This is a powerful, ambitious book on the connection between American presidents and American identity. Mary Stuckey argues that through their rhetoric, American presidents reduce an often contradictory and always complex set of national identities into a single overarching one. Presidents present this idealized universal in attempts to unify and preserve existing political structures and beliefs and to minimize differences in the national debate. They offer this national identity while also attempting to maintain their political coalitions and address certain pressing policy problems.

Stuckey focuses on three themes she finds evident in varying degrees in selected presidential speeches and writings. First, she examines the theme of balance in which presidents weigh competing interests and claims, attempting to articulate a shared national interest or vision. This balance theme is seen, for instance, in President Jackson's balancing farmers, slave owners, commercial interests, and the new westerners in his vision of America. Second, she studies the theme of citizenship as the idea of belonging to the United States less as a matter of birthright and more as a matter of achievement. Third, she considers the theme of visibility. She focuses on how presidents treat groups, such as Native Americans, African Americans, and ethnic immigrants, as visible and invisible at various points in history. Group visibility/invisibility also involves matters of inclusion in or exclusion from the body politic.

Stuckey then moves through history in a sweeping fashion, focusing on Presidents Jackson, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Cleveland, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and George H.W. Bush. Her intent is not to exhaustively examine all presidents but, instead, to offer snapshots at select moments in presidential history. For Jackson, the key to national identity was land—landowners and farmers were the true citizens, the true Americans. Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan (whom Stuckey treats as a group) presented an inherently conservative view of national identity pegged to stability and a focus on the past. The national identity rested on the Union as it had been conceived by the founders—one which balanced North and South, slave and free states. For Grover Cleveland, the national identity rested on calculations of wealth and emerging images of the American dream. National identity during Wilson's tenure placed the United States in the world by claiming American political and cultural superiority in the international sphere. For Franklin Roosevelt, national identity was based on economic relationships, recognizing the common man on the bottom of the economic hierarchy while leaving the hierarchy itself intact. Eisenhower, by contrast, advanced an identity of containment both within the country and internationally. Finally, George H. W. Bush offered a view of civility in an increasingly fragmented polity. Stuckey convincingly demonstrates how much the national identity has changed over this history but also how the core elements of Union, wealth, and homogeneity remain in spite of the change (or perhaps because of it).

As intriguing as the book is, it could have been made even stronger. Stuckey has a tendency to write above the presidents, offering her own views of national identity, development, and change more as a cultural historian and less as a student of the presidents themselves. To be sure, she offers evidence from presidents' writings and speeches, but not to the same degree or in the same depth as other scholars who have analyzed presidential communication in history. The evidence presented seems carefully chosen to support Stuckey's points, rather than having the presidents' words make their own points. In this vein, she offers her own assessment of what should have been the national identity—brimming with equality and the full-fledged inclusion of all groups. She never discusses how this ideal could have been reached in America or whether this ideal has ever been reached in any country during any time period. Although Stuckey acknowledges that presidents put politics first in their espousal of national identity, she does not fully analyze how their political agendas and coalitions shape the identities they offer. It is thus never made clear how presidents or other American politicians could actually espouse an all-encompassing, highly egalitarian identity and actually construct a winning political coalition, which by its very nature is often built on us versus them.

The most provocative, and yet problematic, contribution of Defining Americans involves the tracing of the inclusion and exclusion of groups in the national identity. Stuckey maintains that certain groups are more (less) visible in national politics and that this leads them to be more (less) included in the construction of national identity. In this assertion, she makes an underlying assumption that visibility and inclusion run in tandem. This assumption seems to be extrapolated from her excellent treatment of presidents' discussions of Native Americans. But the assumption seems on shakier ground when other groups are considered. For example, discussing African Americans in the 1850s, Stuckey writes of the “price of exclusion and the pain of invisibility” (p. 61). But, arguably, while African American slaves were excluded from the body politic and national identity, they were hardly invisible as the emancipation movement grew. Indeed, their growing visibility and the visibility of slavery was central not only to the Civil War but also to the reshaping of the national identity after the war. Unhappily, because Stuckey does not consider Lincoln, the clash between visibility and exclusion is missed.

In all, this is a very good cultural history of the American presidency as it is presented in key moments in time. Stuckey is to be commended for her intriguing analysis, her provocative commentary, and thoughtful insights into the presidential office and the nation's identity.