Purifying American History
Part 1

3,123 words

Kermit Roosevelt III
The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story
University of Chicago Press, 2022

On the first night of September of 2022, President Joe Biden delivered a speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, outside of Independence Hall, the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and where the Constitutional Convention was held in 1787. In this address, Biden implored voters to “defend Democracy” by rejecting “MAGA Republican” candidates running for office in that year’s midterm elections. He opened by offering his perspective on the meaning of the Declaration and the Constitution:

This is where America made its Declaration of Independence to the world more than two centuries ago with an idea, unique among nations, that in America, we’re all created equal. This is where the United States Constitution was written and debated. This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known with three simple words: “We, the People.” “We, the People.”

These two documents and the ideas they embody — equality and democracy — are the rock upon which this nation is built. They are how we became the greatest nation on Earth. They are why, for more than two centuries, America has been a beacon to the world.

So, for Biden, America is founded upon the twin pillars of “equality and democracy”, and proof of this can be found in the Declaration and the Constitution, respectively. Moreover, according to Biden’s argument, America was not founded as the homeland of a particular biological group, i.e., the historic American Nation. It is instead a “proposition nation”, with those propositions being a Democratic form of government and the idea that “all men are created equal.”

A Proposition Nation?

Of course, Biden’s narrative about the country being founded as a “proposition nation” is inconsistent with historical reality. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a race realist who wanted to resettle enslaved Africans elsewhere in order to preserve the American Republic for the white race alone. James Madison, known to history as the “Father of the Constitution”, would later serve as president of the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to that same purpose.

In his 1998 essay “Race and the American Identity”, Sam Francis observed that prominent figures on both the right and the left had embraced the idea that America was a “universal nation” open to all who adhere to its propositions, and that the demographic decline of its white majority ought to be of no real concern. However, Francis recognized that this attitude is the precise opposite of the actual beliefs of the founders themselves, as well those of subsequent generations of leaders, writing that “the most casual acquaintance with the realities of American history shows that the idea that America is or has been a universal nation, that it defines itself through the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ is a myth.”

Francis calls on sincere adherents to the “universal nation” conception of American identity to condemn historical figures like Jefferson, and to cease pretending to be the rightful heirs of the racially exclusive state that they created:

You cannot have it both ways: either you define the American nation as the product of its past and learn to live with the reality of race and the reality of the racial particularism and racial nationalism that in part defines our national history, or you reject race as meaningful and important, as anything more than skin color and gross morphology, and demand that anyone, past or present, who believes or believed that race means anything more than that be demonized and excluded from any positive status in our history or the formation of our identity. If you reject race, then you reject America as it has really existed throughout its history, and whatever you mean by “America” has to come from something other than its real past.

In his essay “What the Founders Really Thought About Race”, which should lay to rest any doubts that America’s founders were open and unapologetic racialists, Jared Taylor aptly described “today’s egalitarians”, a category that would include President Biden, as “radical dissenters from traditional American thinking.” “A conception of America as a nation of people with common values, culture and heritage” he concludes “is far more faithful to the vision of the founders.”

The same year that Biden came to Philadelphia and erroneously purported to be following in Jefferson’s footsteps, a leftist academic who teaches in Philadelphia wrote a book that put forth an alternative narrative of American history completely at odds with the one presented by Biden. This bold man, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is aware of the racialism of the founders and appears to concur with Francis that, if egalitarians are to be intellectually honest, figures like Jefferson and Madison should be “excluded from any positive status in our history or the formation of our identity.” The book in question is The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, and the author’s name is Kermit Roosevelt III.

Roosevelt? Yes, Roosevelt. He is the great-great- grandson of Theodore, and a relative of Franklin as well. Ironically, Theodore Roosevelt is quoted twice in the aforementioned article by Jared Taylor, once for calling the existence of blacks in North America “a terrible problem” and again for opining that “nine out of ten” Amerindians are better off dead. Our twenty-sixth president also appears on Francis’s list of erstwhile American heroes who must be condemned by sincere egalitarians.

One thing that becomes immediately clear is that, politically, this younger Roosevelt has little in common with his famous ancestor. Kermit is far from the staunch nationalist that Theodore was; on the contrary, he is a true believer in racial egalitarianism. Actually, it might be more accurate to label him as a preacher in the church of racial egalitarianism. The Nation That Never Was is not a conventional work of academic history; it is a declaration of holy war against the way that American history is popularly understood, by students and political leaders alike.

