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A FUTURE BEYOND THE EDUCATION MYTH

by Jon Shelton

In January 2023, the city of Green Bay’s first ever Equal Rights Commission issued a report that examined how city residents, especially those in marginalized communities, struggled to find good housing. Entitled Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Recommendations to Promote Equal Housing Opportunity in Green Bay, the report was, fittingly, publicly announced at City Hall on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. King, of course, was helping to lead a mass movement for equality in housing when he was murdered by a white supremacist in 1968, and it was especially fitting to release the report on that day because the commission made the argument that recognizing the right of all Green Bay residents to housing was essential to ensuring racial justice in the city.

Though I certainly can’t take credit for all the commission’s work, I am proud to say that I was the Vice-Chair of the commission that produced this report. The recommendations of the ERC report, in my view, represent the growing movement of more and more Americans who are articulating the necessity of universal economic rights, or what I call in my new book, social democracy.

I started work on my new book, The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy, in 2017, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency. Like a lot of Americans, I wondered how a candidate that so upended our basic political assumptions had gotten elected. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, I had been wondering for some time why so many of my students (most of whom were decidedly not Trump voters) also felt so disaffected with our political system.

As I began to consider both of these problems together, I thought about what our political system in recent generations had promised working Americans and what it was actually delivering. For decades, politicians in both parties had been promising that getting the right job skills through education would allow Americans to succeed in the labor market. The reality, however, is that economic insecurity for the vast majority of workers, even many of those with college degrees and advanced skills, has increased dramatically in the last few decades.

So I got to work to tell the story of how this happened and what we should do about it. Here’s what I found: for the first 150 years or so of our nation’s history, few Americans sought education because it would give them job skills. Instead, they sought education to deepen democracy or to enhance social stability. As more and more Americans worked for wages in a deeply inequitable economy in the late 1800s, they sought economic security mostly through labor unions and social reforms, not education. Their activism culminated with the New Deal, a series of laws that provided the promise of workers’ rights to unionize, retirement benefits, and a living wage. FDR even sought to institutionalize these rights permanently in American government in 1944 with his proposal for a Second (Economic) Bill of Rights.

Though we still await that Economic Bill of Rights, the basic contours of political debate in the three decades after the New Deal centered on social democracy: how to expand the economic rights of as many working Americans as possible.

The problem, however, is that beginning in the 1950s, a different vision for how to ensure economic security emerged, this time from economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker. This vision centered on the idea of investing in “human capital”: that the key to unlocking greater economic opportunity for all Americans was to give them more of the skills employers wanted. These two ideas vied for supremacy in the 1960s and ’70s: Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, for example, implemented the social democratic reforms of Medicare and Medicaid while also fighting poverty by enhancing the supposed deficiencies of the (disproportionately Black) poor instead of simply guaranteeing them jobs.

Activists like Coretta Scott King (Martin Luther King, Jr.’s widow) pushed for a jobs guarantee and other social democratic reforms in the 1970s, but more business-friendly Democrats in the decade like Jimmy Carter were not interested. Instead, over the next few decades, politicians like President Bill Clinton settled on investment in education as the solution to inequality—at the same time as policies like welfare reform and NAFTA harmed the livelihoods of working people. Even prominent Republicans like George W. Bush got in on the “education myth”, signing the disastrous, bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act into law under the premise that the future of the American labor force relied on teaching to standardized tests.

It was no wonder that by 2016 Americans were ready to find new political voices. On the left, Bernie Sanders, an FDR-style independent who sought the kind of social democratic reforms that had been lost in mainstream politics. And on the right, Trump, who pitched fantasies about jawboning corporations into bringing back manufacturing jobs that had been lost by capital flight.

As I conclude in the book, saving democracy requires a political system in which a laser focus on expanding working Americans’ economic security is our nation’s most important priority. If readers understand the lessons of The Education Myth, there will be many more calls for broad economic security such as the one that came from Green Bay’s first ever equal rights commission this past January.

THE EXCERPT

Preface

For fifteen years before his death at sixtyeight in 2013, the youth worker and environmentalist Brother Yusuf Abdul-Wasi Burgess took teenagers from Albany camping in the Adirondack Mountains. Brother Yusuf supplied paddles, life jackets, and canoes; his first-time campers brought their wariness and disbelief. City kids from hard-used neighborhoods, they took a cool view of the sixmillion-acre Adirondack Park. Not only was it famously, unwaveringly white, but it seemed a land of grim dysfunctionality where nothing you relied on worked. You could not text a friend or parent. Nobody moved, dressed, or laughed in any way that made you feel at home. How this big green playpen, this so-called getaway, was anybody’s notion of a good time was a mystery you did not care to solve.1

But Brother Yusuf, Brooklyn raised, never aimed to make his campers nature lovers. Learning bird calls, naming constellations—this was never the idea. The mission, always, was to challenge and relax his teenagers’ idea of their turf. With a wider sense of place comes the glint of interest in a world beyond the close-at-hand with its hard-defended codes. Some distant college or line of work may look more thinkable after overnighting in a tent by an icy stream. Test the comfort zone this once, and next time the kids would push it harder. A stretched-out sense of where they fit here may lead to a respect for their historical connection to it, their right to call it theirs.

For this reason, Brother Yusuf always took his campers to John Brown’s Adirondack home. He told them about the radical abolitionist’s assault on a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia today), on October 16, 1859. With a hand-picked band of guerrilla fighters, Brown occupied the armory, aiming to deliver one hundred thousand muskets and rifles to nearby slaves who, he hoped, would join his effort to secure the territory between the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, then push south to free more slaves, plantation by plantation.

But stuck in a small fort, Brown’s group was no match for militiamen and marines. His holdout fell in minutes. Ten men were killed, two sons of his among them. A Virginia jury convicted him of treason. On December 2, 1859, “Old Brown” was hanged.

The teenagers Brother Yusuf took to the park knew Brown’s name, but the impact of his raid, how Harpers Ferry blazed the road to the Civil War, and the war to the legal freedom for four million Black Americans, how Brown’s trial, the first to be reported nationally, has been judged the most important criminal trial in the history of the Republic—this was news for Yusuf’s charges. Also revelatory: learning that John Brown came to the Adirondacks to join a settlement of Black pioneers. Back in the day, said Brother Yusuf, a stretch of Adirondack wilderness ten times bigger than the city of Albany belonged to thousands of Black New Yorkers. They got this land (and Brown got his) from a New York abolitionist named Gerrit Smith. From the tiny town of Peterboro in upstate Madison County, this land-rich white man hoped his forty-acre Adirondack gift lots would pull poor Black families out of cities and put them on new farms. Back then, Black New Yorkers had to prove they owned land if they ever hoped to vote. No property, no ballot—a special rule for colored men alone. That’s why Gerrit Smith came up with his idea in 1846. With their new parcels, Black New Yorkers could get out of the city, start farming, and gain the franchise. They could vote for candidates who hated slavery, vote for equal rights for all. They would be empowered. Working citizens. That’s what land could do.

So, you think twice before you tell me this place is for white folks, Brother Yusuf urged his campers out of Albany. You think hard before you say this place has nothing to do with you. This is your patrimony, your business. You don’t have to buy this story. You own it. You’re stakeholders. This land is my land. This land is yours.

In 2000, Martha Swan, founder and director of the Adirondack social action group John Brown Lives!, invited me to curate a traveling exhibit about Gerrit Smith’s radical agrarian initiative, the plan that inspired John Brown to move to Essex County in 1849. At the time, what I knew about Smith’s scheme I mostly owed to antiquarian historians who considered it a lost cause from its conception. Twentieth-century historians were less dismissive, but their interest in it was still defined by the slit-like window of Brown’s residency. (Brown was away from his North Elba home much more than he was there, and did the work that

gained him lasting fame far from New York State.) Brown’s Adirondack burial in 1859, and his surviving family’s removal to points west, cued the end of any deep historical concern with the fate of the Black Woods.

Swan, a civil rights activist in the Adirondack village of Westport, urged me to approach this story differently. The exhibit she asked me to develop, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, would focus on the Black pioneers. Would I find much? I didn’t think so. There was the inarguable fact that Gerrit Smith’s original idea, a Black farm settlement for thousands, was, for the great majority of Smith’s deedholders, unrealized. Hence that word Dreaming in the exhibition’s name. Smith’s colony was, for most of its beneficiaries, no more than an eager prospect. Nor, I knew, could I glean a thing from artifacts. The cabins and outbuildings that made up Timbuctoo and other Black enclaves in Essex and Franklin Counties were down to duff and moss. I would be working without ruins, pictures, or, really, anything very tangible except headstones. Epistolary evidence from the settlers’ side was scant. No images of the grantees on their farms remained. No pictures of women or children, period. Taken singly, clues that could be gleaned from census data, newspaper posts, legal cases, military pension files, tax reports, school rolls, and local memory seemed inconclusive. Any reconstruction of this history was going to be tough.

Other challenges revealed themselves to me more gradually. I had assumed, for instance, that what I knew about Adirondack ethnic history, something I’d been writing about for decades, could only help. There were a great many nineteenth-century Adirondack enclaves that had slipped through the cracks of antiquarian and twentieth-century regional history. Wasn’t Timbuctoo one of these? I figured the exhibit would reunite the Black homesteaders with all the rest of the great unseen and unremarked-on in the Adirondack region—migratory hired hands, Irish tanners, Italian railroad workers, Polish miners, loggers from Quebec. . . .

