Submitted by: Submitted by anwar23
Views: 69
Words: 1663
Pages: 7
Category: US History
Date Submitted: 12/11/2014 10:36 AM
Essay #1
In his book American Crucible: Race and Nation of the Twentieth Century, Gary Gerstle shows us how much of 20th-century American history can be understood in terms of the changes in how Americans generally and politicians in particular balanced civic and racial nationalism. Gary Gerstle argues that racial and civic nationalism are two largely separate ideological strains that have animated the political history of the United States in the 20th-century (p. 5). When it comes to Civic nationalism, Gerstle put it as an “... American belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings, in every individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in a democratic government that derives its legitimacy from the people’s consent” (p. 4). The idea of this term was first put together by Gunnar Myrdal in 1940. He called it the “American Creed”. But Gerstle and others like him prefer to use the more generic term “Civic nationalism” to explain this idea(p. 4). He goes on further to argue that this idea of American Civic nationalism has contended with another ideology known a racial nationalism “... that conceives of America in ethnoracial terms as a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government” (p. 4).
In the midst of this two idea, there born another new idea. Gerstle tells us in the introduction of his book that “together these two traditions imparted a clear, if paradoxical, shape to what I call the Rooseveltian nation, a nation whose outlines are discernible in the first two decades of the twentieth-century and whose character would define American society from the mid-1930s the mid-1960s” (p. 8). All this will major role as Gerstle makes another argument that at least for the twentieth century “... war has been decisive …” illustrating all this idea (p. 9).
The primary evidence that Gerstle uses in his work to prove his argument are mainly the American Liberal. He...