Roosevelt vs the ‘Standard Story’

Roosevelt’s objective is to present a “story of America” for public consumption that justifies and advances his own political ideology. He feels, and I agree, that the historical narratives that a nation’s citizenry believes are of paramount importance:

Stories about a nation’s history give individuals a sense of national identity- of what it means to be a citizen of that nation, of what the nation itself stands for. They tell us what our values and collective identity are. They are stories not just about the past, but about the future: they give us a purpose, a mission, even a sense of destiny.

According to Roosevelt, if Americans seek to be a virtuous nation, they should embrace what he calls “inclusive equality” which he defines as the belief that:

Our political community is open. Those who are now outsiders are fundamentally similar to us and may become insiders. Political outcomes are legitimate if they are the product of an open and fair democratic process. Government can and should act to promote equality.

The opposite of “inclusive equality” which he calls “exclusive individualism” is defined this way:

Our political community is closed. Outsiders are different and dangerous. Political outcomes are legitimate if they protect the rights and interests of insiders. Government has no business promoting equality and should not redistribute, especially not to outsiders.

These are not mere policy preferences, but moral beliefs. Throughout The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt repeatedly judges whether a historical figure or document is worthy of admiration based on how consistent it is with his own concept of “inclusive equality.” Not unexpectedly, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution fare quite poorly when weighed by this standard.

Roosevelt summarizes what he calls the “standard story” of American history in this way (italics his):

The history of America as a nation starts with the Declaration of Independence. Back in 1776, our great Founders wrote down some wonderful principles. They called them self-evident truths. All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our Founders fought a war for those principles, and they built a society around them. They codified those principles in the Constitution.

The Constitution sets out our fundamental values: liberty and equality—the keys to what it means to be an American. It tells us who we are. For more than two hundred years, our Constitution has served us well, because of the wisdom of the Founders. Our task as Americans is to be true to those principles.

We haven’t always done that. We had slavery, of course, which is in direct conflict with the Declaration’s principles of liberty and equality. But we fought a second war for those principles—the Civil War was fought in the name of the principles of the Declaration. Abraham Lincoln said so in the Gettysburg Address in 1863, when he looked back fourscore and seven years to 1776 and said the nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. So the Civil War was a test of a nation so conceived and dedicated—but it was also an opportunity for Americans to move forward, to realize the promise of the Declaration more fully.

Even after the Civil War, that promise wasn’t fully realized. Racism and discrimination persisted. Eventually, the civil rights movement rose up to challenge them, marching on Washington in the name of the Declaration. In 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King talked about the Founders, the “architects of our Republic,” the people “who wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” They promised, he said, that all men, Black as well as white, “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He pointed to segregation, to race-based denial of the right to vote, as breaches of the promise made by the Declaration, and he dreamed of a day when we would “rise up and live out the true meaning” of “all men are created equal.”

Maybe that day still hasn’t come, but it’s getting closer. The story of America is a story of living up to the ideals of our Founders, the ideals that started us on this journey. We move forward, but we’re guided by the past, by the spirit of 1776. We remember, as President John F. Kennedy said, that we are the heirs of that first Revolution, and we still carry that banner—the flag of freedom, of equality. We march in the name of the Declaration of Independence.

I accept Roosevelt’s summary of the standard story as an essentially accurate restatement of the narrative of American history that is promoted in public schools, popular media, and in the rhetoric of most politicians. This is the narrative that Joe Biden appealed to in his Philadelphia speech.

Roosevelt makes two assumptions about his readership. First, he assumes that his readers agree that “inclusive equality” is a goal worth pursuing. He is not writing for those who prefer a more “closed” political community, or those who perceive some foreigners as “dangerous” and incapable of assimilation. White Nationalists, of course, are not a part of the intended audience for The Nation That Never Was, but neither are civic nationalists or Christian Nationalists. A nation based on Roosevelt’s ideal is one dedicated purely to abstractions, not on protecting the interests of actual people or groups of people. Often throughout the course of the book, Roosevelt uses the words “we” and “us.” He is speaking to those who are already initiated into the “faith” of egalitarianism. He takes it for granted that his readers are more or less “on his side.”

His second assumption is that his readers are adherents to the standard story. Therefore, he is trying to convert believers in the standard story into followers of his alternative. It may be helpful to think of Roosevelt as a preacher in the “church” of the standard story who believes he has discovered a terrible flaw in church doctrine. After making this terrible discovery has taken it upon himself to depart from the mother church and found his own, attracting disciples along the way. The Puritans of New England sought to “purify” the Church of England by purging it of any residual Roman Catholicism. Likewise, Roosevelt is seeking to “purify” the standard story of “exclusive individualism.” He desires a national narrative that even more universalist egalitarian and democratic, and to achieve that, certain aspects of the standard story must be discarded.

