shaping our nation by michael barone - excerpt

7/27/2019 Shaping Our Nation by Michael Barone - Excerpt

1/16


2/16
http://crownpublishing.com/http://www.randomhouse.com/book/8895/shaping-our-nation-by-michael-barone/9780307461513/http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=VD9*lkiWNd8&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&u1=Shaping+Our+Nation-EL--Scribd.com-9780307461537&RD_PARM1=http%253A%252F%252Fitunes.apple.com%252Fus%252Fbook%252Fisbn9780307461537%253Fmt%253D11%2526uo%253D4%2526partnerId%253D30http://play.google.com/http://www.indiebound.org/product/info.jsp?affiliateId=randomhouse1&isbn=0307461513http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?EAN=9780307461513&cm_mmc=Random%20House-_-Shaping+Our+Nation-HC--Scribd.com-9780307461513-_-Shaping+Our+Nation-HC--Scribd.com-9780307461513-_-Shaping+Our+Nationhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307461513?ie=UTF8&tag=randohouseinc5669-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307461513


3/16

Preface: A Story for Our Time

looking back on our decades o published writings, I can

discern a common theme: I have been trying in dierent ways

to understand American politics and the course o Ameri-

can history, starting with the twenty-two editions oteamcf

amecpco which I have been coauthor since the rst edition

was published in 1971. The amcdescribes every state and con-

gressional district and its members o Congress, and over the years Ihave been able in its pages to ollow political and policy developments

in granular detail. My1990 book, ouCuy: te s f amec

fm reve re,1 was a narrative history o American politics

rom 1930 to 1988, buttressed by demographic and electoral analysis

intended as an alternative to the prevailing analyses o the New Deal

historians. In tenewamec2 I argued that the minority groups

o today resembled, up to a point, the immigrant groups o a hundredyears ago: blacks resembled Irish, Latinos resembled Italians, Asians

resembled Jews. My thesis implied a certain continuity in the Ameri-

can experience, with o course some contrasts and dierences. Inhd

amec, sf amec3 I contrasted the zones o American lie where

you have competition and accountability (Hard America) and those

where you dont (Sot America). This was an attempt to view various

developments in the twentieth century through a dierent and mostlynonpartisan lens, with an understanding that we dont want every part


4/16

[ 2 ] Shapi ng Our Nation

events generally known as the Glorious Revolution o168889, the

ouster o King James II and the installation o King William III and

Queen Mary II, the Catholic Jamess Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew. These events, I argued, greatly advanced the causes

o representative government in Britain and in its North American

seaboard colonies as well as guaranteed liberties, global capitalism,

and an anti-hegemonic oreign policy. The Glorious Revolution was

a very chancy and close-run thing, with strong reverberations to this

day; it not only inspired but made possible the American Revolution

and put rst Britain and then America on their ways to be a leadingorce or liberty and the rule o law throughout the world.

For my next book, I sought a way to look at the American expe-

rience through a new prism, and my editor, having heard me ri on

this theme, suggested a book on American migrations, internal as

well as immigrant. In examining the data, it became apparent that to

a great extent the United States was in large part peopleda word I

borrow rom historian David Hackett Fischer, author o the superbab seed5by surges o migration, large mass movements across

the oceans or within the nation, which typically lasted only one or

two generations but in that time reshaped the nation . . . and created

lasting tensions dicult to resolve. None o these surges o migration

was widely anticipated, and most o them ceased rather suddenly and

contrary to expectations.

I was inspired as well by the picture painted by historian WalterMcDougall in the rst pages o his magisterial history o the United

States rom 1829 to 1877:6 He described that i you could be trans-

ported back in time our hundred years and view the world in 1600,

you would nd most o the concentrations o population very similar

to todays. There were great population masses in Ming China and

Mogul India, a Muslim world o many varieties and schisms, a west-

ern Europe o ertile arms and trading ports, and a Russia expand-ing rom its Muscovite base. In the Western Hemisphere there were


5/16

pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 3 ]

and priests. But North America then was very dierent rom today. It

was not vacant, as the writer Charles C. Mann has inormed us in his

wonderul books 14917

and 1493;8

Indian arming and hunting civili-zations o various degrees o advancement had developed there over

centuries. But these civilizations had only the slightest o connections

to the more advanced societies o Europe and Asia, and their peoples

were soon to suer rom enormous depopulation due to diseases or

which they had no immunity.

In their place today, in vivid contrast with the years around 1600,

is a nation with 5 percent o the worlds population that produces25 percent o its economic product and deploys more than 50 percent

o its military capacity, a nation in which only1 percent o its current

population claims ancestry rom the peoples variously called Ameri-

can Indians or Native Americans. The peopling o the United States

is one o the most important stories o the last ve hundred years, a

story o successive surges o migration, across the oceans and across

the continent.It is oten said that in the past quarter century America has

become culturally diverse. But it was culturally diverse rom its colo-

nial beginnings, and each successive surge o migration has changed

the cultural and ethnic and political balance o the country. Ameri-

cans have learned not only to cope but even to prosper as a nation

with cultural variety, but that diversity has also led to grave and seem-

ingly irrepressible confict.The history o American migrations is a story o surprises: ew

anticipated when these surges o migration would begin and even

ewer predicted that they would abruptly end, as most did. That may

be especially relevant, as this is written, or the vast Latino migration

o the quarter century rom 1982 to 2007 seems to have tapered o

sharply, with net migration rom Mexico apparently below zero, while

internal migration sharply slowed with the onset o recession in 2007,as it did even more sharply in the economic depression o the 1930s.


6/16


7/16


augmented by those arriving in some orm o servitudeslaves orc-

ibly imported rom Arica and indentured servants rom England

obliged to work a term o years in return or payment o their pas-sage, plus a ew convicts sent to the new colony o Georgia. So these

colonies, starting o as narrow patches o land on coasts and bays,

grew lustily because o very high birth rates and what was proba-

bly the highest protein diet or the masses o any in the world. By

the middle o the eighteenth century, the population o these colo-

nies was vastly increased to some 1.2 million. They included about

360,000 in New England, where the cold climate proved unhealthyor slaves; 220,000 in the Delaware River coloniesPennsylvania,

Delaware, New Jerseywith another 75,000 in Dutch-settled and

ethnically diverse New York along the Hudson; and about 370,000

in the Chesapeake colonies, about 30 percent o whom were slaves.

In addition there were about 140,000 in the colonies to the south,

sparsely settled North Carolina, slave-majority South Carolina, and

tiny Georgia. Small handuls o colonists three and our centuriesbeore did much to determine the culture and character o a nation

o310 million.

The subject o this book is the much larger surges o migration,

internal and immigrant, that came next, starting with the mass move-

ment rom 1763 to 1775 o the Scots-Irish rom Northern Ireland

and Lowland Scotland to the Appalachian rontier, the ourth o the

British olkways in Fischers ab seed. This was an internationalmigration in the sense that people sailed across the Atlantic Ocean

to a land that would soon become a separate and independent nation.

But it was also an internal migration in the sense that the Scots-Irish

were moving rom one unruly ringe o the British Empire to another,

motivated not just to seek a better living but even more to establish

a community where they could live as they pleased. Unlike previous

colonial migrations, it was not organized by prot-minded propri-etors like the leaders o the Virginia Company or by community lead-


8/16


convicts o slaves. And it was a migration dierent in kind rom those

that came beore.

It was, like surges o migration over the next two centuries andmore, a seemingly spontaneous movement o large numbers o like-

minded people, motivated in part by the desire to make a better

living, but also and more important determined to create a new com-

munity in which they could thrive and live as they wanted. Ameri-

can migrants were not just seeking more money; they were pursuing

dreams or escaping nightmares.

