[This essay was published in 2007 in the book Selling US Wars, edited by Achin Vanaik, Olive Tree Press.]
I am so terrifed, America,
Of the iron click of your human contact.
And after this
The winding-sheet of your selfless ideal love.
Boundless love
Like a poison gas.
– DH Lawrence, “The Evening Land”, 1923
“The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise… The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission…The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.”
– National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002
In expounding the doctrine of “pre-emptive war” and expanding the grounds on which the US considers itself entitled to take military action, the National Security Strategy of 2002 was seen as a departure from the past, in most quarters an alarming one. However, while it certainly reflects a more aggressive posture, the NSS echoes themes that reach back to the origins of the US republic. Its unilateralism is not a novelty but an elaboration of long-standing claims. Its underlying assumptions – that the US embodies the “single sustainable model”, that the US is engaged in a global mission on behalf of universal values, that US national interests coincide with the interests of humanity as a whole – reflect an American exceptionalism that is deeply ingrained in popular conceptions of US national identity.
American exceptionalism: the debate
In its narrow sense, the term “American exceptionalism” refers to the theory that the US is an exception to the general laws that apply to capitalist societies, notably in its lack of a mass social democratic, socialist or labour party and the weakness of collectivist ideas and class consciousness. In its broader sense, American exceptionalism envisions the US as unique among nations and societies; it is a country with a special mission and therefore enjoys special duties and prerogatives. The USA becomes not merely a nation-state among other nation-states, but an idea and an ideal.
There’s a vast literature on whether and to what degree US society actually is exceptional, and whether or not this is a good thing. A number of factors have been cited in attempts to explain the US’s ‘exceptional’ characteristics: the moving frontier, the absence of feudalism, the availability of land, slavery, immigration, the multi-ethnic composition of the working class. Clearly, the US is not a society devoid of class conflict or immune to crisis. Equally clearly, the various factors adduced as explanations of American exceptionalism have shaped the manner in which class conflict unfolds and crises are resolved. Like all societies, the US has distinctive features; among advanced capitalist societies it might be said to lie at one end of a spectrum with the Scandinavian countries at the other. The fact that in recent decades European countries have drawn closer to the US economic and social model suggests that this model is less “exceptional” than was previously assumed. To speak of the US as an “exception” implies the existence of a norm or a general law of development from which it qualitatively deviates, and identifying a norm or law of this kind is always problematic. As a perspective on US history, American exceptionalism fetishises differences and downgrade commonalities.
However, what cannot be denied is the presence and power within US society of the tenets of American exceptionalism, at both elite and popular levels. It’s a living, protean ideology. People in many countries believe their own nation is in some way “exceptional”, but this belief has deeper roots and greater resonance in the USA. It has shaped class relations within the US as well as popular views of the USA’s place in the world. It has played a critical role in securing domestic support for international expansion and deflecting domestic conflict. Crucially, American exceptionalism is today allied to unprecedented military power. Unlike other countries, the USA has the capacity to make real its claims to exceptional status. For these reasons, the anti-war and anti-globalisation movements need to understand how American exceptionalism functions and to devise strategies to challenge it.
Strikingly, in the copious studies of American exceptionalism scant attention has been paid to its impact on or expression in the US’s relations with the rest of the world. Seymour Martin Lipset’s American Exceptionalism: a Double Edged Sword, the most widely reviewed treatment of the subject in recent years, contains not a single reference to US foreign policy, armed interventions, colonial possessions, or military spending – the latter being a category in which the USA is most definitely exceptional. This silence is itself a symptom of habits of thought shaped by American exceptionalism.
“Americanism” and missionary nationalism
US nationalism shares characteristics with and performs many of the same functions as other forms of nationalism. As elsewhere, the “imagined community” of the nation helps incorporate and subordinate the mass of the population into a larger entity guided by an elite. However, because of the circumstances of its emergence, US nationalism could not wear the colours of language or ethnicity or make the territorial claims that sustained nationalisms in other lands. Instead, it posited “America” as an idea and elevated national identity to the status of an ideology: “Americanism”.
Richard Hofstadter observed, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” To its adherents, “Americanism” is transparent and self-justifying; it’s a set of assumptions one naturally subscribes to because one is “American”. The vagueness of the category enhances its potency. It has a greater elasticity than culturally or ethnically delimited nationalisms.
