artistic" nature. Hence they were best led by the coercive than consensual, and they, too, became "Talented Tenth" who had risen, like DuBois him- Americans who were sometimes treated as bearers of self, to civilized rationality(Reed 1992, 131-37). equal rights, sometimes as a group subject to restric- The acceptance of ascriptiveinegalitarian beliefs by tions that other Americans did not face (Ragsdale brilliant and politically dissident female and black 1989, 406-15; Williams 1980, 823-28; Wolfley 1991, male intellectuals strongly suggests that these ideas 177-89). had broad appeal. Writers whose interests they did Women took a major step toward full citizenship not easily serve still saw them as persuasive in light when they gained the vote via the Nineteenth of contemporary scientific theories and empirical Amendment in 1920. But women were little more evidence of massive inequalities. It is likely, too, that favored than nonwhites by the evolutionary theorists for many the vision of a meaningful natural order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. that these doctrines provided had the psychological Darwin wrote that many of the defining characteris- and philosophical appeal that such positions have tics of women were "characteristics of the lower always had for human beings, grounding their status races, therefore of a past and lower state of civiliza- and significance in something greater and more tion," typified by the domination of sexual and enduring than their own lives. No doubt that ground- spiritual emotions over reason. Thus women, like ing was especially reassuring to many old-stock black men, were often lovable but ultimately childlike Americans whose material, political, and social posi- (Degler 1991, 26; Russett 1989, 11-12). Many female tions had been unsettled by immigration, industrial- activists did not repudiate these views so much as ization, and urbanization, as many argue. But these adapt them, allowing women's special vulnerabilities inegalitarian views should not be seen as simply to justify laws "protecting" them in the workplace reactive and fearful. For many, they spawned confi- and contending that their domestic nature gave dence that the intellectual keys to a better future had women insights into social problems that would been found. And these views were often widely render them valuable in the voting booth (Cott 1987, shared by constituencies that consisted of much more 25-27, 53-81; Flexner 1975, 274-323). than simply capitalists, or the Protestant middle Thus when American women gained the suffrage, class, or even that group combined with native-born for many the struggle for gender equality had not workers. In an 1879 referendum, for example, Cali- culminated but rather had been limited, postponed, fornians cast 154,638 ballots against permitting Chi- or abandoned. Until 1922, federal measures taken nese immigration, 883 in favor; Nevada had similar during this era deepened, rather than modified, the results the next year (Hutchinson 1981, 75-77). Such dependence of women's citizenship on that of their overwhelming support suggests that these doctrines husbands (see, e.g., Mackenziev. Hare 1915). Al- appealed to Americans'anxieties and economic inter- though the 1922Cable Act permitted women to retain ests, but also to their loyalties, their hopes, and their American citizenship even if they married aliens, it minds. excepted those who married men "ineligible by race In sum, if we accept that ideologies and institutions for naturalization."And long after 1920, legislatures of ascriptive hierarchyhave shaped America in inter- and courts maintained rules that discouraged female action with its liberaland democraticfeatures, we can voting and jury service (Smith 1989, 273-84). Despite make more sense of a wide range of inegalitarian some major modifications, then, women, like blacks, policies newly contrived after 1870 and perpetuated Native Americans, and most Asian Americans, re- through much of the twentieth century. Those poli-

562 American Political Science Review Vol. 87, No. 3

cies were dismantled only through great struggles, Notes aided by internationalpressures during World War II and the Cold War; and it is not clear that these 1. The percentage varies according to whether one dates struggles have ended. The novelties in the policies the United States from 1776, the Declaration of Indepen- and scientific doctrines of the Gilded Age and Pro- dence, or 1789, the ratifiedConstitution. State policies priorto gressive Erashould alert us to the possibility that new 1789 on the whole made nonwhites and women ineligible for full citizenship. Women could always formally be U.S. citi- intellectual systems and political forces defending zens, but they were almost universally denied the vote until racialand gender inequalities may yet gain increased 1920, making them clearly