Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion in American History: A Framework for Analysis

This paper develops a framework for understanding patterns of inclusion and exclusion in American history in racial, ethnic, religious, and class terms. While recent efforts to make sense of these patterns have focused heavily on racial factors, these efforts have underemphasized other important factors that have played a critical role in shaping the American experience. I deploy the British sociologist T. H. Marshall’s tripartite analysis of citizenship – civil, political, and social -- as the foundation of a framework for analyzing these patterns more fully. I argue that American history can be understood as a process combining 1) the acquisition of territory and populations and their full, partial, or non-incorporation into civic citizenship -- i.e., civic membership and equality before the law; 2) struggles over acquisition of political citizenship – that is, access to the vote; and 3) debates over social citizenship – i.e., full membership in the society, which depends on access to education and to social supports for the vulnerable. While the constitutional self-understanding of the United States presupposes that “all men are created equal,” the degree to which that putative universal equality has been realized in fact varies across time and from group to group. African-origin peoples, for example, were by no means eligible to be Americans until after the Civil War, and then the vote was largely denied Black Americans in much of the country before 1965. Meanwhile, Jews have always been able to enter the country, become citizens, and exercise the vote, but they tended to be regarded as social inferiors until after the Second World War. This was also true of other non-Protestants until at least the 1960s; similar patterns seem to prevail with regard to the Asian populations that have arrived since the mid-1960s. I also examine efforts to supplant exclusion with inclusion.