Sins of Our Fathers-Again

...The United States has done more than perhaps any other nation to search its soul and redeem its misdeeds—even to the point of extreme measures like racial quotas and cur-ricular tribalization in the universities where Professor Smith and his colleagues perform their acts...

...He terms this a "multiple traditions thesis," one that "holds that American political actors have always promoted civic ideologies that blend liberal, democratic, republican, and inegali-tarian ascriptive elements in various Andrew Peyton Thomas, an attorney living in Phoenix, last wrote for The Weekly Standard about the debate over corporal punishment...

...Saying that most nation-states "contain significant numbers of people who rightly feel more abused than advantaged," he argues for viewing "political communities as, from a moral point of view, most akin to political parties, though far more valuable and dangerous...

...He may have lacked the stamina to produce a second large volume, which is just as well, considering the niggling revisionism heaped on, for example, Tom Paine...

...Smith acknowledges why this should be: Many Indians owned slaves...

...Du Bois do not escape Smith's harsh justice...

...Decisions such as Dred Scott and Roe do not necessarily speak for the beliefs and values of the people...

...And the sweep of his analysis is indeed impressive, as it goes back to the 17th century under Sir Edward Coke and forward to the Progressive Era, ending in 1912...

...Sins of Our Fathers—Again Professor Smith's Hall of American Shame By Andrew Peyton Thomas For a taste of the grim orthodoxy that blights America's universities, one could do worse than to open a new book by Rogers M. Smith, a professor of political science at Yale...

...Americans should regard themselves as members of the "Party of America," thus "avoiding the dangers of ascriptive nationalism...

...Racism and bigotry, of course, are banes of all societies, rooted as they are in pride and other deadly sins...

...combinations designed to be political popular...

...Such a statement would be equally true of the decrees of Hammurabi or Charlemagne...

...Smith pays particular attention to the judiciary, what with those 2,500 cases, because, as he explains, "they present official, systematic efforts to connect citizenship policies with the regime's basic principles" (note "regime...

...Still, for a history of American bigotry, this is merely half a loaf...

...Smith takes honorable exception to Bell's severely Marxist critique of the American founding, but he is nevertheless sympathetic to it, for it has revealed the "civic myths" upon which America was established, myths that "seem to many to be clear falsehoods...

...His thesis in Civic Ideals, a history of citizenship, is that "through most of U.S...

...Smith grumbles that, for various practical reasons, he has "reluctantly elected to follow conventional usages...

...Later historical figures are likewise frisked for bigotry—Lincoln is scored for his proposal to colonize freed slaves in Central America and Haiti...

...Finally, Smith offers a new and creative concept of citizenship...

...Smith's inventory of bigotries— impressive in scope—is, nonetheless, undertaken in a misbegotten cause...

...It features a disclaimer about the use of the word "American...

...If Smith had stuck to compiling a mere chronicle of the gloomier episodes in American history, he might have taught us a bit...

...Even such personages as Harriet Beecher Stowe and W.E.B...

...Any society enlightened and tolerant enough to overcorrect for its abuses ought to pat itself on the back—and consign Smith's huge but small-minded book to beautiful, well-endowed libraries, like the one at Yale...

...He was prone to such words as . . . "manhood...

...But he endeavors to embellish his truism with outlandish assertions and silly asides in the apparent hope that the book will seem fresh and provocative...

...He notes, for example, that he and his platoon of researchers surveyed more than 2,500 law cases "in relatively systematic fashion...

...Stowe, he records, regarded African-Americans as the moral superiors of white Americans, yes, but not as their intellectual superiors...

...history, lawmakers pervasively and unapologeti-cally structured U.S...

...citizenship in terms of illiberal and undemocratic racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies, for reasons rooted in basic, enduring imperatives of political life...

...Smith offers no good explanation for his decision to stop at the election of Woodrow Wilson...

...But if, as Smith contends, his aim is to determine which bigoted policies were "politically popular," the last place he should search in the American system of government is the judiciary, the least democratic branch...

...The reader can gain a good sense of the work by consulting its first footnote...

...After inspecting Common Sense for incorrect language, Smith scolds Paine for "repeatedly refer[ring] only to 'men' as exercisers of political rights...

...Smith has created a tome—over 700 pages—from a truism: Like every other nation, the United States has found ways to discriminate against the outsider...

...Paine also employed such shocking words as "brotherhood" and "unmanly"—and even "mention[ed] in passing that gender distinctions were rooted in 'nature.'" The nation's charter, it turns out, is similarly unenlightened...

...The injustices he documents so painstakingly are not simply a reflection of Anglo-Saxon culture, or even of anything inherently "American" (in whatever sense the word is used...

...The framers of the Constitution "said nothing directly" about women, Smith writes, but did "use masculine pronouns thirty times...

...Smith notes the "controver-sy"—at Yale, perhaps—over "whether it is imperialistic to refer to United States nationals as 'Americans,'" instead of reserving that word for all the inhabitants of the Americas...

...Smith starts out with a brief review of the work of other "liberals like myself" who have upbraided America for its endemic "white supremacy and patriarchy...

...Leading off his list is Derrick Bell, who splashily left the Harvard Law School faculty because the school refused to buckle to his demands for yet more affirmative action...

...A prime such myth...

...Consider the curious fact that many American Indians sided with the South during the Civil War, and that the Cherokee warrior Stand Watie was the last Confederate commander to surrender to the Union...

...In this, he is extremely comprehensive...

...The "unproved but sanctifying claim that men have individual rights 'endowed by their Creator.'" Smith proceeds with a predictable recital of the historical injustices perpetrated by the dominant Anglo-Saxon male majority...

...Du Bois's offense...