I

In a now classic essay from the 1980s, Philip Gleason identified World War II as one of the central points of origin for the discipline of American studies precisely because the war encouraged – if not compelled – a self-consciousness about the distinctiveness of American character in a world hostile to its ostensible values.Footnote ¹ But Americans have been doing American studies from the beginning and it seems appropriate to begin our discussion of the “un-American” in 1776, at that constitutive moment when Jefferson began what would prove to be his most enduring piece of writing with a differentiation of peoples. “One people” (or, as he put it in his initial draft, “a people”), he said, was ending its previous connection with another.Footnote ² Americans would climb “the road to glory & happiness … in a separate state.”Footnote ³ “By our separation from Great-Britain,” he explained later, “British subjects became aliens” in America.Footnote ⁴ So the crisis that led to Revolution created two peoples and there could be “no middle character” between them: “natural subjects” of the crown simply could not be “American citizens” who had become “aliens” to that very crown.Footnote ⁵ In this reading, the Declaration was the genesis of American nationhood as well as the “fundamental act of union of these states,” as Jefferson later characterized it.Footnote ⁶ Among other things, Jefferson's Declaration tells what Rogers Smith calls an “ethically constitutive story” – a narrative of “moral affirmation” of American peoplehood.Footnote ⁷ And, as any ethically constitutive story does, this one establishes boundaries and exclusions. In this sense, then, Jefferson's Declaration, whatever else it was doing, also invented the un-American and inaugurated what has become a long-standing American tradition of sorting out friend from foe on the basis of adherence to the story Jefferson told in 1776.

II

Jefferson's own later discussion of the Declaration tended to emphasize this facet of its significance in American life over its legal argument in international law.Footnote ⁸ All Jefferson claimed to have done in the Declaration was to express the “American mind.”Footnote ⁹ They were words, he said, calculated to “command … assent.” But only “a people” which already agreed with him could assent to the claims he made in the Declaration. So the assent itself calls into being a people whose “mind” the Declaration was merely expressing, assuming precisely what had yet to be established (and proven).Footnote ¹⁰ Jefferson's draft of the Declaration – which differed in substantial ways from the one the Continental Congress adopted – should be read in light of his other Revolutionary writing, including, especially, his 1774 paper on the “Rights of British America” – in which he established the contours of what he there called the “American Story” and emphasized the common experience Americans shared of expatriation from the realm. This discussion – originally designed to grant Americans a kind of autonomy within the empire –would later become – through the alchemy of history – a narrative of nationhood legitimizing sovereignty outside the empire. In the new post-Declaration world, the Summary View's mythology was transformed into a history that could legitimize the Declaration's claims that Americans were one people. With the Declaration, Jefferson called the nation into being, but also became its first historian and mythmaker.Footnote ¹¹

We are often so distracted by the truly cosmopolitan nature of Jefferson's discourse – “all men are created equal” – that we overlook the ways in which it affirmed a national identity. The Declaration listed rights as universally applicable, but claimed only that Americans believed them – “We hold these truths to be self-evident” – and most Americans, including Jefferson, ultimately lost any clear sense that anyone else would begin to soon. What the Declaration asserts is a cultural claim that Americans embrace certain liberal values and consider these values to be self-evident and universally applicable. What makes these real, then, is not, for the Declaration's purposes, “the nature of the universe or the properties of the human species as such” (though Americans certainly thought that their claims aligned with the natural order), but precisely that Americans believed them. In this sense, the Declaration's assertions are what John Dunn calls the “political history of a culture,” a culture whose government would recognize the very rights the British state had failed to uphold.Footnote ¹² With the story of peoplehood, the Declaration moves beyond an anticolonial statement of independence and toward the assertion of a national character and identity oriented around the embrace of natural-rights liberalism. It tells us who this people is – what they are like – and this, in turn, legitimizes the state's claims to sovereignty.

