The Garb of White Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

This article examines the development of sartorial visual itineraries for nativism and white nationalism in the United States between about 1840 and 1865. For scholars studying the history of racism in the United States, the documents of so-called “scientific racism” are of paramount importance. These privilege the biovisual body as a site of epistemological and ontological truth. But the first years of the nineteenth century witnessed the proliferation of racialist taxonomies based not on the physical body but on alleged manifestations of ancestral and racial spirit in dress. Using evidence from contemporary costume albums, maps, and theatre prints, this essay argues that US nativist movements took their bodily iconography from a ballooning transatlantic popular and ethnographic interest in what today we call “traditional” or “ethnic” dress, turning nativist figures into folk types, colorful characters who could represent the purity of the so-called Anglo-Saxon US people in their style of dress.