nationalism definition us history

nationalism definition us history

The Evolution of Nationalism in U.S. History

1. Introduction to Nationalism and its Significance

In this study, I argue that a substantial component of how Americans behave and feel today has been a direct result of the rather unique conditions that helped to mold the nation, particularly the consistently high levels of support for nationalism that resulted from the founding of the country and in the almost continuous territorial expansion that occurred over the following century. Unfortunately, high levels of nationalism such as these have also led to high levels of discomfort and suspicion by or about those who live overseas. This is because high levels of nationalism promote a belief in the important differences that exist between the members of one country and those of another, and its ideology generally encourages an overestimation of the power, readiness to threaten, and hostility of other countries.

To understand the significance of the evolution of nationalism in U.S. history, we need to begin with a review of the various components of nationalism and how they have developed over the years. Nationalism has always been a part of United States history, whether in its precursor form, the notion of exclusive identity that existed before independence, the complex and divisive components of the founding period, or the later taken-for-granted nationalism that has been the topic of much social science research since the disagreements of the Civil War era. Yet, more often Americans are seen as uniquely different when compared to the majority of groups that inhabit the earth.

2. Early Forms of Nationalism in the United States

The U.S. Revolutionary War was a separatist war, not a war of nationality. Most of the people who lived in the American colonies at that time thought in terms of kinship, not nationality. When they fought in the Revolutionary War, they were fighting for what today we would call liberal values or at most for the right to make an independent choice regarding a national guardian to protect those values. The U.S. government established by the Constitution has avowedly served as the protector of values, not as the creator of nationalism. However, the U.S. Constitution included several provisions designed to preserve and protect several early forms of American nationalism.

At what point did nationalism first become a force in the United States? It is difficult to pinpoint because the conditions necessary for its rise vary widely. When written into the rules of an association, nationalism transforms self-interest into a concern for others. But under other conditions, it leads a member of a group to tiptoe past the rules of an association to help a fellow. The only time nationalistic forces have been created in the United States with such strength that they rose to impel the majority of the American people to choose nationalism as the only protector of their values was during the 1776–89 period, the only time in Western history this has happened.

3. Nationalism in the Revolutionary and Early Republic Periods

Nationalism had a major constitutional victory with the passage of the Constitution itself. Nationalism had another victory in the Supreme Court rulings that maintained a relatively unified economy. Nationalism had still another set of victories with the disastrous results of the War of 1812. But the overall result of these was the entrenchment of sectionalism. As we will see, sustained nationalism was not achieved until a civil war had been fought.

Despite the rhetoric about universal rights and the spirit of internationalism, American nationalism defined the United States as a nation overrun by Britons. Although it was based on Whig theories of liberty, it took the form of a national struggle against an entrenched and oppressive British king. Once independence had been accomplished, nationalism became essential to the building and consolidation of the new American nation-state. A countervailing theory held that the United States was only a union of free and independent states. Its highest loyalty was to liberty, not the nation. The states’ rights theory provided a defense for a sectional and agrarian minority.

4. Expansion and Manifest Destiny: Nationalism in the 19th Century

Nationalist ardor was at a fever pitch in the young republic of the 1820s. “Liberty,” liberty, and “Freedom” were in vogue. A vogue led by the young, ambitious middle class with its Jacksonian suspicion of an oligarchic elite and the new obsession with the Common Man. Except for the nearly total exclusion of women from the public sphere, the times itself were said to be an era of reform: where none dare contest the assertion that the interests of the country were entirely in the hands of “We, the People.” Such posturing was not only naturally attractive to democratizing, liberal-minded persons but also harked back to the intrinsic nationalism of the Federalists of 1815-1816 by rehabilitating the “unconscionable” notion of national parties. Loren P. Beth has argued that the early American nationalist idea of 1783-1800, long before the concept appeared in Europe, was compounded of the concepts of nationalism in the Old World in such a way that it came out as a third possibility neither entirely determinist nor entirely voluntarist.

The roots of American expansionism lay not only in the nation-building ambitions of the early republic but also in the visions of all four schools of thought. With the exception of the unionist Hellenists, the other three schools (which were also the more full-blooded nationalists) saw territorial expansion as the proper vehicle for advancing the nationalist idea and for solving the country’s manifold social, political, and economic problems. Clay’s American System had only been a partial success. The Whigs had faltered and fallen into sectional squabbling. The country’s best hope lay in Henry Clay’s embodying much of the expansionist nationalist mythology.

5. Modern Nationalism: 20th Century to Present Day

Nationalist sentiment within the United States was stimulated by events during and after World War I. This provided an environment ripe for a revival in Ku Klux Klan activity and for both state and federal immigration restrictions that sharply curtailed the numbers of new voices coming to the United States by World War II. The United States faced the bombings of its naval bases at Pearl Harbor, the staggering loss of American life at Wake Island, Corregidor, and Bataan, and the U.S.-led “greatest generation’s” successful alliances with such threatening nationalist governments. By 1965, the United States seemed to have returned to pre-1924 open-immigration policies as a reflection of the value of nationalist concepts in a culture that now was engaging in a massive war against racial nationalism.

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the United States continues to witness the development of new forms of nationalism. Nationalist ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often articulated in connection with ideas of imperialism. When President Woodrow Wilson decided to have the United States declare war on Germany in 1917, he argued in part that U.S. interests were best served by supporting national self-determination for peoples of other nations. Within his own country, however, he fought against support for Old World forms of nationalism from those who sought to exclude not just some groups of people, but their ideas and cultures, from the emerging U.S. national identity.