American nationalism

• 1. Introduction

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  American nationalism begins with a single document and a single sentence. In 1776, the Continental Congress issued a Declaration of Independence announcing that a new nation had formed, the United States of America. That act set in motion two and a half centuries of argument about what it actually means to belong to that nation. Who counts as a true American? What obligations does the nation carry abroad? And what happens when citizens disagree?

  Those questions have never been settled quietly. The first Naturalization Act of 1790 answered them in racial terms, limiting citizenship to free white men of good character. Abraham Lincoln answered them in 1858 with a speech about the Declaration's electric cord linking hearts across generations and ancestry. Theodore Roosevelt answered them in the early 20th century by insisting on one hundred percent Americanism with no hyphenated loyalties. And a 2021 study in the American Journal of Sociology found that nationalism itself had become sorted by party, with competing definitions of American nationhood pulling in opposite directions.

  This documentary follows that long argument through its sharpest turns.

• 2. The Founding Fractures

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  George Washington signed the first Naturalization Act of 1790 into law, and it drew the boundaries of American identity immediately and sharply. Only free white men of good character could become citizens. Enslaved Black people were excluded, and so was anyone of non-European stock. The nation born from a declaration of universal equality encoded ethnic exclusion from its very first week of formal citizenship law.

  Yet even then, a competing vision was present. Some American scholars have argued that the Founding Fathers built the country on liberal and individualist principles, and that the government institutionalized a civic nationalism resting on legal concepts of citizenship, common language, and cultural tradition. Both visions were alive simultaneously, pulling against each other.

  The Thirteen Colonies had not always thought of themselves as a unified people. Residents identified with Britain until the mid-18th century, and the Albany Plan of 1754 proposed a union among the colonies that went nowhere. What shifted matters was shared grievance. Acts passed by the British Parliament, particularly taxation without representation, produced a common cause. Americans widely agreed that only their own colonial legislatures could levy internal taxes, Parliament insisted otherwise, and London punished Boston for the Boston Tea Party. The Thirteen Colonies responded by forming the Continental Congress, which ran from 1774 to 1789.

  Thomas Paine accelerated what politics had started. His pamphlet Common Sense became a runaway bestseller in 1776, read aloud in taverns and coffee houses, and it gave the growing sentiment toward independence an explicitly nationalist cast. When fighting broke out in 1775 and the sentiment shifted toward independence in early 1776, Paine's appeal to American nationalism was among the forces that moved it. Patriots won the Revolutionary War and received generous peace terms from Britain in 1783. About 80% of Loyalists who had remained loyal to King George III stayed and became full American citizens. Parades, new rituals, ceremonies, and a new flag became the popular occasions for expressing that emerging spirit.

• 3. Lincoln's Electric Cord

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  In an 1858 speech, Abraham Lincoln posed a question that cut to the heart of American civic nationalism: what connection did recent immigrants, people with no blood tie to the founders, have to the country's origins? His answer reached for the Declaration of Independence.

  Lincoln argued that anyone who looked back through history and could not trace a connection by blood could still find it in the Declaration's words. When they read that old document and found the phrase we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, Lincoln said, they could feel that moral sentiment as their own inheritance. He called it the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, and he said it would link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

  This was a direct argument for civic nationalism as a unifying tool across ethnic difference. Lincoln was speaking during a period of westward expansion and mass immigration, when the question of who belonged to the nation was intensely practical. His framework offered a non-racial answer rooted in shared political principle rather than shared ancestry.

  The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, would give that framework constitutional form. It settled the fundamental question of national identity by declaring that everyone born in the territorial United States and subject to its jurisdiction was an American citizen, regardless of ethnicity or social status. Indigenous people on reservations were not included until 1924; those off reservations had always been citizens under the amendment's terms.

• 4. A Hundred Percent American

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  Theodore Roosevelt became one of the highest-profile advocates for American nationalism in the early 20th century. His domestic and foreign policies, collectively known as the New Nationalism, carried a strong national identity as a central element. Roosevelt's demand was unambiguous: one had to be one hundred percent American, not a hyphenated American juggling multiple loyalties.