It didn’t. Timbuctoo was not another bright tooth on the cogwheel of diversity. For all the poverty, social precarity, and cultural invisibility it shared with white Adirondack settlements in its time, it also stood apart. How it figured in Adirondack memory—and how Blackness, more generally, resonated in the regional narrative—was not how poor white enclaves were remembered. It was not how they were disremembered. Here was an othering of a different order: more purposeful, intractable, and, for this writer, demanding. I would need to lose ways of thinking about Adirondack landscape and history that had seemed to work for

me for decades. My idea of inclusivity, long bound to the documentable (evidence of ethnic enclaves, names in the census, work crew rolls, and other hard proofs of diversity), no longer struck me as sufficient. Did the way I research, the way I see, make room for the undocumented, the great ranks of the missing?

Many of Smith’s Black deedholders visited the Adirondacks and left without a trace. Thousands more never ventured to the Adirondacks at all. Why was this? Why, until quite recently, did regional accounts of the giveaway make room for one family only, with no notice of scores of others—almost two hundred Black settlers—who made the Adirondacks home? Also puzzling: the antiquarian emphasis on the Black Woods as a refuge for self-emancipated slaves, even while the influence of slavery in Adirondack life remained wholly unexamined. True, here was no slaveocracy, yet Southern enslavers and their Northern enablers put sugar in Adirondack teacups, cotton on the backs of Adirondack schoolboys, and tobacco in the tins of Adirondack farmers (not to speak of turpentine, indigo, cigars, molasses, palm-leaf hats, and quilt batting on the shelves of Adirondack crossroad stores). Did this not make enslaved people silent but emphatic influencers of Adirondack daily life? In the Black Woods, a veritable army of the unacknowledged and gone missing could pack a census of its own.

I understood the racialized accounts of Gerrit Smith’s pioneers in terms of racial bias in its own time. It would be a while before I recognized how the default racism of the mid-nineteenth century was steeped in white ideas about Blackness that took hold in the region maybe centuries before Gerrit Smith’s grantees went north. Also far from obvious to me: the shaping influence of white Adirondackers’ ideas about Redness on how Black people were perceived. Indigenous peoples had sojourned in the Adirondacks for millennia before its “discovery” by Europeans, but their claim on the land would be discounted by Euro-colonizers who measured their entitlement to this new world by very different standards: in-place year-round settlement, land grants, deeds and titles. Early on, then, an exclusionary paradigm pitted the deserving against the rest.

And that paradigm not only preceded the Black farmers of Timbuctoo but persisted long after they were gone. The late nineteenth-century convergence of the conservation discourse with scientific racialism gave the region’s members-only residential resorts, hunting lodges, sportsmen’s clubs, and other elite strongholds a pseudoscientific rationale for excluding Black people and other “undesirables” for generations. In

the name of guarding and defending the new-claimed Adirondack Park, poor white subsistence farmers, immigrants, indigenous people, and migratory laborers were framed as vectors of impurity, and in strokes both offhand and explicit, racialized as lesser, and unworthy of the park’s bounty.

Given the fact that a legacy of enslavement was largely absent from the region, and that very few Black people lived in the Adirondacks from the first days of European settlement, this exclusionary culture baffled me. Why was it so entrenched? Why so well defended? I was looking for an answer in demography, which, of course, was not the place to look at all—though it took a book of literary criticism to redirect my focus. In her canonical Playing in the Dark, the novelist Toni Morrison argues for a shadowy Black Other as a shaping presence in our best-known American novels, even when—maybe especially when— these books feature no Black characters and evince no concern with race. This Other makes its imprint, offers Morrison, not directly so much as inferentially, “in implication, in sign, in demarcation,” and its work is oppositional; it reinforces authorial ideas of whiteness, offers a foil to the New American—self-made, resourceful, male, white—in many of our beloved novels.2

This writer’s words shook something loose for me. Her subject was great literature, but was there an insight here as well on how to puzzle out entrenched narratives of regional identity? For all its enduringly white populace, the Adirondacks was steeped in a palimpsestic memory of slavery that stood everywhere for degradation and incapacity. Only scan the racist representations of Black Americans, free and enslaved, in nineteenth-century Adirondack newspapers, where editorials, boys’ adventure stories, and dialect columns ensured that ideas about Black indolence and easy criminality stayed evergreen in white minds—and in towns where Black people could be numbered on one hand. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, blackface minstrel shows featuring white performers were a cherished mainstay of Adirondack small-town entertainment, and every time Rastus and Jemima cakewalked into Adirondack grange halls and opera houses (even into the 1950s), racial stereotypes about “natural-born” propensities and an inherent Black servility were reinforced.3

Freedom as the vested entitlement of whiteness was a point made and remade in low culture and high. Whenever an Adirondack county history introduced the courage and resourcefulness of a founding pioneer in terms of his (always) Puritan forebears, these qualities were

conflated with his undiluted Anglo “rootstock”—no small point in a place where the fight for environmental purity defines regional identity. It was a desire to ensure the purity of New York’s water that made the winning case for the conservation of the Adirondack wilderness and the creation of the Adirondack Park, and it is the park’s achievement in defense of purity whose story has dominated the region’s history for the last century and a half. Eloquent dispatches extolled the region’s vaunted unspoiled beauty and healthful assets along with the cultural and racial purity of Adirondack Yankee “founders.” From the 1840s for another century, an emphasis on social purity—who belonged, who didn’t, who were stewards, who despoilers—gave this place a name for exclusivity that outshone all competitors (including the Massachusetts Berkshires, the New Hampshire White Mountains, and New York’s earlier-settled Catskills). And always against purity stood the Other, Toni Morrison’s contrapuntal shadow that lent the normative its clarity and frame.4

Even the memory of John Brown was enlisted in this cause. Brown’s Adirondack sojourn would be deracialized into a one-size-fits-all fable of courage and self-sacrifice without regard to means and ends. In these tellings, his single-minded focus expressed his purity of pedigree, that oft-noted Puritan ancestry so attractive to historians who were unnerved by what he did. This enshrinement in Adirondack memory and the devaluing of Brown’s concern for systemic racial justice should not surprise us. Historians like David Blight have documented how postbellum Blue-Gray commemorative events marginalized the brutal history of slavery in the name of sectional reconciliation. What happened to Brown’s memory was happening all over.5

And, of course, whatever happened to John Brown’s memory affected the memory of Timbuctoo—if only because it was Brown’s interest in Timbuctoo that explains history’s attention to it, sporadic and impatient as it was. I confess that when I was working on the exhibition, my focus on the Black grantees came as a relief; it spared me the mighty challenge of tangling with John Brown’s exacting legacy. But if the exhibit gave me a pass, this book was less indulgent. As I bushwhacked into the afterlives of the Black Woods in memory (lives, not life, because Black memory made one thing of Gerrit Smith’s idea, white memory another, and white memory, more confident and empowered, wrote the lasting script), Brown was everywhere, his energy and vision backlit by the presumed inaction of Black neighbors who declined to join him. They were the foil—the uninspired, uncompelled.

EXPLORING WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD AND POLITICAL INSURRECTION

by Peter Charkles Hoffer

These are days that try our souls. When the capitol is stormed by angry armed partisans to prevent a vice president from doing his constitutional duty; when no honest vote for government offices is final or accepted; when the nation teeters over and over again on the brink of fiscal and political crisis. These are days that try our souls, but they are not without precedent. Historians recall a similar time in the fall of 1860, when the nation did fall into the abyss of widespread violence over the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Then, a few men crossed the aisle in Congress to plead for the Union. A few, led by a senator from New York. William Henry Seward hated slavery. He hated what it did to the slave. He hated what it did to the free. He hated what it did to the nation. He spoke out against it. But he knew that the secession of seven, and then eleven slave states would only make it harder to end their “peculiar institution.”

Although he had been governor of New York, and then its senator in Washington D.C., his heart and his head remained in Auburn, New York. There he had practiced law. A true country lawyer, he represented all who came to his door, regarded of color or gender. His home became a stop on the Underground Railroad. (The Seward House Museum still stands, and opens its doors, as he did, to all comers). His view of slavery grew from that rural law practice. Slavery violated relational rights—the rights that every person had and owed to neighbors, visitors, and strangers. It was hospitality and reciprocity, a social and political golden rule to treat others as one wanted (and expected) to be treated by them. Slavery violated every part of relational rights.

In those terrible fall days, as southern Democratic congressmen departed the lame duck Congress, Seward reached across the aisle to plead for the Union. Leading the Republican Party in the District, working 18 hours days, reporting back to Lincoln, who remained in Springfield, Illinois, Seward bore all the burdens of republican self-governance. Ordinarily cordial, sociable,

Slavery violated relational rights—the rights that every person had and owed to neighbors, visitors, and strangers.

and genuinely warm, he wrote to a friend that he feared he would soon have to make war on his countrymen. Installed as Lincoln’s Secretary of State, he did indeed become the president’s right hand man in prosecuting the war effort.

