(beep) - There are some who argue that the United States of America as a nation, should be defined by its civic identity.

A federal Republic who's found he promised equality under the law and Liberty to all of its people.

But there's a darker side to the American history too, one built on ethnonationalism and white supremacy.

Today's guests traces the rise and fall, and rise again of these competed ideas, over the long arc of our national history.

He's Colin Woodard this week, on "Story of the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square", where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes with the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G.Wayne Miller with the Providence journal.

- This week, we're joined by Colin Woodard, an accomplished journalist who has reported from 50 foreign countries.

He's also a remarkably talented best-selling historian, whose most recent book is "Union", the Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.

Colin, thank you so much for being with us today.

- [Colin] My pleasure.

- I have to tell you, your book really knocked me.

I was just, this was the, probably the best sweeping, broad, intellectual history of American national identity that I've read maybe ever.

So for the audience who maybe hasn't read it yet, why don't you give us a quick overview?

- Yeah, the question I have always had is, you know, what holds our country together, and I think a lot of people are worried about that these days.

And so I wanted to look to the past to understand the story that was developed to hold the United States' different sections and regional cultures together.

A previous book I wrote "American Nations" argued that there's never been one America, but rather several Americas.

That the differences between say the Puritan colonies in New England, and the Dutch settled area around New York city, and the West Indies slave planter, founded area in the deep south and the Scots Irish back country, and the Spanish settled Southwest and so on.

That those differences were enormously profound in the colonial period, and carried on throughout our history.

Fundamentally different ideas about what kind of society should be built, about the relationship between individual Liberty and the common good between church and state, on how you identify who belongs and who doesn't.

We're sort of a bulkinized Federation, a collection of separate nations, if you will, and always have been.

So my question was, what held it together?

How has the story developed that was able to bring all of these disparate regional cultures together and convince Americans that we had a shared history and the past instead of ideals.

Because the facts from the ground were that, we didn't all the way through into the 1870s.

And so "Union" is the story through the lives of the people who first really developed and packaged our story of nationhood, our national narrative.

The battle between them and sort of how they develop their ideas, what those ideas were, how they succeeded in broadcasting them and setting them out to the public and the implications that all has for us today, which are unfortunately pretty profound and pretty relevant to our present moment.

- [Jim] And I think we're gonna get to some of that contemporary stuff in a bit, but I wanna, the issue of nationhood you describe as the national narrative, the conception we have of being unified and one.

Is that a conscious decision?

Were there people setting out just to say, look, I'm gonna tell the story of America, or is this something that just evolves organically?

- Yeah, I mean, I think for different nations, it evolves in various ways, but in our story, a few people did set out with the task of trying to create a national story, a national story of unity to define the country.

You know, at the beginning, you know, there was these different regional cultures had risen up, against a common enemy during the American revolution.

They one, they found themselves together in something called the United States, and nobody was really sure what that was.

You know, was it a military Alliance?

Was it a sort of European Union like entity that would share, trade and foreign affairs responsibilities, but the nations were sovereign, or was it a real nation state?

Nobody knew.

And so a few people actually set out, took it upon themselves, had the audacity and the connections and the wherewithal to try to put forward a story in the 1830s of what the United States was, a story that would hopefully paper over those profound divisions between the different regional cultures and create a myth if you were, that Americans could hold onto, you know, hopefully a successful myth.

Ultimately, it was a successful myth.

But the problem was, that there was more than one of them.

And there wasn't, it wasn't as though our central government, our central government wasn't designed to have, say a, a ministry of culture like a European state would, that would develop such a narrative and send it out through the public school systems and the like.

In our country with the skepticism of the central government, especially in the early decades, it was necessary for individuals to come up with an idea and try to succeed in selling it and broadcasting it across the Federation in a sort of epic battle of ideas and a struggle in the media environment of the 19th century.

- So you follow the lives of three prominent American thinkers from the 1820s through the end of reconstruction.

And we wanna get into each of the three of them.

Why don't you start with George Bancroft, who was he, what was his contribution into the notion of nationhood and what did you write about him in "Union"?

- Yeah, my goal was, you know.

I knew that through into the 1870s, most Americans realized that our country was divided into those different regional cultures.

So I wanted to go back to the beginning of the phenomenon.

At what point was there a national story being put out there and trying to be sold to people?

And who developed that story?

In doing my research, I quickly discovered George Bancroft was the first person to package it, which is why I started with him.

And he's largely forgotten today, but George Bancroft was the most influential historian bar-none in the Americas, in the 19th century.

