The concept of “American exceptionalism” continues to arouse passion and cause controversy. It rattles through historiographical essays, haunts presidential candidates, and sells books. Some pundits have pronounced its resurgence; others have proclaimed its death. In a series of email exchanges during Spring 2017, Brooke L. Blower invited Eric Rauchway and Ian Tyrrell to reflect on the concept's uses and pitfalls for modern American historians.
Eric Rauchway is professor of history at the University of California at Davis. His publications include Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (2003), Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (2006), and The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (2015). Ian Tyrrell is emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (2010) and Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America (2015), as well as the landmark American Historical Review article, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” (October 1991).
Why does the idea that the United States has had a unique, even exceptional, history still have such purchase?
Tyrrell: American exceptionalism is both a material condition and an idea. The two are obviously related but not identical. The language of exceptionalism and its meaning for Americans (and others too) has changed repeatedly over time, sometimes stressing political issues, sometimes material ones, and sometimes religious ones. Over long periods of U.S. history, the “material” and the “idea” were fairly well though not exactly aligned, but since the 1970s, the idea of American exceptionalism has grown stronger while the material conditions of the United States and its people seem less and less exceptional.
The idea of the United States as providentially guided as a “chosen nation,” perhaps the only chosen nation, and one that others might emulate, has been adopted by many groups at various times. Historians have convincingly debunked the frequent claim that American exceptionalism could possibly begin with John Winthrop's “City Upon a Hill” statement in his sermon, A Model of Christian Charity (1630), but the idea of the United States as a special “unexampled” place goes back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville's time, and arguably to the American Revolution.Footnote 1 A large part of the exceptionalist debate, and its predecessor debates stretching back to the early republic, has been about religion. The idea of a chosen nation may be particularly offensive to non-Americans, but millions of Americans do believe that their nation has been chosen by God for a special purpose. One of the tasks of modern American history scholars is to explain how and why the “chosen nation” idea has made such a comeback.
The term American exceptionalism is a relatively recent addition to the lexicon (1929–1931), and to public discourse (after 2000), and its popularity has waxed and waned over the course of modern American history, because the nation's material circumstances and place in the world have changed several times. Since the 1939–1945 world war, a number of themes came together to heighten Americans’ and others’ understanding of the United States as exceptional: a preponderance of material power has been joined to the religious and political notion of the United States as a special place. The 1950s witnessed a Tocqueville revival, and the academic reclaiming of the Puritans as progenitors of exceptionalism, while the term moved from a Marxist sectarian context into academe. The alignment of power and idea barely survived the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency, but surged back after the rise of Ronald Reagan and the “Moral Majority” as well as the fall of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, only to suffer again after 9/11, the gigantic blunder of the Second Iraq War, and the “Great Recession,” which began in 2008. In this most recent period, as fears of national “decline” have resurfaced from their subterranean dwelling in American discourse, they have been met by a shriller, more insistent and ideological vision of the United States as governed by an ideology of “exceptionalism.” The Republican Party carried this reflex action to an extreme in 2012, when an entire chapter of its platform concentrated on asserting this ideological conformity as principle and quasi-religious creed.Footnote 2
One could almost say that the less exceptional the United States becomes in material terms of social mobility or governmental efficacy, the more certain groups insist on exceptionalism as creed and try to use it to rally the nation. Exceptionalism is a very useful term for these political purposes in the modern United States, much more so than its competitor terms. It expresses a sense of the United States as an idea coterminous with a specific place, while not excluding any group within the nation. In contrast, Anglo-Saxonism, prominent in the nineteenth century, had clear difficulties once immigration of Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews reached a torrent. Its successor term “Americanism” had its own limitations. The latter didn't explicitly single out the United States as a model nation for others to copy or admire and was still somewhat xenophobic in implication. Exceptionalism encapsulates the idea of a chosen people, who ought to be the envy of the world, while avoiding outright affinity with any particular religion or group.
