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The wars that America fought for a variety of motives incidentally persuaded its citizens that "these United States" were actually one United States. The American Revolution gave 13 disparate colonies a hint of their possible united strength and their peculiarly American advantages. The War of 1812 confirmed independence from Britain. The Civil War made a national government and helped build a national economy. To supply a large and wide-ranging army, the North speeded the unifying of the railroad systems with a standard gauge, and found itself compelled to produce clothing and all sorts of other items in unprecedented quantities and in nationally standardized sizes. The victory of the North established the fact that no state could divorce itself from the Union, that the Union was an indissoluble nation.
Over there, in 19th century Europe, new nations arose as different peoples asserted their right to speak in (and be governed in) their ancestral tongue. Language (the "mother tongue"), as Nietzsche observed, became the common test of peoplehood, of nationality—and of the legitimate range of government. Impassioned nationalists, like the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, demanded that the Austrian Empire and other motley empires be dismembered. People were thought to be like different species of plants, each of which could grow properly only in its own ancestral habitat.
But the making of America was the unmaking of these clichés. Here it was discovered that no people was quite as peculiar as Old World nationalist leaders had urged them to believe. You became an American by coming to a strange land and learning to speak somebody else's language. Broken English would be the only tongue that really expressed our history. No wonder, then, that education became our national fetish, for the public schoolroom was the frontier of the mind, where children of older nations learned to speak a common language.
The grandchildren of men who had fought each other on the battlefields of Europe now became good neighbors. Of course, this demanded a new kind of patriotism. Older settlers, who imagined that newcomers could become more "American" by becoming more like themselves, were all wrong. America was always being redefined by the arriving millions, by the common quest for a new kind of nation.
As the 20th century wore on we became more and more a nation of birthright Americans. The proportion of native-born Americans increased every year. While 85% of the population was native-born in 1890, the number was 93% in 1950. In the familiar illogic of nationalistic pride, birthright Americans—here not by choice but by chance—began to insist that there was some special virtue in their nativity. The American spirit seemed to be changing from The World Turned Upside Down (a song of the Revolutionary period) to God Bless America.
Yet when Americans joined two world wars, they believed they were fighting not primarily to preserve the integrity of national boundaries but to defend principles by which men could and should live everywhere. They kept alive Lincoln's faith that this nation was destined to be "the last, best hope of earth." They were not talking the language of nationalism when they spoke in American accents of Making the World Safe for Democracy or of Defending the Four Freedoms.