And he's somebody who lived through almost the entire 19th century.

He was born in 1800 and died in the 1890s, and was active throughout as a historian, but also as an actual political actor.

He served as secretary of war and secretary of the Navy under the Polk administration.

He was our ambassador to Germany and to the United Kingdom.

He played a critical role in some of the events in our country, as well as putting forth this first package national narrative.

And so it was he who through his histories, first created this story, this sort of myth that Americans had a shared past and a shared set of ideals that held them together.

And put that forward rather convincingly to the American people at time in the 1830s, when they were really hungry for such a story.

- Were his histories, to use a modern term, best-sellers, were they widely read?

Were they discussed?

Who was the market and the audience there, who bought and read his history?

- [Colin] Yes, massively so at the time, his 10 volume history of the United States was the main vehicle through which he proselytized this national story of the United States.

But it took him 60 years to write this series of books.

The first volume came out in the 1830s, and then others came out in subsequent years.

And all of them put together, only span the period up until the constitutional convention in the 1780s.

In other words, it was really a prehistory of the United States.

One that, as I said, was papering over the fact that each of the regional cultures had totally separate histories, and people wanted to hear this story.

So yes, they were massively successful books.

Cultural and media events at the time, each and every one, that transformed the way people were then writing about America's history, the way history was being taught in universities, the way politicians were talking about America and its ideals.

Including Bancroft himself, who was the Democratic Party boss of Massachusetts, and even ran for governor there.

So I mean, it was an enormous event and enormously influential.

And also controversial because Bancroft's particular take on what America's story is, which we can go into, had its detractors and opponents immediately and in real time, who put together a counter narrative, you know, a competing version.

And those two narrative side by side, have sort of been engaged in a continuing struggle for the soul of this country ever since.

- [Wayne] Maybe you can just break down briefly those two narratives, the narrative and the counter narrative.

- Bancroft story, I mean, Bancroft was sent.

As a young man, he graduated from Harvard in 1817 and was sent by the president of Harvard to Europe to earn a PhD because he couldn't get a PhD in the United States.

And this is important because he was in Europe at the very time that Europeans and particularly Germans and central Europeans were trying to develop the ideas of European nationhood.

And he studied under the key figures of German romantic nationalism.

They were his professors, you know, Herring and Hagle and the Von Humboldt.

And so his story that he came back to the United States with fused his own Puritan background from New England.

He was from Massachusetts, had gone to Exeter and to Harvard.

His father was a congregational unitarian intellectual.

He merged the idea that the Puritans had, that they're on a mission.

The early Puritans thought that they were in a covenanted relationship with God, like the Old Testament Hebrews, that God had chosen them to do specific things in the world, an errand in the wilderness, to put a light on the hill, to create a more perfect utopian society.

And so he took that idea, that Americans had a special mission in the world, sanctioned by their creator and emerged with German ideas, that history had a plan and a purpose.

And that nations were like organisms that grew from their common instructions.

It was inevitable that a nation would have certain characteristics because it was part of their, what we would call their DNA.

And so he put those together into a civic national vision that said that, Americans were chosen to come here to promote human freedom, and to credit across the world and across this continent.

That we were committed, you know, we may appear to be separate people, South Carolinians and New Yorkers and Massachusetts scions, but really each of those places had been planted with the same seed, with the same American national ambition and characteristics.

And that what we were tasked with, what bonded us together, wasn't a shared past or religion or ethnicity, but rather a commitment to a set of ideals, the ideals in the declaration of independence, about the inherent equality of humans and their rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and representative self-government.

And that who belonged, anyone who believed in those things and was committed to those ideals was an American or a potential American.

So it was defined, in a sense it was the first nation, and nations were pretty early in new thing in the early 19th century.

It was the first nation that kind of been defined around ideals, not some kind of bloodline and tribal characteristics.

And so that was the vision that Bancroft had of large elements of which you can still recognize and here in our own national narratives still today.

- Colin, the other story that you track in the first two thirds of the book, is that of William Gilmore Simms.

So Bancroft from Massachusetts, Simms from South Carolina, he has a different idea about what the story of the United States is, can you tell us about that?

- Correct, I mean the, you know, the United States and the world was a much smaller place then, so William Gilmore Simms and Bancroft knew each other.

And when Simms first started reading Bancroft history and realizing the story he put forward, he was outraged.

And he countered it with his own version of a national narrative.

And this was one conditioned like Bancroft, on his own regional cultural experiences.

Simms was from South Carolina and from Charleston.