I have tried to tell Seward’s story in my new book. I have tried to recover the man behind the public image carved in the days of insurrection. The Seward that people think they know is a cigar-smoking wheeler dealer, who did not separate the public interest from his private interests. They see a hard man, who repeated violated the rights of suspected “Copperheads.” He was the man who “bought Alaska” and was reviled for “Seward’s Folly.”

He was the man who “bought Alaska” and was reviled for “Seward’s Folly.”

It is time for the country lawyer to reappear, the man who loved Auburn, the law, and his country. It is time to remember that such men once represented the best in our public life.

1869

The Cornell University Press Podcast

Authors in ConversAtion: Judy Wu And tessA WinkelmAnn

disCuss Dangerous Intercourse

the trAnsCript

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice. If you wish to listen to the original, search 1869 podcast through whichever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to Authors in Conversation: The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press. Hi, everybody. This is Judy Wu. I’m a professor at University of California, Irvine. I’m also one of the co-editors of the Cornell University US in the World book series. And I’m so thrilled today to be talking to Tessa Winkelmann, who is at UNLV. And the author of this fantastic book called Dangerous intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898 to 1946. So welcome, Tessa.

I think, Judy, it’s great to be here.

I’m excited to talk to you about your book. So I’m so intrigued by the title of your book, Dangerous Intercourse. So why this particular phrase, why intercourse? How is it dangerous? And who is it dangerous for?

Yeah, it’s funny, like, lots of people like the title like over winter break, my mom was essentially trying to like, sell my book at a Christmas party to all the people that were there. And she’s like, it’s a history book. And people would look at the title and be like, it doesn’t sound like it’s a history. But it’s actually named that I got from the archives. So there was a surgeon general for the US military. He made this sanitation pamphlet that was going to be distributed free to the US Naval personnel that was going to point to the Philippines in 1899, for the war. And there was a particular set of information in the pamphlet that caught my attention, it said intercourse with them, will be dangerous. The natives and all the towns of the Philippines are prone to all sorts of diseases. And he goes on to name like cholera and all these conditions. But then at the very end, he lists syphilis and gonorrhea and stuff. So I was like, Oh, this isn’t just about like, contagion through sneezes, and stuff, this is about sexual relationships. So I kind of lifted the title from that sanitation pamphlet. And I was compelled by the title because it intercourse was dangerous for, you know, in his eyes for the troops, right, because of how it would imperil their, their bodies, their fertility, etcetera, and affects how they performed in battle. But it was also dangerous in a variety of different ways. This, my book kind of lays out, right. I mean, the the kind of baseline that the basic justification for empire was, with white superiority, right? Like was these ideas of the racial inferiority of non-white peoples? So, so things like interracial marriage, for example, I think, was a dangerous prospect for the colonial occupiers. Because, you know, for many Filipinos, that type of formalized relationship signified to them, that they were racially equal, right, or that the empire softened is somewhat racially equal. And that is, you know, against the whole kind of justification for why Ameri-

cans saw themselves as being there. So it was dangerous in that way. But it was also dangerous. For I mean, mostly, I point out in my book, I think the the people that were, ultimately in the most physical, economic and social danger was the Filipina women at the center of these relationships. Right? They were in danger of abuse, they’re in danger of being sexually violated. If it troops, they’re in danger of being abandoned with children with mixed race children, and they were the ones that that lived with dangerous intercourse, that the longevity of these relationships really saved their lives in much more meaningful and longer ways than Americans.

I was just gonna say I really appreciate how multi layered your book is that you’re looking at the set of interactions from multiple lenses, different perspectives, and it’s so beautiful to see it come together. How did you become inspired to do this work?

I think it’s a long time coming for me. I grew up so my mom is Filipino. My dad is is white. And I grew up always kind of getting asked like if I was from a military family, and I don’t think I understood really. Growing up why that was what people immediately thought, and I had the sense that it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t special, right? I knew that it was there was lots of families like mine. And I think growing up, it was something that I was interested in kind of figuring out, right? Like, why does everybody asked me about the military? And then as I kind of learned about US history, I was like, Well, this is really just a world war two thing, right? Is this, where it starts with the kind of rest and rec industries that that kind of spring up in the Asia Pacific region, after during World War Two, and after, during the cold war in Vietnam. So when I went to grad school, to work with, you know, there’s still a spiritual use, like, nobody’s done research on that this period. A lot of like, yeah, a lot of the research is kind of like World War Two, and later. So, you know, we both knew, that’s not where the story starts. And that was kind of, you know, so it’s been a long standing interest. And then I did some language immersion trips in the Philippines. And we went to places like Subic Bay. And you could see everywhere all over the town was was admiration. Folks just, you know, looking out of place, but they were born and raised there, right. So, yeah, that those those types of trips to the Philippines also kind of heightened my awareness of the longer history and how it had kind of, you know, developed into what I was experiencing there.

Thank you for sharing that. One of the things that you mentioned in the book is that multiracial reality, Mestizo identity is something that has a long tradition in the Philippines was under Spanish colonial rule for four centuries. Yeah. And so why do you think there was a slightly different valence to motion reality when it when the Philippines come under US occupation?

It’s funny, I was talking to my friends about this, I was like, you know, when Americans came to the Philippines to occupy at 98, a lot of the

Judy

Filipino elites were Spanish mestizos, and Chinese mestizos. And they were in politics, and but when you get to, like, you know, through the American occupation, and after, there’s not really too many American mestizos that are in those same kind of levels of political power. Right? I mean, they might have many kind of local names for themselves. It’s like business owners or what have you. But I think I mean, I think part of it is the, the scope and that kind of broadness of of US imperialism in the Philippines versus the Spanish colonialism. Because for a lot of those 500 years, this Spanish didn’t have a ton of people there, it was kind of towards the last like 50 to 100 years that more troops were kind of sent in and more more people went to the Philippines to try to pull in the south and pull in the north and more kind of effective ways. And also kind of fending off advances from the British, etc. So for a long time, there, the number of people saying wasn’t that many, and those people kind of just integrated into communities and then their their kids became leaders in the community because of connections with the Spanish Empire and the resources that it afforded them. And for, for Americans. I mean, I think, as much as there’s this kind of hostility against the Spanish Empire that culminates in the revolution against Spain in the Philippines. I do in the sources that I’ve read it, I do get the sense that Spanish mestizos of Chinese mestizos didn’t necessarily have the same type of stigma around them and their origins as American mestizos who, by and large, like Filipinos, characterize them as you know, the products of Imperial violence if that chapter in the book about the Filipino writers that talk about these kinds of relationships. Now, even in stories where there are these good American characters, so called good American characters that marry i and save Filipinos they’re still kind of you know, they’re still kind of full of themselves and self centered and don’t treat Filipinos as equals. Right. So, it there is, for me in the sources a sense that the Filipinos understood American mestizos more as as symptomatic of American power read and imperialism in the islands. And that’s not to say that those those families didn’t have positions of prominence. But it is to say that they the American, Mr. Issa community seemed to kind of isolate itself a lot more as well, right. They tended to stay as it kind of American community or or kind of like insulated community from other Filipino communities, even though Filipino communities were more welcoming of them. A lot of these dads like really tried to instill in them, their Americanness, right that they were different somehow, even though they’re born and raised in the Philippines like everyone else, right, but didn’t have an American Dad. I think there’s also that that sense of like, mestizot kids were taught to think that they’re, they’re better in various ways.

That’s really interesting. I was thinking about your comment that Filipino writers interpreted these multiracial relationships and families as a product of American Empire. And we began by talking about how these relationships were considered dangerous on from the perspective of the US military, but you also have this really interesting interpretation of these relationships. So in your introduction, you talked about, well,

interracial intercourse, pose a set of dangerous possibilities to colonial officials. It was also a vital importance since the consolidation of imperial rule and legitimacy in the Philippines. Yeah. So could you talk a little bit about that kind of contradictory positioning of sexual of dangerous intercourse as both dangerous but also essential?

Yeah, it’s so I think what it really illustrates is that as much as imperialism has these ideologies of like, white racial superiority, right, white supremacy and curiosity of non white peoples, it’s just as much practical, the processes of imperialism are just as much practical as they are ideological, right. And so when, when colonists are, are in the Philippines, and they’re trying to consolidate 7000 islands, under the US flag, they really come to rely heavily on inter married men are men in relationships with local women who have access to communities, who have access to resources, who have access to knowledge, language, knowledge, and all these things that are going to help them to bring various populations more and more under the US flag. So even though, you know, colonial officials were talking about how they thought these men were deviant, and course like American frontiers, men, right, they relied on them. They were literally their guides, their hosts, and their informants to help them figure out the best ways to bring certain populations to heal, right. And, you know, a lot of these inner married men or men and relationships with local women, were vital intermediaries.

Your characterization of these relationships and how they bolster American empire really resonates. I think, with the scholarship that has been emerging has emerged on settler colonialism. You make this really intriguing comment about how to understand the Philippines in light of that, that scholarship. So at the Philippines during this period as an American colony, with settlers, rather than an American Southern colonial colony. And so I’m really interested in the way that you’re making this distinction with settlers as opposed to settler colony. Could you talk a little bit more about why you want to make that distinction?