In general, the tenets of “Americanism” (or “the American creed”) are similar to those recognised elsewhere as the tenets of liberal capitalism. “Freedom”, “opportunity”, “individualism”, the “rule of law” are all corralled into the “American” pen. What’s critical here is not the shifting assortment of ideas but their perennial branding as “American”. “Americanism” is adaptable and expansive – within it, liberalism and authoritarianism, assimilation and exclusion, white supremacism and multi-culturalism cohabit.
The designation of those who fail to conform to mainstream US ideology as “un-American” is revealing. By virtue of their ideas or lawful activities, US citizens are stripped of their national identity. Dissenters in other countries are frequently labelled unpatriotic or ‘anti-national’, but the “un-American” formulation is distinctive. The only comparable formulation is “anti-Soviet” – where the nation-state in question, the USSR, was identified (like “America”) with universal ideas.
One peculiarity of “Americanism” is that it usurps the designation of a hemisphere for a single nation-state, thus appropriating “the new world” and reducing the status of non-US “Americans”. For all its apparent ethnic and cultural neutrality, “Americanism” has always been culturally and ethnically inflected. Its virtues and values have been understood as the virtues and values of white Europeans, in particular northern Protestant Europeans.
“America”, from the outset, is portrayed as a unique experiment in human annals. “The citizens of America,” George Washington said, “are … to be considered the actors of a most conspicuous theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” This notion of America as the ultimate arena of human nature still informs much US commentary on US culture, in which a variety of common human traits are designated “typically American”. Crucially, “America” is seen as an entity with a global purpose, a mission among the nations. “Our nation’s cause has always been larger than our nation’s defense,” Bush told the cadets at West Point in 2002, “We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors liberty…. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.” As we will see, this is a claim with a long pedigree.
Though it is by definition globally expansive, this missionary nationalism insists it is not imperial. Indeed, it is part of its nature that “America” cannot be an empire, at least not an empire like other empires. In the crucial exercise of disguising imperial realities from the US populace, American exceptionalism plays a key role. The NSS refers to an “American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests”. In this marriage of the nation-state-turned-super-power with a set of transcendent values, America becomes a synonym for “freedom” (and “freedom” becomes a synonym for “free enterprise”). De Tocqueville spoke of the US’s “Holy cult of freedom”. “Freedom” (rather than self-defence) has been the putative motivation of nearly every US war: the campaigns against Native Americans and Mexicans, the Civil War (the battle cry on both sides), the Spanish-American War (“freedom” for Cuba and the Spanish possessions), World War I (to make the world safe for democracy), WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, and now the “war on terror.”
Bush has been careful to deny any “clash of civilisations”, to disclaim American proprietorship of democracy or capitalism; he stresses the universal reach of “god given freedom”, and then invokes the global reach of the US as the instrument of that freedom. Ironically, Bush appeals to an old liberal vein in US thinking about the US global mission: a belief that the USA is the vanguard of human progress, a social and economic model to be exported.
“Ours was the first of the modern ideological countries, born of a revolutionary doctrine,” Gary Wills commented in the 1970s, “We are not merely a country. We are an -ism. And truth must spread without limit; it cannot countenance error.” Americanism is “power purified – and the saints are free of many restrictions imposed on those without proper doctrine.”
Foundation myths and American expansionism: 17th-19th centuries
“The story of America is the story of expanding liberty: an ever-widening circle constantly growing to reach further and include more. Our nation’s founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: in our world and here at home we will extend the frontiers of freedom.”
– George W. Bush, speech to Republican National Convention, 2004
John Winthrop’s oft-quoted admonition to his fellow New England colonists is usually cited as the fons et origo of American exceptionalism: “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” For Winthrop, the colonists’ toe-hold on the North American continent was a moral test, and judgement awaited them if they failed it. The propulsions of Calvinism – the light and darkness of divine election – seemed to be enhanced by the New World setting.
There’s a tendency to view American exceptionalism as a Puritan inheritance, descending in unbroken continuity from Winthrop. And it does retain a religious tinge: “America” is a chosen nation, “Americans” a chosen people. However, it can be argued that American exceptionalism was more profoundly shaped by Enlightenment rationalism’s secular ideas and the mastery of nature and human labour it facilitated. The US’s exceptional historic role was first proclaimed by European progressives. In Rights of Man (1792) Thomas Paine argued: “The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics. So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa or Europe…” The USA was seen a unique opportunity for both institutions and individuals to make a fresh start, to get “back to nature” and first principles. In 1827, an envious Goethe wrote:
America, you are luckier
Than this old continent of ours
…you do not suffer,
In hours of intensity,
From futile memories
And pointless battles.