Jefferson was more interested than Congress in making the cultural claims – distinguishing the one people from another, which may explain why Jefferson's draft points its finger more sharply at the “unfeeling brethren” in England who had forced Americans to assume their “equal & independant station … among the powers of the earth.”Footnote ¹³ Congress dropped most of Jefferson's lament, masking the anguished features of his draft, which nevertheless offer a suggestion about what was most important to him in this moment. The king may have become “a tyrant … unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free,” but it was “our British brethren” who had enabled the king's behavior and that of Parliament. It was they who had been “deaf to the voice of justice & of consanguinity” and who had “by their free election re-established … in power” those “disturbers of our harmony.” Worse, perhaps, “they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade & deluge us in blood.” It was this betrayal of “our common blood” that had “given the last stab to agonizing affection.” “We might have been a free & a great people together,” but experience had severed the connection and rendered the one people two. Americans would “climb” the “road to glory & happiness” alone.Footnote ¹⁴

The Declaration's passage through Congress was delayed, Jefferson remembered, many years later, by “the pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with,” and it was this very illusion – which “still haunted the minds of many” – which led Congress to strike out “those passages” in the document “which conveyed censure on the people of England.”Footnote ¹⁵ But Jefferson included them precisely because they demonstrated to Americans just how different their own character had become from that of the “unfeeling brethren” they were leaving behind. These passages, then, illuminate or bolster the more positive claims about American character in paragraph 2 and their exclusion from the final draft obscures the crucial place of that paragraph for the meaning of the whole.Footnote ¹⁶

For the rest of his life, Jefferson would continue his project of separation, watching – and documenting – the ways in which the English nation, from which the American was separating, would continue on its strikingly different path. Where British conceptions of political obligation had long imagined that subjectship was rooted in the “chance” of birth Jefferson had described in the Summary View, Americans would honor “Choice” or volitional allegiance as a natural right.Footnote ¹⁷ Where Americans understood that right was antecedent to, and transcended, mere power, the English would continue to operate by “the principle that force is right”Footnote ¹⁸ – that “whatever power can make hers, is hers of right.”Footnote ¹⁹ The British was “a nation of buccaneers,”Footnote ²⁰ which “nothing but views of interest can govern.”Footnote ²¹ Its “governing principles” were “conquest, colonization, commerce, monopoly,” and its government was “the most flagitious which has existed since the days of Philip of Macedon, whom they make their model.”Footnote ²²

“In war,” Americans would treat the English as enemies; “in peace,” the English could be America's “friends” if they chose. But in neither case would the English ever again be American “brethren.”Footnote ²³ To be sure, American “laws, language, religion, politics and manners” were “so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as its origin.”Footnote ²⁴ But Americans should never mistake the one for the other. “Sameness of language, of manners, of appearance” might render “it impossible to distinguish us from her subjects.” But “free and independent men” – the distinguishing features of American character – would never submit “to their bondage” just because “we speak English, and look like them.”Footnote ²⁵ Americans would recognize each other – not by language and appearance, not by ethnicity or religion – but by their common adherence to what Jefferson later called the “principles of ’76.”Footnote ²⁶ Americans had cast off the “unfeeling brethren” to join in a union of what Jefferson called in his First Inaugural “brethren of the same principle.”Footnote ²⁷

If while composing the Declaration he was simply the “passive auditor of the opinions of others,” as he told Madison in 1823 – if his “paper of July 4, 1776” was nothing more than “the genuine effusion of the soul of our country at that time” – then Jefferson had produced a story which he assumed would continue to “command” the “assent” of all true Americans. The Declaration would explain their distinctive character and moral commitments – principles that Jefferson assumed Americans would continue to uphold if they were to continue as a people. Little wonder that the central focus of Jefferson's final substantive letter – written as a commemoration of the Declaration of Independence – was his immense satisfaction that the latest generation of “our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.” The “annual return” of the Fourth of July was an opportunity to “forever refresh our recollections” of the rights proclaimed in the Declaration and “an undiminished devotion to them.”Footnote ²⁸ It was by their common devotion to these “principles of ’76,” as Jefferson suggested to his supporters in 1801, that Americans would “learn to rally & to recognize one another.”Footnote ²⁹