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s so messy and so hard to kind of draw the line in terms of How is this? You know, where do we see the apparatuses of settler debate? And because they never really end, right? When I workshop this with people in my department here, people that are more, you know, Native American indigenous studies, they kind of helped me try to wrap my head around what was happening in the Philippines, right, the Spanish Empire was doing various kinds of things in the Philippines that were very much like settler colonialism in the US, right? They were sending soldiers and prisoners down to the southern Philippines, to kind of populate and settle that area, as a way to, you know, hopefully kind of disempower that local Muslim inhabitants. And the US kind of continues those same projects. And, and a lot of the settlers that are helping to consolidate US Empire are mixed race couples, right? Because they’re more often the ones that stayed a lot of the soldiers that are in the Phil-

Judy

ippines, you know, even if they have wives or children, I mean, most of them leave or their their time goes up, right. But the ones that choose to stay usually do so because they have either business interests, or they have wronged some kinds of families in the Philippines, whether they’re formal or and so, you know, the similarities between us settler colonialism in North America, right, are numerous. The same people, you know, the same medical doctors that practiced in the plains wars in the US were the first people they recruited to go be doctors in the Philippines because they felt that these doctors would be more familiar with the types of peoples they would encounter the same kinds of scorched earth tactics of like, first genocide and then assimilate. Right? The same kinds of tactics were used in the southern Philippines, the same kind of boarding school models. Barrows, who is the UC president at the time, right, he his kind of curriculum for boarding schools was the same kind of curriculum that was used in the Philippines. And at the same time, you know, what happens with the Philippines is very different from what happens in the US, it doesn’t become a state, it doesn’t become fully incorporated. Right, it becomes independent. And yet, I mean, independence is one of those kind of fraught, times, right, because the US military still has released to these bases, the largest naval overseas base, US has up until the 90s is in the Philippines. Right. So that is very much like, you know, as people have pointed out, who are looking at, like things like settler militarism, that’s very much like what you would see in a settler colony, right, except it’s being operated by the US military. Supposed to be independent, but I think also, the actors sort of in my book, also think about this. I mean, they very much understand it as the East and like the so called Orient, right. But they talk about it as a frontier of the and they talk, if they call it the West, farthest west of the United States. So they’re even kind of orienting them themselves geographically as Asia Pacific is going to be our frontier, right, our west.

And I think, you know, you could even talk about places like Puerto Rico and Cuba as part of this kind of Western historical trajectory, right, I think Julio Capo in his book, Welcome to Fairyland talks about Miami, right as part of the US Western scholars for much the same reasons. Why don’t you things I find really interesting about your book is that it does connect the scholarship on the US continental West with the overseas US Empire. And you have this beautiful phrase or sentence. You’re asking us to quote reorient our geographical framework to understand this vast ocean world, specifically, current and former possessions of the United States, such as Hawaii and the Philippines, as also belonging to a Western historical trajectory, and to consider how domestic settler colonial history informed the shape of imperialism in the Philippines. So I was wondering if you want to elaborate more about this, how you we specialize our understanding of US history. And in addition to kind of crossing the Oceans, one of the fascinating aspects I find it that your book is for us to really think about the geography of the Philippines, as you mentioned something about some islands. And there’s regional

differences as well in terms of us Imperial role within the Philippines.

Yeah. So I mean, if it all the way that that Americans are thinking about Hawaii and Marshall Islands and the Philippines, it’s all kind of arising from this. You know, scholars have talked about the crisis in this salinity and the closing of the American frontier and all this, these ideas that no American vitality is, was going to end because there’s no more wilds. Supposedly, and they, they orient their gaze farther west, right, like, so you can see that the kind of direct kind of connections with just the US West Coast and places like Hawaii and the Philippines, right, so like, for example, like troops that are headed to the Philippines that they’re leaving from, from the Presidio, in San Francisco. And a lot of them are coming from the Midwest, which is also considered the West, right. And the way that they’re writing about and thinking about places like the Philippines or talking about Kanaka Maoli, is the same kind of racist slurs as they apply to native peoples. They talked about the men that have relations with with indigenous people in the same way as they talk about rugged frontiersman as courses up and etc. So, in their minds, and I think, as I kind of read more sources, in my mind, I was like, Oh, this is just just moving. Now, this is just moving farther west. And a lot of the kind of terms I mean, if you look at a lot of the early interviews that American colonists are doing with elites in the Philippines, as they’re trying to assess the state of the colony and kind of get a lay of the land, they’re talking about Native people in the Philippines, Filipinos, Chinese indigenous Morrow, as Indians. That’s the kind of name that is, is what you’ll see in these kind of early documents. And that changes over the next kind of decade. That is, initially you know, how they understand what you’re doing, right, as this is just a new American western frontier. And these are just new Indians. And I think drawing in the Asia Pacific into historiography, I think it’s been really fruitful. A lot of really great works that I’ve seen lately are doing similar types of works looking at like global indigeneity and how Asia Pacific histories really kind of speak to the histories of us settler colonialism and settler colonialism around the world. Yeah, that was my thinking. When I was asking us to reorient our geographical understanding.

Do you want to elaborate a little bit more about even some of the regional differences within the Philippines?

Yeah. So in the Philippines, I mean, the the entire 7000 Islands was thought of as a frontier. But even within that frontier, there was some places that were more frontier. Right, so in a place like Manila, which was, you know, very highly Europeanized because of the commish population there. As candidate, the major or major hub of reading and commerce for so many years, was already kind of a thriving and bustling city with lots of different ethnic groups and religions. Places that American colonists came to think of as more unruly, right and as more approximating what they knew of, you know, of a frontier. So places like the northern

Cordillera mountain ranges, right, where you have a lot of indigenous groups, as well as the southern island of Mindanao and Sulu Archipelago, which was mostly Muslim, Malaysian and Filipino and indigenous groups, right so those places that that had kind of, unless incorporated under the Spanish period, were seen as like the kind of problem areas that we’re going to be, they’re going to require different types of tools of empire to kind of bring under the flag. And what Americans knew was, was the tools of settler colonialism. To do that, they did the same kinds of things like in the south, they they made essentially kind of treaties and then broke them. They learned that from and then, you know, wars of extermination turned into kind of assimilationist practices and sending people they didn’t want in Manila down to amalgamate with the Muslim population. In the north, it it’s much more of the kind of simulation as practices we see. Later, 1800s, and maybe less, where they’re sending teachers, colleges and schools for they at the same time learn from their projects in the US. They don’t set up boarding schools, they don’t take the money, the schools in New York, they don’t take children away from their home, ask families to send their kids. Right. So they’re seen as you know benevolent versus. So it’s, you know, the tools of settler colonialism but after having honed and refined them in the US, right?

I really appreciate how you provide these kind of micro insights as to what’s happening at the local level, and then being able to pan out. And help us understand that this is a repetition of patterns of technologies of empire. I mentioned previously, I really appreciate the the layering of your interpretation, you look at discourse, you look at lived experiences, you look at institutionalized practices of surveillance. And I wanted to ask you, if you could say a little bit more about sources that you use, what were some of your favorite sources? Were their support sources that surprised you?

Yeah. So I mean, I think, for project that’s looking at like, sexual relationships and gender, I mean, people that do Gender and Sexuality Studies in history know that they’re going to have a problem with sources. And then they know that a lot of times, they’re just going to have to do more work and look at more things and pulling interdisciplinary sources. So I think that’s an even you know, when I was a grad student, I was kind of told by my faculty members, like, Well, do you think you’re really going to find stuff about, you know, people talking about their mistresses? And Stephen was like, you know, I don’t know, I’m a grad student doing research...Maybe, right. I mean and it wasn’t like encouraging feedback. When I first kind of started this. I was like, Well, you know, like other people that have done these projects, in terms of European empires that found stuff. So I think I’m gonna find stuff. But I did have to look at a really broad variety of sources, right. So I had to look at the institutional sources to get a sense of how the government was, you know, thinking about things like, you know, troops infected with syphilis and my troop effectiveness rates. I knew I was gonna find stuff there. And I looked at

memoirs, of soldiers that talked about their own relationships with with Filipinos. I did oral histories with some descendants of people to get their sense of, you know, what made these relationships work and how did their great grandparents understand one another? And what did they leave your family with? Right in terms of kind of historical legacy? But I was also reading things like Farmers Almanac, right, like what does that have to do with like, what I was looking at? I mean, when I kind of found mentioned of this agricultural colony that was made up of mixed race couples, I was like, Okay, so the Department of Agriculture is going to have information and they’re kind of main publication was this farming almanac that they would highlight, like, there is interracial couples that were doing, you know, doing good in the south to encourage other people to settle there. And then I looked at, you know, I thought there’s gonna be stuff in literature, right. And that was the chapter that I really hated writing because I hadn’t really done like critical literary analysis since like undergrad, I have a degree in English and BA. Okay, but that was like, a long time ago. And I was like, Oh, my God, some days, I was just banging my head against the desk, and like, how am I going to talk about these literary stories? So that was a very fraught process for me. But, you know, I’m glad I included them because of the different kinds of angle that they approach the subject from a different kind of perspective from writers that they provide us. And sources that I thought, were fun are my favorite sources, or annex unexpected, I mean, that there was a set of sources, it was a set of interviews. And it was the title of these interviews was the friar land survey. And I was like, Okay, I don’t know what I’m going to find in this. They’re going to be talking to people about Spanish friars. So I know the Spanish friars had lots of mixed race kids like crossing my fingers that comes up, and it comes up. So like, but it seems like that was all Americans wanted to talk about when they’re interviewing people. So that was really surprising to me that like, even when the Filipinos that they were talking to were trying to talk about different topics, that American interviewers will be like, well go back to the Spanish friars and their mistresses, please. Could you keep talking about that? And I was like, This is so weird. These interviewers just really want to know about the sex lives of Spanish friars. And then I and then I realized, Oh, well, it’s because the same intimacies are already happening with with US soldiers, and people are trying to get a grasp on well, how are Filipinos going to respond to them? Let’s see how they think about those same types of relationships. I was like that, that must be part of why there’s this kind of word interest in this excellent fry. Right. Yeah, I also really enjoyed the beer, the beer sources. Um, it’s just a wild that the colonists, you know, were thinking that beer was gonna save soldiers from syphilis, that that beer was the prophylactic that the Empire needed to save men’s bodies from the women of the Philippines. So I laughed a lot when I was writing.

