Other Europeans saw the American political system—none of them called it a culture, let alone a civic culture—as the most distinctive feature of American life and the one that made Americans a nation. John Stuart Mill, who was influenced by Tocqueville’s great work (he reviewed it in 1835 and 1840), saw that by encouraging the practice of civic responsibility, Americans, as vestrymen, jurymen, and electors, lifted their ideas and feelings out of a narrow circle. Mill wrote of Tocqueville that he showed how the American was “made to feel that besides the interests which separate him from his fellow citizens, he has interests which connect him with them; that not only the common weal is his weal but that it partly depends upon his exertion.”8 In his classic work On Representative Government, Mill observed, “for political life is indeed in America a most valuable school.”9 Almost all European travelers to the United States, he noted, observed that every American is in some sense a patriot. Paraphrasing Tocqueville without acknowledging him in this instance, he continued, “it is from political discussion and collective political action that one whose daily occupations concentrate his interests in a small circle round himself, learns to feel for and with his fellow citizens, and becomes consciously a member of a great community.”
Like Tocqueville, Mill pointed out that when some are excluded from the exercise of civil rights they will become either permanent malcontents “or will feel as one whom the general affairs of society do not concern.”10 Without mentioning American slaves, he pointed out that everyone is degraded in an otherwise free society when some persons are not permitted to participate in its deliberations.
Americans were united not just by the political principles of the republic or even the exercise of civil rights, but also by the symbols and rituals that gave emotional significance to their patriotism: speeches about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; celebrations on the Fourth of July; the naming of towns, counties, and cities and the writing of songs to honor the apostles of the American myth (Washington, Jefferson, and later Lincoln). Much later, Americans would add ritual incantations (the Pledge of Allegiance, “God Bless America,” “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “The Star-Spangled Banner”).
Americans were members of a political community that political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba labeled a “civic culture” in 1965, a political culture in which “there is a substantial consensus on the legitimacy of political institutions and the direction and content of public policy, a widespread tolerance of a plurality of interests and belief in their reconcilability, and a widely distributed sense of political competence and mutual trust in the citizenry.”11 When Almond and Verba asked respondents in five democratic countries to list the things about their country of which they were most proud, 85 percent of the American respondents mentioned governmental and political institutions, compared to 46 percent in the British sample, 30 percent of the Mexicans, 7 percent of the Germans, and 3 percent of the Italians. Much more than the others, Americans reported that a good citizen is one who actively participates in community affairs.12
The civic culture was based essentially—though Almond and Verba did not make the analysis—on three ideas widely held by the founders of the republic, the ideas that constituted the basis of what they called republicanism: first, that ordinary men and women can be trusted to govern themselves through their elected representatives, who are accountable to the people; second, that all who live in the political community (essentially, adult white males at the time) are eligible to participate in public life as equals; and third, that individuals who comport themselves as good citizens of the civic culture are free to differ from each other in religion and in other aspects of their private lives.
That third idea was the basis for a kind of voluntary pluralism in which immigrant settlers from Europe and their progeny were free to maintain affection for and loyalty to their ancestral religions and cultures while at the same time claiming an American identity by embracing the founding myths and participating in the political life of the republic. It was a system of pluralism that began, principally, in colonial Pennsylvania, where immigrants of various nationalities and religious backgrounds moved with relative ease into political life. This new invention of Americans—voluntary pluralism—in which individuals were free to express their ancestral affections and sensibilities, to choose to be ethnic, however and whenever they wished or not at all by moving across group boundaries easily, was sanctioned and protected by a unifying civic culture based on the American founding myth, its institutions, heroes, rules, and rhetoric.
The system would not be severely tested as long as most immigrants were English or Scots. The new republic, as George Washington said in his farewell address, was united by “the same religion, manners, habits and political principles.”13 But differences in religion, habits, and manners proliferated after the immigration of large numbers of Germans (many of whom were Catholic), Scandinavians, and Irish Catholics throughout the last sixty years of the nineteenth century, and of eastern and southern Europeans, a majority of whom were Catholic or Jewish, in the decade before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Political principles remained the core of national community. The new immigrants entered a process of ethnic-Americanization through participation in the political system, and, in so doing, established even more clearly the American civic culture as a basis of American unity.
Chapter One
“TRUE AMERICANISM”
The Foundations of the Civic Culture
JACOB De La Motta was only thirty-one but already a distinguished doctor with a substantial practice in Savannah, Georgia, and other cities when he was chosen to give the address at the consecration of a new synagogue in Savannah on July 21, 1820. The physician wondered at the good fortune of Jews in the new republic, who, for the first time in history, “stood on the same eminence with other sects.” So taken was La Motta with his own discourse, in which he praised the Constitution as the “palladium of our rights,” that he sent it to ex-presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two of the most distinguished living Americans. Within a month, Madison thanked him for the copy of his talk, pointing out that the experience of the Jews in Savannah showed that “equal laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country.” A few weeks later, Jefferson wrote that he saw confirmation of two fundamental truths in La Motta’s letter: “that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is ‘divided we stand, united, we fall.’” The sage of Monticello hoped that Jews would soon be “taking their seats … at the board of government.”1
Jews, who had been expelled from every major nation of Europe, and who, when permitted to live in them, were usually denied fundamental rights, by 1820 had become active in the politics of several communities in the U.S.2 Although they came from different national backgrounds and religious orientations and were scattered throughout the country, Jews were developing a surer, clearer sense of their relationship to other Jews in the country—becoming ethnic—while at the same time developing a growing sense of loyalty to the U.S. in a process of ethnic-Americanization that was first nurtured mainly in colonial Pennsylvania.
Three Ideas About Immigrants and Membership: Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania idea was that all white European settlers were welcome into the colony on terms of equal rights. Fueled by the desire of early white settlers for additional immigrants to build a nation and generate prosperity, the Pennsylvania idea would become the basis for U.S. immigration and naturalization policy for white Europeans after the founding of the republic. But the Pennsylvania idea was in competition with two other ideas, the first of which gained prominence in colonial Massachusetts, and the second mainly in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland, called here the Virginia idea. To oversimplify: Pennsylvania sought immigrants