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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Replying to @Noahpinion
Truman's order desegregating the military was issued in 1948, over opposition, and it took years to complete it.
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Yes. But what American Crucible taught me, which I had never known, is that de facto desegregation actually began in the later years of WW2...it just didn't get far before the war ended.
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