From Puritan Idealism and Southern Romanticism to an Ethnonationalist State
Review of Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood Book by Colin Woodard
This is about the struggle to formulate the post-George Washington national narrative – the us and them story to bind Americans together in “a more perfect union”. From a mix of novelists, historians, activists, politicians, and film makers, the book covers US history into Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency; there, the accepted narrative reached a kind of stasis, both refusing to acknowledge the realities of racism and a biased system of law that excluded blacks from civil rights, careers, and modern life. While most politicians were publicly proclaiming the achievement of America’s ideals in a kind of Anglo-Saxon harmony, it is a devastating portrait of self-serving societal failure, hypocrisy, and cruelty.
Woodard begins with 3 competing regional visions. First there was George Bancroft, a Yankee Harvard-educated aspiring preacher who was one of the first recipients of a full scholarship to study in a German university, the seat of cutting-edge academic method in the early 19th century. In Europe, he was entertained by the von Humboldt brothers and met Goethe, Byron, and Hegel, learning 4 languages and gaining a unique perspective. Unfortunately, this seems to have cemented his head in the aether of Puritan idealism, i.e. that the US was a city on the hill that would unite the world’s people, inaugurating a Godly utopia of harmony and brotherhood. He remained a myopic fool for the rest of his life, writing a Panglossian multi-volume history of the US that ignored evidence in order to preserve and promote his vision. Entertained by planters in South Carolina, he came away thinking slaves were happy in their servitude and never once mentioned Frederick Douglass in his writing. He even saw the Civil War as a minor corrective, relying on poetic imagery and Biblical references to inform him of its meaning and scope.
Second, having become a plantation owner by marriage in South Carolina, William Simms wrote a series of popular novels and journalistic articles. He lived in the Romantic tradition: in his eyes, the South represented a gentlemanly society of honor and high culture, the natural steward of racial uplift to the slaves and peoples it dominated. While Bancroft at least paid lip service to equality of men in the tradition of the Declaration of Independence, the pseudo-aristocrat Simms was openly racist and advocated a hierarchical social order based on innate, read white, superiority. Bancroft rose through a series of political sinecures, learning nothing from his experiences, whereas Simms was ruined by the Civil War and died nearly destitute.
Third, the fly in the ointment – the dignified, angry, brilliant activist against slavery and then in the promotion of universal civil rights – was Frederick Douglass. He served to remind America of his treatment as a slave, which included physical and psychological torture, his daring escape, and his unlikely rise as best-selling author and the greatest orator of his time. He too served in government posts, including as Ambassador to Haiti. He died disillusioned and exhausted, but active to the end, speaking truth to power.
Into the next generation, there were a number of better, less hypocritical truth seekers, most particularly the historian Frederick Turner. It was they, rather than the studiously ignorant Bancroft, who pioneered the elucidation of history through documentary evidence and primary sources. Turner’s most important idea was the incorporation of the “frontier” into American historiography, as a principal source of the American character (i.e. enterprising, seeking, liberating), perhaps even eclipsing the influences emanating from East Coast cultures. Ironically, at the moment his views became mainstream and popular, Turner had come to doubt them not only as lacking evidence, but in the meaning and achievements of the frontier societies themselves, which he increasingly saw as violent, corrupt and dysfunctional.
The final and most important major figure was Woodrow Wilson, who was the first Southerner to be elected president in 2 generations. Woodard views Wilson as a grotesque throwback little better than Andrew Johnson, a blatant racist and apologist for the antebellum South. Though associated with Turner as a scholar, Woodard emphasizes that he understood none of Turner’s methodology and wrote in a similar manner to the fabulist Simms, with a mix of florid rhetoric, obscure secondary-source references, and tendentious conclusions: the white race (i.e., Anglo-Saxons) was superior and destined to rule the world, etc. While popular, his scholarship was much criticized by his peers.
According to Woodard, Wilson’s actions made the greatest difference, ending the debate in favor of rigid ethnonationalism, if not outright white supremacy. Not only did he gut the opportunities for the employment of African Americans within the Federal Government – a tiny oasis of professional jobs that had created a thriving, educated middle class in Washington, DC – but he helped to institutionalize Jim Crow, racial segregation, and with World War I, the brutal suppression of dissenting political views with scant judicial due process.
He also invited DW Griffith, the pioneering film director, to screen Birth of a Nation in the White House, thereby legitimizing it rather than opposing or attenuating the idiotically self-serving image of white nationalism in it; the greed and stupidity of African Americans, in that crude film, were portrayed as responsible for the war between the states, Reconstruction was a violation of states’ right, etc. The film was so racially biased that it served as a propaganda tool for KKK recruitment. Finally, Wilson extended his views of racial hierarchy onto the international stage with his 14 Points – only white nations were deserving of the right to determine their destinies democratically. If Woodard is relentless in his attack, I found his argument convincing to the point that I will never again think of Wilson’s Administration as progressive.
This is a very interesting book and a fun read. Though I was uncertain where it was leading for the first half with all the biographical details on Bancroft and Simms, now rightly obscure figures, in the second half of the book it is clear he is critiquing the establishment of WASP ethnonationalism as the lynchpin of the Union. This should have been, in my opinion, indicated clearly in the title of the book. I had thought it would be a much more detailed treatment up to, say, the Civil War and was surprised it took me all the way to 1920. Indeed, it becomes a screed against Woodrow Wilson.
That being said, I read it in tandem with the brilliant Cincinnatus by Garry Wills, which sketches the cultivation of George Washington’s images of power during his career through the high culture of the time. The 2 books are wonderfully complementary and I recommend them both.