Rauchway: There are genuinely distinctive characteristics that make the United States worth a separate field of study. No other nation in modern history has the same peculiar mix of attributes: the combination of agricultural, manufacturing, and financial preeminence; the history of enslavement, segregation, and a variety and quantity of immigration that has given the United States its racial politics; and an enormously rich economy supporting a politics with an unmatched ability to deny, time and again, the logic of socialism and welfare statism.
This said, discussing the distinctive aspects of American history is, I recognize, slightly beside the point. The concept of American exceptionalism does not really have anything to do with actual history; the giveaway is in the name itself, which declares that the United States is an exception to some rule, and the rule we're implicitly if not explicitly referring to is that when nations industrialize, a politics of socialism follows.Footnote 3
Exceptionalism can have a negative valence, and indeed it did for some of its earliest observers such as Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter. As one scholar noted, the question can be properly understood to read, implicitly, “Why, goddammit, is there no socialism in the United States?”Footnote 4 But more usually, and especially for pundits and politicians, it has a positive one: How have Americans been so fortunate as to pass through the gates of industrialization while escaping the iron shackles of socialism? When used in that latter way, of course, the concept is a normative and straitening one for American political discourse: We are a non-socialist people, and that is the source of our freedom.
Historians should not, and I think generally do not, use the term in that normative way. Indeed, there is an argument that scholars should not use the term at all because it implies a rule for national development that is, comparative history tells us, not actually a rule: The alleged pattern of economic modernization derives from the history of industrialism in England and applies to, I believe, exactly no other country.
And yet there is a case for careful use of the concept. Although versions of the exceptionalist thesis, like Frederick Jackson Turner's and Herbert Hoover's, cropped up before the 1930s, I think that were it not for the United States taking up arms first against fascism and then, protractedly, against communism, there would have been no great need for its continued use.Footnote 5 But I think that the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's effort to create a postwar global order can be read as an attempt to turn an idea of American exceptionalism into the basis for a peaceful world. The title of Jefferson Cowie's The Great Exception alludes to what we might call this temporal version of American exceptionalism, which, combined with Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World, might give us some interesting scholarly places to go in terms of a transnational legacy of American exceptionalism.Footnote 6
Tyrrell: I agree that World War II set up an important phase in the history of American exceptionalism. In many ways the New Deal–Fair Deal state of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman represented the peak achievement of American liberalism, which was extended in domestic programs into the 1960s by Lyndon B. Johnson. The anti-totalitarianism shift in American intellectual life in the 1940s simultaneously fueled a serious examination of U.S. exceptionalism in academic sociology and political science. In the context of Nazism, Fascism, and Stalin's purges, the idea of exporting American democracy and creating a new world order modeled on or derived from American liberalism seemed supremely justifiable as an alternative. The American achievement in World War II set the stage for U.S. military hegemony and post-war manufacturing preeminence, which was distinctive in modern world history. Between 1945 and 1950 the United States consumed about 45–50 percent of estimated energy worldwide, for a population that was about 6 percent of the world's total.Footnote 7 That's pretty exceptional in quantitative terms, even as it was part of a larger pattern of the western world's energy dominance of the global economy, a dominance that has been challenged since the 1970s.
Only since the late 1960s has this optimistic view of America's promise come under serious attack as many of the factors that seemed from 1945 to 1970 to justify the ideology of American exceptionalism no longer applied. Declining social mobility, stagnant real wages, de-industrialization, and greater inequality have become entrenched features of American life since the 1970s. The American industrial cornucopia of the Fordist era of mass production is no longer of the same significance that it once was relative to the global economy. The American political economy no doubt continues to have distinctive variations on global patterns, but not exceptional ones.
Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War brought about a revival of ideas about American exceptionalism, because of the widespread perception that the United States had “won” that war, and that liberal democracy would prevail thereafter across the world. Few historians were fooled by this euphoria, but it was significant as a feature of American public intellectual life and military developments gave some credence to it. Only in this short period that Andrew Bacevich calls “The Age of Great Expectations” (1991–2016) could the United States depart significantly from its post–World War II reliance on multilateralism, and undertake—if it wanted to—any military adventure in the knowledge that no other country could stop U.S. action, or was truly needed to help. In terms of defense spending, in 2014 the United States exceeded that of the next seven countries combined. No other state can claim such “full spectrum dominance.”Footnote 8 Belief in the American system, whether as Hillary Clinton's and Madeleine Albright's “indispensable” nation or simply as the world's greatest country, maintained traction in mainstream political discourse and ensured the way the ideology of exceptionalism operated after 9/11 as an adjunct to super-patriotism.
It's interesting that some of the most compelling versions of American exceptionalism have come from foreigners: visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville, social scientists such as Gunnar Myrdal, or nemeses like Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Why have others also been quick to call out the nation as exceptional?
Rauchway: The most obvious foreign contribution to American exceptionalism came from Werner Sombart, whose question “why is there no socialism in the United States?” originated the modern debate about the concept in 1906. That he was asking why there was none of something of which, in fact, there was a fair amount, helps explain why his answer—that socialism ran aground on “roast beef and apple pie”—remains contested.Footnote 9
Another notable contribution comes from John Maynard Keynes, who assured Franklin Roosevelt that the United States remained what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.” Keynes told Roosevelt in an open letter of December 1933, “You have made yourself the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out. But if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried everywhere.”Footnote 10
Of course, Keynes was writing an open letter, and complimenting both Roosevelt and his American readers so that they would do what he wanted. Many emanations of American exceptionalism from overseas probably try to do the same thing: invoke a peculiar American virtue in the hope that flattery will get them everywhere.
Tyrrell: Non-Americans have had a significant impact on the concept of exceptionalism. One of the key openings for further research is on foreign views of the United States as exceptional. Much of this work would need to be done collaboratively.Footnote 11
For the twentieth century, the great irony is that exceptionalism has been transnationally produced, mostly in a transatlantic context. European socialism in the twentieth century from Sombart to Antonio Gramsci has been particularly important in this intellectual gestation because it provided the analytical tools for American exceptionalism. But it is not widely understood that Sombart's argument was quite nuanced. He argued that the United States was only a temporary exception from the emergence of a powerful socialist movement.Footnote 12 Recent work on the socialists and communists of the interwar period demonstrates the complexities of the debate.Footnote 13 Even dissident Marxists such as Jay Lovestone, from whom American academic exponents of exceptionalism drew after 1939, regarded the United States as permanently exempt only from the Bolshevik version of the socialist triumph. These European ideas had to be “Americanized” into an American exceptionalism considered as a permanent condition. The former Trotskyite Seymour Martin Lipset had an important intellectual role in this regard.Footnote 14
Even if scholars avoid the actual term “American exceptionalism,” modern American history narratives often stress difference, even incommensurability. Some older tropes (the frontier, the melting pot) may no longer be as compelling as they once were, but the preponderance of U.S. power in the twentieth century—especially those moments of “great exception” and “great expectations” that you have both called “distinctive”—keep exceptionalist thinking alive.
Yet there are ways to draw countervailing lessons about even the seemingly most incomparable 1940s and 1950s United States. Historians of the U.S.S.R., for instance, have recently offered striking portraits of the parallels between U.S. and Soviet societies during the Cold War.Footnote 15 Why do U.S. historians often mention similarities with other nations in passing but emphasize difference in the end, when they might instead note differences but rest their case with commonalities?
Rauchway: Certainly I agree with your suggestion that the American comparativist habit has usually been indulged in the service of highlighting difference between the Old World and the New (where “the New” is often strangely limited to the United States), and often for self-congratulatory purposes. For me, it is much more persuasive when comparisons are made of identifiably similar institutions and processes. So, you mention Russia and the U.S.—Mark Twain was, I suspect, one of the first to look at the Russian steppes and recognize a setting similar to the U.S. prairies and suspect it resulted from similar processes, and modern scholarship like that of Willard Sunderland has gone on to identify how these processes were not only related but connected (and also how they differed).Footnote 16 Such scholarship sees a global, or at least transnational, system and then identifies the place of nations within it. The function of work like this seems to me no less or greater than to paint a clearer picture of the past.
