Richard Cándida Smith on Ian Tyrrell’s *American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea*

In 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address an Independence Day rally. “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass demanded of the several thousand filling the hall where he spoke.  He of course knew that to pose the question was to shame his largely sympathetic listeners.  White Americans rejoiced with praises of the Revolution of 1776 as a proud step towards the liberation of humanity, he reminded them, but, for slaves, independence resulted only in the strengthening and expansion of the slave system.  To a person of color, such as himself, the holiday was an example of the fundamental hypocrisy that poisoned everything in American life.  The Fourth of July should be a matter of humiliation to anyone who reflected on the freedoms that independence had failed to secure.  Douglass also knew that his audience expected to be dressed down for their failures, and that they would love it.  This was to be one of his most popular addresses.  He delivered the speech many, many times in all parts of the North and the Midwest.  Ian Tyrrell’s book tracing the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism” carefully examines Douglass’s famous contribution as part of Tyrrell’s reconstruction of Fourth of July oratory before the Civil War as a key source for the emergence of new ideas after 1820 that the United States was a nation whose foundations spring from a transcendental, atemporal force.  Tyrell argues that the range of questions connected to the national potential to break constraints found in all other nations were remarkably broad.  At the time there was no single term that collected a rhetorical tendency into conceptual union, but the pattern orators followed was similar to Douglass’s, no matter whether the topic was slavery, temperance, westward expansion, women’s equality, or the Christian origins of the republic—We are not living up to the promises our forebears made when Britain’s North American colonists declared independence.  The next part of the talk, what is needed to cleanse the audience and the nation of shame, also followed a pattern.

After concluding his indictment, Douglass, like other speakers in this genre, offered his listeners a path to redemption. “Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work,” Douglass insisted. “You live and must die, and you must do your work.” The children have no right to the glories they claim for their fathers unless they are prepared to address the problems of their day.  They must be prepared to risk their lives, as their ancestors did, to show their uncompromising pursuit of freedom for all.  The Revolution is hypocritical only if Americans accept it as completed.  It reassumes its providential character whenever Americans address the injustices that they may deplore but would otherwise ignore in the press of everyday life.

In this logic, the abolition of slavery, practically achieved by force of arms in the Civil War and legally guaranteed by constitutional amendment, cannot ever be thought of as a task completed.  Historians may trace how systems of racial segregation and discrimination replaced slavery in the course of violent struggles to reorganize political structures, property relations, and labor markets in post-emancipation America.  In the realm of the ideal that patriotic oratory invoked, the replacement of segregation for slavery underscored that moral failure permeated every aspect of national history and threatened even the most impressive victories.

Douglass’s tactic of inverting patriotic discourse to challenge the presumption of American arrogance has had its counterparts with every national myth.  Discovery was also conquest, and the breadbasket of the world rose upon the funeral pyre of the country’s indigenous peoples.  Technological prowess generates poverty and environmental disaster.  The nation of immigrants unjustly excluded more than half the world and treated many of those it let in with cynical cruelty.  The arsenal of democracy defeated the Nazis but Americans also committed war crimes by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and launching the cold war nuclear arms race.  On a more intimate level, GI’s who returned as heroes also pushed women out of the jobs they filled during the war and encouraged their return to the kitchen and nursery.  Or the power of the father rests upon his capacity in inflict violence, including rape, on those that he claims to defend.  The dilemma facing every form of exceptionalist thought is how quickly each subject of praise invokes its negative.

The connection of universal transcendentals with a wide variety of immediate political demands makes “American exceptionalism” one of the slipperiest concepts found in the history of U.S. ideas.  Tyrrell provides his readers a thorough exploration of the many forms exceptionalist thinking has taken over the last two centuries.  Tyrrell details the relation of exceptionality to Protestant moral reform, Christian republicanism, secular republicanism, westward expansion, Anglo-Saxonism and an equally widespread Anglophobia.  He discusses transcendentalism, environmental consciousness, abolition, and the women’s movement.  Tyrrell’s argument is that to the degree that proponents of these movements adopted exceptionalist rhetoric it was, as Douglass did, to give more drama to their critique of U.S. society.   If and when the United States lived up to its promise, its potential, then the future would bring triumph and celebration.  Since there were in fact readily visible problems and crises kept coming on a regular basis, early exceptionalist thinkers proceeded to explain the causes of defects within U.S. life and culture.  Only the particular agenda each group advanced could elevate the country from its state of imperfection.  As Tyrrell surveys the various components contributing to what will later become known as “American exceptionalism,” he finds elements for a transcendental reimagining of what the United States always and already is, but he argues, most of the key ideas and movements he surveys are not quite “exceptionalist” in the contemporary sense.   In the nineteenth century, rhetorical focus always was what the United States could become.   A celebratory version of “American exceptionalism” arrives after the end of World War II.  Prior to 1945, “American exceptionalism” focused on the country’s potential, which required policies and politics, organization, activity, and a movement acting together to pass new laws.  Engagement with politics and governance returned the country back into history, after a brief mental holiday in worlds existing only in pure thought.