Voluntary mass migrationssettler migrations, as historianJames Belich calls themare a relatively late phenomenon in world

history and could not occur without the right combination o techno-

logical, political, and economic actors. Migrants need available and

aordable transportation and must not be prevented rom moving

by government action. Economic historians have disagreed on when

these conditions have been met; some say ater the conclusion o the

world war between Britain and France in 1815,9

others, ater Britainrecognized the independence o the United States in the Treaty o

Paris o1783.10 But the Scots-Irish migrated to North America in sig-

nicant numbers ater the Treaty o Utrecht ended a British-French

war in 1713 and, in mass numbers encouraged by those who came ear-

lier, ater the Treaty o Paris ended another war in 1763. They came

in numbers that no one seems to have predicted and stopped com-

ing suddenly in a way that almost no one oresaw. In these respectsthe Scots-Irish migration was a prototype o later, post-Independence

American migrations, both immigrant and internal. They sought a

new place to establish their way o lie, where they could fourish and

perhaps be an inspiration to others as well.

~thisaccount will start o with the Scots-Irish migration and show


9/16


o the Mississippi Valley and how their emblematic leader, Andrew

Jackson, successully promoted the acquisition o Florida, Texas, and

Caliorniaour rst, second, and soon-to-be third most populousstatesto the young republic. Having accomplished this enterprise,

the Scots-Irish seemed to stop in their tracks and occupy the same

swath o the nation today. But their achievement presented the nations

political leaders with the dicult issue o whether slavery should be

allowed in the new territories, an issue that could not be peaceably

settled but resulted in a bloody and hugely divisive civil war, one in

which the Scots-Irish ought on both sides.The next section o the book will look at two surges o inter-

nal migration in the rst hal o the nineteenth century: the Yankee

diaspora spreading rom New England across Upstate New York and

the Great Lakes states and across the Mississippi, and the southern

grandees extension o plantation slavery rom the Atlantic coast to

the Mississippi Valley. These migrations were motivated not only by

a desire to establish sae havens or each o these two colonial Ameri-can cultures but were increasingly aimed at extending their cultural

infuence beyond their regional bases, to shape the national character

in their own image. The collision this produced was the Civil War,

in which the Yankee vision was not only the cultural but the military

victor, and in which the deeated southern cultureor rather cul-

tures, white and blacksubsequently lived apart rom the rest o the

nation or three-quarters o a century.The second pair o migrations were the two immigrationso

Irish Catholics and o mainly Protestant Germansthat began sud-

denly in great numbers in the middle 1840s and continued, with

scarcely a pause during the Civil War, until the middle 1890s. Irish

came over in vast numbers1.3 million in the rst decade, 184655,

and about hal a million in each o the next our decades. Germans

came over in even larger numbersabout1 million or ve succes-sive decades, except or hal a million in the decade that included the


10/16


the Civil War. Irish Catholics established communities in major cit-

ies and actory towns, which did much to determine the character o

politics and popular culture in urban America; they built an Ameri-can Catholic Church that or a century was very much an Irish insti-

tution. Germans started o settling in rural areas as well as in New

York City and in large cities in the interior. They ended up estab-

lishing a Germano-Scandinavian zone in the Old Northwest, north

o the Yankee diaspora settlementsin Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota,

the Dakotas. That zone has always had a distinctive politics, hospita-

ble to bureaucratizing reorms and cooperative enterprises and hostileto military involvement abroadthe most pacist, isolationist, and

dovish part o the nation or more than a century.

The third pair o migrations consists o one very large surge o

migration and one potential surge o migration that never happened

at all. In the three-quarters o a century between the Civil War and

World War II there was a vast movement rom rural to urban Amer-

ica, as the economy grew robustly though unevenly. From the 1890sthrough the 1930s, the development o mass production techniques

created a demand in labor markets or mass production workers, and

wages in the industrial Northeast and Midwest drew workers rom

arms. But not evenly. From the American South, where wage lev-

els were less than hal those in the North, very ew migrants ven-

tured northward during these decadesonly about1 million whites

and 1 million blacks. The enormous impact o the Civil War andthe continuing bitterness it engendered created a psychological bar-

rier between North and South, as i a wall had been built along the

Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River.

