Avid American history buffs can’t get enough of best-selling historians like Jon Meacham, David McCullough, and Stephen Ambrose. It’s hard to miss their works, stacked like scale-model skyscrapers on the non-fiction table at your local Barnes & Noble. Readers who eschew factual accuracy and historiographical debates for engrossing stories and riveting narratives can feast on their prodigious output. Jingoists can beat their chests black-and-blue with the chart-toppers’ fulsome biographies and chauvinistic military histories, all larded with heaping dollops of triumphalism.

Not that Barnes & Noble has become America First’s one-stop shop for reading material. The chain also panders to those who lean left. Militant America-haters can further misinform themselves with Howard Zinn’s propaganda over on the “Banned Books” table.

But if you care more about history as the study of change over time, and how our understanding of that change has changed over time—historiography—you will have to make your way to the store’s history section. There you will find rigorous scholarship written by academic historians like Gordon Wood, David Hackett Fischer, and Samuel Huntington, all of whose books often crossover into the mainstream. But instead of sky-high piles of their works, readers will only find scattered copies. Books in the real history section are as forlorn as unwanted elderly cats at an animal shelter, awaiting execution while the adopted kittens over on the pop history bestseller shelf head to their forever homes. Novelty trumps venerability at the ASPCA, and at bookstores too.

Yet even august intellectuals sometimes let romanticism and chauvinism taint their work. Gordon Wood, professor of history emeritus at Brown University, ranks among the United States’ foremost scholars of the early American Republic. He has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, his contribution to the indispensable Oxford History of the United States series, was also a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer. Unfortunately, Wood’s Nov. 25 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Why America is a ‘Creedal Nation’,” won’t win any awards, at least not from this magazine. 

For creedalists, “we,” that is, Americans—as distinct from Spaniards or Russians or Ugandans—don’t exist. Not now, and not ever.

In the article, Wood sets out to explain “why we are at heart a creedal nation” without bothering to first define who he means by “we.” For creedalists, “we,” that is, Americans—as distinct from Spaniards or Russians or Ugandans—don’t exist. Not now, and not ever. According to Wood, “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state” today. And that’s not a recent finding, as he hastens to reassure his fellow creedalists, “There was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776.” Wood knows this because, as he argues, “Americans created a state before they were a nation,” all the while conveniently ignoring the nearly two centuries of British colonists’ existence in North America, from Jamestown in 1607 right up to the establishment of the American State with the Constitution’s ratification in 1788.

None of those pesky details bother Wood. He dismisses the idea of an American nation that evolved organically over centuries, firmly rooted in British customs and folkways like the English language and common law—not to mention Christianity, the Protestant work ethic, and representative government. Rather than recognizing these seminal factors in our national DNA, Wood instead declares, “The Declaration is vital to understanding who we are as Americans.” 

If you don’t believe him, his encounter with an immigrant couple from Romania will prove his point. “I believe with all my heart” that the pair, naturalized in 1980, are “as American as someone whose ancestors came on the Mayflower” even though “they speak with a slight accent.”

In Wood’s view, if you raised your right hand last week while waving your paper flag with your left hand and repeated, even “with a slight accent,” the platitudes the immigration judge uttered at your naturalization ceremony, you are just as American as someone whose ancestors fought at Yorktown, Gettysburg, or Omaha Beach. Four centuries of tilling American soil, tending American graves, and serving American institutions don’t make you any more American than those who demand translators at the voting booth and then remit much of their earnings back to the countries they fled. As long as immigrants believe in their heart of hearts some thundering bromide like “All men are created equal,” they’re just as American as a fourth-generation West Point grad who speaks with a Southern drawl. But unlike men, accents aren’t created equal.

All of which makes it funny to consider Wood’s later comments. He contends the War of 1812 “seemed to vindicate America’s bold experiment in democracy.” But he admits the war had another effect, one that weakens his creedalist dogma: “It also diminished the country’s sense of being English.” Diminished, perhaps. But not abolished. 