I can't say, however, that I see per se virtue in de-emphasizing nation-states; moreover, it seems to me that there is every reason to remain cognizant of the role they have played in creating those very transnational systems scholars find intriguing: There is no transnational movement of persons without immigration policy; no transnational movement of goods without trade policy; no transnational movement of ideas without nation-state-stamped vehicles—including undersea cables and satellites—to conduct the traffic; no transnational movement of capital without the agreement among nations to make it possible. It seems to me that in the decades after the Second World War Americans lived in a world where they were able to take these policies increasingly for granted and to regard these transnational processes as somehow natural, rather than politically constructed; it also looks—just at the moment—as if we should not do that.
On that point, some recent comparative and transnational scholarship seems to me highly suggestive. Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen, and Kevin O'Rourke did an intriguing study of the relation between persistent economic malaise (a transnational phenomenon with substantial local variation) and the rise of right-wing movements in the interwar years, finding a correlation.Footnote 17 The United States proved a significant outlier to this trend then, but in the twenty-first century iteration of a similar pattern, it has not enjoyed similar outlier status. Why this should be so seems an excellent research question for today's comparativists and transnationalists.
Tyrrell: The problem lies not with comparative history as such but the ways that it is deployed within assumed national narratives. American history has traditionally worked within the framework of some form of “immaculate conception.” Whether as John Winthrop's “City Upon a Hill” or reverence toward the Founding Fathers, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution, there is a tendency to see U.S. history as developing from DNA implanted at some point of conception, immaculate or not. The metaphor of the great oak that grows from a little acorn comes to mind. In my opinion, U.S. history is not at all like this. Its history is contingent and does not move along fixed tracks, to change the metaphor, towards the present and into the future. If one assumes that the United States gained a national identity at some key point, and then interacted with other nations, then one is bound to come back, in the end, to a national unit of analysis. What is needed is a much more open assessment of possibilities. Transnational analysis facilitates this maneuver. Historians can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can trace transnational phenomena that cross boundaries and influence events within a given nation as it changes over time, sometimes serving to produce stronger global links, for example perhaps in trade, but also serving in other cases and at other times to stimulate regulation of borders, as in the movement of people.
All historical explanation implicitly involves comparison; that is, why did something happen rather than something else? Alternative hypotheses are explicitly or implicitly posed in such explanations. But when comparison involves making the United States a benchmark from which other nations diverge, every country raised for such a normative comparison makes the United States appear different.
If a single country other than the United States is used as the baseline, the comparison can produce different results. For example, in murder rates, the United States looks bad in relation to Australia, but Australia doesn't look good compared with Singapore, and the United States looks good when compared with South Africa, which in turn is not as bad as much of Central America. In such an analysis, the United States should be considered on a continuum, and wrenching it from that continuum reinforces exceptionalism. Certainly the United States can be seen as an outlier in many instances of multinational comparison, but, just to take the example dealt with by de Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O'Rourke, the data on the Great Depression and right-wing movements doesn't make the United States exceptional, as the authors understand: It doesn't help us to distinguish among Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States, none of which had right-wing extremism as a major electoral force, yet which adopted varying policies to deal with the Great Depression. The United States was part of a pattern of countries with strong democratic traditions, rather than an outlier in itself.
