The myth of continuity: Why ‘America’ has not always been an ‘exceptional’ country

The worst myth about US exceptionalism is also among the most widespread, that its origins date all the way back to Puritan times. Consider the following claims, for example: ‘American exceptionalism has been a powerful, persistent, and popular myth throughout American history’; ‘[p]rotestant exceptionalism helped breed American exceptionalism and led to a consistent belief in America as a chosen nation and in Americans as a chosen people’; ‘American exceptionalism permeates every period of American history’; [i]n short, Americans were a chosen people delivered from bondage to a Promised Land, and you can't get more exceptional than that.’Footnote ⁵⁷

In large part, this myth derives from an important strand of American Studies that treats Puritan thought as indispensable to the subsequent unfolding of American history.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet, we should not jump to the same conclusion as Deborah Madsen that ‘[e]xceptionalism informs the foundational work of such influential theorists as Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Miller, to my knowledge, never actually used the term ‘exceptionalism’, and Bercovitch prefaces The American Jeremiad: ‘[i]nsofar as this book supports the notion of American exceptionalism, it does so only in terms of an increasingly pervasive middle class hegemony’ – which, as the author himself acknowledges, did not exist in Puritan times.Footnote ⁶⁰

What we are witnessing here is a growing tendency over time to read ideas about American exceptionalism back into American Puritanism. A narrative has developed according to which the first settlers saw themselves as undertaking a political mission of global significance:

This myth has since been appropriated by neoconservatives to suggest, no less anachronistically, that the Puritans were ‘global revolutionaries’ who saw themselves as ‘the vanguard of an English civilization that was leading humanity into the future’.Footnote ⁶²

However, it is misleading to speak in generic terms of the Puritans sense of ‘mission’. True, the Massachusetts Bay colonists may have ‘had a positive sense of mission’, but the Plymouth Colony settlers ‘were reluctant voyagers; they had never wanted to leave England, but had been obliged to depart because the authorities made life impossible for Separatists’.Footnote ⁶³ Although the former aimed to prove the workability of a model reformed polity that could be emulated throughout Europe, their sense of mission began to wear off during the second and third generations as they realised that the eyes of the world were not, in fact, upon them.Footnote ⁶⁴ Elsewhere, there were no such missionary ideas in the first place: ‘the earlier Virginia settlements were commercial, as were those of the Dutch, and the proprietary colonies in Pennsylvania and Maryland were Quaker and Catholic’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similar holds true of the earliest colonies: the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest, and the French on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.Footnote ⁶⁶

It is important that we do not read history backwards so as to treat Puritanism as the seedbed from which all subsequent American history sprouted. For one thing, there was no United States during the colonial period, let alone anything that could be called a ‘redeemer nation’. Even Miller, who arguably did more than any other scholar to make American Puritanism relevant to the present, was well aware of this when he wrote, ‘the migration was not sent upon its errand to found the United States of America’.Footnote ⁶⁷ If anything, in fact, the original settlers were concerned with the exact opposite of exceptionalism:

Indeed, ‘Virginia was conceived as an extension of God's chosen England, not as a qualitative break or an Exodus from it.’Footnote ⁶⁹ The myth of a ‘straight line from the New England, indeed from that barren Plymouth Rock, to the full-blown federal nation in stride’ was in fact the product of post-Revolutionary historiography.Footnote ⁷⁰

It is sometimes said that the Puritans sought to create a ‘New English Jerusalem’, or that they ‘firmly believed that America had a unique spiritual destiny and that the millennium would begin in New England’.Footnote ⁷¹ On this account, there is seamless continuity from colonial times through to the founding of the United States and Philip Freneau's poem ‘The Rising Glory of America’ (1772), which describes America as ‘a New Jerusalem sent down from heaven’. As Patrick Deneen writes, ‘[t]he belief that there is a continuity between a vision of “Zion”, or “the Promised Land”, and the history and trajectory of an existing nation … has been the tendency in American history from its very outset.’Footnote ⁷²