So in the Declaration and in his later elaboration of its centrality to American nationhood, Jefferson merged the civic components of national identity – rational and volitional devotion to law and rights – with the historical and emotionally powerful story of peoplehood that constituted a community of belonging and an inheritance for future generations born (or naturalized) into the community.Footnote ³⁰ Future Americans would be most themselves when they voluntarily reaffirmed their rootedness in this past. And the historical American identity was precisely an adherence to the future-oriented liberal principles articulated in the Declaration which became not only the American creed but also, in his view, the symbol of American belonging, continual remembrance of which would “nourish our devotion to this holy bond of our Union, and keep it alive and warm in our affections.”Footnote ³¹ The point of remembering the Declaration, he told Madison, was “to cherish the principles of the instrument in the bosoms of our own citizens.”Footnote ³² In other words, true Americans would be distinguished by what they believed, by what drove their heart's pulsations. The nation's “holy purpose” from that first moment of its birth would be “adhesion to” the “principles” of the Declaration and “a sacred determination to maintain and perpetuate them.”Footnote ³³ The elaboration of American nationhood was a lifelong project for Jefferson and his story of American peoplehood had far-reaching implications for American policy. Prior to 1776 American patriots had spent a good deal of time characterizing British policies as counter to the British Constitution and violations of the “rights of Englishmen.” After 1776, critiques of this nature ceased and the only way one could challenge policy was to renounce it as un-American.

The un-American has never been a strictly legal category, used to distinguish Americans from non-Americans in a legal sense.Footnote ³⁴ Instead, it has largely been used to distinguish behavior – or thought – that would seem improper for an American – a kind of internal policing mechanism among citizens (rather than between citizens and aliens). Early on, it was easier for Americans to think in terms of the opposition of American and foreign values – much as Jefferson had done with the juxtaposition of American with “British” – because of the widespread assumption that Americans were unified and homogeneous. But soon enough, the meaning of the American itself became a contested subject in domestic political and social life as the Revolutionary consensus broke down.Footnote ³⁵

By 1823, when he told Madison that it was “a heavenly comfort to see that these principles are yet so strongly felt,” the nation had undergone significant convulsion and the solidification of its meaning had been maintained by political struggle with what Jefferson considered an un-American effort to derail the nation's Revolutionary purpose.Footnote ³⁶

Because Jefferson assumed that real Americans would always imagine “a return under the dominion of Gr. Br.” to be “the greatest of all possible miseries,”Footnote ³⁷ he found it utterly astonishing to return from Europe to discover what he eventually concluded was a British party in America working to “assimilat[e] … us in all things to … the British model,” precisely why he could never understand the Federalists as true Americans, but rather as “English in all their relations & Sentiments.”Footnote ³⁸ The Federalist party was not merely “monarchical and aristocratical”; it was “Anglican” – or un-American – as well.Footnote ³⁹ He simply took it for granted that “the toryism with which we struggled in ’77 differed but in name from the federalism of ’99” as well as “the Anglicism of 1808.”Footnote ⁴⁰

To be sure, Jefferson was hardly alone in turning his political enemies into foreigners, and the Federalists never tired of associating him with Revolutionary France or labeling the Republicans the “democratic frenchified faction in this country.”Footnote ⁴¹ But it was one thing to accuse an opponent of being partial to one foreign power or another, quite another to assert, as Jefferson did, that the Federalists – American citizens who ought to know better – had not made the break that defined Americans in the first place but had retained English “sentiments” and manners. It is easy to smile at what are now understood to be slightly hyperbolic charges of this sort, but the significance of the accusation cannot be overstated. The Federalists, in Jefferson's estimation, were, by their embrace of English mores and governing ideas, threatening everything that was supposed to make America distinctive. Precisely because it was possible for “a country” to be “erased from the map of the world by the dissensions of it's own citizens,”Footnote ⁴² the real threat to liberty in America, he always believed, was no longer the potential “assaults” of British arms, but rather the overweening influence of “English books, English prejudices, English manners, and the apes, the dupes, and designs among our professional crafts.”Footnote ⁴³ Jefferson even welcomed the War of 1812 as a “second weaning from British principles, British attachments, British manners & manufactures,” and later considered the eradication of “English partialities” to be “one of the most consoling expectations from the war.” Such purification, he believed, would “form an epoch of a spirit of nationalism and of consequent prosperity,” which continued “subordination to the interests & influence of England” would derail.Footnote ⁴⁴

