| Review of: | True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism by Noah Pickus |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Eric Kaufman |
| Reviewed in: | Nations and Nationalism |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 341-367 |
Book Reviews
From France to Australia, policy-makers and scholars are struggling to reconcile an increasingly large and diverse immigration flow with long-established national identities. The United States has a long history of grappling with such questions, and Noah Pickus, Associate Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, has added his name to a venerable list that includes many of the American Founding Fathers and many eminent writers like Arthur Schlesinger, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington and, most humbly, myself.
Pickus' new book,
Pickus admits that this kind of 'bridging' social capital is much more difficult to attain in today's globalised, hyper-privatised, expressively individualised world. Nonetheless, he is at pains to point out that an engaged civic nationalism holds out the best promise for a country whose immigration and nationality politics are as polarised as ever. The book isolates four distinct schools of thought on these questions: cultural nationalist (the white nationalism of Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan); universal nationalist (the creedal nationalism of neoconservative writers like Michael Barone and Seymour Lipset); rights and representation approaches. The latter two can largely be subsumed under the mantra of cosmopolitanism, and are linked to writers like Matthew Jacobson or Martha Nussbaum, who question the value of nations in an age of globalisation and urge the United States to offer full rights to non-citizens while asking for little commitment in return.
Pickus' book blends both empirical and normative scholarship, but in terms of chapters is six parts history and two parts advocacy. The first three chapters concern the approach taken by the Founders to naturalisation and immigration - mainly in the 1790s. The next three chapters dissect the immigration/nationalisation politics of the Progressive era - principally the two decades prior to 1920. Finally, the last two chapters offer a summary of recent developments and a critique of the four existing approaches to immigration and nationality in the country today. Most writers on these subjects have paid only patchy attention to the Founding period, and for good reason: non-WASP immigrants were few and the key issues were political, not cultural. Though the period does not warrant as much ink as it gets here, Pickus definitely adds to our body of knowledge by thoroughly plumbing the writings of some of the Founders in this era. He argues that James Madison, whose views straddled the Federalist-Republican divide of the period, exercised the most sound judgment in favouring a civic nationalism of complexity over the easier answers provided by both exclusionists and cosmopolitans. Though these chapters are instructive, Pickus should have underscored the differences between the 1790s - when the key debates were over immigrants'
Pickus' work does a good job of assembling the excellent secondary literature on cultural issues of the Progressive period into a coherent picture, and garnishes this with a reference to the primary writings of Jane Addams, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Teddy Roosevelt and others. Pickus locates a civic national tradition that stretches improbably wide to encompass both Teddy Roosevelt and Randolph Bourne. Though Roosevelt's writings traced an Anglo-Saxon and Nordic pedigree to the American nation, Pickus picks up on Gary Gerstle's observation that Roosevelt opposed some of the more exclusionary outriders of the nativist movement (like the literacy test) and managed to win the immigrant vote to the Progressive banner. He finds that Roosevelt actively believed in the immigrants' capacity to Americanise - a belief shared by liberal Americanisers like Frances Kellor or Jane Addams. Bourne, meanwhile, despite his pluralism, is grouped as a civic nationalist because of his view of a 'future America, in which all can unite' (p. 119).
The problem here is that Pickus is too selective in his quotation and draws a line which connects dots that lie at the margins of these individuals' thoughts. Randolph Bourne was a New York WASP avant-garde radical in revolt against his own culture, which he associated with puritanism and a lack of expressive individualism. He had no concept of cultural continuity and believed in a cosmopolitanism in which the United States' only role was to launch a project through which America could ultimately dissolve itself. Any concept of unity was a mere flag of convenience. By contrast, Roosevelt was an ethnic nationalist
All of which highlights the most serious weakness in a generally well-argued and worthwhile book: its protean, therapeutic difference-splitting. This is manifested in a tendency to stretch the notion of civic nationalism to mean all things to all people, and a related proclivity for charting a middle course between all schools of thought so as to avoid controversy. It is also unclear that civic nationalism can satisfy the desires for meaning and rootedness among either immigrants or native-born Americans, many of whom yearn for ethnicity in a time of atomisation. In this regard, a better solution might be to recognise the validity of a majority 'American' ethnicity to which newcomers can assimilate (in the strong sense) while maintaining an easygoing approach to minority ethnic retention and issues of loyalty and citizenship.
This said, there are many original aspects to Pickus' proposals. Pickus rightly exposes the contradictions in the thinking of those he labels 'rights advocates': the cosmopolitans who ask America to extend a hand to non-citizens while encouraging minorities (often against their will) to look scornfully upon American history. Pickus should also be applauded for his centrist appeal to build bridges between natives and immigrants through English instruction and civics classes. Pickus' interpretation of recent developments in American immigration politics is also impeccable and a useful update to the current literature. It will strengthen the hand of those who dissent from the prevailing multicultural ethos of the universities, but will also challenge some of the more popular quick fixes of Congressional policy-makers. Put simply, this well-written book is a must-read for scholars of American national identity and immigration.