second-class citizens. Other overt power in our own time. legal discriminationson their political and economic rights The civil rights reforms of the 1960s and 1970s are continued through the 1960s. Naturalizationwas confined to whites from 1790 through 1868 and closed to most Asian not as seriously threatened today as were the civil nationals until 1952. By then, the national origins quota rights measures of the 1860s in the 1890s. Yet leading system of immigration restrictions, enacted in the 1920s, scholars like Richard Epstein now argue that the prevented most Asians and many southern Europeansfrom nation should eliminate all race-consciouslaws, even coming to the United States and becoming permanent resi- dents or citizens, explicitlybecause of their originalnational- the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in favor of programs of ity or ethnicity. That system was not repealed until 1965. black self-help in the marketplace-precisely the po- Despite formalconstitutional guarantees enacted in the mid- sition many nineteenth-century "liberals" used to 1860s, blacks were also widely denied basic rights of citizen- justify abandoning Reconstruction (Epstein 1992). ship until the 1964Civil RightsAct and the 1965Voting Rights Act (Higham 1975, 29-66; Kettner1978, 287-322;Smith 1989). Also like these nineteenth-century predecessors, Ep- Thus, though the specifics changed, denials of access to full stein ultimately grounds his laissez-faireviews not so citizenship based explicitly on race, ethnicity, or gender much on a doctrine of human rights as on evolution- always denied large majoritiesof the world's population any ary biology, undaunted by how others then and now opportunity for U.S. citizenship up to 1965. That represents views as about 83%of the nation's history since the Constitution,88% have used such to explain racial as well since the Declaration of Independence. If, controversially, economic inequalities (Epstein 1985, 341, n. 19; Fair- one assumes that women became full citizens with the vote in child 1991). But though this blend of economics and 1920,then a majorityof the domestic adult populationbecame sociobiology has disturbing precursors, some influ- legally eligible for full citizenship then. This still means that a ential contemporary black leaders, such as Justice majorityof domestic adults were ineligible for full citizenship on racial, ethnic, or gender grounds for about two-thirds of ClarenceThomas and economist Thomas Sowell, like U.S. history (from either startingpoint). Booker T. Washington before them, are aligned with 2. Orren (1991), a major alternativecritique of Tocquevil- such "self-help" views. lian accounts, shows ascriptive inegalitarianlabor systems Racial, nativist, and religious tensions are also long prevailed even among white men. 3. From early on, many Americanintellectuals and politi- prominent in American life, as the Buchanan and cians believed that "like the Chain of Being, the races of man Duke campaigns, the Christian Coalition, the Los consisted of an ordered hierarchy"(Haller 1971, 11; Russett Angeles riots, the English-Only agitation, the popu- 1989, 201-3). Some believed in a naturalorder of rank among larity of anti-Japanese novels, renewed patterns of the races, some that culturesfell into a higher and lower levels residential segregation, and the of of civilization.Most thought race and culturelinked. Scholars upsurge separatist disagreed about the relative ranks of Asiatics, blacks, Native ideologies among many younger minority scholars all Americans,and other races and cultures,but these gradations indicate. The discourse about the "ethno-underclass" matteredless than the supremacyof whites over nonwhites. is particularlystriking, for as Lawrence Fuchs notes, Mulattoes, for example, were legally treated as an intermedi- poor urban minorities are often portrayed as histori- ate racial group in antebellum America, but by the 1850s whites began to reduce their status to that of "pure" blacks cally and socially conditioned to possess foreign (Williamson1980). moral values (1990, 487-89). The political message 4. A tradition here is comprised by (1) a worldview or that these accounts convey often resembles, however ideology that defines basic politicaland economicinstitutions, unintentionally, that of Lodge's similar characteriza- the persons eligible to participatein them, and the roles or tions of undesirable "races":these groups appear so rights to which they are entitled and (2) institutions and practicesembodying and reproducingthose precepts. Hence irreparablydifferent and dangerous that they do not traditions are not merelysets of ideas. The liberal tradition merit equal status in the political community. involves limited government, the rule of law protectingindi- It is too early to assess the significance of these vidual rights, and a marketeconomy, all