In these blogposts, I discuss questions and issues that students have raised in my classrooms during the previous semester. They are good springboards to classroom discussions/debates about the Revolution, American history, and history itself.
Virtually everyone who approaches the study of American history – in the United States and abroad – already knows that Americans are different. They have their own sports, a quirky political culture and unique political institutions, a distinctive approach to criminal justice, an attachment to religion that stands out among Western nations, a materialist and consumerist ethos, and a pop culture that is easily identifiable as American (from rock ‘n roll, jazz, soul, hip hop, and country music to Hollywood blockbusters, westerns, comic books, talk radio, and daytime soaps). It is no surprise, therefore, that perhaps the most prominent theme that students all over the world learn in classes on early-American history is the formation of American identity – when and how did American society become distinctively American, featuring uniquely American manners, philosophical and political sensibilities, religiosity, and sociology.
Most historians hold that life in colonial America gradually reshaped English settlers’ habits, mores, values, and beliefs. According to this view, Americans gradually formed their own cultural traits, as the colonies drifted away from English influence. The result of this process of Americanization was an American impulse to secede from the British Empire. Other scholars – mostly specialists on colonial America (myself included) – see the settlers as conventional Englishmen. These historians argue that settlers retained their English identity, patriotism, customs, and sensibilities; their rebellion was not the product of gradual and continual Americanization, and their uniquely-American identity took form mostly after independence, in the 19th and 20th centuries, rather than in the colonial era.
The framework of Americanization as the driver of the American Revolution is as prominent abroad as it is in the United States. First, students (both foreign and domestic) are introduced to colonial and Revolutionary America already pre-loaded with the knowledge that the United States is today a distinctive and idiosyncratic country, and one with a unique role in the world – a technological, cultural, economic, and military superpower. They are therefore encouraged to identify colonial antecedents to the distinctive path the United States later took as an independent nation.
Moreover, it makes intuitive anthropological sense that the American environment would reshape the culture of European settlers. After all, we expect peoples living in different environments – hot versus cold, mountainous versus flat, arid versus fertile – to differ from one another culturally. In 1782, a French settler in New York (Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, naturalized as John Hector St. John) explained to European readers in his Letters from an American Farmer that Americans are Europeans who had been transformed by America itself: “Europeans submit insensibly to these great powers [of environment], and become, in the course of a few generations, not only Americans in general, but either Pennsylvanians, Virginians, or provincials under some other name. […] The inhabitants of Canada, Massachusetts, the middle provinces, [and] the southern ones will be as different as their climates.”
(Adolf Hitler famously expressed a similar assessment of the cultural impact of America’s physical environment. In explaining why Eastern Europe is the proper site for German settlement, he stressed that only in Eastern Europe’s cold climate can the German character persist unchanged: “Transplant a German to Kiev, and he remains a perfect German. But transplant him to Miami, and you make a degenerate of him – in other words, an American.”)
Historians and other observers have provided variants of Crèvecoeur’s explanation for the development of American identity ever since, examining not only the influence of America’s geography, topography, climate, flora, and fauna, but also the transformative effects of America’s social environment (for example, its racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, its cheap land and high wages, slavery, and the absence of a legal aristocracy). Many scholars thus hold that American ethical, religious, and political sensibilities were formed in America, reflecting the colonies’ unique demographics and economics.
Other colonial scholars remain skeptical of the Americanization thesis, however. While there is no denying that environment does shape culture, one should keep in mind also that culture shapes the environment. The question is which force is more pervasive. In the American case, there is evidence that colonial America was marked more by forces of Anglicization than Americanization. English settlers in America prospered and multiplied because they gradually Anglicized America to become less foreign; to become a place that would sustain pre-existing English patterns of settlement, agriculture, manufacturing, trade, and social and civic organization.
The English carried to America not only people, animals, and plants, but also an English culture. The settlers transformed America – Anglicized it – through military conquest, farming, animal husbandry, logging, settlement, and civil engineering. Thus, as frontier demographics and economics gave way to more conventional patterns of English life, colonial settlements and colonial culture became more recognizably English. This allowed Anglo-American settlers to retain their English identity, customs, values, and beliefs. When one considers family life, home furnishings, fashions, technologies, religious practices, civic and political life, law, agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, the colonies were not drifting away from Britain’s sphere of cultural influence. To the contrary, the Empire encompassed a truly transatlantic civilization. Indeed, the settlers eventually rebelled because they were British, not because they had taken on a new identity or political creed. Their complaints about arbitrary power on the eve of the American Revolution repeated the traditionalist complaints of British rebels during the English Civil War (1642-51), the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the two Jacobite revolts of 1715 and 1745.
* * * * *
Because U.S. History classes are designed as national histories, virtually all U.S. History textbooks (both K-12 and college) employ the narrative of Americanization to help students understand how American colonists formed their own ideas, beliefs, and practices, and why they separated themselves from their mother country. This approach makes use of hindsight to explain the country’s founding, identifying for students colonial antecedents of the Revolution – Puritan separatism, the Mayflower Compact, the economic and cultural dynamics of the frontier, imperial restrictions on American trade and manufacturing, the rise of colonial assemblies, the development of American racial attitudes and practices, the Great Awakening, Albany Plan, Braddock’s defeat, and the like. These textbooks thus tell a story of America’s physical and social environment gradually transforming English settlers into Americans. It is this process of Americanization that differentiated and distanced the settlers from their mother country.
What is obscured in this conventional account is the colonists’ own understanding of the origins, causes, and ends of their Revolution. English settlers in America did not display or perceive a growing sense of alienation or distance from England during the 17th and 18th centuries. They referred to themselves as British, they took patriotic pride in Britain’s accomplishments on the world stage, and they saw themselves as integral components of a British civilization. Moreover, even as they resisted Parliament’s imperial policies in the 1760s and ‘70s, settlers understood and explained their resistance as conventionally English – they understood themselves not as agents of change, but as upholding traditional English practices and liberties. Like British rebels in 1642, 1688, 1715, and 1745, they were trying to preserve the old established order, rather than create a new order or a new system of government. Only during and after the war did Americans develop their own national identity, including a new system of government.
As the settlers understood it, they rebelled because they were English, not because they had gained a new and different identity. They saw their political resistance and subsequent rebellion as products of their English inheritance, not of uniquely American sensibilities that they had acquired by living in America. Indeed, the settlers’ beliefs regarding self-government, arbitrary power, law, law enforcement, and criminal justice were mainstream beliefs not only in the colonies, but also in Britain.
The Americanization debate is significant for anyone interested in American history. It determines whether the ideas we associate with the American Revolution were created in America or transported to America; whether America Americanized English settlers or was Anglicized by them; whether American traits and mores were made in America or carried to America and preserved there; whether centrifugal forces drew the colonies away from Britain, or were the colonies increasingly integrated into a transatlantic British civilization; whether Revolutionists were trying to create a new political system or preserve an old one; and whether the Revolutionary era is a story about change or a story about resistance to change.
More generally, the Americanization debate raises the question of whether people from the past are reliable witnesses to their own motivations and beliefs. If they are, then historians should investigate past societies through the eyes of contemporaries, channeling how they themselves understood their actions. If they are unreliable witnesses, however, then historians must use hindsight, comparative models, and integrated data to identify forces (such as Americanization) that were hidden from contemporaries but nevertheless shaped their ideas and actions. Awareness of what is gained and lost in each method of investigation reveals to students that history is a more contentious and active endeavor than a simple chronicling of things that happened in the past.
Comments