A decade later, de Tocqueville declared: “the position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”
The idea of “America” as a great social experiment conducted on a tabula rasa (the American hemisphere) meant that, from the beginning, its borders were in flux; it was conceived as expansionist. In 1787, John Adams (the future second president of the republic) in his Defence of the Constitution of the United States saw the newly-formed USA as an “experiment…destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe.”
Adams’ successor, Thomas Jefferson, was one of the first to articulate the universal claims of human rights on the political stage. In later ages and remote societies, the arguments and the prose of the US Declaration of Independence, authored by Jefferson, would be echoed by peoples seeking freedom from colonial domination. But even in there, the rhetoric of human rights slides into claims for national aggrandisement. Among the charges the Declaration makes against King George III is that he has blocked “new appropriation of lands”, failed to encourage migration from Europe and sided with “the merciless Indian savages” against the “inhabitants of our frontiers”, i.e. the white settlers seeking to expand the colonial domain.
In 1786, Jefferson declared that “our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, north and south, is to be peopled.” He wrote to Monroe: “I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could be made to our system of states.” What was envisioned here was not the spread of sovereign governments, but incorporation into a system predicated on white supremacy. As president, Jefferson quarantined Haiti, the hemisphere’s second independent republic. Haiti was an even bolder experiment in democracy than the one made to the north, but it was an experiment conducted by black salves, not white property owners. Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 – in which the US acquired a huge land mass directly from the French Empire – Jefferson sent troops to New Orleans to ensure the reluctant inhabitants acceded to US rule. His belief that “America, north and south, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own” became the basis for the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared that the US would oppose any attempt by European powers to interfere in the hemisphere’s affairs – i.e. that the right to interfere in these affairs belonged exclusively to the US. This founding claim to hemispheric hegemony introduced an extra-territorial definition of national self-defence, underpinned by American exceptionalism.
Enlightenment universalism was, in the context of North America, made to serve as a settler-colonial ideology. White Anglo-Saxon supremacy was ingrained in it. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that “the origin myth” of the USA disguises the fact that the “American revolution” was “a split in the British empire, not an anti-colonial liberation movement”. Nonetheless, anti-colonial claims became dominant in the official memory and helped shape US popular resistance to the idea that the US should be an empire, and even more to the realisation that it is an empire. Whether it’s the intellectual Jefferson or the ineloquent Bush, a paradoxical claim is made that by virtue of its unique culture, the USA embodies values that transcend culture.
In 1845, on the eve of the war against Mexico through which it would seize what is now the southwest of the USA, a US newspaper editorialised that it was the “manifest destiny” of the nation to spread from Atlantic to Pacific. There was a mixture here of Calvinism (the predestination of the elect) and social experimentalism, the idea that the American model was progressive and superior, and could therefore disregard the claims of others. In due course, the US completed a process of territorial expansion as rapid, brutal and permanent as anything in the annals of the human race.
Nor was the US’s reach confined to the north American mainland. According to the State Department, the country engaged in 103 overseas military interventions between 1798 and 1895. To protect US shipping, the nascent republic fought battles in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Sumatra, Samoa, Argentina and Peru. The principles of sovereignty and self-government were always secondary to commercial interests. By the end of the 19th century, the US had established bases on dozens of islands across the Pacific and used military force to secure a foothold in the markets of China and Japan.
An American super-race
De Tocqueville noted that Americans lived “in a perpetual state of self-adoration”. As a result of the success and vibrancy of their great experiment, “they have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart form the rest of the human race.” Twenty years later, Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, an innovatory, rhapsodic poem sequence in which Americans do indeed appear as “a species apart”.
Whitman was self-consciously and professedly an “American bard” and remains the major poet of American national identity. His thrust was democratic, egalitarian and inclusive. He celebrated and identified himself – physically, sometimes erotically – with the life of the streets. In nobody else’s verse does the word “America” recur so frequently or carry such freight. He defined “America”, of course, not merely as a territorial or civic entity but as “perennial with the earth, with Freedom, Law and Love”. He seems, at times, to envision Americans as a kind of super-race.
Whitman supported the Mexican War of 1846-48. He called for US troops to be stationed in Mexico to establish a regime “whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States.” He hoped this would open an avenue “for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country will go.”
Whitman enthusiastically embraced a missionary nationalism. “Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of lasting power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivalling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long defer’d, the democratic republican principle…” Yet this rhapsodic exponent of American exceptionalism shivered in the face of a reality in which “we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annexed Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as though we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.”