When we delve deeper into the historical context, other patterns appear. Of those four countries, Australia made the least “progress,” if you like, toward social welfare democracy and full employment policies in the 1930s. The key reason was bad timing. The party in power at the start of the Great Depression in Australia was the left-wing party (at least it, the Australian Labor Party, included a very strong left wing, much more so than today). That party was hammered for its hapless performance from 1929 to 1931, just as Herbert Hoover was for his. In Australia, conservatives ruled in the 1930s and penny-pinched, while unemployment remained intractably high. On the other hand, the New Zealand Labour Party had the good fortune to be out of power in 1929, and when they got back in their own right, in 1935, they established a welfare state that Australia could not match until after World War II. But in neither Australia nor New Zealand did fascist parties or communists make significant electoral progress. Viewing the Great Depression looks very different if the vantage point is the periphery of Europe and the Atlantic world in this way. Such comparisons are not ignored entirely in American historiography, but only analysis of the sequence of events in a variety of countries, operating somewhat like balls struck on a pool table, can shed light on the fate of economic performance and social democracy in the grim era of the Great Depression.
At the core of historical analysis is the issue of timing, and transnational analysis is in line with this point because it deals with historical events in a certain temporal frame. In these terms, the United States was not an outlier in the 1930s, but somewhere in the middle of the pack. Performance indicators marked on grids, such as de Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O'Rourke produce, can't do that work. A four-country study of the Great Depression's social welfare policies, comparing nations similar to the United States, like Australia, New Zealand, and perhaps Sweden, would be most interesting.
Rauchway: I think Ian's quite right to emphasize contingency in U.S. history. To the extent that the United States has had exceptional or distinctive characteristics, they have had to be reinforced or re-created periodically. If, for example (as Daniel Rodgers pointed out in Atlantic Crossings), U.S. social policy and social thought converged toward the pack of modern industrial nations in the middle twentieth century, it diverged again afterward—and not for any predestined reason or because some invisible historical elastic snapped the nation back to some exceptional habit, but because conservative politicians and their supporters campaigned hard to get that result.Footnote 18
And again, as Ian suggested in a previous exchange, one of the main components of that campaign was reinscription of American religiosity. Some of the reviews of Kevin Kruse's recent One Nation Under God reveal how successful that work has been.Footnote 19 They asked, essentially, hasn't the United States been Christian since before it was the United States—going back (as this conversation always seems to do) at least to John Winthrop? Kruse's book seemed to me quite persuasive in arguing that postwar conservatives, and particularly businessmen, reinvented the concept of the United States as explicitly blessed, or chosen, as a way of fighting against the New Deal. The fact that Roosevelt, from his first inaugural to his last, repeatedly invoked biblical and Christian points of reference to bless the New Deal and the war, was easily set aside in favor of a different kind of Christianity. Dwight D. Eisenhower began his first inaugural by asking Americans’ indulgence while he paused for “a little private prayer of my own,” and asking his fellow-citizens to bow their heads. There is nothing private, or one's own, about a prayer that delays a major public address and in which you ask your fellow Americans to join. This slyly compulsory civic religion, despite lacking much in the way of theological warrant, did indeed accelerate in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps reaching a plateau with Reagan's misinterpretation of Winthrop's sermon.
So religion plays a major role in the exceptionalist story—one that, like the exceptionalist story itself, has to be rewritten repeatedly in order to maintain its grip on the public imagination. What's the historian's role in dealing with such seductive narratives? I fear I cannot say anything more profound than that the scholar ought to maintain skepticism and resist being taken to places where evidence cannot support us.
Historians will likely continue to be very good at tackling the tasks you both mention: on the one hand tracing when, where, and why the “chosen nation” discourse has flared up and, on the other hand, emphasizing the discord between these narratives and actual, material circumstances. Yet are there any dangers in focusing so much on debunking and de-exceptionalizing?
Comparative and transnational studies, stressing contingency and timing, have produced compelling portraits of modern U.S. history that might help Americans to see themselves as part of a broader world. But could such histories have the unintended consequence of eclipsing narratives that have taught Americans to regard their nation's particular democratic traditions and institutions as precious and worth protecting? Are there ways to recount the American experience that allow for some kind of civic religion that keeps democratic principles alive and well without slipping into exceptionalist celebrations?
