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Noahpinion's profile
Noah Smith
Noah Smith
Noah Smith
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@Noahpinion

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Noah SmithVerified account

@Noahpinion

Bloomberg Opinion writer. Elected "top neoliberal shill" of 2018. Occasionally posts anime gifs.

San Francisco, CA
bloomberg.com/view/contribut…
Joined April 2011

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    1. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

      1/I recently read "American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century", by Gary Gerstle. https://www.amazon.com/American-Crucible-Nation-Twentieth-Century/dp/0691173273 … Here is my review, in tweet-thread form.

      3 replies 11 retweets 47 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

      2/The book is a decent overview of race relations and conceptions of nationhood and national belonging in America. The people who most need to read this book are people from Canada, UK, Australia, etc. It will help you understand how America is different from your own countries.

      4 replies 5 retweets 20 likes
      Show this thread
      Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

      3/Substantively, much of the book is a quick-gloss of stuff Americans learned - or should have learned - in high school. There are two big exceptions: 1) the story of Teddy Roosevelt's nationalism, and 2) the story of military unit integration during WW2.

      11:21 AM - 12 Oct 2018
      • 10 Likes
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      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          4/Teddy Roosevelt gets the most coverage, and is obviously the focus of the author's scholarship. A fascinating man, both brilliant and crazy, full of contradictions and inconsistencies. His importance seems underrated in most popular accounts of American history.

          1 reply 1 retweet 14 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          5/Teddy Roosevelt had the idea of forging a new American race, which he thought would be a superior race. It would include white people of all types (including Jews), as well as Native Americans. But not black people.

          4 replies 3 retweets 9 likes
          Show this thread
        4. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          6/T.R. didn't believe in gradual "melting pot" assimilation - he believed that war would be the force that would unify the new American race in the fire of battle. He assembled the Rough Riders as a test of this idea.

          2 replies 3 retweets 10 likes
          Show this thread
        5. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          7/In the middle of battle in Cuba, the Rough Riders found themselves mixed with a black unit. T.R., happy for the help, started writing nice things about black people. But a couple of years later he was back to excluding them from his would-be master race.

          3 replies 4 retweets 11 likes
          Show this thread
        6. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          8/Gerstle sees this incident as a metaphor, presaging the real crucial moment when America actually implemented T.R.'s idea: WW2. Gerstle sees WW2 as the moment when the modern American white race was forged - through battle, just as T.R. wanted.

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          9/Gerstle's account of WW2 taught me things I never knew about the racial history of the U.S. military during that was. At the beginning of the war, the military carried out strict segregation, like in WW1. There were fights between white and black American units!

          1 reply 3 retweets 11 likes
          Show this thread
        8. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          10/BUT, as the war went on, the military began to experiment with racial integration of blacks and whites, including on some Navy ships. The experiments all went well. Black and white troops, when integrated, got along great.

          1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          11/But it was too late. The black-white integration was too slow. It was still only minor by the time WW2 ended. A couple of years later, the entire military was desegregated. But by then, Gerstle says, it was too late. The chance was lost.

          4 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
          Show this thread
        10. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          12/Gerstle obviously thinks, though he does not explicitly say, that Teddy Roosevelt's plan to forge a truly American race might have worked, if America had fully integrated the military during WW2. I am skeptical of this idea, but it's really interesting.

          3 replies 0 retweets 14 likes
          Show this thread
        11. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          13/More broadly, Gerstle's book shows that Americans have always used a mix of civic nationalism and racial nationalism to define their national identity, and that neither of these traditions has ever been able to vanquish the other.

          1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
          Show this thread
        12. Noah Smith‏Verified account @Noahpinion Oct 12

          14/The big question, going forward, is: Will America continue to define American-ness partly in racial terms? And if so, who will be included, and who, if anyone, will be excluded? This is an incredibly crucial question for our nation, but no one knows the answer. (end)

          7 replies 1 retweet 19 likes
          Show this thread
        13. End of conversation
        1. New conversation
        2. Eduardo Alvarez‏ @EdAlvarezB Oct 12
          Replying to @Noahpinion

          An uncle used to say that until WWII everyone lived in their ethnic neighborhoods until they went to their military units. After the war they started visiting each other and dating their sisters. For him this is when the melting pot started.

          4 replies 9 retweets 35 likes
        3. Cesar Clandestine‏ @digitalbeard Oct 12
          Replying to @EdAlvarezB @Noahpinion

          I had a professor who called attention to this trope in post-WWII war lit and cinema he referred to as “the melting pot platoon”

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        4. Eduardo Alvarez‏ @EdAlvarezB Oct 12
          Replying to @digitalbeard @Noahpinion

          In movies they had a Brooklyn guy

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        5. Cesar Clandestine‏ @digitalbeard Oct 12
          Replying to @EdAlvarezB @Noahpinion

          I found an interesting citation that seems to argue that the trope persisted in VW lit although the reality was units in that war were much less integrated than in WWII http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00111619.1983.9937778 …

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        6. End of conversation

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