What dismayed Jefferson about the Federalists was their apparent inability to understand that Americans were not a people who could or should be governed by force or corruption by the “better sort.” The Federalists, in other words, were accepting premises which were, by their very nature, inapplicable in an American context: un-American premises. So his opposition to them was rooted in his sense that they were attempting to apply European ideas of governance to an exceptional people. This is the substance underlying his concern (which might otherwise appear superficial) about their preferences for British manners and style.

III

Jefferson always distinguished the political possibilities in America from those in Europe on the basis of distinctive character traits we might, with certain qualifications, properly label “exceptionalist.” “Never was a finer canvas presented to work on than our countrymen,” he effused to John Adams in 1796 in a letter in which he spelled out some of the characteristics which rendered Americans uniquely able to govern themselves. “All” Americans, he said, were “engaged in agriculture or the pursuits of honest industry, independent in their circumstances, enlightened as to their rights, and firm in their habits of order and obedience to the laws.” The lesson was clear: “If ever the morals of a people could be made the basis of their own government, it is our case.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In America, he told Adams years later, “every one may have land to labor for himself if he chuses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age.” It followed, Jefferson noted, that everyone,

Here, and elsewhere, Jefferson made several claims about the United States that will sound trite to practitioners of American studies precisely because they have become such standard themes of American exceptionalism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Because of the “immensity of land” in the United States, Americans were “a people at their ease,” in possession of a “lovely equality,” in which most families, by and large, were not artificially burdened with poverty, where the agricultural labor of men was sustaining and even profitable.Footnote ⁴⁸ America was essentially a classless society, with “no paupers,” and very few rich.Footnote ⁴⁹ All Americans were able to maintain a comfortable competence. This generalized prosperity gave Americans a rough equality and freedom from hierarchy, as well as a disposition in favor of law and the constitutional order that seemed to indulge their private pursuits of happiness and – to complete the circle – foster their prosperity. In short, American circumstances had forged a people safe with the franchise and with a degree of liberty unknown in the history of the world: “men susceptible of happiness, educated in the love of order, habituated to self-government, and valuing its blessings above all price.”Footnote ⁵⁰

All of these characteristics were easy to contrast with those of Europe. Since Europeans were “not at their ease,” Jefferson argued, they lived degraded lives.Footnote ⁵¹ Every man in Europe, Jefferson argued, was “either the hammer or the anvil.”Footnote ⁵² And European aristocracy created artificial hierarchies that stifled human potential and condemned the mass of society to ignorance and poverty, leaving them without a true stake in the society or any public spirit that might preserve republican government.

And if “the excellence of every government is its adaptation to the state of those to be governed by it,” it followed that Americans – “constitutionally & conscientiously Democrats” – could handle liberty without falling into licentiousness.Footnote ⁵³ If, by contrast, “an unprepared people” acquired freedom “by mere force or accident” (instead of through long “habituation” and “growth in the progress of reason”), they would immediately pervert their freedom into “a tyranny still, of the many, the few, or the one.” Constitutional monarchy was never “the best possible government,” but it just might be “the best” such degraded peoples could “bear.”

Because Americans had “sucked in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother's milk,” the strength of American republicanism was located “not in our constitution,” but “in the spirit of our people.”Footnote ⁵⁴ And this American spirit, Jefferson asserted in a remarkable statement, “would oblige even a despot to govern us republicanly.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The character of the American people, in other words, would force even tyrants to abide by republican principles if they ever hoped to govern Americans. The American people, Jefferson asserted over and again, would not long suffer a government that did not ascend from their will; nor could they abide a government inconsistent with their republican character, precisely because, as Jefferson put it, “our countrymen” had been “impressed from their cradle” with the “habit of self-government” and the principles of republicanism “so that with them it is almost innate.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Accordingly, one of Jefferson's principal critiques of the Federalists in the 1790s was that they were attempting to force upon Americans a style of government ready-made for the European societies he described, but ill-suited to the American people. The Federalists simply did not understand “the difference between the rabble who were used as instruments” for the French revolutionaries, “and the steady & rational character of the American people, in which [they] had not sufficient confidence.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The Federalists had to be resisted, Jefferson thought, precisely because they were not sufficiently well attuned to what was special about the American people and destiny.