That is so great. And actually, this reminds me you went to UCI as an undergraduate. Degree, right? Yeah. Go Anteaters! Yeah.

My favorite, my favorite mascot that I’ve ever had, Anteaters.

I don’t know, if you want to share more about what were some of your favorite aspects of your book, or maybe some of the most difficult aspects of your book to write.

I mean, I really like the chapter with the court cases. That also, that was a late addition to the book. And it was only because I had came across the Supreme Court records that I had never seen before. And I don’t know why they haven’t been used, I think. I think it’s highly likely that that a lot of the sources just became digitized by law schools in the Philippines. So they put up like, what, what types of summaries that they had, I think a lot of the kind of paperwork and transcripts, probably kind of got destroyed in World War Two, but a lot of the records remained. And so you know, I didn’t get like word for word transcripts, but a lot of the court summaries were being digitized. And so I just started looking through them to see if I, you know, first I started going through and looking for American names, right, or American sounding names, and that was how I found some of these sources that were court cases involving civil and family law that went all the way up to the Supreme Court in the Philippines and I really loved those cases, because it really highlighted how Filipina women how far they were willing to go to get what they knew that they deserved. Right? Whether that was custody at their own kids or spousal support or inheritances that are left to them in the wills of their spouse. Right, but it’s often their erstwhile American in laws are trying to take away from them, trying to take away their own kids, or support, right, but even like, I mean, these relationships were precarious enough, but with women that were lucky enough to kind of have a formal marriage and like a contract that says they were owed something, right, even for them, it wasn’t guaranteed, and even more that their spouse left a will saying, I’m going to leave this money to my Filipino wife and children. It didn’t guarantee really that they were going to get it. So these women often had to go to court, because white family and in the US, it’s like, we would argue, well, you know, in Kentucky, there’s no such nation, also, your marriage is invalid, that you don’t get any of this even though there’s a will. And if you know what you see in a lot of court cases like this, and even in other colonial locations, right, the women, often when we because because it kind of the legal parameters, like if there is a there is a will, and it’s been assessed. And you know, the court can’t really go against that, because the family is arguing that you’re a sexually non white woman. Because the facts are, that there is a will. The facts are, we know that you’re the first mother of this child, so we can’t legally give this child to someone that we can’t verify is actually her family. Right? Even though the court might have wanted to do those things and might have wanted to side with people that were trying to take their families and inheritances away. Women often succeeded the courts and it was just so great to see. Even, you know, they go through all these hoops, knowing that they’re going to be vilified, knowing that they’re gonna, patients are

going to be dragged through the mud and that it was probably going to show up in the press. I don’t even know how they’re paying for it. Right, paying for the legal representation. And they still did it. That was great. Chapter Two, right.

That’s a terrific find. Yeah.

I know, this book is about a particular time and place. But I think the arguments that you’re making actually resume beyond the Philippines beyond us colonization. And so I was wondering if you would like to share what you think are kind of maybe the legacies, the larger implications if you’re studying

Yeah, it’s it was a lot of these kinds of presentist concerns that brought me to this project. Like the immersion population in places like a longer post city we kind of persistent like, in Korea, whether it was a military brat and even like growing up, you know, as my parents got divorced and seeing how hard it was for my mom trying to to enter the dating pool again and kind of seeing and understanding how people expected her to be as an Asian so you know, I, I looked at things like the the admiration homecoming act, this legislation after the Vietnam War, that that recognizes that there’s all these mixtures of kids that are being worn all over Southeast Asia because of us occupations there. And, and setting out a path for preferential immigration status. And yet the Philippines is never I mean, there’s like three different three different emigration acts that they get passed, and none of them apply to Filipinos. The Philippines is a country that’s consistently left off of there and in various accounts that I’ve read the number of Philippine ama regions to pass is like most other Southeast Asian countries in terms of your, like volume and numbers. It was something that I was like, Why? Why are they on there? And the laws are kind of skirting around the issue saying, Well, we’re going to include places that are that were active war zones, where we understand that such children will face discrimination. So I began to understand well, this is basically saying the Philippines was never an active war zone. The Philippines has a different sort of relationship with the United States, not one of occupier occupied. Right? The Philippines is more racially tolerant because of its years of interracial mixed roof. And so we can just leave them out of this. Right? When, when really, I mean, all those those kind of reasons don’t make any sense. It’s really, I feel like the people that end this probably knew that there were going to be so many more people from the Philippines that this would apply to write in it’s kind of that that yellow peril moment, again, where we were, I understand this as lawmakers not wanting to, quote unquote, open the floodgates, and kind of kind of limit it to a small population as possible. And they do that by invoking this idea of us exceptionals. Us is somehow different than the US is never an occupying power in the Philippines,

US and the Philippines have a long shared friendship. We still see that in a lot of the documents that talks about the Philippines like Department of Defense. Documents and in the kind of United Nations kind of documents they talked about the Philippines as Asia’s oldest democracy, had the US shares a special relationship with the Philippines. And he talks about it as like, as a long romance, your long kind of familial relationship, when the history is actually that, you know, in the chapter with the court cases, the courts and Americans did all they could to deny those familial familial relationships and say that they would never be a part of the American And it really, you know, during this history I mean, I hope that it will kind of help people to understand why, why things also like the recent tragic Atlanta spa shootings, why? Why things like that happen? We’re not random, they’re not, you know, this person didn’t target these places. For no reason. Right. But these are the deeper this is the deeper history that that shows us how Filipina women and Asian women more broadly, came to be understood by Americans, and how the Philippines and its people come to be understood, and why it’s so difficult to kind of see and undo is because of this longevity. Right? It’s just so deeply ingrained, and it has been for a long time. And these dangerous ideas about our course that these comments made about Filipina women and how they characterize them, meant to be such a significant way that that many Americans think about. So that was also a hope of mine to kind of. So this longer history, and how it still continues to be something that shapes women’s lives, Asian women’s lives, significant and sometimes life ways. As it did then.

Thank you so much for your important contribution to this geography to Republic conversation. So appreciative of your work. Thank you, Tessa.

Thank you, Judy. This is really great. Thank you for your really great questions.

Thank you for listening to Authors in Conversation: The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press.

three Questions With LEE CONGDON

author of George Kennan for

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for ths book?

I suppose my favorite anecdote is the bringing back to memory the dinner my wife and I shared with Mr. and Mrs. Kennan during the year I spent as a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study. It is not just Mr. Kennan’s dignity and graciousness that I recall, but something more: he never showed the least condescension while at the same time never pretending that he was not George Kennan. That is, he knew how to handle fame.

Our Time

behavior toward a major nuclear power.

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

As a historian, I should like to see those who write about contemporary international affairs demonstrate a greater historical consciousness. To write, for example, about the war in Ukraine with seemingly little knowledge of that land’s history—its historic ties to Russia, legacy of pogroms, and terrible suffering under Stalin’s rule—makes any serious understanding of the present conflict all but impossible.

to pass.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

When I began to write the book, I wish I could have known what has happened internationally since I finished it. With respect to the conduct of foreign affairs, almost everything Kennan warned against has come to pass. He thought it dangerous folly for NATO to continue to push ever closer to Russia’s borders— particularly by threatening to draw Ukraine into the military alliance. To admit Finland and Sweden, he would have thought madness. These are provocations that no Russian government, of any kind, can tolerate. In general, he would have been chagrined by the US’s increasingly reckless and irresponsible

With respect to the conduct of foreign affairs, almost everything Kennan warned against has come

THE EXCERPT

The Catholic Work of Nation Building

When Charles J. Guiteau approached James A. Garfield in a Washington, DC, train station on July 2, 1881, drawing his revolver and firing two shots at the president, the assassin was sure that he was saving his country from a corrupt administration. When questioned by police after he had committed his foul, evil deed, Guiteau proclaimed that he was a “stalwart among the stalwarts” and that General William Sherman and Vice President Chester A. Arthur were at that moment on their way to rescue him from his captors and restore order to the nation.1 What he did not tell detectives after his arrest was that he was also fulfilling the destiny of a long line of reformers reaching back to Martin Luther. The murder of Garfield functioned, then, as the ninety-sixth thesis nailed to the modern church of Wittenberg.