  The context behind that demand was a rapidly changing country. Immigrants arrived from Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba in large numbers, drawn by a fast-growing industrial economy. Becoming a citizen was relatively accessible, requiring the completion of paperwork across five years. But that openness did not extend uniformly. The U.S. imposed restrictions on most Chinese immigrants in the 1880s and informal restrictions on most Japanese immigrants in 1907. By 1924, entry for nearly any Asian immigrant had been made effectively impossible, even as children born in the United States to Asian parents remained full citizens. The restrictions on Chinese immigrants were lifted in the 1940s, and restrictions on other Asian groups ended in 1965.

  The insistence on one hundred percent Americanism found cultural expression as well as political expression. The film The Birth of a Nation appeared in 1915, and the Ku Klux Klan rose again in the 1910s and 1920s, both reflecting and intensifying nativist anxieties about Catholic and Jewish immigrants who spoke languages other than English at home. Public school education became compulsory in many jurisdictions during the early-to-mid 20th century, with parochial schools restricted or outlawed in some places. The school day typically began with the Pledge of Allegiance. The Immigration Act of 1924 followed, designed to regulate immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. In that same period, citizenship was extended to Native Americans for the first time, a significant expansion in the other direction.

• 5. War and National Identity

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  World War II produced what the source calls unprecedented nationalism in the United States. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, enlistment surged. Much of American daily life reorganized around the war effort through volunteer work, entry into the labor force, rationing, price controls, and income saving. What makes the period distinctive is the breadth of the buy-in: even members of pacifist churches, the anti-war movement, and conscientious objectors set aside their pacifism. They concluded that World War II was a just war, a judgment that overrode prior convictions.

  The Cold War reshaped nationalism again after the fighting ended. The United States emerged as a world superpower and abandoned its longstanding policy of isolationism in favor of interventionism. Americans increasingly understood their country as a kind of world police with the goal of eradicating communism. That framing gave nationalism a global mission. Involvement in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion all flowed from this transformed sense of national purpose.

  The September 11 attacks in 2001 triggered another wave. Military enlistment rose and, distinctively, the surge came not only from lower-income Americans but also from middle-class and upper-class citizens. That nationalism persisted through both the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War. Political scientist Paul McCartney has argued that the pattern reflects something structural: as a nation defined by a creed and a sense of mission, Americans tend to equate their own interests with the interests of humanity as a whole, which shapes their global posture across administrations and conflicts.

• 6. Four Kinds of Nationalists

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  In a 2016 paper in the American Sociological Review, sociologists Bart Bonikowski and Paul DiMaggio set out to map American nationalism empirically. Their paper, titled Varieties of American Popular Nationalism, identified four distinct groups, which they ordered from smallest to largest: the disengaged, creedal or civic nationalists, ardent nationalists, and restrictive nationalists.

  The ardent nationalists made up about 24% of the study. Members of this group closely identified with the United States, expressed strong national pride, and associated themselves with national hubris. They held that a true American must speak English and live in the country for most of their life. A full 86% believed a true American must be born in the country, and 75% believed they must be Christian. This group viewed Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and naturalized citizens as something less than fully American.

  The disengaged, at 17% of respondents, were the smallest group and also the least nationalistic. They showed low pride in government institutions, American history, American democracy, political equality, and the country's political influence.

  Restrictive nationalists, at 38% of respondents, were the largest single group. Their national pride and identification were moderate, but their definition of a true American was sharply exclusionary, drawing lines that excluded non-Christians among others.

  Creedal nationalists, sometimes called civic nationalists, made up 22% of the study. They held liberal values, expressed pride in the country, and imposed the fewest restrictions on who could count as a true American. Bonikowski and DiMaggio named this group creedal because their beliefs most closely matched what is widely considered the American creed.

  The authors found that the dividing line running between all four groups was religious: whether being Christian is an integral part of being a true American separates the creedal and disengaged groups from the restrictive and ardent ones. A 2021 study by Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein, and Sean Bock in the American Journal of Sociology added a further finding: nationalism had become sorted by party, with Republican identifiers moving toward more exclusionary definitions and Democrats moving toward more inclusive ones.