Again, however, this is all highly debatable to say the least. Reformed Protestants in the early seventeenth century scorned millennial thinking, associated as it was with the excesses of the Radical Reformation. American Puritans strove for ‘reconnection with the paradigmatic events and utterances of ancient and unspoiled times’ rather than a movement forward ‘toward the eschatological climax’, meaning ‘there was no straight line of development to the increasingly prospective standards of the succeeding age’.Footnote ⁷³ They saw their new colony, not as the New Jerusalem itself, but as only a ‘foretaste’ or ‘prefiguration’ of it.Footnote ⁷⁴ If anyone transformed ‘“America” into the Promised Land – not a metaphor for the promised land but the Promised Land itself’,Footnote ⁷⁵ it was Cotton Mather and the second generation of colonists. ‘Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on a hill, they were left alone with America’ and scrabbled to give it meaning, fearful that their ‘errand into the wilderness’ had been a fool's errand.Footnote ⁷⁶ This was desperate ad hockery, not evidence that America has always been God's chosen land.

The founding of an exceptional nation?

For those who do not wish to trace American exceptionalism as far back as Puritanism, it is common to see it as a product of national identity forged during the American Revolution. Consider the following scholarly opinions, for example: ‘the merger of the republican and millennial traditions … formed an ideology of exceptionalism prominent in American historical writing’; ‘American exceptionalism is as old as the nation itself’; ‘[s]ince its founding almost a quarter of a millennium ago, the United States of America has thought of itself as, and been widely perceived to be, exceptional’; ‘[t]he religious and political founding combined to create an exceptionalist image, leading to the idea that the United States was a “model” for the rest of the world.’Footnote ⁷⁷ In each case, it is not Puritanism alone that gave birth to American exceptionalism, but the fusion of Puritanism and Enlightenment thought at the ‘founding’ of the nation.

No doubt ideas about Providence were very appealing by way of providing ‘divine’ justification for the revolutionary cause and helping to inculcate what Jean-Jacques Rousseau had described in 1762 (and what Robert Bellah in 1967 would also characterise) as a ‘civil religion’ among the American people so as to foster national identity and social cohesion.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet, ‘Providence’ was anything but a link in the chain from the ‘city on a hill’ to ‘manifest destiny’ and beyond. As Nicholas Guyatt has shown, it was, rather, a historically contingent and shifting category, a complex and polyvalent term that was not always at the heart of American politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁹ Besides, it is common knowledge that ‘the Founding Fathers’ (another myth invented in 1916 by Republican Senator Warren Harding) saw their new republic as a grand political experiment rather than a divinely ordained step along the path to human salvation. As John Adams opined, ‘[w]e may boast that we are the chosen people; we may even thank God that we are not like other men; but, after all, it would be but flattery, and delusion, the self-deceit of the Pharisee.’Footnote ⁸⁰ In some ways, in fact, religious ideology played less of a role during this period than in any other during American history: the emphasis was firmly on rationalist thought and the Enlightenment project of transforming the world by application of the scientific method to construct a new kind of political order.Footnote ⁸¹ Political experimentation, and not sacred destiny, held the key to historical progress.Footnote ⁸²

The reification of ‘Manifest Destiny’

Anders Stephanson's Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (1995) is one of the most frequently cited texts on American exceptionalism, even though the term ‘exceptionalism’ is only mentioned once there. It is also one of the worst culprits when it comes to propagating the myth of ‘manifest destiny’ as a timeless category that has always informed America's self-image as an actor on the world stage. According to Stephanson, ‘manifest destiny is of signal importance in the way the United States came to understand itself in the world and still does’.Footnote ⁸³ Stephanson purports to trace the idea of manifest destiny from 1600 to 1990, from the British settlement of North America all the way through to Woodrow Wilson's efforts to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ and Ronald Reagan's struggle against the ‘evil empire’. Incredibly, all this is achieved in a mere 144 pages, with the influence of manifest destiny in the post-1945 era requiring only 17 pages of explanation!

