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Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, by Rogers Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 719 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-300-06989-8.
Rogers Smith sets out to slay the Hartzian dragon of ever-present and suffocating liberalism in the explanation of citizenship in U.S. history from 1606 to 1912. In 12 chapters representing distinct periods in citizenship history from the first colonies to the progressive era, Smith traces the internal citizenship rights and external naturalization and expatriation rights of women, African Americans, native Americans, and, when appropriate, Asian and European immigrants. While many studies covering these earlier periods of history are apologies for various heros in the American pantheon-if you understood the times, Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson were real supporters and benefactors of the poor and oppressed-Smith takes on each one with a the steely eye of a present-day universalistic citizen. Although this might cause German historicists of the nineteenth and postmodernists of the near twenty-first century to shiver, Smith gives the reader those contexts and still presents the contradictions in each period with impressive force.
The main point is that liberalism is not always the main problem for discrimination...