Review Essay of:
Contradictions make good material for history books. Find a group of people experiencing a conflict between two sets of ideals or a collision between their noble intentions and the reality they face, and you have the potential for a good story. These kinds of quandaries may crop up somewhat less commonly as the subjects of popular histories, but academics are beholden to complexity. Like cattle with their egrets, historical traditions are symbiotically accompanied by scholarship that “problematizes” and debunks, frequently by locating contradictions.
Two relatively recent works exemplify this relationship of revision. Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible is a sweeping synthesis of two historical interpretations—America as beacon of democracy and equal opportunity, and America as racial imperialist—and combines them into one quandary-infused narrative. Theodore Roosevelt was just the first of many twentieth-century U.S. leaders who struggled to reconcile what Gerstle terms “civic nationalism” with “racial nationalism.” From the Spanish-American War to the Cold War, Gerstle argues that “these two powerful and contradictory ideals” have decisively shaped U.S. history. Gerstle skillfully keeps the contradiction in play throughout the text, neither condemning nor praising the United States. This attention to complexity is one reason why reviewers have called his work “insightful and nuanced” and “deeply textured.”
David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tightly focused history of labor relations in California specialty-crop agriculture from 1875 to 1920, is different in almost every way from American Crucible. But Vaught’s raisin, almond, and fruit growers faced a contradiction not unlike that of Theodore Roosevelt and his ideological descendents: they sought a dignified, independent, community-oriented life and business, while depending upon the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.
In what follows, I consider each work in turn, highlighting its major themes, evaluating its argument, and delineating what I take to be its most important contributions. Without attempting to pronounce a winner, since the books are competing in altogether different races, I will argue that in its narrow scope, mundane subject matter, and attention to detail, Vaught’s study provides a helpful perspective on Gerstle’s argument. While Gerstle soars over the American political and cultural landscape, Vaught digs into the agricultural and economic specifics, providing a view of Gerstle’s synthesis from the ground.
Tracing the contours of the twentieth-century American nation is a monumental task, even for 370 pages. Considering the breadth of his topic, Gerstle’s narrative is astonishingly “brisk”, as one reviewer put it. In part this coherence stems from Gerstle’s sharp focus on the two ideological traditions at the center of his analysis. Civic nationalism, for Gerstle, comprises beliefs in “the fundamental equality of all human beings, in every individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in a democratic government that derives its legitimacy from the people’s consent.” One has only to remember words from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to recognize this “ideological inheritance.” Racial nationalism, on the other hand, imagines the American nation as “a people held together by common blood and skin color and by an inherited fitness for self-government.” For Gerstle, this more ignoble tradition is as prominent in American history as civic nationalism, although less celebrated. These two themes seem immediately familiar and prove easy to keep track of throughout the text.
The first two chapters chronicle the genesis of what Gerstle calls “the Rooseveltian nation”, conceived in the 1890s by Theodore Roosevelt as both a civic and a racial entity. As a starting point, Roosevelt serves Gerstle well: his peculiar formulation of civic and racial nationalism sets the stage for the rest of the book. Roosevelt looms large over the rest of the book; in the apt phrase of one reviewer, his “ferocious energy seems to reach from the grave and grab hold of Gerstle’s imagination.” After a decade of “hardening the boundaries” of the racial nation during and following World War I (Chapter Three), Franklin Roosevelt takes the Rooseveltian nation out of the Depression and to its highest height in World War II (Chapters Four and Five). While the ascendancy of the civic nationalist vision during World War II is well-known—in no other time of war has the U.S. experienced such patriotic solidarity—Gerstle highlights the war’s racial character is well. Not only was U.S.-Japanese combat particularly savage, but the military was still segregated, and conflict between white and black servicemen was frequent. The World War II civic-nationalist consensus was maintained somewhat by the threat of communism during the Cold War (Chapter 6), but collapsed under the strain of two developments: a civil rights movement that laid bare the contradictions of the Rooseveltian vision, and a war in Vietnam that failed to live up to America’s civic ideals (Chapters 7 and 8). Gerstle concludes with a discussion of the 1980s “culture wars” between Reaganite conservatives and multiculturalists, arguing that the contradictory nature of American ideals has survived the death of the Rooseveltian nation.
American Crucible, as Gerstle acknowledges in his introduction, owes much to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson’s influence informs Gerstle’s themes, structure, and even his sources, so it is worth spending a little time on the original argument. A nation, for Anderson, is an “imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” It is imagined in that its members will never meet most of their fellow members; limited in that no nation includes all humanity; sovereign in its power over its members; and a community because in spite of real inequalities, “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.” This definition is what allows Gerstle to speak of two nationalisms within the United States. Nationalist loyalty, according to Anderson (and Gerstle) is not to a particular piece of land, nor to one’s immediate neighbors, but to a community in one’s imagination. American Crucible, then, is not a U.S. history but a history of two particularly powerful imaginings of the American nation.
