President Truman Has Beef With: American Nations By Colin Woodard
Hello Netizen.
I went with Netizen as a greeting because it's a term that seems to have fallen out of popular internet culture, which feels appropriate for a blog post, a medium with a similar fate. As such, I doubt anyone will ever read these posts, but if you're out there... Well, I sure do appreciate your time.
Anyway, I'm President Truman, and I've got beef.
Over the past few weeks, I've been reading American Nations by Colin Woodard. I'm roughly 40% of the way through it. That feels important to disclaim as it's possible some of my complaints are somehow addressed in later sections of the book. That said, I'm not sure I have the desire to finish for reasons I'll get into.
Superficially, I'm disappointed with the title because it's not what I expected. This isn't any fault of the book itself. I try to go into most of the media I consume with as little information as possible, which helps keep an unclouded and unbiased mind, but sometimes that leaves you surprised in negative ways.
The tagline for American Nations is "A history of the 11 regional cultures of North America". If it's meant to draw the reader in, Mr. Woodard got me hook line and sinker. America is a big place, and I find it fascinating how one country can have so many different sets of dialects, customs, and ways of life. I thought the analysis would be on the lighter side, discussing the origins of different food cultures, social norms, things of that nature. This isn't the case. American Nations isn't a particularly happy book. Rather, it is politically charged, the author's main thesis being that "Americanism" is a fabrication and that even with formal borders uniting us, the different sections of the country have been at odds from the beginning. The nature of his argument is inherently combative and hostile, and oversimplified. Each "nation" is treated like a singular persona, with a singular set of beliefs and goals. I fancy myself an optimist, which may be an attempt to cope with being naive or out of touch, but I just don't believe Mr. Woodard's cynical and jaded outlook is the reality of American history. It's a personal disagreement on my end, but it felt pertinent to discuss because it does set up my actual beef.
More importantly, my issue with this book is Mr. Woodard's habit of oversimplification that sometimes, in my opinion, strays dangerously close into misinformation territory. In the interest of respecting my (hypothetical) reader's time, let's focus on one example that particularly aggrieved me:
"To complicate matters, the elites of the deep south were ambivalent about the revolt, with many of them changing sides during the course of it. (Georgia even rejoined the empire during the conflict)."
As I've mentioned, Mr. Woodard's main idea is that the different compartments of American culture are at odds with one another and self interested. In this example, he uses the line "Georgia even rejoined the empire during the conflict". The "empire" referring to Great Britain, and the "conflict" referring to the US revolutionary war for independence. Uh, what? Georgia rejoined the empire during the Revolution? I don't remember that.
Being a history teacher, of course I know what he meant. It was a colony of mixed patriot and loyalist allegiances from the start of the conflict, and it's true that the colony was formally reabsorbed into the empire after British military conquest. (If you're interested in the details, the New Georgia Encyclopedia has a great article on this)
The problem here isn't the statement itself, rather, it's the careless phrasing and off handed nature of using such phrasing as a throwaway supporting detail. Without proper background knowledge, I would argue the general reader would understand this line as "The people of Georgia were unanimously growing jaded and suspicious with the patriot cause and, feeling hungry and late for dinner, decided to happily leap into his Royal Majesty's loving arms, only to be forcefully separated at the end of the war once again thanks to the efforts of those meddling Puritans from Yankeedom. Damn them!"
I try to give everyone in this life the benefit of the doubt, but I'm struggling here. This line takes the reader's pre existing knowledge for granted at best, and is a disingenuous misrepresentation at worst. This is not a title written for a pretentiously academic audience of stuck up professors or arm chair historians. It's a New York Times best selling pop history book written by an award-winning journalist. Of all people, I would expect journalists to understand that phrasing matters. "Georgia even rejoined the empire" implies a collective decision, an aligned cultural will, and abandonment of the patriot cause. The missing nuance is that the colony was absorbed involuntarily and forcefully after British military reoccupation, which started a period of loyalist preeminence and suppression of local patriots.
This single line, for myself at least, committed the greatest sin a nonfiction author can make: violating my trust as a reader. I'll continue for a little while longer, but the rest of the book is inherently less enjoyable as I'm finding myself suspicious of every claim and position Mr. Woodard takes. While I detest know-it-all "your history book isn't good enough" types in academia, this experience has made me understand their point of view and distrust of the pop history genre
That's all I have to say on the matter.
This is President Truman, thank you for taking the time to read my blog