Wood further undermines his creedalist argument when he shockingly suggests, “No nation should allow the percentage of foreign-born residents to exceed about 15% of its population.” If merely regurgitating the American creed represents the sine qua non of American citizenship, why would the ratio of foreigners in the United States population matter? More importantly, why would it matter when, according to Wood, “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something,” even in the case when that “someone” would be part of a foreign-born population exceeding 15 percent of Wood’s second-class native population?

I sound like one of my haughty college students telling me how the world works. So let me go back to the history section to check with Huntington and Fischer. The work of both of those eminent scholars provides evidence against Wood’s ideological creedalism. And they do so without pushing a pernicious political agenda. While some historians use history to promote their plans to perfect society, the historical facts speak for themselves. And few historians have shown us the facts better than Fischer and Huntington.

In his must-read, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, Fischer presents his “modified ‘germ thesis’ about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.” Over the course of 900 pages of text, illustrations, and graphs, Fischer proves “the legacy of the four British folkways remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today.” 

Gordon Wood sees no difference between an octogenarian member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a Tren de Aragua bandido who arrived last Tuesday—provided el bandolero pretends to believe in government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Fischer, however, sees important historical differences, all of which speak to a distinctive American-ness.

“Americans,” according to Fischer, “are Albion’s Seed.” He finds that seed in, among numerous other qualities, “the major dialects of American speech, in the regional patterns of American life, [and] in the complex dynamics of American politics.” The British colony that became America differed from French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies, none of which have succeeded like the United States, and not just because of some special creed jotted down after two centuries
of settlement.

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington made the same argument, albeit more pugnaciously. He left no doubt in 2004’s Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity when he asked, “Can a nation be defined by a political ideology?” Not surprisingly, “Several considerations suggest the answer is no.”

Contra Wood, Huntington showed how “a creed alone does not a nation make.” One wishes The Wall Street Journal’s editors had considered Huntington’s conclusion that “For the Creed to become the sole source of national identity would be a sharp break from the past” before publishing Wood’s screed. Huntington deemed every nation defined by a creed a “fragile nation,” since “people can with relative ease change their political ideologies.” History provides ample proof. When the Communist creed evaporated with the Soviet Union’s fall in the early 1990s, “Countries defined by nationality, culture, and ethnicity” reasserted themselves. At their best, creeds are just one of many “markers of how to organize a society,” according to Huntington. More importantly, “They do not define the extent, boundaries, or composition of that society.”

Huntington raised the bar on what makes an American an American. Instead of just spouting a creed, immigrants “become Americans only if they migrate to America, participate in American life, learn America’s language, history, and customs, absorb America’s Anglo-Protestant culture, and identify with America rather than with their country of birth.” Huntington agreed that America has a creed; most nations do. But creedalists must recognize a nation’s “soul is defined by the common history, traditions, culture, heroes and villains, victories and defeats, enshrined in its ‘mystic chords of memory.”’

Huntington’s haunting conclusion portends trouble. Should the Gordon Woods of the world have their way, “A multicultural America will, in time, become a multicreedal America.” “America” according to both Huntington and common sense, “cannot become the world and still be America” when the sole requirement for being an American boils down to belief in a creed.

Unlike Wood, Huntington wasn’t afraid to define “We the people of the United States” as those with “common ethnicity, race, culture, language, and religion.” But he did so in 2004 before wokeism and Joe Biden’s open border fiasco. I can imagine Huntington standing in Eagle Pass, Texas, as hordes stormed the border during Biden’s reign, ruefully reading his book’s conclusion aloud: 

America cannot become the world and still be America. Other peoples cannot become American and still be themselves.

One can also imagine the Afghan who shot the National Guardsmen, and the alleged Somali welfare cheats in Minnesota, chanting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to overworked immigration officials during their vetting processes. But it’s a lot harder to imagine that the translator understood them.