CIVIC IDEALS: CONFLICTING VISIONS OF CITIZENSHIP IN U.S. HISTORY by Rogers M. Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. 719pp. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 0-300-06989-8.

Reviewed by Michael McCann, Department of Political Science, University of Washington.

Rogers Smith’s CIVIC IDEALS is a huge book in many ways. It is massive in size (719 total pages), extensively documented (137 pp. of notes), grand in its aspirations, bold in its arguments, and highly significant in its achievement. Given the large proportions of the volume, my review will be divided into three sections. The first segment provides a summary of the book’s central claims and the historical evidence provided to support them. A second section follows with a critical assessment of Smith’s argument. I conclude in the third section with some comments about the book’s relevance for public law scholarship and teaching.

A SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK.

Smith’s general contentions are neatly summarized in the opening chapter. His analysis begins from the premise that aspiring leaders must craft civic ideologies or "myths" of an "imagined community" to mobilize public support. These myths or narratives of collective identity not only facilitate effective leadership, Smith insists, they shape, or "constitute," the very character of the polity as well. Such civic myths of nation building, moreover, can be either benign or malign; they may be "noble" or "ignoble, ugly lies" (p. 34).

Building on this general understanding, Smith proceeds to challenge the "misleading orthodoxy" among intellectuals stipulating that the dominant civic ideology crafted by America’s leaders has been "liberal" in character. Smith contends that this orthodoxy originated with Tocqueville’s famous analysis of democracy in America and was revitalized by modern social scientists such as Gunnar Myrdal and Louis Hartz. The core contention of this familiar account is that Americans, lacking feudal traditions and "born equal," from the start have overwhelmingly accepted the principles of universal citizenship, popular consent, and equal treatment for all individuals under the law. Most advocates of this position do not overlook that the great majority of adults within our borders --especially "nonwhite, nonmale, non-Christian, nonheterosexual" person-- have been excluded from full citizenship rights and subordinated to minority rule during most of our history. Rather, such scholars usually have explained this fact as the result of either: lingering residue from pre-liberal social forms ("belated feudalism"); the dark underside of liberal ideology itself; or prejudice, selfishness, and political "interests." The problem, Smith argues, is that such perspectives greatly "minimize" the role of racism, sexism, and nativism by relegating them to the status of largely inarticulate, hidden motivations undermining fidelity to our espoused creed, while at the same time exaggerating the preeminence of liberalism itself in that creed.

This critique sets the stage for Smith’s substantive reinterpretations of American political history. First, he argues that American society has been guided by "multiple" ideological traditions rather than a singular tradition. Specifically, our nation’s cultural fabric has been woven together by three separate ideological threads: liberalism, "democratic republicanism," and "inegalitarian ascriptive Americanism." Whereas the first two traditions are likely to be familiar to most readers, Smith defines the third tradition by its commitment that "‘true’ Americans are ‘chosen’ by God, history, or nature to possess superior moral and intellectual traits associated with their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation." (p. 508, fn 5). What is gained by this general typology is the recognition that "blatant," "constitutive" ideological commitments to illiberal exclusionary practices from the start have coexisted with liberal democratic commitments in authoritative public debates over, and legal definitions of, American citizenship (pp. 15, 28).

Smith’s challenge to the "hegemonic liberalism" thesis runs deeper yet. In short, he argues that liberal democratic values have historically been at a decided disadvantage in mobilizing support from constituents. The reason is that liberal values ask much of people --to be rational, industrious, self reliant, and respectful of others-- while offering them little sense of distinctive membership in a larger group. By contrast, ascriptive norms both rationalize inherited patterns of privilege and offer individuals the prospect that, "regardless of their personal achievements and economic status, their inborn characteristics make them part of a special community" that is "distinctively and permanently worthy" (p. 38). Smith acknowledges that liberal commitments have "checked" the appeal of ascriptive doctrines and inspired democratic reform at various historical junctures, most dramatically in the last half of the twentieth century. But such moments of liberal ascendance are generally short-lived and we can see about us today much evidence for the continuing allure of exclusionary ideals.

The bulk of the book aims to explore and to demonstrate these claims through close interrogation of American political history. Smith surveys two interrelated types of primary data as the basis for his argument. His most original empirical contribution entails an exhaustive examination of citizenship laws --including all the federal statutes and over 2,500 federal district, circuit, and Supreme Court decisions-- that constituted the American civic community from 1798 until 1912. In addition, Smith discusses the ideas regarding citizenship publicly espoused by important political leaders and intellectuals throughout much of U.S. history as well. This produces an unabashedly "top down" view of American political life that is appropriate for the author’s argument about nation building. To his credit, Smith emphasizes contesting claims among prominent elites at each historical juncture, including those by prominent representatives of marginalized groups.