But no matter, since other critics have been willing to pick up where Stephanson left off. Roberta Cole, for instance, thinks ‘Manifest Destiny has remained embedded in America's civil religion as a resilient and robust narrative useful for justifying war, intervening on behalf of a ubiquitous national interest, and restoring America's self-image of exceptionalism.’Footnote ⁸⁴ She goes on to argue that the foreign policy discourses of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton ‘were replete with the tenets of Manifest Destiny though neither ever invoked the term itself.’Footnote ⁸⁵

Arguably nowhere else do we see more glaring examples of critics’ willingness to read American exceptionalism on its own, ahistorical terms. ‘Manifest destiny’ here is uncritically abstracted from its historical context and turned into a mythological category deployed to legitimise virtually any American war, from the War of Independence to the War in Kosovo. It speaks to the power of US exceptionalism as a discourse that scholars can write about ‘manifest destiny’ in this way, even though the term itself only came into being in 1845, held sway after the term ‘Monroe Doctrine’ was coined in 1850 to justify US imperialism in Latin America, only to go rapidly out of fashion in the 1930s when it was hammered by its political opponents.Footnote ⁸⁶ Moreover, it was evident to scholars even then that ‘three of the most significant additions to American territory, including the two largest, namely, the procurement of Louisiana, the purchase of Alaska, and the acquisition of the Philippines … had nothing to do with manifest destiny or popular ideology of any kind’.Footnote ⁸⁷

The idea of ‘manifest destiny’ only became ‘useful’ again to the United States when it found itself engaged in a superpower contest between two rival empires – and even then it had its doubters.Footnote ⁸⁸ As critical allegations surfaced in the 1960s that US imperialism was not so very different from any other and that the westwards expansion in the nineteenth century bore similarities to the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, Frederick Merk argued: ‘Manifest Destiny … did not reflect the national spirit. The thesis that it embodied nationalism, found in much historical writing, is backed by little real supporting evidence.’Footnote ⁸⁹ His book Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History traced its titular categories in an unbroken line from the Puritans via Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson.Footnote ⁹⁰ The myth of America's ‘mission’, drawn in terms of adherence to a set of ‘higher’ principles rather than nationalism, was thereby invoked and the dominant lineage established to which future American presidents would later be added.

There exists a common misconception that ‘manifest destiny’ – and indeed America's sense of ‘mission’ more generally – are primarily religious categories. This goes back to Ernest Tuveson's characterisation of ‘manifest destiny’ in terms of a ‘conception of the “chosen people” with a millennial mission’, as well as Conrad Cherry's interpretation of key American rituals as premised upon the idea that ‘America is a nation called to a special destiny by God.’Footnote ⁹¹ In truth, however, if there was any group during the mid-nineteenth century that took literally the idea of America as a chosen nation blessed by God, it was the Mormons, a small, persecuted and highly idiosyncratic sect that saw their ‘holy city in the wilderness’ (Salt Lake Valley) as emanating influences that would turn all of America into God's Zion, the literal (and not merely proverbial) embodiment of a ‘new Israel’. Most Americans, including the most politically influential, were influenced more by Enlightenment thought than by a two-centuries-old religious tradition. In fact, the very idea of ‘manifest destiny’, as championed by the Young America movement, was rooted much more in the idea of progress rather than in any religious ideal (though echoes of Puritanism can still be heard).Footnote ⁹²

