In this classic interpretation of the 1930s rise of industrial unionism, Gary Gerstle challenges the popular historical notion that American workers' embrace of "Americanism" and other patriotic sentiments in the post-World War I years indicated their fundamental political conservatism. He argues that Americanism was a complex, even contradictory, language of nationalism that lent itself to a wide variety of ideological constructions in the years between World War I and the onset of the Cold War. Using the rich and textured material left behind by New England's most powerful textile union--the Independent Textile Union of Woonsocket, Rhode Island--Gerstle uncovers for the first time a more varied and more radical working-class discourse.

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER 1 Theodore Roosevelt's Racialized Nation, 1890-1900 14
A History of the American "Race" 17
War, Renewal, and the Problem of the "Smoked Yankee" 25.
CHAPTER 2 Civic Nationalism and Its Contradictions, 1890-1917 44
"True Americanism" 47
Racial Dilemmas 59
The New Nationalism 65
CHAPTER 3 Hardening the Boundaries of the Nation, 1917-1929 81
War and Discipline 83
"Keeping Pure the Blood of America" 95
Civic Nationalism in the New Racial Regime 115
Aborting the New Nationalism 122
CHAPTER 4 The Rooseveltian Nation Ascendant, 1930-1940 128
A Kinder and Gentler Nation Builder 131
Radicalizing the Civic Nationalist Creed 139
Conservative Counterattack 156
The Survival of Racialized Nationalism 162
CHAPTER 5 Good War,Race War,1941-1945 187
The Good War 189
Race War 201
"Something Drastic Should Be Done" The Military's Hidden Race War 210
Combat and White Male Comradeship 220
CHAPTER 6 The Cold War, Anticommunism, and Nation in Flux, 1946-1960 238
War, Repression, and Nation Building 241
The Red Scare and the Decline of Racial Nationalism 246
Racial Nationalism Redux: The Case of Immigration Reform 256
CHAPTER 7 Civil Rights, White Resistance, and Black Nationalism, 1960-1968 268
Civil Rights and Civic Nationalism 270
"I Question America" The Crisis in Atlantic City 286
"Speaking as a Victim of This American System" 295
CHAPTER 8 Vietnam, Cultural Revolt, and the Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation, 1968-1975 311
A Catastrophic War 313
The Spread of Anti-Americanism and the Revolt against Assimilation 327
The Collapse of the Rooseveltian Nation 342
EPILOGUE Beyond the Rooseveltian Nation, 1975-2000 347
Varieties of Multiculturalism 349
"A Springtime of Hope" Ronald Reagan and the Nationalist Renaissance 357
Reviving the Liberal Nation 365
Notes 375
Index 439

Gary Gerstle
With a new preface by the author