Tyrrell: There is no necessary connection between a democratic political culture and exceptionalism. Comparative histories show this, particularly if one includes a broader range of countries than the typical, dichotomous Europe versus United States comparison that has long underpinned exceptionalism. Criticizing exceptionalism may strengthen the democratic culture by separating it from the hubris of exceptionalist thought, which can serve to encourage actions at odds with American democratic traditions. I would argue that this over-reach occurred during the Second Iraq War, since denying empire in the name of exceptionalism (“We don't do empire,” etc.) excused torture and other war crimes in violation of cherished American values. The primary duty, therefore, is speaking truth to power, whatever the consequences. But duty number two is to try to tell history in an open-ended way, showing different possibilities in any historical situation.
Transnational history is compatible with both of these edicts. In a stint teaching at UCLA a few years ago I was quickly made aware that I did not have to, nor did I want to, force upon students the idea of wider horizons than the nation-state. A good part of the class comprised Hispanic Americans or immigrants (from as far away as Ethiopia via Saudi Arabia) or their children. Others had travelled or studied abroad or had multicultural and multiethnic descent. My students were eager to tell stories of their upbringing or their links with other countries. They quickly understood that American history was part of a complex history of migration across the world, not just immigration to one favored country.
But for other Americans in other places, belief in American exceptionalism has been equally visceral. It is founded in everyday experience and constitutive of identity. No facts can easily penetrate such a shield without doing damage to the individual. That is, American exceptionalism's durability cannot be explained just in terms of a top-down imposition or manipulation of values, rather than as a story of Americans’ experience refracted through the existing civic culture, where evangelical religion has been a longstanding but variable force.
For this reason, I certainly think it's difficult to shift popular consciousness on this question. Attitudes will only change with personal and collective experience and learning. So-called revolutions in historical practice have usually been slow in making a widespread impact, but they do tend to have a cumulative effect eventually.Footnote 20 Because transnational history unsettles the chronological divisions of American history, it is hard to challenge the over-all narrative. The first task is indeed to convince academic historians and teachers to re-balance the transnational and the national in their own narratives, especially in textbooks and syntheses.Footnote 21
Rauchway: The reality of transnational connections and interdependencies has generated a narrative backlash. President Donald Trump's immediate priorities include the halting and (insofar as it has extended to deportation) reversal of migration from some parts of the world, as well as “unwinding and repatriating the international supply chains on which many US multinational companies rely.”Footnote 22 The president says he is bringing American manufacturing home and restoring jobs to American-born workers. In other words, it is the new administration's intention to create a materially less transnational United States. Whether this goal is plausible is irrelevant to this discussion: it represents a politically powerful story, and it is the one that candidate Trump campaigned on.
We have seen precedent in U.S. history, when globalization produced a political backlash against it, reinforcing a narrative and a politics of exceptionalism. The Populist Party, the Socialist Party, and the politics of progressivism all drew on a backlash to capitalist-led globalization as I argued in Blessed Among Nations.Footnote 23 That time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was an element (not an overwhelming one, but an existing one) of democratization in this narrative of exceptionalism; it appears this time there is not. So I must agree forcibly with Ian's suggestion that there is no inherent connection between a democratic political culture and exceptionalism.
Regarding whether there are dangers to narratives that encourage Americans to see themselves as part of a broader world, Franklin Roosevelt said much the opposite in his fourth inaugural, in 1945: from bitter experience, Americans “have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.”Footnote 24 Even that now-classic conservative text on American exceptionalism, Ronald Reagan's 1989 farewell address, comes closer to these sentiments than the America-first style of exceptionalism that defined the 2016 election. Reagan's version of Winthrop's City Upon a Hill was one of “free ports,” he said, and “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”Footnote 25 Inasmuch as Americans have unlearned the lessons of FDR and Reagan, it is not because of the independent force of Christian belief—which both of them invoked—but because of the use politicians have made of it in recent decades.
