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Civic IdeaIs ConJIicling Visions oJ CilizensIip in U. S. Hislov I Bogevs M. SnilI Beviev I Luc SaIev Lav and Hislov Beviev, VoI. 19, No. 3 |Aulunn, 2001), pp. 698-699 FuIIisIed I American Society for Legal History SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/744290 . Accessed 06/01/2013 1717 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . American Society for Legal History and The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Law and History Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 17:17:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Law and History Review, Fall 2001 Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. His- tory, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. 736. $40.00 (ISBN 0-300- 06989-8); $21.00 paper (ISBN 0-300-07877-3). In Civic Ideals, Rogers Smith takes aim against the "misleading orthodoxy on American civic identity" perpetuated not only by popular culture but also by ma- jor political thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and later historians, most no- tably, Louis Hartz, who emphasize the United States' "equality of condition" as the prime determinant of American democratic political culture. According to this view, American citizenship is distinctively liberal in basing membership on con- sent and allegiance to political principles rather than on race, religion, gender, or national origins. Smith undertakes his comprehensive history of citizenship in the United States to show that while at certain points in American history-the Revolutionary peri- od, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s-liberal dem- ocratic principles have triumphed for a time, competing and less admirable "civic traditions" have often had more sway over American law and policy. "Through most of U.S. history," Smith argues, "lawmakers pervasively and unapologetically struc- tured U.S. citizenship in terms of illiberal and undemocratic racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies, for reasons rooted in basic, enduring imperatives of political life" (1). Smith sees political elites playing a crucial role in the creation of civic identity as leaders need "a population that imagines itself to be a 'people';.. . they need a people that imagines itself in ways that make leadership by those aspirants appropriate" (6). All too often, political leaders have relied upon "civic myths" that rest on what Smith calls "inegalitarian, ascriptive" definitions of membership in their effort to build constituencies with a common identity. These more exclusive conceptions of American citizenship have shaped much of the law on American citizenship, as Smith dramatically points out: "For over 80 percent of U.S. histo- ry, American laws declared most people in the world ineligible to become full U.S. citizens, solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender" (15). Smith bases his argument upon an overview of the history of American citizen- ship between 1798 and 1912, divided into chronological periods paralleling ma- jor shifts in political party control. In each period, he explores the competing civ- ic ideologies advanced by political actors, the visions that succeed, and the resulting legal constructions of citizenship. Smith has ample evidence to support his major claim that U.S. citizenship law has been plagued by contradictions and irrational- ity as it responded to "a variety of political imperatives" (35). It has not been un- usual for political parties to advance both liberal democratic and inegalitarian as- criptive arguments. Jeffersonian Republicans, for example, emphasized citizenship as a matter of mutual consent, yet also promoted an "aggressive civic racism"; Jacksonian Democrats were "more openly racist, but also more radically libertar- ian and more militantly republican than any [party] in U.S. history" (138, 201). The Jacksonian era witnessed the achievement of universal white male suffrage and the popularization of party politics and, at the same time, the disfranchisement of African Americans, the relegation of Indians to the status of dependent wards, and the denial of political rights to women. Smith also debunks the whiggish nar- 698 This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 17:17:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ratives that argue that the American polity has progressively shed its discrimina- tory policies and come to a more thorough realization of the liberal democratic principles first embraced by the nation's founders. Rather than a story of steady progress, Smith relates a history with significant fluctuations, each period of signifi- cant reform and liberalization of citizenship law being followed by a period of reaction and inegalitarianism. While the story Smith tells will not come as a surprise to social and political historians, his primary purpose is to provide critical historical perspective to con- temporary discussions about the present and future state of American civic identi- ty. That object is most apparent in the last chapter of the book. Here Smith focus- es on the limits and possibilities of liberal democratic theory, a theory he believes is worth bolstering as it offers "more potential than any other alternative to pro- vide paths to greater human material prosperity, personal security and happiness, domestic and international peace, and intellectual and spiritual