officiallyopen to all aspects of currentAmerican life. The achievements of minimally rational adults. The republican tradition is grounded on popularsovereignty exercisedvia institutionsof Americans in building a more inclusive democracy mass self-governance.It includes an ethos of civic virtue and certainly provide reasons to believe that illiberal economic regulationfor the public good. Adherents of what I forces will not prevail. But just as we can better term ascriptiveAmericanist traditions believe true Americans explain the nation's past by recognizing how and are in some way "chosen" by God, history, or nature to possess superiormoral and intellectualtraits, often associated why liberal democratic principles have been con- with race and gender. Hence many Americanistsbelieve that tested with frequent success, we will better under- nonwhites and women should be governed as subjects or stand the present and future of American politics if second-class citizens, denied full market rights, and some- we do not presume they are rooted in essentially times excluded from the nation altogether.My thesis-that an evolving mix of these traditionsis visible in America'spolitical liberal or democraticvalues and conditions. Instead, culture, institutions, and the outlooks of Americans of all we must analyze America as the ongoing product of backgrounds-is indebted to Orren and Skowronek1993. often conflicting multiple traditions. 5. Other major Tocquevillian works include Daniel

563 Multiple Traditionsin America September 1993

Boorstin's(1953) Genius of AmericanPolitics and S. M. Lipset's in terms of liberalismand republicanism,ignoring issues of (1963)First New Nation. racial, ethnic, and sexual civic statuses entirely. 6. As a full survey of pertinent works is impossible, I shall 9. I also agree that tensions between liberaland democratic note some broad categories of scholarship in which most ideas and institutions have been vital factors in American participantsemploy a misleading Tocquevillianframework, history, visible, for example, in the great struggles between focusing on recent general discussions of American political the defenders of property rights and populist and labor culture and citizenship, where the limits of Tocquevillian movements. Those conflicts have, however, also always in- premises are most damaging. volved battles over the nation's racial, ethnic, and gender 7. This Tocquevillianoutlook has since been endorsed by ordering. writers as differentas Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote in 10. Fromcolonial times, Americanelites studied European 1981 that the United States is virtually unique because the naturalists'classifications of humanity into races, whose dis- "political ideas of the American Creed"-not ancestry, eth- tinctive moral and intellectualcharacteristics created, at least nicity, religion or culture-have been the basis of American implicitly, a rank order among them. Johann Blumenbach nationalidentity, and MichaelWalzer, who in 1990 endorsed designated the "Caucasian"race as the original and "most Gleason's formulationand added that in America, with "se- beautiful" human race, of which others were progressive vere but episodic exceptions," tolerance "has been the cul- "degenerations"(Haller 1971, 5). In the antebellum period, tural norm." Walzer reached this conclusion while setting Blumenbach's work was a reference for the "American aside discussion of blacks and, implicitly, women's second- School" of ethnology, led by physicians Samuel Morton, class citizenship as well (Huntington 1981, 23-25; Walzer Josiah Nott, and John Van Evrie and supported by Harvard 1990, 597-98, 610-11 [includingn. 30]). biologist Louis Aggasiz. Theirapparent evidence of biological 8. Several earlier works on citizenship employed frame- racial inequalities made racial exploitation of blacks and works closer to the one developed here. Hans Kohn's (1957) Native Americans seem reasonable to many (Haller 1971, AmericanNationalism analyzed Americannationality in terms 6-10; Horsman 1981, 125-35; Lofgren1987, 99-101). By 1870, of three similar foundations: the Enlightenmenttradition of Americans had also long entertained doctrines, favored by liberty, federal republicanism, and the interaction of the northernEuropean historians and philosophers, holding that predominantAnglo-American cultural tradition with those of the "Teutonic"and "Anglo-Saxon"peoples had been histor- other national origins (pp. 9, 135, 165, 173, 252, n. 45). But ically conditioned to be specially capable of self-governance writingbefore Bailyn and Pocock, Kohn treatedfederal repub- and hence of paternalgovernance over lesser peoples. These licanism as essentially a structuraldeterminant of American views were echoed even by Whig politicians like Daniel nationalityand saw its ideological content as derived chiefly Webster and romantic intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emer- fromliberalism. And though Kohn recognizedthat the United son, who opposed slavery and exterminationof the native States had often demanded assimilation into a "distinct na- tribes (Gossett 1963, 84-100; Horsman 1981, 9-42, 158-86; tionalidentity" built on Englishroots, his focus on the English Howe 1979, 38-40; Jordan1968, 339-41). commitment to liberty led him to downplay how illiberal- exclusivistthis conception often was (pp. 13, 21, 28, 165-69). Mark Roelofs's (1957) Tensionof Citizenshipanalyzed citizen- ship generally-and American citizenship incidentally-in terms of three patterns focusing on (1) "pride and participa- References tion" in the "communallife of the civic republic";(2) "loyalty and service" to an "organiccommunity"; and (3) individual- Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. We the People:Foundations. Cam- istic and universalisticdefiance to claims of particularcom- bridge: HarvardUniversity Press. munities and concern for protection of personal privacy. Adams, Charles Francis. 1908. "The Solid South" and the Though he labels these three "Greek," "Hebraic," and Afro-AmericanRace Problem. Boston: PublisherUnknown. "Christian-Roman,"they resemble the civic republican, as- Arieli, Yehoshua. 1964. Individualismand Nationalism in Amer- criptive Americanist, and Enlightenment liberal elements I icanIdeology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. argue to be the chief original ideological traditions shaping Ashworth, John. 1983. 'Agrarians'& 'Aristocrats':Party Political Americancivic culture. Roelofs, however, conformsto ortho- Ideologyin the UnitedStates, 1837-1846. New Jersey:Human- doxy in emphasizing the dominanceof individualistic,ration- ities Press. alistic Enlightenmentliberalism in America (pp. 31, 37, 76, Bailyn, Bernard. 1967. TheIdeological Origins of the American 116-18, 125-31, 150-65). Yehoshua Arieli (1964) also chiefly Revolution.Cambridge: Harvard University Press. identified Americannationality with liberalrepublican politi- Balzacv. PortoRico. 1922. 258 U.S. 298. cal principles.But he discernedan "awarenessof belonging to Beer, Samuel H. 1984. "Libertyand Union: Walt Whitman's a national organic community whose values are to a certain Idea of the Nation." PoliticalTheory 12: 361-386. degree not transferable."Thus he saw the "tension createdby Bell, Derrick.1987. And WeAre Not Saved:The Elusive Quest for these two competing types of national consciousness" as RacialJustice. New York:Basic Books. perhaps the chief determinantof the "structureand course of Bellah,Robert N., RichardMadsen, WilliamM. Sullivan,Ann Americannationalism" (pp. 29-30). The present argumentis Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habitsof the Heart: partly an elaborationand justificationof that insight. James Individualismand Commitmentin PublicLife. Berkeley:Uni- Kettner(1978) published a seminal study of citizenship laws versity of CaliforniaPress. that attended to the status of women, blacks, and Native Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1978. The AmericanJeremiad. Madison: Americans. But like Myrdal, Kettner treated liberal and re- University of Wisconsin Press. publican ideals as Americans' genuine beliefs and racially Boiler, Paul F. Jr. 1969. AmericanThought in Transition:The inegalitarianones as simply "deep-seated prejudices," not Impactof EvolutionaryNaturalism, 1865-1900. Chicago: Uni- explicit ideologies (pp. 3, 10, 349-51). More recent writers versity of Chicago Press. have combinedthe republicanand religiousrevisions of Hartz Boorstin, Daniel. 1953. The Geniusof AmericanPolitics. Chi- by identifying three strands in Americannationality, placing cago: University of Chicago Press. a "biblical"or "Christian"tradition alongside civic republican Brinton,Daniel G. 1895."The Aims of Anthropology."Science and individualisticliberal ones (Bellah et al., 1985; Kioppen- 2: 241-252. berg 1987).But religious elements are better seen as bound up Burnham, Walter Dean. 1970. CriticalElections and the Main- with all three of the traditionsidentified here. When they are springsof AmericanPolitics. New York:W. W. Norton. taken as grounds for denying citizenship, as in Protestant Burnham, Walter Dean. 1982. TheCurrent Crisis in American nativism, they are closest to ascriptive Americanism;but Politics.New York:Oxford University Press. religion is not the only source of Americanism, nor can Ceaser, JamesW. 1979. PresidentialSelection: Theory and Devel- Americanistsclaim to be the "authentic"voices of American opment.Princeton: Princeton University Press. religiosity.Sinopoli (1992)analyzes Americancitizenship only ChaeChan Ping v. UnitedStates. 1889. 130 U.S. 551.

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Rogers M. Smith is Professor of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-3532.