This is clearly a fantastic account. If true, it would revise historians’ understanding of the Garfield assassination and the Gilded Age and would revolutionize several centuries’ worth of scholarship on the Protestant Reformation. This notion of Guiteau as a legatee of Luther, however, was not pulled from thin air. Isaac Hecker, one of American Catholicism’s most notable converts, proposed it. As Hecker noted in 1887, “[When] Guiteau was condemned by an American judge and jury as a murderer, and this verdict to all appearance was ratified by the American people, then and there the standpoint of Protestantism was also condemned. And now a bronze statue is about to be erected, or is already erected, in honor of Martin Luther, in the very city which

hanged as a criminal, upon an infamous gallows, his logical child!”2 Hecker granted that church reform was a regrettable necessity in Luther’s day, placing the German priest in the pantheon of “true reformers,” which included Hildebrand, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Charles Borromeo. He would go no further, however, instead arguing that the moment Luther rebelled against the authority of the Catholic hierarchy was the moment of his effective damnation, and the author made a dizzying leap to the late nineteenth century by connecting what he called the “free-individualism of Protestantism” to a host of other social ills of his day, including presidential assassination, child murder, Unitarianism, and spiritism. The latter, Hecker argued, “leads directly to the entire emancipation of the flesh, resulting in free-lovism, and sometimes ending in diabolism. Spiritism is Satan’s master-stroke, in which he obtains from his victims the denial of his own existence. These are some of the bitter fruits of the separation from Catholic unity.” According to Hecker, Protestantism was the root of all evil in American society, and its “dogmas [were] foreign to republicanism and [led] to a theocracy in politics.” By contrast, that society’s ideological and spiritual parent and necessary savior was Catholicism.3 Hecker made these comments at a time when Catholics were becoming a force in American politics, culture, and public life and at a moment when Catholic leaders were demarcating church boundaries, reworking the meaning of Americanism, and redefining Catholicity on the eve of the twentieth century.

Although scholars have analyzed Catholics as outsiders in American history, historians have devoted far less space to the inverse questions of how Catholics claimed the mantle of Americanism and how they worked to achieve mainstream status. Making Catholic America describes how Catholics worked in the years following the Civil War to entrench their claim to belonging in the American nation. They did so by demonstrating the integral roles they played in a variety of connected imperial, political, and public reform projects and by engaging in a rhetoric of anti-Protestantism against Protestants, who frequently regarded themselves as the model Americans.

The postbellum era was a period of immense cultural, economic, political, and social change. It was also a time of significant transformations in the country’s religious life. Catholics, whose church became the country’s largest by 1890, reconceived of their own places in the American nation between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Catholics in this period argued that their church was the country’s most faithful supporter of freedom and constitutional liberty and that Catholicism had birthed American independence. They attacked the loyalty of Protestants to highlight their own and spoke of their leadership of the American nation as self-evidently apparent and appropriate. As one Catholic author wrote in 1875, “American history testifies with

gratitude to the names of Rochambeau, De Grasse, De Kalb, Pulaski, Lafayette, and many more; all Catholic heroes, who nobly led on their gallant troops in our cause, and obtained speedy triumph, even at a time when the odds were against us.” This author, who went by the name of “A Resident,” asked rhetorically of these Catholic Revolutionary War figures, “Were they enemies of liberty? Were our Catholic forefathers cowards, who stood bravely in the fight and fought with their noble leader De Kalb, while the Protestant lines of Virginia and North Carolina, with Gen. Gates at their head, fled from the field of Camden?” “A Resident” answered, “History will testify that Catholic citizens fought when others fled,” and argued that Catholics continued to demonstrate their devotion to the Union and to the newly consolidating nation through their ser vice in the Civil War.4

Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul told his fellow Catholics in 1889, the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American church’s first diocese, that they should stand proud as members of a powerful religious community. “We number ten millions,” Ireland reminded them. He described American Catholics on the eve of a new century as “a powerful army” ready to convert the nation and take their place as leaders of an enlightened society.5 Converting the nation to Catholicism was an avowed goal of Ireland and other similar Catholic leaders of the period. Ireland and his fellow bishop, John J. Keane, argued in an 1886 memorandum to the Vatican’s Propaganda Fide, its Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, that the “conversion of American Protestants” was “a vital matter for our religion. The Church will never be strong in America; she will never be sure of keeping within her fold the descendants of immigrants, Irish as well as others, until she has gained a decided ascendancy among the Americans themselves.”6 Laypeople also expressed this confidence in the conversion of the nation to Catholicism. James L. Meagher of Cazenovia, Minnesota, wrote in 1892 to Archbishop Ireland, “The time is coming when the English-speaking people will enter the church in crowds.”

Meagher praised James Cardinal Gibbons, Ireland, and Keane—leaders of the liberal wing of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US church— for “advanc[ing] the Cause of Catholicity in a remarkable manner within a few years last past, and if it continues in the same proportion, we may look for a breaking away from the other churches, and a wave of conversions sweeping over the English speaking peoples.”7 Such confidence in the making of a newly Catholicized American nation was building through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and would serve as the foundation for further Catholic empowerment in the twentieth-century American political mainstream.

In a recent work, one historian argues that post–Civil War Catholics worked to create “a separate American Catholic subculture in the United States” and

that their general attitude can be described as “an instinctive defensiveness born out of their encounter with antebellum nativism.”8 It may be true that some Catholics retreated to defensive ghettos in the late nineteenth century, but such a perspective silences the numerous stories of antebellum and postbellum Catholics who routinely went on the offensive against non-Catholics and the forces of nativism. By assuming that these Catholics viewed themselves as outsiders, scholars may be in danger of tacitly accepting the view of Protestants as the normative Americans, which Catholics of this period did not accept. Instead of privileging Catholic difference and separateness over Catholic similarity and inclusion, Making Catholic America brings more balance to the picture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US Catholicism as an empowered and influential political and cultural force, despite its members’ linguistic and devotional practices, which may have differed from those of many other Americans.

Instead of assuming that Catholics sought acceptance, this book suggests that such a perspective is based on faulty assumptions. Perhaps Catholics sought no acceptance at all because they felt it would be illogical to assimilate into a nation of which they believed they were already a part and which they considered an outgrowth and creation of their own religious community. The Civil War career of Catholic chaplain Peter Paul Cooney provides an instructive example. In his war time diary, Cooney portrayed Protestant chaplains as being poor at their jobs and as questionable Christians. He characterized them as unmanly cowards who shrank from their patriotic and religious duties in the face of battlefield horrors and described their faith as “empty.”9 Cooney defended a deathbed baptism of a Methodist soldier who supposedly requested the sacrament and claimed that the soldier asked him “with more than ordinary energy, ‘Where then is our ministers—where is their words of consolation for the poor departing soul. I see them nowhere in the hospital.’ ” Cooney blamed the entire war on one of the bedrocks of Protestant theology: “Private Judgment.” He extended his critique of Civil War–era Protestantism to the competitive, American religious marketplace, blaming private judgment for the United States becoming “the prolific mother of sects, from Free Love to Mormonism up to the ribald & flexible creed of Episcopalianism & down again through the ravings of Miller & his Snow oil theory, to the irrational principle of Presbyterianism that some men are born to be damned.” This led to a “spirit of disobedience to both Divine & Civil laws.” “Private Judgment,” Cooney argued, “is the fatal apple of the human race—the production of a corrupt tree nurtured by the corruption of human Nature—its end is death.”10 Protestantism, then, was the wellspring of disunion and disaster, whereas Catholicism was the source of united, national power and order.11

In the view of many Catholics of the nineteenth century, the American nation was made by and for Catholics, as evidenced by Cooney’s contrasting of the faithful, patriotic Catholic priest with the faithless, disloyal Protestant minister. As Catholic priest Patrick Cronin of Buffalo, New York, exclaimed in his speech, “The Church and the Republic,” given at the Columbian Catholic Congress in 1893, “This land, discovered by Catholic genius, explored by Catholic missionary zeal, baptized in the blood of the Catholic revolutionary heroes, and preserved in unified glory by the prowess of Catholic arms on many a gory field—is it any marvel that the Church should have phenomenally grown and flourished here?”12 Catholics had invented the nation; it was their proper inheritance; and it should thus not seem remarkable that the Catholic Church would have grown so substantially by the turn of the twentieth century.

The subjects that make up this book’s narrative core—western expansion and US Indigenous policy; turn-of-the-twentieth-century world’s fairs; extraterritorial imperialism; immigration reform, regulation, and restriction; and judicial and po liti cal battles over the public role of religion in the Progressive Era—served as essential components of the postbellum nation-building project. They functioned as the nexus in which Catholicism, Protestantism, and the state vied for influence and power in defining the physical extent, ideological character, and demographic composition of the nation. Underlying them all was an ever-present critique on the part of nationalist Catholics, which held that the nation was far more dynamic an entity than was described by the Protestants of their imaginations. This critique also argued that Catholics should play an integral role in spreading Christian civilization across the American frontier, extending it beyond the western hemisphere, and then advancing the civilizing project within their own ranks to prove to non-Catholics that Catholicism was a quintessentially American community worthy of taking its place alongside Protestantism in the administration of the country’s civil religion.