progress" (489). The essential problem of American liberalism, according to Smith, is that it has failed to acknowledge and address "the political imperatives that have structured U.S. civic identity and nation-building more broadly" (472). In particular, liberalism has been unable to provide Americans with a satisfying answer to central questions concerning American national identity: What makes Americans distinct? Who are we as a people? What is our shared identity? Answering those questions in a man- ner that affirms liberal democratic theory without slipping into claims of Ameri- can exceptionalism or creating civic myths that exclude in discriminatory ways is tricky. Trying to find the foundation for a liberal democratic civic identity, Smith turns, as other recent thinkers have, to Americans' shared historical past. What makes the United States unique, Smith argues, is its existence as a "distinct his- torical entity, . . with a linked set of compelling stories that are very much of its own, ... that genuinely transcends any and all of the individuals who ever have or ever will participate in it" (497). Given the history related by Smith-one dom- inated by conflict, narrow-mindedness, and inegalitarianism-his choice of the past as a rallying point for American civic identity is curious. Smith does not believe that an emphasis on a shared past would necessarily degenerate into "inspiration- al history" and the creation of new civic myths. He wants us to look American history in the eye, with all of its warts and imperfections as well as its accomplish- ments, and to come away determined "to write a happy ending, or a least a better next chapter" (499). Lucy Salyer University of New Hampshire David Kyvig, Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1995, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. xx+ 604. $55.00 (ISBN 0-7006-0792-7). After two decades of sustained attacks on judicial activism and judicial suprema- cy-what critics regard as defacto amendment of the Constitution by the Supreme Court-David Kyvig has produced a comprehensive history of the formal amend- ratives that argue that the American polity has progressively shed its discrimina- tory policies and come to a more thorough realization of the liberal democratic principles first embraced by the nation's founders. Rather than a story of steady progress, Smith relates a history with significant fluctuations, each period of signifi- cant reform and liberalization of citizenship law being followed by a period of reaction and inegalitarianism. While the story Smith tells will not come as a surprise to social and political historians, his primary purpose is to provide critical historical perspective to con- temporary discussions about the present and future state of American civic identi- ty. That object is most apparent in the last chapter of the book. Here Smith focus- es on the limits and possibilities of liberal democratic theory, a theory he believes is worth bolstering as it offers "more potential than any other alternative to pro- vide paths to greater human material prosperity, personal security and happiness, domestic and international peace, and intellectual and spiritual progress" (489). The essential problem of American liberalism, according to Smith, is that it has failed to acknowledge and address "the political imperatives that have structured U.S. civic identity and nation-building more broadly" (472). In particular, liberalism has been unable to provide Americans with a satisfying answer to central questions concerning American national identity: What makes Americans distinct? Who are we as a people? What is our shared identity? Answering those questions in a man- ner that affirms liberal democratic theory without slipping into claims of Ameri- can exceptionalism or creating civic myths that exclude in discriminatory ways is tricky. Trying to find the foundation for a liberal democratic civic identity, Smith turns, as other recent thinkers have, to Americans' shared historical past. What makes the United States unique, Smith argues, is its existence as a "distinct his- torical entity, . . with a linked set of compelling stories that are very much of its own, ... that genuinely transcends any and all of the individuals who ever have or ever will participate in it" (497). Given the history related by Smith-one dom- inated by conflict, narrow-mindedness, and inegalitarianism-his choice of the past as a rallying point for American civic identity is curious. Smith does not believe that an emphasis on a shared past would necessarily degenerate into "inspiration- al history" and the creation of new civic myths. He wants us to look American history in the eye, with all of its warts and imperfections as well as its accomplish- ments, and to come away determined "to write a happy ending, or a least a better next chapter" (499). Lucy Salyer University of New Hampshire David Kyvig, Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1995, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. xx+ 604. $55.00 (ISBN 0-7006-0792-7). After two decades of sustained attacks on judicial activism and judicial suprema- cy-what critics regard as defacto amendment of the Constitution by the Supreme Court-David Kyvig has produced a comprehensive history of the formal amend- Book Reviews Book Reviews 699 699 This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 17:17:26 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions