Are Americans a People with a Creed, or a Creed-Made People?

E minent historian Gordon Wood, in remarks given at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual prize dinner that were reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, made the case that America is a creedal nation. Though he didn’t mention JD Vance by name, it’s hard not to notice that Wood was engaging with an argument popularized by the vice president in his 2024 nomination speech.

People have tried to say that Vance in some way denigrated American ideals when he said that we’re not just a creedal project but also a true nation, a people with a shared history. From Vance’s speech:

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

He went on to talk about how America welcomes immigrants — immigrants like the family of his wife, Usha — on its own terms. But he also invoked his family’s history, the generations of people who fought and died in this country’s wars.

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to. . . .

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland.

He called this idea of nationhood a source of our greatness. This seems to me undeniable. But many people have taken this contextualization of the American creed as an insult or a repudiation. Their view is that any admixture of “blood and soil” ideas into our concept of nationality is a kind of betrayal. They worry that this would lead swiftly to greater interethnic or interracial conflict domestically, or — I think more acutely — that if America’s creed is in any way contextualized or cabined by the idea of America as a nation, then America’s armed forces are only going to guard America’s interests rather than be a kind of missionary force for democracy and human rights around the world.

From Wood’s speech:

There has been some talk recently that we aren’t and shouldn’t be a creedal nation — that beliefs in a creed are too permissive, too weak a basis for citizenship and that we need to realize that citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more-recent immigrants.

I reject this position as passionately as I can. We have seen these blood-and-soil efforts before. In the 1890s, we also had a crisis over immigration. Some Americans tried to claim that because they had ancestors who fought in the Revolution or came here on the Mayflower, they were more American than the recent immigrants.

Straw-man alert: I can’t find anyone of significance who’s talking about removing the American creed from the idea of American nationhood.

Wood, however, is a great historian whose work has benefited almost all of us and his nation. He fills his speech with colorful historical detail and moving anecdotes about his neighbors. He touchingly refers to Romanian neighbors who still speak with an accent and generously proclaims them to be as American as Mayflower descendants. And this is impressive enough that many readers of his remarks in the Journal might pass over a portion where he gives in to the very contention — that “citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more recent immigrants” — which he claims to oppose.

Of course, the word “stake” has a double meaning. It can refer to a literal stake, hammered into the ground — the deeper it is, the stronger it will be, presumably. It can also refer to a kind of share — as in the resources ventured in a gamble or investment. A refugee who flees persecution obviously has his or her whole life in some way staked on the welcome of another nation. However, we are not the only nation that gives safety and security to those fleeing persecution. Similarly, the person who immigrates here to avoid starvation or penury has great stakes in this country’s promise of opportunity.

But then Wood says something that is both obviously true and should cause him to pause for a moment and reflect:

America has its own problems with immigrants, especially those entering illegally at the southern border. These problems pale in comparison with the problems European nations are facing and will continue to face. But immigration must be handled carefully. Because assimilation isn’t easy, no nation should allow the percentage of foreign-born residents to exceed about 15 percent of its population.

Well, if America is not in any way a traditional nation defined by shared history — the soil and blood stuff — then how could assimilation possibly be a problem? Most legal immigrants have a chance within three to five years to profess allegiance to America’s creed and forswear allegiance to any foreign nation or potentate.

If we took any other human quality and said that it’s important that at least 85 percent of the people who live here have it, we would deem that a very rigorous form of discrimination. Apparently, Wood, creedal nationalist, still believes that America needs an absolute supermajority of — what else would you call them? — heritage Americans, for the purpose of assimilation. Churches, defined purely by creeds, routinely grow faster than this country, incorporating those who weren’t born into them.

Charles Francis Adams (yes, from that Adams clan) had been a young radical Republican in the Lincoln years. Late in his life, in a 1913 speech, he said that in his youth there was tremendous faith in the assimilative power of American society. “The universal ‘melting-pot’ theory in vogue in my youth was that but seven, or at the most fourteen, years were required to convert the alien immigrant — no matter from what region or of what descent — into an American citizen,” Adams said. “The educational influences and social environment were assumed to be not only subtle, but all-pervasive and powerful.” But the experience of the great waves of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had taught him what Wood seems to be acknowledging. Adams continued: “So far from seven or fourteen years making an American citizen, fully and thoroughly impregnated with American ideals to the exclusion of all others, our experience is that it requires at least three generations to eliminate what may be termed the ‘hyphen’ in citizenship.”

It’s almost as if people who disagree with Vance want to posit that the American creed creates a “New American Man” just as communism promised a “New Soviet Man.” But proponents of the American creed should not feel ashamed that the American creed doesn’t overturn the realities of human socialization. The fact that Mayflower descendants may be more “culturally” American, and may more easily feel the truth of saying “George Washington is the father of my nation,” than someone who has just arrived, does not imply or require any legal distinction or inequality. But it can still inform our common sense and, as with Wood, our intuitions about immigration policy.

American creedalists often talk as if older nations are entirely different from ours, as if their people all have a common ethno-religious origin. This just isn’t true. I went back to Ireland a few years ago and sat at a bar next to a Catholic professor of Trinity College. I asked about his religious background, assuming it might be Church of Ireland, indicating Anglo-Irish ancestry with roots after the Tudor era. No, in fact, he was Catholic. But he was not Gaelic Irish. His ancestors were French Huguenots who had fled to Ireland for safety from anti-Protestant persecution but had subsequently converted to Catholicism. Just as Wood’s Romanian neighbors are truly American, so too is this man truly Irish. Nations are units — often related to ethnic and religious groups but distinct from them. The absence of national loyalty would make more room for and invite back religious and ethnic loyalties and rivalries.

And if socialization is part of human life, so are its consequences. Nationality is a project of sharing law and territory in peace, by which individuals gain a stake in one another’s life. It is necessarily a multigenerational project. We cannot help but sanctify the lands where our ancestors were buried, the mountains they climbed, or even the city skylines they marveled at. We cannot but help to inherit from our ancestors, and if they were American, then a greater share of our inheritance is American. African Americans are likely to have twice as long a history here as my ancestors do. African-American pop music, when I was a kid, could reflect patterns of life and internal migration in the United States that predate my immigrant ancestors. That is a fact of history. And Gordon Wood of all people should know that history matters, even here.