Beschreibung:
In this classic interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, Gary Gerstle challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. Using the rich and textured material left behind by New England's most powerful textile union--the Independent Textile Union of Woonsocket, Rhode Island--Gerstle uncovers for the first time a more varied and more radical working-class discourse.
List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER 1 Theodore Roosevelt's Racialized Nation, 1890-1900 14 A History of the American "Race" 17 War, Renewal, and the Problem of the "Smoked Yankee" 25. CHAPTER 2 Civic Nationalism and Its Contradictions, 1890-1917 44 "True Americanism" 47 Racial Dilemmas 59 The New Nationalism 65 CHAPTER 3 Hardening the Boundaries of the Nation, 1917-1929 81 War and Discipline 83 "Keeping Pure the Blood of America" 95 Civic Nationalism in the New Racial Regime 115 Aborting the New Nationalism 122 CHAPTER 4 The Rooseveltian Nation Ascendant, 1930-1940 128 A Kinder and Gentler Nation Builder 131 Radicalizing the Civic Nationalist Creed 139 Conservative Counterattack 156 The Survival of Racialized Nationalism 162 CHAPTER 5 Good War,Race War,1941-1945 187 The Good War 189 Race War 201 "Something Drastic Should Be Done" The Military's Hidden Race War 210 Combat and White Male Comradeship 220 CHAPTER 6 The Cold War, Anticommunism, and Nation in Flux, 1946-1960 238 War, Repression, and Nation Building 241 The Red Scare and the Decline of Racial Nationalism 246 Racial Nationalism Redux: The Case of Immigration Reform 256 CHAPTER 7 Civil Rights, White Resistance, and Black Nationalism, 1960-1968 268 Civil Rights and Civic Nationalism 270 "I Question America" The Crisis in Atlantic City 286 "Speaking as a Victim of This American System" 295 CHAPTER 8 Vietnam, Cultural Revolt, and the Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation, 1968-1975 311 A Catastrophic War 313 The Spread of Anti-Americanism and the Revolt against Assimilation 327 The Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation 342 EPILOGUE Beyond the Rooseveltian Nation, 1975-2000 347 Varieties of Multiculturalism 349 "A Springtime of Hope" Ronald Reagan and the Nationalist Renaissance 357 Reviving the Liberal Nation 365 Notes 375 Index 439