According to Anderson, the rise of the nation and nationalism was occasioned by a “complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces,” two of which will be mentioned here. First was the decline of traditional religious cosmology. The nation stepped into this vacuum of purpose with the ability to transform “fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning,” as religion had once done. This transformation, for Anderson, helped explain the fanatical devotion many otherwise rational citizens held for their nation-states. But in explaining nationalism this way, Anderson assumes the inexorable decline of religion, an assumption that, given the explosion of Christianity and Islam in the developing world, seems hasty if not downright foolish. This assumption seems to be replicated in Gerstle’s work.
The rise of nationalism was also predicated in Anderson’s account by the development of print technology. Newspapers and novels, in particular, taught people to experience homogenous “empty time”, in which readers could imagine other people existing and acting simultaneously, even though they had no direct relationship with them. This emphasis on the power of the printed word helps to explain why Gerstle makes so much of popular art’s power to shape “the communal imagination.” Throughout the book, films, television, novels, and even comic strips are key sources for elucidating the imagined American nation.
A series of symbolic images propels Gerstle’s narrative; in this way American Crucible is a little like the movies that pepper its footnotes. Consider Theodore Roosevelt, leading his famed “Rough Riders”—all whites, but of diverse origins—to the top of San Juan Hill. It is the triumph of his vision of the military and America as a melting pot carefully controlled for an improved hybrid white race. But on San Juan Hill, Roosevelt found to his chagrin that his triumph was shared by numerous black troops who had also fought their way to the summit. This intractable “problem”—the presence of African-Americans who could neither be killed nor conquered—would haunt Roosevelt’s thoughts and political career. San Juan Hill is the symbol that explains Roosevelt’s vision.
In general the use of images, representations, and symbols works well for Gerstle. As rhetorical devices they enable him to describe complex phenomena in a relatively short amount of space, and they make it easier for the reader to “see” his argument. At times, however, the technique appears to make up for thin evidence. In describing the pressure on Italian-Americans to Americanize and “play by the rules” during the Cold War, Gerstle uses Joe DiMaggio as a symbol of success unprecedented for Italian-Americans (measured by his popularity and ability to marry the Nordic “sex goddess” Marilyn Monroe), allowable only because DiMaggio conformed to Anglo-American standards of “serene” and courtly behavior. Perhaps DiMaggio was under a lot of pressure not to “act Italian,” and perhaps he did “convey a potent message” about how to succeed in America, but Gerstle supplies no evidence to prove his point. DiMaggio is just a symbol of a larger argument.
As befits a history of two national imaginings, Gerstle takes ideas very seriously. In several cases he argues for the importance of a leader’s ideas over his political situation or material conditions. Thus, Theodore Roosevelt supported women’s suffrage not out of political necessity but because “it would ultimately strengthen men.” Similarly, while Gerstle grants that Roosevelt’s refusal to seat blacks at the Progressive Party convention was due partly to his attempt to court the favor of Southern whites, it was also illustrative of Roosevelt’s contradictory ideology.
For all this emphasis on ideology, however, religion receives surprisingly little attention. Sometimes Gerstle employs it as a kind of ethnicity, as in the multi-ethnic platoons of World War II movies that invariably included a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew. Elsewhere black churches “replaced unions” as centers of protest and community organization, and New Testament theology influenced Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commitment to racial equality. But even in the case of civil rights movement, Gerstle’s analysis of religion is rather limited. A work like David Chappell’s Stone of Hope, which argues for the centrality of what he calls “prophetic religion” to the success of the civil rights movement (and white resistance), suggests that Gerstle could have paid more attention to the religious beliefs of his subjects. Perhaps, like Anderson, Gerstle assumes that the power of religion has been all but replaced by secular loyalties to governments and cultural traditions.
Synthetic works, especially those on a national scale, will always struggle to contain within themselves the country’s complexities. American Crucible is no exception. As reviewer Francis Courvares points out, one example of this tendency to stretch explanations to make them fit his interpretation is Gerstle’s description of the New Deal’s limitations. The “ineradicable power of racial nationalism” only partially explains the shape of the New Deal, Courvares writes. One must also consider the power of special economic and even religious interests in “moderating or thwarting the New Deal’s more radical impulses.” Projecting racial nationalism onto Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush also seems like a stretch. The evidence for Bush’s racial nationalism is a 1988 television advertisement involving a black rapist. Here again, more attention to religion might have made for a more convincing story.
Probably Gerstle is aware of these limitations. He chose, after all, to tell the story of twentieth-century America as if racism and nationalism were its most important features. Gerstle does this so well that it is easy to be swept away by the power of his argument.
