Colonial Conflicts Don’t Disprove ‘Heritage Americanism’

The different ethno-cultural groups eventually assimilated into a common identity

Journalist Leighton Woodhouse is on a mission to disprove the existence of “Heritage Americans.” In July, he wrote a column for UnHerd arguing that the U.S. “has always been multicultural.” He based this argument on a poor reading of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, a failure I noted in a previous American Conservative article.

Woodhouse returned to this mission last week in the New York Times. The journalist expanded on his argument, claiming America has always been riven by conflict between different cultural groups and this refutes the Right’s idealization of a homogenous America. This article is even dumber than his previous one. It contradicts its own points with the scholarship it relies on and undermines the notion that diversity is a strength.

Woodhouse begins by pointing to the conflicts that animated colonial Pennsylvania. The fact that Irish Presbyterians on the frontier and the urban Quaker elite didn’t see eye-to-eye provides all the evidence the writer needs to declare Heritage Americanism a “myth” and pluralism an all-American value. Here’s how he defines the Right’s heritage ideal:

True Americans, proponents of this emerging patriotic mythology believe, are the cultural descendants of founders who were united by a shared system of values and folkways even more than by an Enlightenment political creed of equality, liberty and democracy. Those founders were Protestant, largely English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans. Those who can trace their bloodlines to that group, which one essay describes as a “founding ethnicity,” are, in some spiritual sense, deemed more American than those who cannot. And the dilution of that pure American stock by mass immigration has made the country less culturally unified.

This seems reasonable. It’s also historically-grounded, as this view animated antebellum nativism and immigration restrictionism in the 1920s. This isn’t something conjured up out of thin air, like the delusion that America has always been a Tower of Babel. It’s something that was a common belief among Americans up until the modern era.

Woodhouse can’t seem to figure out if he wants to argue that diversity is a strength or not. Despite starting his column with an exposition on how different cultural groups came to blows in colonial America, he then wags his finger at the Trump administration for pointing out diversity reduces social trust and causes conflict. He concludes his essay with a paean to cultural diversity and how our government alone made us cohere to America. The rest of the column undermines his argument.

It’s also a bit strange to claim that the only thing that kept us together is our government and laws. It pretends we were all speaking different languages and shared no cultural commonalities. That’s false. We boasted a common Anglo-Protestant culture that committed Americans to a shared nationality. We spoke the same language and shared much of the same history, values, myths, and traditions. It wasn’t solely a commitment to the Constitution that kept us together. We would’ve never survived as a country if a piece of paper was our only common bond.

The chief work Woodhouse relies on in this column refutes his own thesis. He turns to Peter Silver’s Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America to outline how diversity defined early America. The problem with relying on this work is that its thesis claims hostility towards Indians provided a common identity for these colonials to rise above their ethno-cultural differences. A non-white enemy provided grist for a common white identity among the frontier settlers. Germans, Scots-Irish, and Englishmen would see their racial similarity as a bond against a shared enemy. Woodhouse, conveniently, leaves out Silver’s thesis, despite it being inferred by the book’s very title.

Woodhouse’s refusal to grant the existence of this heritage identity leaves him to imply these colonial differences remained intact. That’s obviously inaccurate. These groups all assimilated to an Anglo-Protestant identity, a process helped by warfare against Indians. The cultural tensions of the colonel era subsided when further generations only spoke English and only saw themselves as Americans.

The writer would stand on better grounds if he didn’t argue that this “Heritage American” identity–under different names–never existed, but rather focused on how it may not be the common national identity in the modern era. The identity immigrants assimilate into is very different from the one settlers aspired to or even the one immigrants of the early 20th century conformed to. Rather than an Anglo-Protestant melting pot that takes in a few things from the newcomers (like pizza or pilsner) and makes European migrants 100 percent American, the new process of assimilation turns newcomers into indistinguishable slop.

Sure, we still expect Americans to speak English and respect the Constitution. But the Anglo-Protestant culture isn’t what it once was. The native population hardly reveres its heritage, heroes, and myths like they once did. Old norms and standards are cast aside in favor of unrestricted cultural libertarianism that allows the individual to pursue his own happiness regardless of what people think. Hence, we get visible tattoos on white collar workers, weed smoking in public parks, and furries.

What the new slop identity is primarily concerned with is consumerism and mass culture. We’re united in our desire to shop at the same stores, watch the NFL, and listen to Taylor Swift. It’s not a “thick” identity, that’s for sure. But it seems to be enough for many Americans.

Woodhouse prefers his multicultural vision over that of the Slop Bowl, even if it is less accurate. It’s more captivating to imagine everyone adhering to rich, albeit different cultural traditions than to imagine everyone assimilating to a shopping mall identity. He would provide support for the Heritage Americans by admitting that. It’s much better to reclaim an authentic identity rooted in the national past than to extol the virtues of the Slop Bowl.

It’s extremely ahistorical to pretend there never was a common American identity centered around Anglo-Protestantism. It’s something even liberal historians admit it existed, as evidenced by the works Woodhouse keeps inaccurately citing.

But that identity is threatened today. A new common culture is emerging that offers the promise of shallow unity, but of little else. It’s also one that few liberals want to defend. There’s little inspiration to be found in the shared value of mass consumerism. It’s why they glamorize a mythical version of multiculturalism. The reality is too mediocre.