Nationalism

Nationalism. Nationalism is a political ideology based on the assertion by some bounded social group—usually, though not always, a culturally or linguistically homogenous one—of its right to its own state or a sphere of autonomy.Nationalists demand that citizens subordinate other loyalties (to class, party, church, geographic region, or ethnic group, for example) to national loyalty. In the United States, nationalism has often taken the form of unstinting support for the federal government and suspicion of groups perceived as threats to it. In many periods, nationalism has carried racial, cultural, and linguistic overtones, with nativists trying to limit the term “American” to English‐speaking Protestant whites. Yet countertraditions of American nationalism also exist among African Americans, immigrants, and workers.

In antebellum America, nationalist arguments were most frequently deployed against Southern disunionists or foreign states. The 1850s saw the first national political parties explicitly dedicated to cultural or linguistic nationalism. Variously calling themselves “Americans” or “Know Nothings,” these parties reacted to a massive Irish influx by demanding immigration restriction and curbs on Roman Catholicism. Nativist Americanism reappeared in the 1890s as a second great wave of immigration began. In that decade, veterans' organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic joined hereditary societies such as the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution in a patriotic onslaught. Public campaigns sought textbook revision, military drill in schools, and protection of the national flag from “desecration.” The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was written and Francis Scott Key's “The Star Spangled Banner” proposed as the national anthem. This nervous upsurge of nationalism among native‐born whites was a reaction not only to immigration, but also to industrial unrest and to the Spanish‐American War.

During World War I, the federal government attempted to manufacture nationalist sentiment through propaganda agencies such as the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Wartime demands for “100‐percent‐Americanism” led to a postwar Red Scare that targeted socialists and radicals as “un‐American” and resulted in the arrests of more than 6,000 alleged subversives. Meanwhile, however, writers such as Randolph Bourne, Louis Brandeis, and Horace Kallen urged a more inclusive Americanism that recognized ethnic and political pluralism as a source of national strength. In the interwar period, immigrants and industrial workers, too, emphasized alternative nationalisms rooted in the ideals of democracy and equal rights rather than in ethnicity or middle‐class respectability. Still, powerful ethnic nationalisms persisted through the 1920s among nativist whites in a revived Ku Klux Klan, and among separatist blacks led by Marcus Garvey.

The administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted inclusive nationalism, first through the New Deal cultural agencies' rediscovery of American folk cultures, then through World War II propaganda contrasting American diversity and tolerance to Nazi racism. In the Cold War, this vision was joined to a celebration of American material abundance, with communists portrayed as not only anti‐democratic but also anti‐consumption. In the 1960s, this version of American nationalism came under attack from the political left as a mystification obscuring racial and class oppression. Post–1990 nationalist arguments were deployed mostly by the Right, and more frequently against internationalist targets (such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization) than against internal enemies. In its many permutations, nationalism has remained a powerful ideological force throughout U.S. history, paradoxically both uniting and dividing the American people.
See also Antebellum Era; Anticommunism; Immigration Law; Internationalism; Irish Americans; Know‐Nothing Party; Race and Ethnicity; Social Class.

Bibliography

Merle Curti , The Roots of American Loyalty, 1946.
Stuart McConnell , Nationalism, in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, Stanley I. Kutler, ed., vol. 1, pp. 251–271, 1995.

Stuart McConnell