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George Fletcher’s
Loyalty
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
    39. Quoted by Donald Pisani in “Forests and Conservation, 1865–1890,” in Charles Miller, ed.,
American Forests
(Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1997), p. 23. For history of this movement, see this volume and Roderick Nash,
Wilderness and the American Mind
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 108–81; and Samuel Hays,
Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 36–190.
    40. On this treatment, see Edward Spicer, “American Indians, Federal Policy Toward,” in Stephen Thernstrom, ed.,
Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 114–22.
    41. Higham,
Send These to Me
, pp. 58–59.
    42. For different perspectives on this matter, see Richard Alba,
The Transformation of Identity in White America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and Mary Waters,
Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America
(Berkeley: University of California, 1990). Alba thinks that white Americans, after years of ethnic conflict among themselves, have now begun to think of themselves as “European-Americans … in opposition to the challenges of non-European groups (316).” Waters maintains that Americans still connect to their “ethnic” pasts but only weakly, freely choosing, whenever they wish, to be Irish this month or Italian the next, or whatever, depending on their ethnic mix. Both books are simplistic and mechanistic. Both also do not accept the idea that Americans may be, well, Americans.
    43. Quoted from his essay “The Forgotten American,” written in 1969 and republished in Peter Schrag,
Out of Place in America
(New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 14–34. Schrag’s view of Americans contrasted sharply with the notion held by one of Schrag’s contemporaries, sociologist Milton Gordon, who argued that most Americans by the 1960s got their “sense of peoplehood” (to quote Gordon), not from being Americans but from being “Negroes, Jews, and Catholics” as well as “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants” (Gordon,
Assimilation in American Life
[New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 77]). Gordon’s view became over the years the dominant view. See, for instance,Michael Novak’s
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics
(New York: Macmillan, 1972), which declared emphatically that ethnic “inheritance colors the eyes through which we discern what is reasonable, fair, cause for joy, or for alarm.” “Each of us is different from any other,” Novak said, “and yet our similarities with some others tend to cluster around shared ethnicities (p. 320).” See also Alba,
The Transformation of Identity in White America
and Waters,
Ethnic Options
, note 42.
    44. John Steinbeck,
Travels with Charley
(New York: Bantam Books, 1963), p. 208.
    45. Quoted in Mann,
The One and the Many
, p. 172. Mann also wrote that “in the early 70s census,” conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, “close to 80 million Americans did not identify themselves by origin or descent.” In 1975, John Higham, respected immigration expert, said that “contrary to some claims, we are not all ethnics. Everyone has sense of ancestral belonging, but many Americans, much of the time, feel little ethnic identification.” See Higham,
Send These to Me
, p. ix.
    46. In 1960, English novelist Lawrence Durrell observed in a travel piece in the
New York Times
(hereafter
NYT)
that Americans abroad seemed always able to identify other Americans by the states or counties or regions their compatriots came from, simply by listening to accents. To Europeans, Durrell said, most Americans all seemed the same. “The great big nations like say the Chinese or the Americans,” Durrell went on, “present a superficially homogenous appearance; but I’ve noticed that while we Europeans can hardly tell one American from another, my own American friends will tease each other to death at the