So the traditional tropes of American exceptionalism vis-à-vis other countries in the international community merged here with – and even necessitated – a description of domestic tensions as a juxtaposition between American and un-American approaches to governance. In this way, Jefferson could characterize his own election to the presidency in 1800 – the defeat of the Federalist agenda – as “the resistance which our republic has opposed to a course of operation for which it was not destined.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Unlike Republicans, the Federalists, in their attempt to govern Americans with the tools that had served rulers of the European past – hierarchy, deference, and force – were simply out of touch with American realities. The Federalists, Jefferson later remembered, had worked “to recover … in practice the powers which the nation had refused” when it declared itself a separate people in 1776, styling themselves as “authorities independent of [the people's] will” and working to “maintain their privileged orders in splendor and idleness, to fascinate the eyes of the people, and excite in them an humble adoration and submission, as to an order of superior beings.” The Federalists attempted to reestablish in America “the doctrines of Europe” precisely because they extrapolated from the universal human experience to that point in history without taking into account the unique experience of the United States.Footnote ⁵⁹ True Americans, Jefferson argued, rejected their politics precisely because that very experience, he believed, had prepared them for new and greater possibilities than political theorists of the past could reasonably expect from other peoples. The election, in this Republican (partisan) narrative, had rendered Federalist ideals un-American. (And, indeed, the Federalists remain the last major party in American history to explicitly deny that Americans were sufficiently different from the rest of the world's peoples that they could practice a uniquely democratic politics.) So Jefferson's evaluation of American “exceptionalism” vis-à-vis other nations quickly turned into a domestic politics of un-Americanism which began the process of marginalizing the Federalists in American collective memory.

IV

Whether Jefferson was right or wrong about the Federalists is not the issue for this essay, though the question is more than germane to the larger theme.Footnote ⁶⁰ What this reading of Jefferson opens up is a path toward exploring all the ways in which political discourse in America has so often asked whether opponents are sufficiently American when they promote policies or endorse social agendas that would, so the claim goes, contribute toward unmaking the uniqueness – the exceptionalism – of America. In other words, we are not particularly concerned here with whether America was in fact exceptional in all the ways Americans have believed or with whether the charge of “un-American” has corresponded in any meaningful way with a true “American” identity or character.Footnote ⁶¹ Our suggestion here is merely that these kinds of claims ought to be considered as manifestations of American nationalism – assertions about the nationality – and that the continuity of such discourse throughout American history is a social fact that demands historical analysis.Footnote ⁶²

If various forms of exceptionalism have long been the peculiar expression of American nationalism vis-à-vis other nations, the un-American has long served as a tool of domestic politics. Assertions of exceptionalism, though invested in mythology, can theoretically be evaluated empirically: either the United States is or it is not distinctive against the practices of other nations. But the un-American is an ideal category that can be established or validated only through political struggle. Efforts to evaluate American exceptionalism have generated reams of sociological data that have been used to confirm or deny such claims.Footnote ⁶³ But it is much more difficult to say precisely when or why a politician, a party, a religious sect, a law, a practice, a viewpoint, a principle, a food, a sport is “un-American.” With a category so subjective, what is its use for scholars? Precisely this: that it gives us a map toward exploring American self-conception and representation – what Americans have thought they were like and were willing to go to the mat to defend or to call out as un-American – through history. And because embedded in any invocation of the “un-American” is certain to be a set of positive assertions about American identity, wherever Americans have called out the “un-American” for exposure becomes a site for the exploration of the discourse of American identity itself.

Because nearly every successful claim about American character runs back through some route to the assertions that Jefferson made in the Declaration, America has at its core a transcendental set of ideals that remain almost unrealizable in practice – in the sense that they are both lofty and always susceptible to divergent interpretations and manipulable by partisans. The un-American, then, is particularly sensitive to the perceived incongruity between the ideal America of the imagination and the reality of current American practice on the ground. This gap has spurred Americans to great achievement in the realm of social justice but it also has frequently generated a politics of nostalgia.