Wilson, Luce, and the myth of ‘exemplary’ vs ‘missionary’ US Foreign Policy

According to Robert Tomes, ‘[e]xceptionalist thinking was refined and enhanced in the twentieth century, taking on a more assertive tone that emphasised the missionary or interventionist aspect of America's unique role in world affairs … American exceptionalism changed dramatically after the Second World War.’Footnote ⁹³ This viewpoint echoes Trevor McCrisken's claim that ‘the exemplary strand of exceptionalism dominated the early years of US foreign policy, whereas the missionary strand of exceptionalism conclusively won out in the foreign policy debate only after the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941’.Footnote ⁹⁴ It also recalls Walter McDougall's division of US foreign relations into two distinct periods: an ‘Old Testament’ from 1776 to the 1890s, designed to ‘deny the outside world the chance to shape America's future’, and a ‘New Testament’ in the twentieth century premised on ‘the belief that America has a responsibility to nurture democracy and economic growth around the world’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The pivot is usually said to be Woodrow Wilson's quest to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, with Wilson himself even being seen as ‘American exceptionalism personified’.Footnote ⁹⁶

All of this represents lazy historiography. It is no accident that it begins in 1997/8, the same years in which the neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), was established with a view to forcing ‘regime change’ in Iraq. PNAC deliberately styled itself upon Henry Luce's call for ‘the first great American Century’ in an editorial in Life magazine on 17 February 1941, in which Luce urged his country to forsake isolationism and to assume the missionary's role of spreading democracy in the world. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke in similarly messianic terms when seeking to justify US military intervention in Iraq in 1998: ‘if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Even in the early Cold War years, such theologisation of politics had its critics. Recall, for instance, Harold Laski's caution regarding the ‘vital danger’ that the United States’ ‘drive to expand may come to be regarded as a mission’; Reinhold Niebuhr's warning regarding ‘[t]he illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny’; and Hans Morgenthau's characterisation of liberalism and Marxism as ‘secular religions’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such critiques, however, fell on deaf ears. By the early 1960s, mainstream historiography was all too willing to cosign the myth of ‘free security’, whereby an initially isolationist United States, having once been afforded the protection of oceans on either coast, now found itself involuntarily drawn into a ‘missionary’ stance by the globalisation of technology, two world wars, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.Footnote ⁹⁹ The attendant ‘burdens of power’ and ‘benign hegemony’ myths also arose in the same decade.

‘Revisionist’ historians of the Wisconsin School, led by William Appleman Williams, challenged the isolationist paradigm.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ US continental expansion during the nineteenth century, they argued, which had previously been classified under frontier history, in fact represented US imperialism. For

Again, the message fell on deaf ears. Several decades later, mainstream IR scholars such as Fareed Zakaria, John Ruggie, Charles Kupchan, and John Mearsheimer continued to reinscribe the myth of ‘exemplary’ vs ‘missionary’ strands of US foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁰² In debunking that myth, Restad has done for IR what the ‘revisionist’ historians did in an earlier age,Footnote ¹⁰³ but until US power starts to wane there is scant reason to think her truth will be heard.

The United States: Exceptional compared to Europe?

It is revealing that so many accounts of US exceptionalism place great emphasis on American Puritanism, Providence, Manifest Destiny, and ‘missionary’ Wilsonianism, only to skim briskly across the twentieth century and into the present (the much vaunted link between Wilsonian interventionism and the ‘Bush doctrine’ being a case in point). Yet, if the early links in the chain prove weak, as argued above, the later links prove extremely brittle. And the reason for this is simple: the chain itself was only invented in its putative later stages: [a] database search of the word in the social science indexes reveals that, with one notable exception, “exceptionalism” does not appear in any of the literature until the late 1950s.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The honour goes to Max Lerner, who wrote: ‘[t]he idea of American “exceptionalism” is valid if you take it in the sense that America has its own civilization pattern, which does not follow the pattern of others and is not linked by any inevitable destiny to their doom.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ American exceptionalism, then, was, at one level, a Cold War invention intended to demonstrate that the United States would not go the same way Europe had pre-1945. Although ‘not immune to the surging beat of world forces’, the United States was said to represent ‘the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern Western history’,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ a sentiment that would be echoed by generations of modernisation theorists to come.

