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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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