Tyrrell also stresses that practical people in politics, business, the professions, religion, and education strongly opposed exceptionalist arguments, even if on patriotic holidays they too invoked the “rising glory of America.”  For most men of affairs, the republic existed in constraining circumstances just like every other nation in history.  They did not have patience for fantastic proposals, especially when they captured popular enthusiasms and complicated practical affairs.  Tyrrell concludes that during the nineteenth century, the many varied propositions regarding U.S. exceptionality were never hegemonic.  They persisted because advocates, typically adjacent to but outside the centers of power, found belief in the transcendental nature of the U.S. nation useful for giving more grandeur to the practical objectives orators proposed.

The term “American exceptionalism” was first used by an English journalist covering the Civil War in an article on the Battle of Bull Run.  This author was not impressed with the special virtues of America but wondered how a nation as wealthy as the United States could produce such amateurish and mediocre armies as both the Union and the Confederates fielded.  To the English journalist, the United States seemed an exception to the normal development of civilized states.   The term resurfaced four decades later in the German Marxist sociologist Werner Sombart’s 1906 pamphlet Why Is There No Socialism in the United States.  Sombart attempted to explain why the U.S. working class, alone in the industrializing countries, had failed to organize a socialist or labor party to represent its class interests.  Sombart assured his readers that the labor movement in the United States would inevitably converge with Marxist expectations.  For the next fifty years, Marxists bandied about “American exceptionalist” as an intensely pejorative term applied to anyone arguing that U.S. liberal institutions, freed from the corrupt influence of corporate tycoons, were inherently democratic and revolutionary.   It was a handy term applied to many of the people expelled from the Communist Party.

Movement of “American exceptionalism” from the enthusiastic fringes of political life into the political mainstream occurs after the Second World War.  U.S. social scientists, most prominently Seymour Martin Lipset, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Bell, adopted the term “American exceptionalism” to identify uniquely favorable features of U.S. life and culture responsible for the country’s outsized economic power, apparent political stability, and global cultural influence.  Liberal, mid-twentieth-century “American exceptionalism” grew out of faith that New Deal programs provided a model for political and economic development that should be exported to the rest of the world.   Closely tied to the dominant managerial liberal agenda of the first two decades of the Cold War, liberal “American exceptionalism” could not sustain its prominence within the academy after the Vietnam War, the economic crises of the 1970s, or the failure of civil rights era legislation to end racial injustice.  Still, liberal exceptionalism remained a fundamental proposition for centrists within the Democratic Party as well as a wide range of liberal scholars who continued to argue that even with the country’s abundant problems and policy errors, the United States was unquestionably the dominant force in the world.  Liberal exceptionalists, united around a commitment to an inclusive secular republic, a market economy as the basis for prosperity, and global activism based on multilateral alliances, were eager to proclaim the unique status of the United States in the late twentieth century.  The United States remained the “indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright termed it.

In the 1970s, an alternative form of “American exceptionalism” emerged out of the growing evangelical movements that stressed the centrality of the country’s supposed Christian foundations.  The republic may be non-denominational, but was always religiously inspired.  In the more enthusiastic versions, God had “chosen” the United States to fulfill biblical prophecy.  In his campaign for the presidency, Ronald Reagan adopted and temporarily tamed Christian “American exceptionalism.”  Over the last four decades, a militantly religious “American exceptionalism” has been an increasingly important part of Republican Party rhetoric.  Elections since 1980 have, in part, been contests between secular and religious versions of what makes the United States different from and supposedly superior to the rest of the world.  Donald Trump deprecated the concept of  “American exceptionalism,” but many of his most committed supporters have viewed him as a vehicle for realizing their goal of transforming the United States into a Christian republic.  The polarity between liberal and evangelical exceptionalism has allowed both political parties to make questioning their opponents’ faith in basic national values a central element of their electoral campaigns.