In a wry key, a similar anxiety was expressed by Whitman’s contemporary, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who celebrated “the young American of the 19th century” as “heir to all old civilizations, founder of that new one which … is to be the noblest, as it is the last” but then went on to warn, “the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is made for him”.
Empire and denial – from 1898 through the Cold war
Despite incessant foreign interventions, it was only in the late 1890s that the US began to acquire foreign territory outside the continental land mass of north America. This was one of the rare periods in which the US has spoken openly of itself as an empire. The 1890s witnessed a major depression and extensive, often violent conflict between labour and capital, as well as the challenge of a bi-racial, agrarian Populist movement. In the same decade, immigration from eastern and southern Europe reached mass proportions and Jim Crow laws imposed segregation and subordination on African-Americans across the south.
In this context, both government and private corporations sought to promote a new, unifying patriotism. The Pledge of Allegiance was introduced in schools. It became customary to stand for the Star Spangled Banner at public events. State and local Flag Days were inaugurated. At the same time, sections of elite opinion began arguing that the US should become an empire, a rival to the great European powers. Overseas expansion offered a remedy to a crisis of surplus capital and industrial capacity. In this decade, the US constructed a fleet that made it the world’s second greatest naval power. It annexed Hawaii, and in a brief but heavily publicised war prised Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from the dying Spanish empire. Propaganda for the war emphasised its economic befits to “our farmers and workmen.” A higher gloss was offered by Rudyard Kipling, who urged the US to shoulder “the white man’s burden” and bring civilisation to the dark-skinned Filipinos.
In opposition to the new American imperialism, there emerged a substantial, avowedly “Anti-Imperialist” movement. “I am an anti-imperialist,” said Mark Twain. “I oppose putting the eagle’s talons on any other land.” For the Anti-imperialists, acquiring territories overseas was contrary to the principles of America’s own anti-colonial revolution. They warned (prophetically) that America could not be both a republic and an empire. And they frequently argued that if America became an empire, it would sacrifice the very qualities that made it exceptional. To the extent that the nation acted like a European power, its citizens would forfeit the blessings of their special historic providence.
Initially, there was extensive labour support for the anti-imperialist cause, including Samuel Gompers, leader of the AFL and apostle of “pure” (i.e. non-political) trades unionism. Gompers feared that American workers would be undercut by cheap labour in backward countries. However, along with the bulk of the labour movement, he soon acquiesced in overseas expansion. At this crucial juncture, which saw the emergence of independent labour parties in Britain and Australia, mainstream US unionism rejected political alliances, turned away from the unskilled and the unorganised, and sought accommodation with employers. One of the major factors in this momentous development was the impact of the Spanish War and the consequent US overseas expansion. Years later, the Populist leader Tom Watson observed: “The Spanish War finished us. The blare of the bugle drowned out the voice of the Reformer.” The brevity, success and spoils of the war fueled the new jingoism, which had a fierce racial edge. American superiority had been confirmed; white people who ruled over black people at home could now rule over black people abroad.
According to historian Charles Bergquist: “The imperialist thrust of 1898 coincided with the … the beginning of the long wave of capitalist expansion that lasted until the 1920s. In the Americas, this period witnessed a great burst of US investment in Latin America, US intervention to assure the separation of Panama from Colombia, the building of the Panama canal, and the consolidation of informal US control over the whole Caribbean basin.” The canal fostered the integration of the domestic market, enabled the US to dominate Latin America and penetrate further into east Asian markets. Growth rates after 1898 shot up to 5.2 % per annum. US foreign trade and foreign investment expanded exponentially. Sections of the US working class now enjoyed the fruits of empire, providing a material base for imperial ideology and American exceptionalism.
Filipinos, however, took the rhetoric of “freedom” seriously and rebelled against US rule. After more than a decade of brutal counter-insurgency, a quarter of a million Filipinos had been killed, and 4200 Americans. This was ten times the number of Americans killed in the brief Spanish-American War. Yet US history textbooks routinely assign far more space to the latter than the former. And even the Spanish-American war – with its enormous historical consequences – is treated as a self-contained incident, a curiosity, not part of the larger narrative. Thus the US population knows little of the US’s history as an explicitly imperial power, which makes it harder for it to grasp the imperial nature of its present activities.
Openly imperial rhetoric was soon replaced by something more compatible with American exceptionalist traditions. For the most part, the US chose to shoulder the “white man’s burden” through indirect rule, through economic coercion backed up by the threat of military intervention. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt issued his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, anticipating the NSS in its targeting of ‘rogue states’:
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