And that was a region that was built on a classical Republican vision, modeled on the slave states of classical antiquity and democracy like ancient Greece or ancient Rome, where a small minority at the top of the pyramid has the privilege or the Liberty to practice democracy and the subjugation and slavery with a natural lot of the many lower down in societies pyramid.

And this was the society he believed in and he came forward with a counter narrative that said, nonsense, you know, Jefferson was entirely wrong when he wrote that people have inherent, you know, are inherently equal when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

They're clearly not and in fact, the only people Simms said who actually had the capacity to exercise the freedoms articulated in the Declaration of Independence, where the allegedly superior Anglo-Saxon race.

And that the different colonies that formed the United States, were all the organic, ethnic homelands of the Anglo-Saxons.

They're the ones who had brought the genius of democracy and it created the Declaration and the constitution, and therefore it was their home land.

And the wonderful thing about the United States is that it was an umbrella or a shield that helped protect these various ethno states so that they could proceed.

And other peoples certainly to include people of African descent, were not members of the community, we're not full citizens or even entitled to citizenship necessarily.

So it was an ethnic based, you know, bloodline based definition of what an American was, that was inherently exclusionary and ultimately a white supremacist model.

It would evolve over time from, you know, the belonging group being Anglo-Saxons to being more broadly Protestants, to eventually include Catholics.

And it's been with us for a long time, but the point is, there's always based on bloodlines and cultural lines, certain people who belong to the community and others who do not, and or excluded based on those things and an ethno nationalists definition.

- And so the third thinker in historical figure of course, is Frederick Douglass, talk about him.

- Yeah, he was the pivotal figure in this story because he's a little bit younger than Simms and Bancroft were.

And he of course, was a escaped enslaved person.

He escaped slavery in the Eastern shore of Maryland, had gotten to the north, had been discovered by the early abolitionists, the Garrisonians.

And, you know, the key thing, the way that these, you disseminated ideas and won the battle of ideas then, started with people giving public orations.

And people would attend those orations, those speeches at a major hall, and people would then talk about it afterwards and tell their neighbors and stuff, because there wasn't a lot of stuff going on back then.

The newspaper would come and would often, if it was an important speech, actually transcribed the entire speech, you know, lay it out and print it in their next edition, and that newspaper get distributed, and go on a ship and reach the next city.

And the newspaper editors there would subscribe to the other papers, and if they really liked the speech, they would go out and put down, then take all the letters and their printing press and actually reprint the whole thing.

They would retweet it if you will.

If they were outraged by it, they might take a segment of it and reprint it with a comment above it, right, re-tweeting with comments.

It worked a lot like Twitter, but much slower.

And those ideas would move around and eventually spread from place to place and somebody else might counter them.

Simms might hear about Bancroft speeches in that way, and step up and be invited to speak in an August hall in South Carolina and we start the process.

And the most important speeches would form books, and this was how the battle, the media battle over ideas happen.

And I tell you this because the Garrisonians took Frederick Douglas, who was working as a day laborer in the docks of New Bedford.

And they saw that he had an incredible story to tell.

And you know, a first person, you know, first hand account of slavery and the way it corrupts both the enslaved and the masters.

But also he was staggeringly gifted as a public speaker, and he had covertly, even though it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, he had covertly learned and was a great writer as well.

So they grabbed him and they put him full-time on their speaker circuit, sending him by train all over the Northern tiers of the country, all the way out to Ohio and Michigan giving multiple speeches at a day, at a time when giving these speeches was an incredibly consequential, media lever and way of getting ideas out.

And he became very quickly, one of the most famous and notable people in the United States and even in the Anglo-American world.

That when the Fugitive Slave Act came out, he actually had to fleet to Ireland and the United Kingdom, where he did a speaking tour there to audiences of thousands.

And so he became incredibly influential, and what he was saying in essence, in all of his speeches and writing, is he was taking that civic national story.

That what bonds Americans together is fealty to the ideals and the Declaration of Independence.

And saying, these are great ideals and Americans are obviously not achieving them, they remain aspirational ideals.

And that you, and he was speaking mostly to white northerners, you know, should defend those ideals.

He was imploring white Americans to do so as the, you know, in the years leading up to the Civil War.

And he wanted not only that African-Americans be brought into the circle of belonging, but also he was standing up for almost any oppressed group at any one time.

He was close friends with Susan B. Anthony and spoke at the Seneca Falls Women's Convention and in favor of suffrage.

When he was in Ireland, he arrived in Ireland, in the United Kingdom, right after the potato famine had begun and was arguing against the oppression of the Irish to English audiences and Scottish audiences.