The concept of the un-American is remarkably protean and throughout American history it has been marshaled for projects from left, center, and right; for purposes of progressive social justice, for liberal projects for political equality, and for xenophobic hostility to the very presence of foreigners or to social policies that appear to favor “European” social democracy. The point, in every instance, is to identify political opponents as ignorant of – or hostile to – American realities or ideals.

The Federalists, whose ambivalence about immigration produced a restrictive definition of citizenship that emphasized native birth and natural allegiance, were less comfortable with challenging what they considered to be settled American institutions and practices (and they were also, it must be noted, less enamored of the transcendental authority of the Declaration).Footnote ⁶⁴ They met the threat of a vibrant active public with the argument that the American Revolution had successfully answered most of the major questions so that there was no need for continual engagement or reconceptualization; for them, the obligations of citizenship seemed largely reducible to obedience to established authority.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Federalists practiced their own version of the un-American: in their cosmology, it was the Republicans who wanted to transform the wisdom of the Founders into a radicalism they associated with the French Revolution. The cry of “Un-American!” has often been associated with attempts to foreclose more radical possibilities by associating the “American” exclusively with settled institutions and practices. In this formulation ever since, the “American” becomes a ratification of whatever the United States happens to have done; the “un-American” is anyone who raises questions or seeks to more closely align American practice with a transcendental ideal. It is no accident that Mitt Romney began his campaign for the presidency by castigating President Obama for both “apologiz[ing] for America” and for wanting to “‘fundamentally transform’ America.”Footnote ⁶⁶

But the un-American has never been the exclusive province of the right – witness E. L. Doctorow's recent essay in the New York Times describing the social policies of the current GOP as a recipe for making America “unexceptional” – and others have argued that popular reconceptualization and engagement is the essence of the American Revolutionary tradition itself, that foreclosing possibilities is the essence of Toryism.Footnote ⁶⁷ And it is certainly possible to imagine a patriotism that refuses a simplistic celebration of whatever America has done or is doing and instead seeks to align the nation with universal values and moral concerns that transcend national boundaries.Footnote ⁶⁸ Frederick Douglass considered “the best friend of a nation” to be the one who “most faithfully rebukes her for her sins” – even if such rebuke exposed the nation's hypocrisies to global critique – rather than the one who “under the specious and popular garb of patriotism, seeks to excuse, palliate, and defend them.” But most of the progressive causes in American history – including, eventually, Douglass's – have advanced under the assumption that America was not properly practicing itself: the goal has typically been to wrench American practice into some kind of conformity to American theory precisely so that it could become exceptional again, a nationalist orientation which has long distinguished the American left from many of its European counterparts and which has bewildered and fascinated those concerned with the question “why there is no socialism in the United States.”Footnote ⁶⁹

So the concept of the “un-American” – though it has long been used to identify domestic enemies – also has, in certain formulations, a kind of redemptive power to demand self-evaluation and call Americans back to first principles. And yet, if David Hollinger is right to emphasize capacious democratic aspirations as a prime signifier of American identity, Dorothy Ross properly reminds us of the ways in which “nationalist ideology” has just as often stifled reform, rendering invisible “the contradictions between ideals and practice” and “bath[ing] the darker shades of national reality in the glow of the ideal.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Historians, then, must both remember what the national narratives forget and, at the same time, evaluate those narratives of continuity and seamlessness, too, as social action worthy of analysis.