Immigration rom traditional sourcesBritain, Ireland, and

Germanydropped o as those nations economies developed roughly

in tandem with Americas. Instead there was a vast and unanticipated

Ellis Islander immigration to the northern states rom regions oEurope that had produced ew immigrants beore the 1890s. These


11/16


EuropeJews and Poles rom tsarist Russia; Poles, Czechs, and other

Slavs rom the Hapsburg Empire; and southern Italians rom the

northern-dominated kingdom o Italy. While American Southernersound the culture o Northern America unwelcoming, second-caste

peoples rom the ar sides o Europe ound it more attractive than their

native lands. The Ellis Islander migration halted during World War

I and was ended by the restrictive Immigration Act o 1924, which

allocated immigration quotas according to the national origins o the

nations population in the preEllis Island year o1890.

I the Civil War was a divisive confict, leaving the southernculture alienated rom the northern one, and vice versa, World War

II was an annealing event, bringing Americans together, putting

them in uniorm and sending them around the country and around

the world. Altogether 16 million Americans served at one time or

another in the military, in a nation o131 million; the proportionate

number in 2010 would be 38 million. The unity o the war eort also

ostered cultural uniormity, promoted already by mass media withuniversal appeal, the radio o the 1920s and 1930s, and the movies o

the 1930s. The demands o war industries brought Southerners, black

and white, to the great cities and actory towns o the North. The

war in the Pacic drew or the rst time millions o the 90 percent

o Americans who lived east o the Rockies to the West Coast. These

wartime movements introduced many Americans to what they came

to regard as a promised land and stimulated two surges o migra-tion, which continued or the rst postwar generation and which are

the subject o the next section o the book, the movement o mostly

white Midwesterners to Caliornia and the movement o one-third

o American blacks rom the rural South to the urban North. Those

surges o migration lost momentum when the destination no longer

seemed to be a promised landthe black northward migration wan-

ing in the middle 1960s as eective national civil rights legislationwas passed, and the Caliornia migration, in the early1980s when its


12/16

[ 10 ] Shaping Our Nation

The nal chapter concerns the two unpredicted and vast surges

o migration over the our decades rom 1970 to 2010. One was the

vast migration rom Latin America and Asia rst to major metropoli-tan areas, especially in Caliornia, Texas, and Florida, plus New York

City and Chicago, then dispersing over time to smaller but rapidly

growing metropolitan areas in other states. The other was volitional

migration, primarily rom high-tax states to low-tax states, but also

or many liberals and conservatives movement to culturally conge-

nial surroundings.

The turning points here came at the end o the rst postwar gen-eration, in the years on either side o1970. Formerly immigration was

minimal, thanks to the Immigration Law o 1924 and the postwar

economic recovery in European nations with large immigrant quo-

tas. When the immigration law was rewritten in 1965, little thought

was given to potential immigration rom other sources. In act immi-

gration rom Latin America was theoretically restricted more by the

1965 law than previously. But country quotas proved beside the pointas millions immigrated legally using amily unication provisions and

millions more immigrated illegally by crossing the border clandes-

tinely or overstaying visas.

As or volitional immigration, the generation rom 1945 to 1970

saw the conclusion o longtime arm-to-actory internal migration.

Growth concentrated in major metropolitan areas including the cor-

ridor rom New York City to Washington, D.C., and in the industrialactory cities o the Midwest, where auto and other manuacturers

were siting new plants. From 1970 to 2010 the picture is very dier-

ent. The population o the major metropolitan areas o the North-

east and the Midwest (with the conspicuous exception o Washington)

stagnated, as millions fed increasingly high state and local taxes. The

major northern immigrant destinations, including Los Angeles and

the San Francisco Bay Area, starting around 1990 saw internal out-migration or similar reasons. Domestic infow was channeled largely


13/16


The rule-proving exceptions were infow into tax havens in the

Northeast and Midwest, including New Hampshire, Delaware, and

South Dakota.By1970 the cultural uniormity o World War II and early post-

war America was being replaced by a cultural diversity more typical o

the nation in the long run o its history. As a result many Americans

in deciding where to live their adult lives or where to retire sought out

places compatible with their liestyle. This was particularly true o

proessionals and others in a position to choose where to live. Liber-

als gravitate to New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, universitytowns, and ski resorts, while conservatives gravitate to Dallas, Hous-

ton, and Atlanta and retirement towns in the Smokies or the Ozarks.

