BY MICHAEL BARONE | The Washington Examiner
“You all share the American belief that there is strength
in all our differences,” Vice President Al Gore told the Institute of World
Affairs in Milwaukee in January 1994. “We can build a collective civic space
large enough for all our separate identities, that we can be e pluribus unum —
out of one, many.”
Gore, of course, was mistranslating the Latin motto for
the Great Seal of the United States adopted by Congress in 1782. But he was
reflecting an idea more common today than when he spoke, that the U.S. has been
becoming diverse for the first time, that a monocultural America has become
multicultural.
That idea, to put it bluntly, is just plain wrong. In his
1988 book Albion’s Seed, historian David Hackett Fischer has
explained in vivid detail how emigrants from different parts of the British
Isles brought distinct folkways to the different North American colonies.
Fischer’s book would not have surprised the Founding
Fathers. When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775,
he immediately noted the differences in attitudes and behavior between New
England Yankees and his fellow Virginians. In Federalist No. 60, written in
1788, Alexander Hamilton wrote of the “diversity in the state of property, in
the genius, manners, and habits of the people of the different parts of the
Union.”
The founders lived when memory was fresh of how religious
wars wore apart much of Europe and the British Isles. They knew that
Massachusetts was founded by Calvinists, Virginia by Anglicans, Maryland by
Catholics, and Pennsylvania by Quakers. The Articles of Confederation they drew
up to govern their revolution against Britain purposely gave the states maximum
autonomy.
The framers of the Constitution aimed to create a more
powerful federal government, but with limited powers. “No religious test shall
ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States,” they wrote in Article VI, fully aware of religious tests in
Britain and Europe.
“Congress shall make no law regarding an Establishment of
religion,” they wrote in the first words of the First Amendment. There would be
no state religion in a nation of greater religious diversity than any in
Europe. States could choose to abolish established churches, as Virginia did at
the urging of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1786, or to maintain them,
as New Hampshire did until 1817, Connecticut until 1818, and Massachusetts
until 1833.
American ethnic diversity, already apparent in the Hudson
Valley Dutch and Pennsylvania Germans, increased in the early 19th century.
“Irish and German immigrants fleeing the potato famines of western Europe in
the 1840s poured into the Northern states in numbers so enormous” — three times
as many proportionate to the preexisting population as in this century — “that
a panic arose in Yankee America,” writes historian Robert Kelley, But
immigrants were allowed in unless sickly or unable to support themselves.
A second huge surge of immigration, mostly from Eastern
and Southern Europe, came in the generation before World War I and provided
labor for booming garment factories and steel mills, and sharp upward mobility
over the next generations. This immigration was largely shut down by 1920s
legislation, but a third wave, mostly from Latin America and Asia, began in the
1970s, cresting in the 2007-09 recession and continuing in lower numbers today.
And, of course, America since colonial days has been
racially diverse. Slavery, abolished in Northern states between 1780 and 1804,
expanded with the cotton boom in the South, and arguments over the expansion of
slavery led to civil war in 1861. Reconstruction — attempts to guarantee equal
rights after the war — ended in 1877, and the North allowed Southern whites to
impose racial segregation until the civil rights laws and court decisions of
the 1950s and 1960s.
The universal media of the 20th century — radio, movies,
television — with appeal to just about everybody, created an image of
Americanness that still rings true and that in time included ethnic and racial
minorities. It presented an image of cultural uniformity that seems to have
convinced older baby boomers, such as Al Gore, that America had always been
monocultural.
They were on better ground in protesting that America has
not always been perfect in its toleration of diversity. Today, much intolerance
comes from the political Left, with its university speech codes and insistence
on political correctness. But they are working against a rich American
tradition of tolerating and appreciating diversity, a tradition that goes back
to our beginnings as a nation and that has been strengthened again and again
over the years.
