To study American history is to chart the paradox of e pluribus unum.
From the outset, it is a story of conflict and compromise, of economic, social, and cultural contests filtered through regional antagonism. But despite these divisions, Americans built the wealthiest and most powerful empire in human history. For even as North and South grew further apart, their yawning divide was bridged by a dynamism that fed U.S. independence, enrichment, and expansion. The new empire at once grew rapaciously and tore itself apart. As it strode from ocean to ocean, it nearly consumed itself completely in the Civil War.
The Union victory ended Southern political secession. But cultural cohesion and a unified American identity would take another century.
After the bloody crucible, a series of historical forces began to homogenize the American people, slowly drawing them together and developing a more cohesive national culture.
The first step-towards building a unified, post-war American identity came at the expense of African Americans and other minorities. By the latter part of the 19th century, the formerly hostile Northern and Southern white population had found common ground in a new brand of virulent, pseudo-scientific racism. It infected American culture as whites put aside their former differences, elevated themselves above all of the “colored races,” and defined themselves as the true Americans.
While regional differences remained sharp, racism became the bedrock of a new American identity that was decidedly white. This left minorities on the outside looking in.
In the South, African Americans remained extremely marginalized. In the North, Jewish, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox immigrants, whose numbers swelled beginning in 1900, were defined as the non-white Other. And in the West, a kaleidoscope of bigotry proliferated across the vast region. Hatred of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Indians each grabbed the spotlight in various locales from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast.
Those groups thought to be redeemable, such as Indians and some European immigrants, were pressured to assimilate by adopting White Anglo Saxon Protestant norms. At the same time, groups marked as irreconcilably foreign or inferior, such as blacks and Asians, were completely shunned. Asian immigration was banned in the 1880s. Shortly thereafter, blacks were
subjected to Jim Crow apartheid in the South and parts of the West, and more de facto but still very strict forms of segregation elsewhere.
By 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt was warning the nation that white people were in danger of committing “race suicide.” That “white” women had a duty to produce more and more white babies, lest the non-white population (including southern and eastern European immigrants) outpace them.
But beyond race, other more neutral forces also helped smooth out regional differences and establish a unified sense of what it meant to be “American.”
Crowded cities promoted cultural mixing. Developments in transportation, particularly the railroad, brought North, South, and West into greater contact. So too did the new communications technologies such as the telephone. Also important was the new mass media. First national magazines and newspaper syndication, then radio and film, presented people all across the American empire with consistent cultural messages. And new corporations standardized the work environment and eventually consumer culture as well.
Homogenization was underway.
As all of these factors helped break down regional divisions, the pivotal event that began to move the United States past a racialized American identity was World War II.
By the 1940s, Jews and Italians had begun to follow the Irish example. They were finally being accepted as “white.”
However, for those groups society deemed incapable of transcending whiteness, such as African Americans and many Latinos, it was a taller hill to climb. But WWII opened the door for them to claim at least a version of Americaness. The war demanded sacrifices from the whole of society. Under this pressure, racial institutions and programs began to crack. For example, black and white often worked side by side in defense plants.
Unsurprisingly, violent resistance soon followed. In the summer of 1943, approximately 250 race riots erupted in 47 cities across America.
But there was no turning back. You couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. After the war blacks, Latinos, Indians, women, gays, and others waged the civil rights movements that challenged the exclusivist definition of “American.”
At the same time, mass communication and popular culture furthered the grand homogenizing process, with TV at center stage. And in the political arena, the Cold War continued WWII’s function of binding Americans together through fear of a common enemy.
As Americans reconceptualized their whites-only version of identity during the post-war era, they developed the Melting Pot model of American identity: all the different cultures blending together into a distinctly American stew, though with WASP as the dominant flavor.
By the 1980s, the acceptance of non-white Americans went even further as multiculturalism began to assert itself. The Melting Pot metaphor was replaced by the Salad Bowl, in which all the different ingredients are still distinctly identifiable and each contributes to the greater whole.
That’s not to say racism and sectionalism had been completely erased from the American psyche by the end of the 20th century. Far from it. But both had faded greatly compared to earlier eras. And indeed, by the dawn of the 21st century, the popular definition of what it meant to be “American” had broadened considerably.
Yet here we stand, in the 2013, staggered by divisions among Americans so deep that we wonder aloud if the national political system can remain 
functional. We are nearly drowning in a cacophony of shouting matches. That hard won but ever tenuous inclusion and oneness is beginning to disintegrate. America is possibly coming apart once more.
Of course there is no fear of returning to a bygone era of balkanized sectional divides, of North versus South. The new fractures aren’t the result of provincial and chauvinistic regionalism, or even debased racism. Rather, the nation is segmented by a new spider web of ideological differences.
Certainly there have always ideological differences. And in a nation that now boasts well over 300 million people, there always will be. But those differences are on the verge of overtaking any sense of national consensus and rupturing the common ground upon which Americans stand.
Many of the forces that previously helped to homogenize the American people are either radically transformed or now absent.
- The Cold War is over while Iraq wars and Al Qaeda attacks can no longer stand in as suitable substitutes.
- Multiculturalism maybe superior to the mid-century melting pot motif in many ways, but it offers no unifying vision for what it means to be “American.”
- And communication technologies have exploded. What Ma Bell and Hollywood helped bring together, cable and the world wide web have helped tear asunder. The cultural monoliths that once enjoined Americans through a common experience, have been eclipsed by the new fractured and individualized media.
Many of those homogenizing forces that once helped to moderate American opinion have been honeycombed, creating ideological and cultural cells into which Americans are now free to descend.
This essay is not a moralistic polemic. I am not in league with the 1990s social critics who decried multiculturalism as a divisive force and pined to maintain whatever degree of homogeneity they could.
Or as historian Arthur Schlesinger put it, there was too much pluribus and not enough unum.
Well pish posh to that. I’m not pie-eyed. Change brings bot
h good and bad.
I don’t know where this change will lead America, good bad or otherwise. And I’m a historian by trade, which means I appreciate how foolhardy it is to predict the future. But indeed, the change is unfolding before us.
Americans, it seems, are unbecoming.