If the “un-American” as a theoretical concept is to become more than a mere recapitulation of the “paranoid style,” its protean nature should not be ignored. The paranoid style, as Hofstadter originally formulated it, is not anchored in a compelling appraisal of political reality; the un-American, by contrast, can be a device for creating political reality. When assertions of un-Americanism fail to capture the public assent – Robert Welch's insistence that Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious communist agent, for example – they are confirmed as “paranoid.” Countless such movements claiming exclusive possession of Americanism have themselves been progressively rendered “un-American” by later reconceptualizations of the American. One way to read the McCarthy era, in retrospect, is as a liberal triumph that rendered the conservative witch hunt itself un-American (though perhaps only temporarily). Certainly our dominant historical narratives turn the tables on the principals in this story: the House Un-American Activities Committee typically plays the role of the most un-American thing in the room. And, yet, at the time, the committee was engaged – to at least some degree – in the process of defining what it might mean to practice Americanism in a dangerous postwar world. Whether that would mean (among other things) censoring the contents in the libraries of US embassies, weeding out material written by “controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers” (including Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser, apparently), or celebrating abstract expressionism and a dissenting literary tradition as indicative of the democratic freedoms enjoyed in the West, was very much an open question at the time.Footnote ⁷¹ To take another example, if today we agree with many antebellum activists that slavery is “un-American,” we must do so in spite of the fact that Americans practiced it for well over two hundred years. Slavery, in other words, became un-American – but only after political struggle and much bloodshed. Prior to that, it is difficult to deny that slavery was, in fact, as American as apple pie.Footnote ⁷²

When a movement oriented around the goal of rendering a particular practice un-American prevails, it becomes – retroactively – the only way to read the national creed. The concept of the un-American actually serves – or has served in the past – to, paradoxically, give Americans a sense that only a minority of outliers could hold views so at odds with the American creed embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people: precisely the way Jefferson described his political enemies.Footnote ⁷³ Thus endemic threats are retroactively externalized: Slavery wasn't American, we think, after all; now we very often remember it – rightfully or not – as a peculiarly southern aberration. To take another example, the only way we can identify the emphasis on language and biological descent in Woodrow Wilson's nationalism as “deeply ‘unamerican’” is if we emphasize the civic components of American ideology over its history of excluding people on the basis of descent, a battle not quite over, to understate things in 2013.Footnote ⁷⁴

Maybe this is what Perry Miller meant when he said that the American was “not something inherited but something to be achieved” and that “generalizations about the American character can amount to no more than a statistical survey of the decisions so far made.” And, interestingly enough, Miller argued in a backdoor endorsement of our concept: “he who would fix the pattern of decision by confining the American choice to one and only one mode of response … is the truly ‘Un-American.’”Footnote ⁷⁵

So the “un-American” can revitalize our study of American identity, not by leading us to worry over whether American practices are normative and exceptionalist, but by forcing us to think through the ways the various manifestations of this concept throughout American history demonstrate precisely what is at stake in such debates: on what terms have Americans claimed to represent Americanness? What in American practice has been rendered “un-American” through political struggle and social movements?

All national mythologies emphasize some events in the past and deemphasize (or forget) others.Footnote ⁷⁶ The American memory tends to forget its sins in a progressive tale of ever-greater openness and inclusion. Because historians must remember what the collective memory must minimize, their tales are messier – more complex – than those of the collective consciousness. When the forgetting is a by-product of repentance, this act of collective memory (or forgetting) can be redemptive. But that which has been rendered un-American by the national narrative ought not to be ignored either by the historian – whose story must admit that, yes, those things really were “American” at one point until they fell out of favor with the national reconceptualization of its creed – or by the citizen who can see that the American is in the process of continual definition. Present practices become “un-American” only retroactively and the national past is progressively redeemed by the future, but only in terms established by the past, the American tradition, the tradition which invented the un-American. So we can analyze the “un-American” as a concept in American history without ignoring the history that it has rendered invisible in our collective narratives.