If the United States somehow stood outside European modernity – which more serious thinkers have always known to be a mythFootnote ¹⁰⁷ – then its ‘exceptional’ status would need validation from European thinkers. In that respect, it is almost impossible to overstate the significance of the name Alexis de Tocqueville. In Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville famously wrote:

It is imperative to make three key points here. First, this tiny capsule is the only passage in which Tocqueville uses the term ‘exceptional’. Second, if Americans are ‘exceptional’ in the sense outlined above, then it is certainly not as a morally exemplary people blessed by divine favour; rather, it is a somewhat uncouth, materialistic people with an underdeveloped sense of the transcendental and of ‘high’ culture.

Third, and perhaps most important, Democracy in America had been largely neglected in American intellectual history for nearly a century. Having gone out of print in English in 1862, it only experienced a major revival after Alfred Knopf republished it in 1945. But what a revival it was: every US president since Dwight Eisenhower has quoted Tocqueville. Democracy in America quickly become a canonical text in the history of American political thought, a fact that owes in no small part to Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), a massively influential piece of myth-making about America's exceptional ‘liberal tradition’ (Deudney and Meiser's 2008 piece on US exceptionalism is steeped in it) that was quickly exposed once Soviet communism disappeared.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The key point is that foreign observers have not been continually been remarking upon America's ‘exceptional’ qualities ‘ever since Tocqueville’; rather, Tocqueville's work was pillaged and wilfully misinterpreted to meet Cold War expediencies.

Commentators tend to assume there is a ‘tradition’ of foreign observers of American exceptionalism. According to Michael Kammen, for instance, ‘What is especially striking in the literature written about the United States by foreign observers is that the emphasis upon exceptionalism is so persistent and so powerfully felt.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ Rogers Smith cites ‘a distinguished line of writers from Hector St. John Crevecoeur in the eighteenth century and Harriet Martineau and Lord Bryce in the nineteenth century’ before jumping to Gunnar Myrdal and a slew of commentators since 1945, mentioning that virtually all cite Tocqueville.Footnote ¹¹¹ Seymour Lipset claims that, since Tocqueville, there has been ‘a myriad – thousands upon thousands – of books and articles by foreign travelers’, although he only actually mentions Martineau, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber.Footnote ¹¹² In truth, this is typical: the ‘line’ of foreign observers of ‘American exceptionalism’ seldom extends much beyond Crevecoeur (‘What Then is the American, This New Man?’), Tocqueville (‘The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional’), Engels (on ‘the special American conditions’), and Weber (on America's supposedly pristine Protestant heritage). Yet, one glance even at these figures reveals they were each pursuing very different and unrelated projects, variously assessing the prospects for democracy in France, communism, and secularisation. They do not form the backbone of a ‘tradition’ investigating why ‘America’ is so special; rather, they each refract their own intellectual and cultural concerns through the prism of the United States.

‘American exceptionalism’: A Soviet invention

In a historical irony to delight poststructuralists, ‘American exceptionalism’ proves not to be the product of a pristine, self-contained national tradition. It was, in fact, coined by none other than Stalin:

That is, although Americans themselves later appropriated the term, ‘American exceptionalism’ was originally a Soviet invention.

Here we encounter a fascinating intersection with Werner Sombart's famous 1906 book Why is there no Socialism in the United States? Sombart's provocative question gave rise to a very significant body of historical and social scientific literature in America following its belated translation into English in 1976.Footnote ¹¹⁴ That literature converged upon a central problem: if, as Karl Marx argued in Capital, there was a dialectical relationship between capitalist advancement and the potential for communist revolution, then surely the United States, rather than Russia, should have been the first communist country. The fact that it was not suggested, to some, that there was something ‘exceptional’ about America: that it somehow stood outside the laws of historical development as they applied in Europe. Thus, during the Cold War, ‘American exceptionalism named the limit to the political provenance of the Soviet Empire [ … representing] the manifestation of economic and political processes that negated communism at its core.’Footnote ¹¹⁵