Through their conflicts with Protestants over religious liberty and control of Indigenous agencies and reservations in the US West, Catholic missionaries, bishops, and laypeople active in the western missions sought to leverage power over federal bureaus and over Native Americans, who were frequently their Catholic coreligionists. Through this activity, Catholics assisted in shaping national borders during Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age. In the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, Catholics continued their battles with Protestants over schools and missions in the islands and once again portrayed themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution and American values, in contrast with Protestants, who sought allegedly to subvert public order. They built on their imperial training on the western reservations to colonize the Philippines, and they played central roles, alongside federal officials

and the Protestants they sought to supplant, in projecting national power across the Pacific. These nationalist Catholics also harnessed their church to prevailing ideas of white racial superiority and immigration regulation and directed them inward. Their national belonging, then, was dependent in part on delimiting the American nation within Catholicism. Finally, Catholics in the first three decades of the twentieth century kept alive their religious nationalist project through their continued contributions to western missions, extraterritorial imperialism, and immigration policy. They worked successfully through the judiciary and the political process to continue demonstrating their belonging in the national community. These venues of debate and public policy— Native missions, Philippine colonization, immigration regulation, and the anti-Catholic revival and Catholic backlash in the Progressive Era—were connected by the common theme of the enduring Catholic challenge to Protestant power. They played a collective role in Catholic participation in the reconstruction of the postbellum American nation through the related projects of border formation, power projection, and defining of national membership, and Catholics redefined the national mainstream as essentially Catholic.13

In this revised narrative of American Catholic nation building, many Catholic leaders of the postbellum United States were comfortable putting a distinctively Catholic spin on imperialism and colonization, scientific racial theories, immigration regulation, and national boundary formation. Historians have typically regarded the ideas of whiteness and race, religious nationalism, and Manifest Destiny as the sole domain of middle- and upper-class Protestants. This book, on the other hand, argues that the provenance of these concepts must be broadened to include the Catholics who played an appreciable role in formulating them. The Catholics at the heart of this book—many of whom were part of the church’s Gilded-Age and Progressive-Era liberal wing—were those individuals, both lay and clerical, historian Thomas T. McAvoy argues, who supported “the adaptation of Catholic practices to the American milieu whether they were of American, Irish, French, or German birth.” These included leading clerical figures, McAvoy explains, such as “Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, Father [Isaac] Hecker, Bishops [John] Ireland and [John J.] Keane and [James] Cardinal Gibbons,” who “were making determined efforts in speeches and articles to show the American people that American Catholics were united with them in their efforts to improve the civic and social welfare of the country.” In several of their forays into public and political life, they were opposed by conservatives, including prelates such as “Archbishop [Michael] Corrigan, Bishop [Bernard John] McQuaid, and Bishop Ignatius Horstmann,” who “felt that these adaptations were heretical.” This battle between conservatives and liberals was a theological and political power

tWo Questions With RODNEY HESSINGER author of Smitten

1. What is your favorite anecdote or insight from your research for this book?

My book is full of stories about religious competition, showing how disagreements about sex and gender could infuse these contests. One of my favorites is the one I use to open my book. It is about a failed Mormon mission trip from Kirtland to North Union village to convert the Shakers in 1831. In terms of sex and gender differences, one could hardly imagine two more opposite groups from this era. And yet the Mormons genuinely believed they could convert their Ohio neighbors. And not

real insult was added to injury, when Leman Copley abandoned the Mormons, returning to the Shakers and a life of celibacy a few days later. The sexual stakes were high in the Second Great Awakening.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

Technically, it wasn’t entirely true back when I started the book. But in terms of finding sources, over the last number of years, a much greater wealth of early American print sources has become available electronically, especially

without reason: they had converted one Shaker man, Leman Copley, to their faith. In fact, it was Copley’s idea to visit his former religious community. The mission was given divine validation by Joseph Smith in a revelation. Smith sent a strong warning to the Shakers, telling them they had violated God’s word by foregoing both sex and marriage. Such a berating message was not received well. The Shakers retorted that the Mormons were led by a “false Christ,” living by the flesh. Mormon Parley Pratt was so offended by the reception that he shook the dirt off his coattails towards his Shaker audience as a mark of disrespect. The Shakers chastised him for shaking his “filthy tail,” telling him to “purge your soul from your lusts.” The Mormons rode away in frustration. This was bad enough, but the

through Hathitrust.org and the Library of Congress. Not only are more sources available, they are much more easily searched. By immersing myself in print sources from the early American republic, the contingency and vibrancy of the debates about religion and sexuality came alive to me. I came to appreciate that there was a real “contest for souls” in the early American republic.

The mission was given devine validation by Joseph Smith in a revelation.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

The World the Fish Made

In 1852 the United States seemed to inch toward crisis. Just two years earlier, many Americans felt they had quelled the rising tide of sectional antagonism with yet another compromise that they hoped would stave off disunion for another generation. But indignation over the continued existence of slavery in the national polity still burned. In March 1852 the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s incendiary novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin exposed the inhumanity of human bondage to a national audience. In July the formerly enslaved orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass queried his audience in Rochester, New York, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” In doing so, he questioned the very efficacy of the United States as a nation purporting to guarantee liberty but inextricably bound to slavery. And symbolic of a coming crisis, that same month, Henry Clay, the ardent nationalist and architect of compromise, was the first American to lie in state in the rotunda of the national capitol. With his passing, an era passed.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Daniel Webster addressed an audience at his home in Marshfield, Massachusetts. The aging statesman did not, however, address the inequities that Stowe’s novel vividly described, the broken promises of US nationhood Douglass decried, or even the death of the nation’s most prominent politician. Instead, Webster talked about fish.

Since before independence, Americans had gone forth from the coasts of New England to the fishing waters of the Northwest Atlantic in search of cod.

In the summer of 1852 Great Britain made known its intention to curtail US access to the fisheries by removing US fishermen from those waters for real or imagined violations of the series of international agreements that governed the use of this maritime resource. Such action threatened the livelihoods of thousands of New England fishermen while striking a blow against an industry that had defined the nation since the colonial era and that drew tight the economic bonds that tied the United States together and drew closer the faraway markets of the Caribbean and Mediterranean. The British decision also raised fears over the fragility of US independence, as such heavy-handed action suggested that London looked to undermine the nation’s sovereignty at sea. A crisis—one born not of domestic disunion but of foreign friction— gripped the nation that summer, as Americans across the union and across the political spectrum reacted viscerally to this affront to a right the nation had enjoyed for decades.

As tension between US fishermen and the Royal Navy mounted in the aftermath of Britain’s announcement, Webster departed Washington. The secretary of state was nearing the end of his illustrious career in national politics. He left the capital to escape the oppressive heat of a Washington summer and returned to his home on the New England coast. On his arrival he was greeted by throngs looking to catch a glimpse of the statesman and perhaps even hear what the federal government was prepared to do in response to the unfolding drama on the North Atlantic. They were not to be disappointed.

Betraying his sober, even conservative approach to diplomacy, which ordinarily leaned toward Anglophilia, Webster struck a defiant tone that day from his home in Marshfield. He promised the federal government would counter British designs on the fisheries: “The fishermen shall be protected in all their rights of property, and in all their rights of occupation.” The Millard Fillmore administration would not falter, but would, Webster said, in words that no doubt resonated with an audience in a seaside town, protect the fishermen “hook and line, bob and sinker.”1 Despite such unequivocal language, the question remains: why was Daniel Webster so concerned about fish?

The answer, in part, lies in the fact that for nineteenth-century Americans, fish were never merely fish and the fisheries were not just another mine of natural wealth that undergirded national prosperity. As Webster observed that day, “The most potent consequences are involved in this matter,” including questions about national security. “Our fisheries,” the statesman continued, “have been the very nurseries of our navy. If our flag ships have conquered the enemy on the sea, the fisheries are at the bottom of it—the fisheries were the seeds from which these glorious triumphs were born and sprung.” Per-

haps of more importance to Webster’s audience, the economic value of the fisheries was among the “potent consequences” that impelled action on the subject. Speaking of the fisheries, Webster remarked that “they employ a vast number. Many of our own people are engaged in that vocation. There are perhaps among you some who have been on the Grand Banks for forty successive years, and there hung on to the ropes in storm and wrecks.” Webster steeled his audience: “You may be assured it is a subject upon which no one sleeps at Washington.”2 Over the coming weeks and months, news of Webster’s speech and of the brewing dispute on the fisheries raced across the nation. Showing that this was not merely a regional issue concerning a trifling subject, papers from farming districts like Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Gulf ports like New Orleans, and places even as far away as Honolulu carried Webster’s words and breathlessly reported on any developments emanating from the fisheries.3 By the mid-nineteenth century, the nation eagerly consumed any information about conflict over the North Atlantic fishing grounds. That conflict was as old as the nation itself.