But of course racism and nationalism do not explain everything, and Vaught’s Cultivating California reminds us of this truism by showing how ideals and labor relations affected the real lives of specialty-crop growers and workers in four California communities. Vaught is trying to complicate what he sees as the one-sided story that took root with Carey McWilliams’ Factories in the Field, a muckraking exposé of California’s ruthless agribusinessmen that has only been reinforced by subsequent historiography. By Vaught’s account, he was going to write a book that similarly emphasized exploitive labor relations, until found something entirely surprising in the archives: California specialty-crop farmers thought of themselves not just as businessmen, but cultural leaders of close-knit communities in the Jeffersonian agrarian tradition. Cultivating California is a reply to what Vaught calls the “reductionist cultural materialism” of a historiography that has not appreciated the perspective of growers. Like Gerstle’s Rooseveltian liberals, they also faced a contradiction.
The growers’ dilemma lay in the fact that they relied upon a cheap, docile labor force in order to cultivate and harvest their finicky specialty crops. How could growers be cultural leaders of their specialty crop communities—which Vaught describes as “a specific ‘class of people’ pursuing a ‘pleasant and profitable’ life in microenvironments where water and other natural advantages were abundant”—when their success depended on poor transient whites, or worse, Asian workers who were outsiders to this community ideal? This contradiction was especially embarrassing in the context of tightened immigration restrictions around the turn of the twentieth century. Growers knew they needed immigrant labor to exist, yet in keeping with their vision of (white) self-sufficient communities, they felt compelled supported the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and the ban on Japanese immigration in the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907.
Not that the specialty-crop growers were monolithic in thinking about their labor problem. One of Vaught’s key points is that labor relations should be “analyzed in their agricultural context,” where diversity is the rule. Raisin growers in Fresno found that Chinese immigrants made “superior workers” for the delicate process of turning grapes into raisins, but they were well organized and could exert considerable pressure for increased wages. Fresh fruit growers in Newcastle also depended on Chinese labor, and their turn to tenancy instead of contract labor raised questions about growers’ “status as community guardians.” Hop growers in Wheatland were able to pay high wages to relatively unskilled labor at harvest time, with the result that labor “increasingly became a white, even middle class undertaking.” Almond growers also had more flexibility in their labor relations, since their crop was less perishable. Labor relations bedeviled all growers at one time or another, but in very different ways.
Vaught convincingly dispels the stereotype of California agriculturalists as profit-worshiping labor lords—like Gerstle’s, his work also wins praise as “nuanced and complex.” California’s horticulturalists were “reluctant moderns”, as one reviewer put it, with their own set of economic and environmental pressures. Vaught is very sympathetic to their plight, and there may be a subtle polemic at work in the very lack of alternatives available to growers. Unlike Gerstle, who emphasizes the opportunities missed by Theodore Roosevelt and others to articulate a more racially inclusive civic nationalism, there is no “moment of hope” in Cultivating California, no beacon of righteous labor relations that might have suggested a way forward for the growers.
But Vaught’s revision leads us back to the original problem of defining the origins of California’s labor conflict. In the older exploitation interpretation, the cause is clear: greedy capitalists monopolized the land, creating the conditions for exploitation. Vaught never spells it out clearly. Were poor labor relations a result of a racial ideal contained within the growers’ horticultural ideal? Or was it a case of environmental determinism in which the crops dictated the labor conflict? Considering his promise to illuminate farm labor relations, it would have been helpful if Vaught could have addressed some of these questions.
Still, Cultivating California provides an important reminder: ideas need to be grounded in material conditions. In the triumphs and tribulations of Vaught’s specialty crop growers, we see the day-to-day negotiation of ideal and reality, both of which are dependent on a specific agricultural context: a crop, a marketing arrangement, a labor regime, and a way of life. By examining the growers’ quandary in such detail, Vaught sheds light on the broader contradiction delineated by Gerstle: the curious coexistence of an inclusive, egalitarian civic vision with oppression and inequality.
NOTES
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5.
Francis G. Couvares, “Liberalism, Nation, And Race”, Reviews in American History 30, no. 1 (2002): 152; Susan Curtis, “Fusing and Refusing American Nationalism”, American Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2002): 318.
Couvares, 150.
Gerstle, 4.
Gerstle, 4.
Couvares, 150.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
Anderson, 7.
Anderson, 4.
Anderson, 11.
Anderson, 24.
Gerstle, 5.
Gerstle, 264.
Gerstle, 266.
Gerstle, 59.
Gerstle, 264.
David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Couvares, 152.
Gerstle, 358-359.
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939).
David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8.
Vaught, 44.
Vaught, 9.
Vaught, 72.
Vaught, 86.
Vaught, 90.
Carlos A. Schwantes, review of Vaught, Cultivating California, in The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (June 2001), 236.
David Igler, review of Vaught, Cultivating California, in Agricultural History 75, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 263.
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