Attendant Cruelties
Nation and Nationalism in American History
By Patrice Higonnet
Other Press / 400 pages / $25.95
When savages - in the Philippines or the American West - perform acts of bloodthirsty brutality, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, whites should not shrink from responding in kind: To "withdraw from the contest for civilization" because of its "attendant cruelties is, in my opinion, utterly unworthy of a great people." The Puritans would have understood the Rough Rider's "dark and dangerous" passion, Patrice Higonnet insists, and George W. Bush is the latest - and worst - in a parade of presidents who have manipulated the "historically conditioned reflections" of nationalistic exclusion.
In Attendant Cruelties, Higonnet, a professor of history at Harvard University, seeks to expose the nation's dark side. Americans' belief in economic individualism and their status as God's chosen people, he asserts, has given rise to two traditions, "inclusive patriotism and exclusionary nationalism." They exist in "uncanny proximity" to one another because Americans believe it is their duty to defend their exemplary values, especially liberty, against all enemies. And to extend them to people throughout the world, by example, assimilation, or, if necessary, force of arms. Universalism, then, propels Americans from "patriotic restraint to nationalistic adventurism."
According to Higonnet, nationalism is "the most contagious" of humankind's maladies. In the United States, nationalism became "a habit that took on weight as it went along." A "cabal of insiders" shoved aside the patriotic ethic of peace and inclusion in the 1840s and 1850s, the 1930s and the 1960s, when it began to burst forth. By manipulating the press and concealing "material inequalities," the Andrew Jacksons, William McKinleys and George Bushes enlisted America's silent majority in crusades to bring law, order and progress to the world. Unable to draw on anti-clerical or anti-capitalist critiques, which never took root in the United States, Higonnet suggests, many Americans concluded that the emotionally satisfying politics of exclusion was the best available compensation for the adversities they bore in everyday life. And so, they acquiesced in "unjustified aggression" against the Cherokee Nation, Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq.
Higonnet is not the first critic to identify economic individualism and Manifest Destiny as foundational themes in American history. Or to lament the American penchant for what the historian Richard Slotkin called "regeneration through violence," with its dire consequences for "people of color" inside the United States and abroad. Since Higonnet makes virtually no effort to explain his (seemingly arbitrary) association of peace, liberty and inclusion with patriotism, and compulsion, racism and imperialism with nationalism, Attendant Cruelties sheds little light on the struggle for the soul of the nation.
As it grinds its axioms, Attendant Cruelties is riddled with errors. Higonnet assigns the wrong first name to Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist who was murdered by a mob in 1837; Albert Beveridge, United States senator from Indiana, and an ardent advocate of imperialism in 1900; and Horace Kallen, a turn-of-the-20th-century American-Jewish intellectual. He elects William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, vice president of the United States. And he finds the beginnings of genetic research and advanced numerical calculation in the administration of Harvard's Conrad Aiken. Aiken, of course, was a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet. The president of Harvard during the 1930s was James Bryant Conant.
There are many questionable judgments as well. Although he admired Andrew Jackson's aggressive defense of the Union, Abraham Lincoln was not a "Jacksonian leader." And he did not do nothing to hasten the outbreak of the Civil War. His order to send provisions to Fort Sumter precipitated the conflict, as he knew it would. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not "resolutely isolationist" until 1939. While he was neither a courageous nor a consistent interventionist, Roosevelt did declare in 1937, for example, that the United States could not isolate itself from Europe and must help "quarantine" aggressive nations if international peace was to be preserved.
Higonnet's lack of precision may be due to his "presentist agenda," which is little more than a rant against the Bush administration as "the endpoint of this long national and religious trajectory," an heir to James K. Polk, "one of America's blindest and most mendacious presidents," and the "repellent" William McKinley. Gratuitous references to President Bush are ubiquitous in Attendant Cruelties. Even board-certified Bush-whackers may acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, that Higonnet serves up more cheap shots than an Irish pub on Saint Patrick's Day.
Higonnet ignores Bush's approach to immigration, for instance, perhaps because it complicates his portrait of him as the engineer of "a machine of exclusion."
Every thesis, it's true, has its attendant simplifications. But Higonnet's slipshod sermon to the choir on nation and nationalism has too many of them - and not enough rigorous analysis - to command our time and attention.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.