In this admittedly conjectural reading, then, the greatest exponent of the redemptive face of the “un-American” turns out to be Lincoln, who took Jefferson as axiomatic (literally: “The principles of Jefferson,” he said in 1859, “are the definitions and axioms of a free society”) but made Jefferson mean something specific to Lincoln's own time and place. What distinguishes Lincoln is his unwillingness to jettison the tradition – in contrast to both abolitionists like Garrison and pro-slavery theorists like Fitzhugh – he was nevertheless willing to remake. Garrison, for example, never imagined that the practice of slavery was un-American. Instead, he argued that what had, regrettably, become American was no longer compatible with justice, Christian morality, and natural rights. His solution was to burn the Constitution in favor of a higher law.Footnote ⁷⁷ What Lincoln did was very different: he argued that slavery was by definition – precisely because of its incompatibility with Christian morality, justice, and natural rights, but also because of its violation of Jefferson's Declaration – un-American. For Lincoln, Jefferson's Declaration was “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The only solution, he argued consistently before the war, was to wash our “soiled” Republican Robes “in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution” – to “re-adopt” the Declaration and make American practice compatible with its highest ideals, the “better angels of our nature.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Of course, the trouble with such a narrative is that it leaves open the question whether America is more apostate or impostor, to take David Hendrickson's useful juxtaposition. For if the concept of the “un-American” can be redemptive, it also has the potential to sanctify “unholy propensities” and revitalize – rather than temper – America's reflexive sense of its exceptionalism. In light of this conundrum, Philip Roth's recent novel The Plot Against America, in addition to being a profound meditation on history, offers a model approach to the theme of the “un-American.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The story – which is, as Roth is quick to note, entirely fictional (365) – follows the fortunes of the Newark, New Jersey Roth family after Charles Lindbergh wins the presidential election of 1940 on a platform expressing his intention to “preserve American democracy” by keeping the United States out of the European War (30). Over time, the Lindbergh administration reaches an understanding with both Germany and Japan, pledging neutrality in what had already become World War II, and creates a series of programs ostensibly designed to “Americanize” purportedly ethnocentric American Jews which become, however, increasingly sinister as the plot develops, ending in a series of pogroms perpetrated by mobs of “upright American Christians unleashed by the acting president of the United States” (357).

What pushes Roth's book beyond an interesting counterfactual exercise is precisely the way he wrestles with American identity and with the concept of the un-American. From the title on, especially through the character of Mr. Roth, the book calls out Lindbergh's program as “un-American,” but at the same time recognizes that Lindbergh's program nevertheless appeals to something latent within American culture – an identification of American character exclusively with ascriptive and thus immutable attributes not shared by Jews or other “ethnics” – that is in fact being exalted and practiced (in the story) as the essence of Americanism.Footnote ⁸¹ So Lindbergh's program, it progressively dawns on the reader, is “un-American” only insofar as it clashes with the transcendental ideal articulated in the Lincolnian reading of the Declaration of Independence that Mr. Roth embraces. On a visit to Washington, DC, young Philip realizes that his family was “counting on … American history … to protect us against Lindbergh” (58).

As the story unfolds, Mr. Roth (the character) continually refuses to flee to Canada with others in his neighborhood who have given up on America – conceded it to Lindbergh – precisely because he remains convinced that the America he believes in simply cannot abide such a series of events and will, in fact, surely come to reject Lindbergh's program as un-American. But what Roth (the author) seems to want readers to understand is that such a program is “un-American” only as long as Americans reject it as incompatible with their deepest values. Roth never pretends that any of the least-attractive aspects of American identity – the stuff typically denied by American exceptionalism – are not really there. The story continually reminds us of their presence. But Roth knows that the story he tells did not really happen.Footnote ⁸² He knows that the US fought the “good war” against fascism, and reaffirmed its commitment to the most capacious kind of reading of the Declaration of Independence articulated in Roosevelt's “Four Freedoms.” What is compelling about the book, and what keeps it from descending into just another interesting counterfactual exercise, is the way Roth forces us to rethink the inevitability of the “good war” narrative we tell about the era.Footnote ⁸³ So in the end we remember that America fought the “good war,” yes, but only because certain values and ideals that were reaffirmed as “American” triumphed over others that very likely would have been spun – as Roth's (fictional) Lindbergh did spin them – in the same way: as American ideals.

The point here is that a contest over the content of American character is embedded in all claims about Americanism and in all accusations of the “un-American.” This is its analytical value to historians and scholars of American studies. But all uses of the un-American are nationalist almost by definition, and American struggles over the concept in civic life will continue to revolve around the story of their peoplehood and the claims about their character embedded in the Declaration of Independence which first articulated the un-American and which continually pushes them to read their practice against its claims.