The Treaty of Paris (1783) left the new United States with a statutory claim to the fisheries, along with formal independence. From the beginning, then, fisheries and independence were tied in the minds of American statesmen, if not Americans more generally. Subsequently, those statesmen used the power of the state to safeguard this totem of US nationalism from any threat. The North Atlantic fisheries would help define the limits of federal authority for nearly a century.

Cod fishing in places like the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Grand Banks operated as a central facet of US statecraft for much of the nineteenth century. The fisheries stood at the nexus of multiple forces— economic, social, and cultural—making the fisheries the fodder of politics at multiple levels—local, regional, national, and international. The phrase “fisheries issue” will serve as shorthand for the series of questions that surrounded US commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. Internationally, the question was one of who could fish where, while domestically, the central question concerned the degree to which the US state would support the fishing industry both politically and economically. How the federal state addressed those questions shows us the extent to which the state could and did use its power.4

Commercial fishing occupied such an impor tant place in the operations of the federal government because it represented so much more than just fish. The fisheries became an environment on which the US political community ascribed various meanings. Fundamental beliefs like independence and national security were tied to the daily operations of fishing to make this maritime environment an impor tant element of US state making.5

Ocean fisheries are an extraordinarily well-situated prism through which to study statecraft. These aquatic resources are most often tied to the problems of regulating elusive, mobile, yet ubiquitous organisms, with little concern for humanity’s political and regulatory regimes. Often, these kinds of resources demanded the attention of political establishments not only because of their value as commodities but also because of their mobile nature, making them fundamentally different than other resources. Active political regimes have been necessary to facilitate the extraction of this resource because of its peculiar nature. Histories of fisheries are often tied to how governments at various levels work, and often fail, to claim, manage, and defend the rights of their citizens to exploit a maritime resource. In that way, then, the history of fisheries is the history of statecraft.6 The relationship between fishing, if not the maritime world more generally, and the development of the US state and US nationalism during the nineteenth century was not unique. Great seaborne powers, from the British Empire and the Dutch Republic to ancient Athens and Carthage, not to mention a host of intermediate powers like Norway, Denmark, Portugal, and Japan, have all defined themselves in terms of their historical relationship with sailors, the sea, and its resources.7

At Marshfield, Webster spoke forcefully but he did not say anything new. He tapped into decades of rhetoric that placed the North Atlantic fisheries at the heart of US statecraft. The economy, commerce, war, sectionalism, nationalism, and domestic politics all met at the fisheries. But it was not the unique position of the fisheries in relation to all these forces that gave the fisheries issue its importance. Instead, it is how the federal government sought to solve the fisheries issue that revealed the limits of state power in a world of competing actors.8

Foreign relations was but the most obvious arena in which concern for the fisheries steered state power. But with the fisheries issue, the exercise of that power was never straightforward. While at times the federal government could impose its vision on the actors and environments in the region, just as often, fishermen and the fish themselves were the primary agents of US foreign relations. This kind of give-and-take relationship typified the fisheries issue and shows that the operative question was not whether the federal government possessed power enough to impose on the lives of its citizens, but rather how that power operated.

While New England fishermen ranged much closer to home than the merchant mariners and whalers who traversed the globe, they were vitally important in defining the nation’s relationship with the wider world and, crucially, with Britain. From the American Revolution through the Civil War, the fisheries

were a central concern in Anglo-American relations, tacking with the ups and downs, the cooperation and confrontation that defined the United States’ most impor tant foreign relationship. The fisheries were not merely another line item on the laundry list of concerns that echoed across the Anglophone Atlantic. While debates tied to things like commerce, finance, and culture were the meat of Anglo-American relations, nothing else, with perhaps the exception of slavery, reached the level of ubiquity in that relationship that the fisheries issue did. At every turn, diplomats found fish—at times, fostering closer transatlantic ties, and at other times acting as the harbinger of friction. The fisheries issue, like Anglo-American relations more generally, defied simple characterization apart from its close association with the most impor tant inflection points in that relationship. Anglo-American relations during the nineteenth century simply cannot be understood without the North Atlantic fisheries occupying a central place.

The fisheries issue was enshrined in Anglo-American relations from the beginning. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris US diplomats secured recognition from Great Britain that the United States would enjoy forever the “liberty to take fish” on the Grand Banks and along the coasts of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador.9 Yet, sown within the unassuming language of the fisheries article were the seeds of Anglo-American friction that would ripen into the bitter fruit of transatlantic discord. The 1783 treaty set three precedents that structured the nature of the fisheries issue in Anglo-American relations for nearly a century. First, it established that the fisheries would be a subject of consideration for Anglo-American diplomats. By allowing US fishermen a perpetual claim to waters so far from their own shores, British diplomats ensured that the waters of the Northwest Atlantic would be a transimperial environment subject to the periodic wrangling of diplomats. Second, by including the fisheries in a comprehensive agreement that recognized US independence, Americans made an explicit connection between the fisheries and independence itself. As the fisheries issue continued to resurface in transatlantic relations, US diplomats and the US public reacted so viscerally to any encroachment on the rights of US fishermen because it seemed to represent an encroachment on independence. And finally, the Treaty of Paris demonstrated how diplomatic agreements were doomed to fail when addressing the fisheries. Anglo-American diplomats treated the fisheries as a passive subject that would naturally comply with their dictates. In reality, the fisheries were a dynamic environment whose shifting nature ensured that any static treaty would be out of date as soon as the ink dried. The Treaty of Paris, like the string of treaties that would follow over the next century, was steeped in irony as it only exacerbated the very tensions it sought to address. For the statesmen who

drafted and debated these treaties—men far removed from the everyday operation of the fisheries—this was a difficult lesson to learn, and it demonstrated the necessity of including fishermen and the fish themselves in this story.

These trends continued to influence the tenor of fishery diplomacy as US and British representatives addressed and readdressed tension in the North Atlantic. In 1818, in 1854, in 1871, and again in 1877, Anglo-American statesmen looked to hammer out the differences that continued to dog the situation on the fisheries. At each turn, they failed. In fact, with each new agreement, these diplomats created the conditions under which tensions would transform but never abate. Yet, crucially, it was never just the fisheries these statesmen discussed. Borders, tariffs, trade, and slavery were just some of the issues this series of treaties also addressed. At times the fisheries became an entrée, a necessary prerequisite to addressing this myriad of concerns, as it was fish that got diplomats to the table.10

The story of fisheries is a story of the limits of US power. The fisheries issue was concerned with the very shape of the US state. As Anglo-American statesmen time and again turned their attention to the North Atlantic fisheries, they were in fact shaping the emergent US imperium. By determining where US fishermen could or could not fish and where the lines between US and British imperial sovereignty were, the fisheries issue set the limits of the US state. This story is also the story of the limits to the exercise of US power. The British Empire was the most obvious check on Washington, but the marine environment also limited the ability of the state to impose its vision. We cannot fully understand the operation of state power absent how that power was brought to bear on the nonhuman world.11

The centrality of the fisheries in US politics during the first century of the United States’ existence was not merely a product of transatlantic politics—it was a product of the Atlantic itself. When Webster addressed the crowd at Marshfield, he was just a couple miles from where the steel-gray waters of the North Atlantic lapped the New England shore. Twenty thousand years ago, however, the land and seascape were drastically different. At the peak of the Wisconsin glaciation, two massive ice sheets, thousands of feet thick, descended across North America. The larger, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, covered a wide swath of the continent extending from the Arctic to Long Island and ran in a curve that reached as far south as the modern-day Ohio River and as far west as the Missouri River before receding north and joining the smaller Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which rested on the furthest western parts of the continent. With so much of the world’s fresh water locked up in these icy behemoths, global ocean levels were hundreds of feet below where they are

three Questions With

SPENCER MCBRIDE & JENNIFER HULL DORSEY editors of New York’s Burned-over District

1. What inspired you to write this book?

We were inspired by our experience leading two NEH Landmark of American History and Culture Workshops on the history of revivalism and reform in early nineteenth century America (2013 and 2016). One hundred sixty K-12 teachers, librarians, and administrators participated in those workshops. The questions they asked —and the presuppositions they challenged— provided the original impetus for this documentary history. We also recognized a need to provide students and researchers with access to primary source documents that will help them make sense of

support and complicate these commonly shared assumptions about the history, progress, and meaning of the Second Great Awakening.

3. What about your book will attract your colleagues in the field??

This is a useful primary source book for teaching undergraduates New York State history or early American religious history. We anticipate a strong interest in certain subfields of American religious history, such as those who study the history of Mormonism and communal societies.

such a pivotal moment in the history of New York, and the United States as a whole.

2. How will your book make a difference in your field of study?

Presently, there are three competing explanations for the history of the Second Great Awakening. One theory explains the revival as a reaction to religious skepticism. Another argues that the democratization of American Christianity spurred revivalism, and a third credits the coordinated efforts of religious groups to make use of the uncertainty underlying an American society in flux to bolster church membership. Collectively, the documents featured in this volume simultaneously

Presently, there are three competing explanations for the history of the Second Great Awakening.

Over the course of the next twelve months we will publish more than twenty new books in the field of US history. You can find these, as well as all books previously published in this subject area on our website. Either use your smartphone camera to scan the QR code below or visit cornellpress.cornell.edu/imprints/us-history to see our extensive list.

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