Tyrrell’s lengthy discussion of the early nineteenth century Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher demonstrates how thoroughly alien contemporary evangelical conceptions of “American exceptionalism” are from their supposed origins.  Beecher’s sermons and missionary activities were among the most important initial efforts to define how the United States could become a model Christian republic.  That the early republic had Christian foundations would have been a surprise to Beecher.  He stated bluntly that the United States had never been a Christian country, indeed was increasingly a sinful country meriting chastisement.  Lyman Beecher’s sermons often addressed the perennial question of corruption in republics, which classic political theory had located in excessive accumulation of power in the hands of a few strong-willed individuals who substitute personal ambitions for the common good.  Beecher argued that the ability of tyrants to seize power, as they inevitably had in all previous republics, was a product of the deficient, corrupt nature of the citizenry.  Republics foundered because the pride and cunning of the citizens overwhelmed their piety and humility whenever they asserted their sovereignty.  The solution Beecher proposed was to turn to those excluded from citizenship but who were nonetheless Christian.  To organize those who were not corrupted by the desire for worldly power that being the citizen of a republic stimulated into effective counterweights of a corrupt public order.  The congregation, meekly subservient to the all-powerful will of God, would perennially rebuke the pride of the citizens.  In practical terms, his vision of an eternal conflict between republic and congregation meant organizing the women who formed the core of most Protestant churches into missionary societies that could proselytize the faith, succor the weak, and admonish the sins of the powerful in the United States.

Tyrrell’s previous books focused on temperance and other nineteenth-century moral reform movements in the United States, discussing both domestic and international dimensions.  He has also written on the exchange of environmental ideas between Australia and the United States.  He has been a pioneer in putting more emphasis on non-state actors in studies of the United States in the world.  Tyrrell notes in his final chapter that as a foreign scholar, born in Australia and based at the University of New South Wales, there are many aspects of U.S. history that he sees in a somewhat different way than his U.S.-based colleagues.  He gives several examples, but Tyrrell’s assessment of the New Deal might well be among the most startling.  From an international perspective, Tyrrell states, the New Deal was an average response to the challenges of the Great Depression.  Roosevelt’s administration adopted approaches developed in many countries in all parts of the world.  In general, however radical the New Deal might have seemed to people in the United States in the 1930s, it was no way at the forefront of innovating new approaches to social policy.  The outcomes as a result were mixed.  Most New Deal programs were generally not as effective as similar programs in other advanced countries for restoring economic and political stability.  Nor could the New Deal address racial inequities except superficially.  In large part the limitations of the New Deal were due, Tyrrell explains, to the unusually decentralized nature of governance in the United States before World War II.  Resistance from state and local authorities diluted the impact of New Deal programs or redirected them to other priorities.

Tyrrell notes as well that exceptionalism itself is widespread around the world, found in a variety of forms in most countries.  He adds that Australia has a hearty tradition of exceptionalism that incorporates many themes found in “American exceptionalism,” but of course Australian exceptionalists read the evidence to conclude that Australia has succeeded where the United States must fail.  If  “American exceptionalism” deserves special attention, it is due to the degree of power that the United States possesses, not to any special virtue of U.S. institutions and practices. The United States does not define modernity, nor does it reveal the future to the rest of the world.

Since the 1980s, “American exceptionalism,” Tyrrell argues, has become a pervasive belief system spread across the political spectrum in the United States.  It is no longer as it was for the preceding century and a half, an enthusiasm enlivening the margins of political discourse.  Given its integration, albeit in Manichaean forms, into the rhetoric of both the Republican and Democratic parties, Tyrrell assumes that “American exceptionalism” will continue to be a disturbing force in U.S. political and cultural life for many more years. The practical incoherence of exceptionalist ideas seems to matter not at all.  Policies and results have come to be less important for practical politics than beliefs and convictions.  Nothing that historians of the United States say diminishes the hold exceptionalist assumptions currently have in public culture.  The result is a narcissistic and self-delusional complex, in some ways disturbingly reminiscent of the scenes in Sleeping Beauty when the wicked queen repeatedly looks into the mirror and asks, “Who’s the fairest of them all?”  As a belief system “American exceptionalism” is self-indulgent, hence it should be no surprise how comfortably it fits into the age of the selfie, Facebook, Twitter, etc., where self-expression has displaced the Delphic oracle’s command “Know thyself!”