And when the Chinese Exclusion Act was happening, he was speaking for the rights of Asian Americans.

So, I mean, he was really committed to that civic national vision and in his speeches, because he understood the tragedy that Americans hadn't achieved these ideals, that they still needed to be fought for.

His writings and descriptions of our national purpose remained some of the most evocative and relevant ones to this day.

And you'll find pieces and metaphors and ideas from them scattered throughout all of our speakers who start talking about the United States history ever since.

So, I mean, enormously pivotal figure in the creation of our national story, who helped influence, you know, Lincoln at the Gettysburg, the Gettysburg Address, to commit the nation to the struggle for those ideals, to say for the first time in the middle of the Civil War, that this was what the civil war was really about.

I mean, he just had an enormous influence on our national story.

- [Jim] So Colin, you mentioned the Civil War, and we've got about five minutes left here, and we wanna make sure that we spend a little time talking about America today.

But you mentioned the Civil War and you know what I took from your history of both the Civil War and the period of reconstruction, is that, while civic nationalism emerges from the immediate aftermath of the war, over the long period of reconstruction, and then the decades that follow, it's really the rise of the ethno national identity that Sims advocated, rather than the civic nationalism of Bancroft and Douglas, is that an accurate summation?

- That's correct, I mean that's the tragedy of our story.

I mean in the battle over what kind of nation the United States should be, the south lost the war but indeed won the peace.

And reconstruction failed and you know, I think anybody in the 1870s would have been surprised, that by the 1910s and 1920s, the story, these two stories, these two stories were in competition and fighting each other from the 1830s onward, including in the Civil War itself, when it came to actual fighting and blows.

And it's in the 1910s and 1920s, that one of them finally becomes dominant and it is indeed that white supremacist model, sort of in the Woodrow Wilson presidency days, when all these Confederate statues we see being taken down were put up, with the height of Jim Crow.

When the United States passed an Immigration Act based explicitly on defending the Anglo-Saxon character of the country, with race and ethnic based quotas to do so.

I mean it was a very ugly period in which in north and south in the aftermath of the Civil War that that ethno nationalist narrative triumph.

It would be overthrown again in the 1960s, and that our civic national narrative then became the consensus narrative, but it wasn't until then until the 1960s that that was the case.

And one of the reasons that the battle for the soul of this country is so profound, is precisely because the ethno national alternative, has indeed been the dominant force in our country, in our not so distant past.

- [Jim] And it seems not so distant, it seems that the 2016 hanger on that idea of America as an ethno nationalist state, where are we now?

What's the state of play right now in terms of the story of America.

- Right, I mean the, you know, Trump and Trumpism draw a great deal on this ethno national idea.

There's some people who aren't real Americans and who don't belong.

And I think it all culminated even on January 6th, where you're seeing the Confederate flag, brought them to the Capitol Rotunda.

You know the resistance to replacing the monuments of notorious Confederates and others.

This is a battle over precisely this again.

So and it's never completely gone away, but after nationalism is definitely in a resurgence like we haven't seen in my lifetime.

And because of the faults in our country, the fact that we're bulkinized with these different tectonic plates of different regional cultures with different views on this, and the fact that it's our national narrative, our civic national story, that is the glue that holds us together.

It's always very dangerous to the United States, when people start pouring solvent and challenging that civic national story, there's not a lot to fall back on because the ethno national one, you know.

Anglo-Saxons are not a majority in this country these days, so it's not a recipe for union, but rather disunion.

- [Jim] And I know you've given some thought to what we need to be doing to work on that new American story.

We've got a little bit more than a minute left.

What should we be doing as citizens?

- It's essential for any country to have a national story, whether it's Japan or Germany, or Iceland or ourselves, and we've kind of dropped the ball on it.

People after the Cold War and globalization started thinking nations wouldn't matter and that our national story wouldn't matter, it matters a lot, individuals need it.

So we need to revamp, revisit that civic national story, and those ideals in declaration and we package them and articulate them for today.

And people should define politics that way, the reason that you are putting forth this set of policies or rejecting that, may have to do with actually extending the promises and the Declaration of Independence.

That's what defines Americans and what America is all about, and people, you know, and our leaders and we ourselves need to recommit to that and start articulating it because the forces that would overthrow that are active and on the move.

- Colin that's where we're gonna need to leave it today, thank you so much for being with us.

He is Colin Woodard, the book is "Union", and we strongly endorse it.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

From G.Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time, for more "Story in the Public Square."

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