The Nation That Never Was- Book Review
I recently finished reading “The Nation That Never Was” by Kermit Roosevelt.[1] Kermit Roosevelt is the great-great-grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt’s writing style is a bit repetitive, at least in this book, but he puts forth an interesting perspective. Roosevelts starts by calling America’s founding story as the “standard story.” It’s a presentation we are all familiar with: America broke away from the British empire to found a new nation of liberty and though we didn’t apply that liberty to perfection since we still had slaves, it was a work in progress moving forward to a “more perfect union.” Sound familiar? It’s the American founding mythology which grounds itself on the Declaration of Independence and preamble to the Constitution as well as the Constitution itself.
But Roosevelt says this is essentially false. Our nation was never founded to move toward this better union or more liberty. His assertion is that the nation was founded for liberty, yes, but only for the “insiders.” I.e. White men. Both the Constitution and the Declaration are claiming rights for the insiders. Black people, native Americans and others are outsiders and not part of this liberty. The antebellum Supreme Court even declared black people could never be citizens.
Throughout the book, Roosevelt quotes by Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Both initially made use of the “standard story” in their speeches and writing. But Roosevelt illustrates with their words how they gradually began to alter their view and cease referencing the “standard story” as the baseline for their positions on rights. They too began to see our founding story as the myth that it really is.
Roosevelt also makes the point that we actually have two Constitutions. There is the original Constitution which existed until 1865. Then there is the current Constitution, the Reconstruction Constitution, with the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments which were a revolution of their own. These amendments literally created a new nation by changing the parameters of who were insiders when they created citizenship for black people as well as birthright citizenship for anyone of any ethnic background.
A similar point was made by author Garry Wills in his 2006 book “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America.”[2] His point, too, is that the nation became a different nation after the Gettysburg address. Lincoln was, in his speech, foreshadowing what the USA would become after the passage of those three amendments, though they were not yet authored.
Prior to those amendments, the USA was a collection of states bound together by a legal framework called the Constitution. People at the time did not consider themselves citizens of the USA primarily. They were citizens of Virginia, or New York, or Massachusetts first, and Americans second. This is amply illustrated as states broke away during the Civil War and why Lee joined the Confederacy rather than remain in the United States Army.
Roosevelt even points out that several confederate states even cited the Declaration of Independence.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
It was the southern states that were really the heirs of the founding myth, the ‘standard story’, not Lincoln and the northern states!
But with the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, black people became citizens, all citizens became citizens of THE United States of America. We ceased to be a collection of states and citizens ceased to be first citizens of a given state.
But the founding myths that we clung to actually enabled Jim Crow, segregation and impeded civil rights because people were clinging to the “standard story” which was grounded in the collection of states bound together legally by the Constitution and which was reflected in the argument of “states rights.” Even after the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, some states used Amendment 10 (states rights amendment) to over-ride the rights enshrined in the 13–14–15th amendments! And indeed, some states and political groups STILL seek to impede rights using the same arguments as were used during the Jim Crow era.
Perhaps the real element, and an impactful one too, which obstructs our ability to achieve a true democratic nation, is the Electoral College. The Electoral College is a vestige of that pre-Civil War point of the nation as a collection of states under the Constitution, rather than a real united states.
[1]
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo146791172.html
[2]
https://books.google.com/books/about/Lincoln_at_Gettysburg.html?id=JyAOOJJFxfQC