Just as Francis did a quarter-century earlier, Roosevelt finds it significant that both Republicans and Democrats are eager to embrace a universalist narrative of American history. At first glance, one might think that a proponent of “inclusive equality” would be pleased with this state of affairs. After all, the standard story recognizes “equality” as a foundational principle, and celebrates the introduction of blacks, once considered “outsiders”, into the national community. It also features the enslavement of Africans as the primary example of America “falling short” of its stated ideals, with segregation coming in next on the list. Moreover, through its celebration of the Union cause and the passage of civil rights legislation, it endorses government action on behalf of “outsiders.” But for Roosevelt, it’s not good enough. First, Roosevelt recognizes that it’s characterization of the founders is inaccurate. Second, Roosevelt believes that he can present an alternative that is more conducive to the promotion of his ideology. As he puts it:

I do argue that the standard account of American history isn’t accurate- not because it leaves out unpleasant truths- although of course it does. It’s because it tells us a fundamentally false story about where our values come from, and about who the heroes and villains of our national story are. Once we see that, we will also see something else: There is another story that hasn’t been told. There is a different, better way to understand America. It is more true. It is more inspiring, and it is more useful. It can bring us together in a way that the original story promised to.

Later, Roosevelt states that “Ultimately, my argument is that the consequences of the standard story are bad. In its triumphalist versions, it encourages complacency. And in all versions, it brings along things we do not want in our national story. There are troubling elements to it that we cannot eliminate, no matter how we shade the past.”

Roosevelt on the Declaration

For Roosevelt, foremost among these “troubling elements” are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He recaps the popular interpretation of the Declaration, writing that “(t)he standard story tells us that the Declaration is fundamentally about human rights and that its central meaning is that all people are entitled to some kind of equal rights or equal treatment by the government. However, he rightly points out that the title of the document itself offers the first clue that something is amiss:

As the title tells us, it’s not about rights at all; it is about independence. It was written at a specific moment and for a specific purpose, designed to do two things: to announce that the American colonists were throwing off allegiance to the British crown and to justify the act.

Roosevelt calls attention to the fact that slavery had been abolished prior to 1776 in England proper but not in the American colonies, so justifying independence based on a vague notion of “equality” would have been counterproductive. “Is it likely” asks Roosevelt, “that Jefferson started the declaration with a novel, useless, radical claim that, in fact, offered better grounds for condemning the slaveholding colonists than the King?” Obviously not.

Some might involve the Declaration to condemn slavery, but Roosevelt argues that “the contemporaneous understanding of the Declaration was pretty clearly that it was about national independence, not individual liberty, and certainly not the liberty of political outsiders.” He flatly asserts that the document “does not contain our modern values of liberty and equality. “The heart of the Declaration” writes Roosevelt “is not a moral principle like liberty or equality. It is the political theory that people form governments to protect certain rights and that if, in their judgment, the government threatens those rights, people can rebel.”

Roosevelt on the Constitution

Roosevelt’s appraisal of the Constitution is also unfavorable. He makes the important point that although the Declaration and the Constitution are closely connected in the public mind, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of the standard story, they were written for totally different purposes and there is, in fact, “very little connection between the two.” Having already established that the Declaration was intended to rationalize the colonies’ separation from Britain, Roosevelt proceeds to summarize the purpose of the Constitution:

The main goal of the Constitution, then, was the first goal listed in the preamble: to form a more perfect union, to meld the separate states into one nation. It sought to do this primarily for reasons of interstate and international relations. A single nation on the American landmass would resist dismemberment by the European powers in war. It would be able to negotiate more effectively in peace. A single nation would not require a standing army, which the Framers saw as a dangerous tool for would-be tyrants. And a single economic union would benefit the states via free internal trade.

Once again, equality between individuals or races is nowhere to be found. The documents may have been written for entirely different purposes, but the lack of any of the tenets of Roosevelt’s ideal of “inclusive equality” is something that both share:

In all of this, we can see a parallel to the Declaration’s theory of government. However, the entities whose rights and existence are being protected and harmonized are the states, not individuals. The rights of states to free commerce are being protected. They are promised protection from invasion and domestic violence, and they are guaranteed a republican form of government. They are protected from each other, as well: domestic tranquility means a lack of interstate conflict. The states are even guaranteed some kinds of equality—equal suffrage in the Senate, for instance. Yet the Founders’ Constitution has almost nothing to say about the liberty and equality of individuals.

Roosevelt, unsatisfied with the continuing glorification of this pair of documents that he (correctly) identifies as incompatible with his own moral standards, seeks to dismantle the “standard story” of American history and replace it with an alternative story. To find a suitable alternative, he looks to the period of Reconstruction in the South following the War Between the States.