Yet again, it is worth noting just how ideologically overdetermined such readings were. For one thing, most American commentators on Why is there no Socialism in the United States? quietly downplayed the fact that, even accepting the crude American conflation of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, there had been ‘socialism’ in the United States since the original publication of Sombart's book. The Socialist Party of America, formed in 1901, was a significant force in US politics in the early twentieth century, attracting nearly a million votes for its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, in 1912 and 1920. Two of its key players, Jay Lovestone and Bertram Wolfe, left to cofound the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1919, which played a significant role in the US labour movement well into the 1940s. When Lovestone was condemned by Stalin for his support for Bukharin in 1929, he and Wolfe formed a communist splinter party that took several names, most notably the American Communist (Opposition) Party, before its dissolution in 1941. The new party aligned itself with Trotskyism, proletarian internationalism, and the rejection of Stalin's 1924 policy of ‘socialism in one state’.

Most significant about Lovestone and Wolfe for our purposes is that while Cold War theorists took ‘US exceptionalism’ as signifying an in-built aversion to communism, precisely the opposite was true historically. Consider Wolfe's words of 1932, for example:

Barack Obama, in his remarks on US, British, and Greek exceptionalism,Footnote ¹¹⁷ has nothing on these early communists. For here we see eloquently expressed the idea that American exceptionalism merely signifies difference within a framework of universal values. To Wolfe and Lovestone, the fact that capitalism was more deeply entrenched in the United States than elsewhere simply meant that communists should pursue more moderate strategies to achieve their goals (compare this to Obama's insistence on moderate means). It explicitly did not mean that the United States is immune to the ‘laws of history’, differs quintessentially from Europe, or is ‘innately’ anticommunist.

The pernicious influence of Ronald Reagan

It is hard to overstate Reagan's influence when it comes to thinking about US exceptionalism. Consider, for instance, his widely cited 1974 speech entitled ‘We will be a City upon a Hill’:

Here, Reagan adds a rhetorical flourish to Abraham Lincoln's ‘the last best hope of earth’, much as he would later embellish John Winthrop's ‘city upon a hill’ metaphor. Yet, to my knowledge, the accuracy of Reagan's Pius XII citation has not once been challenged in almost forty years. I can find no evidence whatsoever that Pius XII ever actually uttered these words. On the contrary, all I am able to uncover is evidence that Reagan grotesquely distorted what the pontiff actually said.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Reagan's words in fact come much closer to those of another thinker towards the end of World War II, Gunnar Myrdal, who characterised the United States as the most ‘moralistic’ and “moral conscious” branch of Western civilization’, referred to ‘the American Creed, where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts’, and claimed: ‘This moralism and rationalism are to many of us … the glory of the nation, its youthful strength, perhaps the salvation of mankind.’Footnote ¹²⁰ In other words, Reagan twisted the words of the pope himself to lend unmerited authority to a narrative of American sacred destiny, drawing on Lincoln and Myrdal, in which being an American means adhering to the timeless universal principles of the Declaration rather than blood lineage. The fact that this rhetorical sleight of hand has for so many decades gone unremarked is itself remarkable, as it speaks volumes about the discursive power of US exceptionalism that no one should think to question it.

Today, it is almost impossible to think about American Puritanism without thinking about the ‘city upon a hill’. Yet, American Studies scholars from Miller to Bercovitch made precious little use of that phrase.Footnote ¹²¹ In political discourse, the phrase was first invoked by a Democratic president, John F. Kennedy, in 1961 – but Kennedy did so as a metaphor for accountable government and public service, not to sing the exemplary virtues of the United States.Footnote ¹²² Since Reagan, however, the ‘city upon a hill’ has been hijacked by the New Right. Reagan's strategy was to appeal to the emergent power of the religious Right in America, and in doing so he conjured up an abiding myth of the nation's originary virtue and sacred purpose. Ever since John Winthrop declared ‘Wee [sic] shall be as a Citty [sic] upon a Hill’ in 1630, Reagan implied, America had constituted a morally exemplary people and a light to the world – ‘a shining city on a hill’, as his embellishment of Winthrop would have it.Footnote ¹²³ On this reading, Americans had, from the first, been destined to lead the world to salvation.

