the New Pantagruel

The War for the Family

Allan Carlson's The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, reviewedby John Zmirak

here did America go wrong? How did our country fall under the domination of social mores and patterns of life which would have been unrecognizable to our grandparents, and sickening to the Founders? That’s a question conservatives like to debate among ourselves, particularly after the third glass of Maker’s Mark and the second cigar. Different answers arise depending on your diagnosis of what exactly was special about the country in the first place. Is “the problem” the rise of big government? The displacement of European culture as the dominant social force? The suicide of the WASPs? The new “culture of death” which subordinates altruism to hedonism, discarding the moral norms essential to any sustainable society?

The American Way:
Family and Community
in the Shaping of the
American Identity
by Allan Carlson
ISI Books, 2003
ISBN10/13: 1932236112 / 9781932236118
223 pages

To Reagan conservatives, libertarians, and most members of the Old Right, America’s wrong turn occurred somewhere in the New Deal–with its unprecedented expansion of government involvement in the everyday conduct of American life. Southern conservatives trace the decline of American liberty to the fall of the Confederacy, arguing that the destruction of real local power to resist the federal government made inevitable the Leviathan state and the degradation of public life into squabbles over the spoils of massive, unjust taxation. Catholic “traditionalists,” who attribute the dissipation of moral certainty to the heritage of the Enlightenment and the Reformation, go back a little further–for instance, to 1761, which marked the British defeat of the French. And neoconservatives, of course, blame the 1960s, which saw the corruption of the Civil Rights Movement from a morally-grounded demand for equal opportunities into a permanent force for social revolution through activist government. However justified its original claims, that crusade served as the template for an endless succession of “liberation” movements conducted on the behalf of self-designated “victim” groups: first spoiled suburban women, then flagrant homosexuals, now illegal immigrants–against the interests and preferences of the normative culture.

There’s truth in each of these diagnoses–and a broad agreement to disagree once constituted the unspoken code of civility which made it possible for “movement conservatism” to flourish. The fissures within that coalition, it is well known, broke into schisms with the collapse of Communism. Now that we have nothing in particular to oppose–unless you think we can unite the country by chasing the specter of “terrorism,” or persecuting a billion-man world religion, Islam–around what rallying point can diversified, secularized Americans unite?

Similar questions have faced thoughtful Americans before, as Allan Carlson shows in The American Way–a concise, immensely readable book which examines important episodes in the search for an American self-definition since 1900. At that time, Carlson notes, the country still faced the immense challenge of assimilating tens of millions of immigrants who did not hail from the Northern European, Protestant countries which had settled the 13 colonies. The United States at one point–during the Industrial Revolution–needed strong backs and thick arms to tame and man a thinly populated continent. But the influx of Italian, Irish, Jewish and other Eastern European migrants seemed to threaten the common mores which had united the nascent American Republic. As Carlson notes, even the presence of millions of thrifty, industrious Germans posed a problem to the Anglophone, low-church Protestant American consensus–particularly once Imperial Germany began to threaten British dominance in Europe.

With great affection, Carlson details the vast network of social, religious, and charitable organizations created by German immigrants across the U.S. before 1900–which could serve as a model for anyone who prefers private, faith-based initiatives to statist bureaucracy as the means for addressing poverty and the displacements endemic to a market economy. Carlson relates how virtually all these organizations moved away from the narrow ethnic particularism which might have attended their creation to search for the common premises which their migrant members shared with native-born Americans. They located these shared values in the sanctity of the family–and in so doing laid the groundwork for a powerful ethic of domesticity, centered on a gainfully employed father, a prudent, strong, nurturing mother, and children reared close to the maternal bosom to love God, country, and family.

This domestic ethic, Carlson shows, became the common denominator on which most Americans could agree–repressing, at least for a time, the individualist dynamic promoted by American capitalism and encouraged by its religious and political heritage. To borrow Marx’s cynical phrase, the “holy family” rather than the sovereign individual became the centerpiece of America’s self-definition; this institution crossed ethnic, political, and religious lines, providing for many decades the rationales for domestic and even foreign policy. For Carlson, collapse of this moral consensus, more than any other single factor, is responsible for America’s current social pathologies.

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