This "descriptive and explanatory" historical study is developed in chapters Two through Twelve. These chapters address familiarly defined eras in chronological order from the colonial to the Progressive periods. Summarizing these 400 pages would be impossible in the space allotted here. I can, however, at least hint at the riches that the author offers the reader. For one thing, Smith never loses track of his central mission to demonstrate that U.S. citizenship laws and public discourse "have always expressed illiberal, undemocratic ascriptive myths of U.S. civic identity, along with various types of liberal and republican ones" (p. 470). But there is far more here than a mere aggregation of evidence for this contention. The chapters are full of fascinating discussions and perceptive insights, from the opening complex analysis of the seventeenth century British CALVIN’S CASE to the identification of four different levels of citizenship status (ranging from full exclusion to full rights of inclusion) in the U.S. around the time of the Spanish American War. Along the way Smith offers many acute assessments of familiar public figures and legal developments, often turning the tables on conventional "progressive" historical judgments. For example, Smith provides solid reasons to conclude that early U.S. citizenship laws, while more inclusive for white propertied males, were more exclusionary for racial and ethnic minorities than were those of the much vilified British, a point underlined by the recent movie AMISTAD. Likewise, progressive heroes such as Jefferson, Jackson, and the political movements identified with each are --rightly, in my view-- excoriated for their overtly illiberal, exclusionary commitments to slavery and Indian removal. And Smith is equally incisive in contending that Darwinian strains of scientific racism and nativism informed citizenship laws and politics far more than did "the golden banner of Horatio Alger" during the Gilded Age. Finally, some very provocative secondary themes emerge from these chapters. The most interesting pattern that I detected from the historical account is that advocates of state’s rights, local control, and republican community --sometimes unwittingly, usually by design-- frequently have provided cover for our most exclusionary ascriptive tendencies, while defenders of national authority more often than not have been allied on the side of relatively greater inclusiveness and liberalism.

In an extended Epilogue, Smith shifts to a more "normative or moral" (p. 471) discourse concerning contemporary debates about citizenship. He admonishes that we neglect at our peril the imperative to craft compelling civic myths that can bind the nation. The author initiates his own contribution to this end by analyzing the positions of leading academic moral philosophers (Rawls, Young, Kymlicka) on the issue. Building on arguments scattered throughout the earlier historical chapters, Smith distinguishes between two general schools of thought, "separatist pluralists" and "universal integrationists," and offers a critical assessment of the problems inherent in each, especially the former. He concludes by outlining his own version of a compelling civic vision that is thoroughly liberal, egalitarian, and inclusive in character. The key to this agenda is the analogy of citizenship to political party membership, on which Smith bases his plea for "normatively defensible citizenship" allegiance to what he calls the "Party of America."

As my comments so far have suggested, Smith’s book is a towering achievement. Although broad in scope, highly ambitious in its claims, and intricate in its historical detail, the volume is well organized, cohesive, and accessible. Smith’s well crafted sentences help the reader to negotiate the manifold, often complex ideas and arguments developed throughout the book. Likewise, Smith’s coverage of ideas voiced by legal authorities and other political actors throughout our history is comprehensive, compelling, and most impressive. I was surprised about some omissions, such as Henry David Thoreau’s writings blaming lawyers and our constitutional inheritance for the nation’s exclusionary racist policies while invoking our liberal egalitarian revolutionary legacy as a remedy for the wrong. But, overall, the book displays exemplary erudition and scholarly rigor.

There is also much to be said for Smith’s central interpretive arguments. He surely is correct to insist that widespread assumptions about the hegemonic triumph of liberal values are exaggerated and misleading about the complex interplay of various ideological traditions in our nation’s history. Whether blamed for our most persistent wrongs or esteemed for what is most right, liberal principles no doubt have been routinely accorded greater causal power by intellectuals than is deserved. Moreover, Smith’s specific contention that exclusionary racist, sexist, and nativist sentiments have been repeatedly articulated throughout our legacy in unabashedly explicit, principled terms strikes me as incontrovertible. Finally, the author’s tenacious defense of liberalism as a positive, if beleaguered, force in American history deserves respect, especially in the present climate in which liberal egalitarianism once more is under assault.

The book is not equally convincing in all of its arguments, however. For one thing, there is a problematic tendency to treat our multiple ideologies as discrete, insular, and unitary constructs. Smith’s accounts convincingly recognize considerable inventiveness over time within ideological traditions, to be sure. And some of his most interesting historical analyses recognize how elements of different ideologies have been "intertwined" in unique "packages" (his term). Overall, though, there is little recognition either that constituent elements of ideological traditions often are internally contradictory or that specific elements of different ideologies often converge, overlap, interact, or complement one another. As a result, the author’s reading of history often becomes too much of a shell game, attributing all ignoble proclivities wholly to one or the other tradition while completely exonerating or extolling the other(s).

