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August 25, 2004
"And You Know Nothing of My Work"
by Ron HoganYou may recall my April item concerning Alan Wolfe's labeling of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? as "Patrick Buchanan with footnotes" in a Foreign Affairs review. Huntington sure noticed Wolfe's remarks, though probably not my blog, even though I went and gave him his own category without badness attached to his name, which is an honor only Christopher Ricks and Plum Sykes have managed... Anyway, as I was saying, Huntington saw the review, and boy is he pissed. And then he sets about explaining to readerss what his book's really about.
Central to American identity from the beginning has been the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers. Would America be the America it has been (and, in some measure, still is today) if it had been settled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.
"In addition," he claims, "for two and a half centuries, Americans defined themselves ethnically, first as British and then as northern European." That last bit must have been when Huntington remembered the Pennsylvania Dutch. After Huntington has his say, Wolfe shoots back that the book "is not a treatise on a fashionable academic concept. It is a cri du coeur lamenting the threat to American unity its author sees coming from immigrants, primarily those from Mexico" before noting that "American culture has never been uniformly Anglo-Protestant." Then Huntington pretty much calls Wolfe either a liar or an idiot.
Looking back at my original post on Wolfe's review, I wondered aloud then when the NYTBR was going to get around to reviewing this book. Unless I'm missing something in the archives, neither McGrath nor Tanenhaus ever assigned a review; Michiko panned it, but Sunday readers never found out about it...a glaring oversight considering Huntington's stature and the extent to which his earlier tomes have wound up shaping contemporary views in some establishment circles. And now it's probably too late--although if Tanenhaus wants to drop me a line, I'm right here!
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