Nationhood: an American activity - the validity of the United States as a single nation rather than a collection of ethnic identities - Demystifying Multiculturalism - Cover Story

National Review, Feb 21, 1994 by John O'Sullivan

IF WE WERE to approach a passer-by in Paris, London, or Berlin and ask him the question: "What is a Frenchman (or an Englishman, or a German)?" we might not get a clever reply, or an accurate reply, or in Germany a short reply. What we would get, however, would be a reply. The speaker would know what the entity in question was---even if he could not always describe it in a convincing way. He would not be baffled by the question, nor confess that he had always wondered the same thing.

But if we are to believe the learned journals, magazines of opinion, op-ed pages, and television talk shows, the same question here would produce a puzzled and astonished response. Acres of print are spent agonizing over the question: "What is an American?" It is said by some to mean a legal resident or citizen of the United States; by others to mean a member of one of the many ethnic groups such as Italian-Americans, combining to form the U.S.; by others to signify an American national identity of an ethnic kind, similar to a French or British identity; and by perhaps the dominant opinion to mean someone who sub- scribes to the principles of the Declaration of Independence embodied in the Constitution

Since it would be futile to hope that an essay on public affairs could contain anything like suspense, let me give my own conclusion at the start. It is commonly said that America is more than a nation; it is an idea. My thesis is the precise opposite: America is more than an idea; it is a nation. This distinction is of more than theoretical consequence; it has profound implications for such questions as racial and ethnic quotas, bilingual education, immigration (legal and illegal), and above all multiculturalism.

Like everyone else who has ever addressed the topic of American nationhood, I begin with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who asked in 1782 in Letters from an American Farmer: "What then is the American, this new man?" and answered: "He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles." Indeed, both admirers and detractors of the American idea have seen the American as something new under the sun, and the American Revolution as a caesura in human history, bringing a new order based upon liberal political principles into the world.

Thus Emerson: "the asylum of all nations . . . the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and of the Polynesians, will construct a new race... as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages."

Or Tocqueville: "Imagine, my dear friend, if you can, a society formed of all the nations of the world... people having different languages, beliefs, opinions: in a word, a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times happier than our own." (My emphasis.)

What these tributes establish is that the rise of America and Americans was something dramatic, important, and, in the eyes of most observers, good--an improvement on the rivalries and oppression of the Old World. But in what sense was it new? Had a different human personality been forged in the revolutionary heat of 1776, as Christianity seems to have brought forth a new kind of human being in the first centuries after Christ, and as the Bolsheviks hoped to bring forth New Soviet Man? Or, as the comparison by Emerson to the new Europe that formed after the Dark Ages suggests, was the American new in a less radical sense? Were Crevecoeur, Emerson, Tocqueville, and others witnessing not the birth of a new kind of man but merely a splendid yet still routine historical event: namely, the birth of a new nation?

IF AMERICA is a nation not quite like any other, but also not wholly unlike any other, as I shall end up arguing, this is reflected in its history. The process of nation-building had its hard and realistic side from the first. The Tories were, of course, expropriated and driven out. Some of the Founders--as Lawrence Auster points out in his searing polemic Suicide of a Nation--were worried about immigration not on racial or even cultural grounds, but because they feared that immigrants from European monarchies would lack a natural fidelity to republican principles. Their concern was, in effect, for a social cohesion founded upon at least a philosophical homogeneity. As Thomas Jefferson, sounding on this occasion very like Alexander Hamilton and even like Pat Buchanan, said: "Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we believe that the addition of half a million foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here."