This tendency is most apparent in Smith’s persistent effort to draw clear, almost impenetrable boundaries between liberal and ascriptive traditions. "Liberalism" itself becomes a slippery analytical category in these renditions. Sometimes the tradition is explicitly linked to the seventeenth century thinker Locke and other historical figures (pp. 1,37, 48, 145...). Far more often the term is linked to words such as "democratic" and "egalitarian," identified with contemporary understandings of civil rights and liberties, and invoked as an almost incorruptible force of inclusion (see fn 5, p. 507). In this recurrent guise, the term is severed from historically linked commitments to the sanctity of private property rights, to limited state authority, and to insistence that only rational self-disciplined individuals are entitled to citizenship rights. This is significant because most scholars who emphasize the ideological power of our liberal inheritance consider these latter elements to be as important as the universal egalitarianism selectively highlighted by Smith. Moreover, it is precisely these historically constitutive elements, often in alliance with illiberal principles, that typically are cited by critics as undermining the egalitarian promises of liberalism. For example, critics often point out that, while slavery was built on non-liberal property relations, Southerners routinely invoked liberal legal norms protecting property rights, limiting federal authority, and upholding constitutional government to defend the "peculiar institution." Similarly, many historians have documented how women, slaves, and Indians throughout our history have been excluded from full citizenship in part because they have been characterized, like children, as incapable of the rational self-government necessary for participation in liberal society. Perhaps most revealing, Smith’s focus on ascriptive hierarchies almost completely sidesteps (although see p. 5) the most enduring concern of Left critics: those extreme inequalities of wealth and capital legitimated by liberal commitments to private property, contractual exchange, and formal understandings of equality in our political tradition.

Smith surely is on firm ground in arguing that liberalism does not "logically require" patriarchy, racial exclusion, nativism, or perhaps even radical economic inequality. Moreover, this reviewer agrees that there are good reasons to defend many aspects of our liberal tradition. But such a defense need not ignore how liberal principles, alone or in concert with other norms, often have been used to defend many types of hierarchical relations and exclusionary practices in our history. Smith’s argument thus is unlikely to convince those who think that the best case for liberalism is one that squarely recognizes its mixed legacy of both noble and ignoble contributions.

Smith’s CIVIC IDEALS will be of great interest to specialists in American history, political culture, and ideology, and particularly to those who are interested in race, gender, and ethnic relations. Its most obvious classroom use is in conjunction with original texts in a conventional undergraduate or graduate "History of American Political Thought" course, although it surely could be fit into other classes on American politics as well.

But what of its relevance for legal scholars? Curiously, several features of the book might discourage interest from sociolegal scholars. First, Smith relegates to a single footnote (pp. 509-10, fn. 12) recognition of the study’s affinity with "new institutionalist" analysis of law and politics, to which several of his own earlier articles have greatly contributed. Second, while bowing briefly to understandings about law’s "constitutive" power in society (pp. 31-33), Smith primarily treats law as a window into, or a "map" of, our society’s political culture (p. 35). As such, discussions of law per se --its character, influence, contingency, etc.-- are not a significant part of the book’s agenda. Finally, the concluding section of the book (Epilogue) is likely to be of less interest to legal analysts than to ethical philosophers .

Nevertheless, I do think this book is immensely relevant for sociolegal scholars. For one thing, Smith makes a very important empirical contribution by documenting pervasive ascriptive logics at work throughout our public law record, which is where we might least expect them. More important, his central argument has critical implications for the many types of conventional legal study that focus on our liberal ideological heritage, including: critical legal scholarship; attitudinal approaches to judicial decision making; studies of public opinion regarding civil liberties and civil rights; analyses of legal mobilization and legal disputing; and most types of "cultural" studies that analyze law as constitutive norms, ideologies, knowledges, and/or practices.

For related reasons, it seems that the book is relevant for many types of classes regarding law. These include, most obviously, both undergraduate and graduate classes on legal history, law and society, and legal culture. I recently used the book as the centerpiece of a graduate class on American law and political culture, and it worked extremely well. Some creative teachers could also integrate this book into a historical class on constitutional law or civil liberties and rights; Smith’s tome provides splendid studies of leading constitutional

cases as well as a rich political contextualization of related legal developments in various eras.

Overall, I thus am pleased to accord this book my highest recommendation. No doubt many of us will be debating its important insights and arguments for years to come.

Copyright by the author