It is testimony to the power of New Right discourse in the last four decades or so that the ‘city upon a hill’ metaphor has proven so durable. Even a cursory glance at Winthrop's ‘Model of Christian Charity’ sermon reveals that it has absolutely nothing to do with a global political mission. For Winthrop, the ‘end’ (purpose) of the colony was ‘to do more service to the Lord’ by building a model society that could be emulated elsewhere; it was not to act as God's agent of redemption on earth. As Richard Gamble shows, there is no indication that Winthrop had any intention of expanding the colony, or even that he expected it to endure beyond a few generations.Footnote ¹²⁴ He was definitely not speaking of New England in general, let alone the non-existent United States. Contrary to Reagan's encomium to America's everlasting moral superiority, Winthrop's famous 1630 sermon – which was probably not delivered aboard the Arbella – was intended to sound a note of caution rather than praise. If the colony failed to do right by God, it would be universally ridiculed: ‘the eyes of all the people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through all the world’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Far from being a continuous inspiration in American history, Winthrop's sermon disappears from historical records until 1838, when a badly-edited version was published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the phrase ‘Citty upon a Hill’ was not regarded as key until 1939.

Reagan was also fond of myth making when it came to the topic of immigration. Only an exemplary kind of person, he claimed, made it from Europe to America in the early days: ‘there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage’.Footnote ¹²⁶ That ‘divine plan’, he later intimated, pointed forwards ‘toward the “brotherhood of man” that God intended for us … though our heritage is one of bloodlines from every corner of the Earth, we are all Americans pledged to carry on this last, best hope of man on Earth’.Footnote ¹²⁷ In some ways, Reagan's myth making was a twentieth-century reinvention of the type first entered into by post-Revolutionary historians when they sought to sanctify their new nation by describing its original settlers as ‘Pilgrims’.Footnote ¹²⁸ The truth about the new nation's demographics, however, is altogether different: ‘[b]etween 1770 and 1775, a total of 585,800 immigrants arrived in the 13 colonies from all over the world. About 52,200 [9 per cent] of these immigrants were convicts and prisoners.’Footnote ¹²⁹ Originally, that is, colonial America (and not just Australia) was a primary destination for Britain's unwanted criminals, not a divine magnet attracting only the most virtuous.

Deconstructing the ‘American creed’

‘Exceptionalist thinking’, we are told, ‘runs deep in American politics. It is an ethos tied to an American creed of individuality, liberalism, progressivism and pragmatism.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, US exceptionalism is routinely defined in terms of a set of values that go under the banner of ‘the American creed’. Those values include ‘liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire’, or ‘liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law and private property’.Footnote ¹³¹ They promote tolerance for diversity, upward mobility, hospitality towards immigrants, and a shared constitutional faith that putatively sets America apart from other national cultures.Footnote ¹³² Whereas any given European society is said to hold a national identity distinct from political ideology (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, etc.), and whereas successive dominant ideologies are said to change national cultures in Asian societies, being an American supposedly means living the ‘American creed’.Footnote ¹³³

The fundamental principles of the ‘American creed’ are allegedly identifiable in the Declaration of Independence, and the indispensable figure in this narrative is Abraham Lincoln. The principles of the Declaration, Lincoln thought, could be subscribed to, not just by those born in America, but also by immigrants ‘as though they were the blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration’.Footnote ¹³⁴ The same principles, he told Congress in 1862, were what made the Union ‘the last best hope of earth’. In his famous address at the National Soldiers’ Cemetery in Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln pronounced:

Here, Lincoln effectively imbues the nation's founding principles (which were, remember, largely scientific in nature) with religious significance: martyrs are created, political principles sanctified. In his second inaugural address (1865), Lincoln cast slavery as America's great national sin, saw the civil war as divine retribution for it, and called upon the nation to accept its punishment and to rededicate itself to its founding principles. One month later, he was assassinated.