The result is what journalist Bill Bishop has called the big sort, with

liberal areas becoming more liberal and conservative areas, more

conservative.

The surges o migration in these our decades have produced

an America that seems to be fying apart. It may not be headed toa collision as dramatic as the Civil War, which was the result o

the surges o migration in the rst sixty years o the nineteenth

centurythough culture-wars political rhetoric sometimes gives that

impressionbut it can seem sorely in need o some less-than-total-

war equivalent o the annealing experience o World War II. Just

when the centripetal orces seemed at their maximum, the recession

and nancial crisis o the late 2000s produced a sudden halt to thesurges o migration that had been occurring or at least a quarter

century. Immigration rom Asia ell and immigration rom Latin

America plummeted, with more reverse migration back to Mexico,

particularly o illegal immigrants, than migration rom Mexico to

the United States. It seems at least possible that immigration rom

Mexico and perhaps rom all o Latin America will never again reach

the levels o the almost entirely prosperous years rom 1983 to 2007.The surge o Latin immigration may have stopped as abruptly as the


14/16


addition, domestic migration also was sharply reduced, though not to

the very low levels o the 1930s.

The post-1970 surges o migration, like surges o migration inthe past, have led many to question whether and how Americans with

diverse cultural, religious, and political belies can live together. This

is a question Americans have always had to grapple with, not one that

has suddenly and or the rst time been posed by the transormation

o a long-homogeneous country to one with cultural and racial diver-

sity. The Framers o the Constitution and the Bill o Rights had to

deal with similar problems. They were well aware o the dierent reli-gious and cultural backgrounds o the dierent states. They had seen

that the colonies were unable to come together in response to a pro-

posed plan o union at the Albany Conerence in 1754. They learned

to their dismay that the ederal government set up by the Articles o

Conederation lacked the power to eectively tax and protect its citi-

zens. They were determined to create a stronger ederal government

but one whose powers would be limited in order to reduce culturalconfict and preserve zones o autonomy. And they were careul in

their grants o power to the president and the Congress; they were

vague about the powers o a supreme court; they required in a reli-

giously diverse nation that there would be no religious test or ederal

oce (although religious tests or state oce persisted through the

late nineteenth century). This was a revolutionary doctrine, adopted

when England required public ocials to be members o the estab-lished Church o England and when in all European nations Jews

were subject to civic disabilities, including prohibitions on holding

public oce.

The First Amendment, ratied in 1790, provided that Congress

shall make no law . . . regarding an establishment o religion, nor

prohibiting the ree exercise thereo. They acted knowing that di-

erent colonies had had dierent established churches and as severalstates, notably Virginia, were amid controversy regarding disestab-


15/16


1831. The Framers ormulalimited government and individual

rightshas not always been applied aithully in American history,

and it was not enough to prevent the outbreak o a civil war. But ithas provided a ready and useul template or the accommodation o

diverse peoples, even as the nation has been peopled by successive and

culturally diverse surges o migration.


16/16
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/8895/shaping-our-nation-by-michael-barone/9780307461513/http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/stat?id=VD9*lkiWNd8&offerid=146261&type=3&subid=0&tmpid=1826&u1=Shaping+Our+Nation-EL--Scribd.com-9780307461537&RD_PARM1=http%253A%252F%252Fitunes.apple.com%252Fus%252Fbook%252Fisbn9780307461537%253Fmt%253D11%2526uo%253D4%2526partnerId%253D30http://play.google.com/http://www.indiebound.org/product/info.jsp?affiliateId=randomhouse1&isbn=0307461513http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?EAN=9780307461513&cm_mmc=Random%20House-_-Shaping+Our+Nation-HC--Scribd.com-9780307461513-_-Shaping+Our+Nation-HC--Scribd.com-9780307461513-_-Shaping+Our+Nationhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307461513?ie=UTF8&tag=randohouseinc5669-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307461513

shaping our nation by michael barone - excerpt

Documents