Out of Our Past

American author and historian Carl Degler’s non-fiction book Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (1959) poses a straight-forward but enormously complex question: "How did Americans get to be the way they are in the twentieth century?" Out of Our Past became a well-established component of many high school and college curricula.

Degler traces the roots of American capitalism to the nation's earliest permanent European settlers: The Puritans. The Puritans fled England to establish a haven where they could freely practice their religious beliefs. While the Puritans were guilty of their own persecution against others over the years, their arrival helped establish America as a destination for those seeking independence from European social and religious customs. The Puritans also found that America was a continent full of fertile soil, a buyer's market of arable land, allowing a relatively poor family of European descent to ascend to a status of considerable wealth in less than a generation's time. Thus, the rigid class system of the Old World was upended by a new sense of social mobility, and American capitalism was born.

Rather than allow themselves to be divided by tribalism and out-grouping, immigrants from all over Europe began to establish a national American identity. This shared sense of nationalism was helped along by England's increasingly onerous policies against the colonies, uniting the various factions of the New World against their imperial overlords.



Degler discusses how these policies, while designed to keep the colonies dependent on English rule, had the opposite effect of inspiring revolution. Degler calls it a "new" kind of revolution because, rather than upsetting order in the colonies and thus weakening their potential as a world power, it established a new, stronger union that would be a force to be reckoned with on the global stage for centuries to come.

Degler explores American efforts to expand its civilization West, particularly in the wake of the War of 1812, which ushered in an era of relative stability in regards to the United States' foreign adversaries.

Degler views the advent of "Jacksonian Democracy" under President Andrew Jackson as one of the most important major political tests for the young nation. Jackson sought to wipe clean any vestiges of the elite aristocracy that still ruled nations throughout much of Europe. America's ability to navigate this populist era was watched closely by observers throughout Europe.



Degler examines America's long and costly campaign to rid itself of the barbaric institution of slavery. The fact that the South's "war for independence" failed where America's war against Britain succeeded suggests to Degler that revolutions are rarely effective when they don't have principles of equality to undergird them.

Newly freed slaves faced profound challenges in the wake of the Civil War. The South had trouble filling the economic void left by the abolition of slavery. Both struggles persisted for decades and arguably still do today. Degler goes into further detail about the political and cultural schisms that America had to work through in the wake of the Civil War, between rural and urban, black and white, and rich and poor.

The rise of labor movements corresponded with a tripling of the U.S. population between 1860 and 1914. During that same period, the labor force expanded five times over. Degler examines widespread resistance to shifts in the demographics of America's immigrant populations, from the Northern and Western European immigrants to the second wave of immigrants hailing from Eastern Europe and Russia, many of who were Jews. Degler zeroes in on the urban-rural divide in America, which, by the early twentieth century, had only increased. A humanitarian overlap arose between Christians who felt threatened by industrialization and urbanization and labor movements that sought to protect their workers from mistreatment. Degler characterizes the Great Depression and the New Deal as "The Third American Revolution," because of how they reignited people's faith in America at a time when its fundamental building blocks were threatening to collapse.



Degler takes a long view in assessing the evolution of the American family unit throughout the nation's history.

Finally, Degler observes the ways in which World Wars I and II erased the isolationism that lay at the heart of American foreign policy for decades.