In terms of American exceptionalism, the significance of Lincoln's legacy really only begins in 1917 with the introduction of ‘The American's Creed’ upon the United States’ entry into World War I. That ‘creed’ draws upon Lincoln's conception of the Declaration to call upon Americans to sacrifice their lives if necessary in the name of the higher principles of ‘Freedom, Equality, Justice, and Humanity’. The war-time influence on both occasions should be obvious enough by way of encouraging Americans to give up their lives for the national cause; nevertheless ‘the American creed’ passed into folklore as an integral component of American identity from the beginning. In 1922, for instance, G. K. Chesterton described America as ‘the only nation in the world founded on a creed’, laid out with ‘theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Gunnar Myrdal characterised ‘the American creed’ in terms of its emphasis on liberty, equality, and justice and argued that belief in the creed was what united the highly diverse elements of American society in a single nation.Footnote ¹³⁷ In 1955, Seymour Lipset claimed ‘American patriotism is allegiance to values, to a creed, not solely to a nation’, and this is ‘a creed to which men are converted rather than born’.Footnote ¹³⁸ In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr famously proclaimed: ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”’. Thus abstracted from its wartime origins, the ‘American creed’ became a symbol of social inclusivity in an age of rising multiculturalism.

The above genealogy offers yet another of those famous yet fleeting lineages of American exceptionalism to which we have become so accustomed. America, we are told, is unlike any other nation: it pursues principles and values that are genuinely universal rather than based on race and bloodline. Through this alchemy, America's entirely unexceptional status as a nation that tore itself apart through civil war is erased: the Civil War itself is said to have been fought over the correct interpretation of the noble principles of the Declaration rather than the principles themselves.Footnote ¹³⁹ Recent revisionist scholarship, however, suggests this account has it precisely backwards. Harry Stout, for instance, casts Americans’ sacred devotion to their nation and its symbols, not as an idealist victory of higher principles, but as the product of massive blood sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The Civil War was not fought over the ‘higher’ principles of ‘the American creed’; rather, the huge loss of life it entailed was the very thing that caused Lincoln to imbue a set of political values with sacred significance in the first place. Far from being ‘God's chosen people’, Americans of all political and religious persuasions claimed that God was on their side and used faith to interpret the meaning and course of the Civil War.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Lincoln's Gettysburg address may have referred to ‘this nation, under God’, yet Lincoln left the phrase ‘under God’ out of the original draft and may well have intended it simply to mean ‘God willing’.Footnote ¹⁴² The idea of ‘one nation under God’ was, rather, an early Cold War invention designed to counter godless communism.Footnote ¹⁴³

By the start of the 1960s, the idea of the ‘American creed’ had clearly not taken hold in any meaningful sense: Morgenthau, for instance, was heartened by the fact that ‘attempts to invent a slogan which would tell us and the world what we are about in substantive terms have remained utterly futile’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The same can no longer be said today, however, when the discourse of the ‘American creed’ is so powerfully pervasive. The contemporary narrative of the ‘American creed’ neglects its origins as an ideology used to justify war and blood sacrifice and instead elevates a certain set of liberal principles to the status of timeless and eternal verities first revealed in 1776. How did this astonishing transformation come about?

The answer, I would venture, again has much to do with the rise of the American New Right and its pillaging of American history to construct a national identity favourable to its own interests. It is telling, for instance, that Huntington's influential description of the ‘American creed’ cited above appeared early in the Reagan era and worked to bolster national identity at a time when American patriotism was on the wane following defeat in Vietnam. The myth, beloved of so many conservatives, that American identity has, from the first, been reducible to the principles enshrined in the Declaration offers a reassuring vision of historical continuity and national purpose. Despite running counter to the historical evidence, that myth has remained an effective way of galvanising the nation as it grows increasingly multicultural – though increasingly it is also being used as a mechanism of social exclusion directed against immigrants who do not subscribe to the tenets of the ‘American creed’.