American Exceptionalisms

From Winthrop to Winfrey

Sylvia Söderlind, James Taylor Carson, Sylvia Söderlind, James Taylor Carson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781438435749, 9781438435756
• eBook ISBN: 9781438435763
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

An incisive and wide ranging look at a powerful force and myth in American culture and history, American Exceptionalisms reveals the centuries-old persistence of the notion that the United States is an exceptional nation, in being both an example to the world and exempt from the rules of international law. Scholars from North America and Europe trace versions of the rhetoric of exceptionalism through a multitude of historical, cultural, and political phenomena, from John Winthrop's vision of the "cittie on a hill" and the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century to The Blair Witch Project and Oprah Winfrey's "Child Predator Watch List" in the twenty-first century. The first set of essays focus on constitutive historical moments in the development of the myth, rom early exploration narratives through political debates in the early republic to twentieth-century immigration debates. The latter essays address the role of exceptionalism in the "war on terror" and such cornerstones of modern popular culture such as the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, the songs of Steve Earle, and the Oprah Winfrey show. Sylvia Söderlind is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Québécois Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) and articles on American, Canadian and Québécois fiction, "ghostmodernism" and translation, and the politics of metaphor published in, among others, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Ariel, Essays in Canadian Writing, Voix et images, RS/SI, New Feminism Review (Japan), ARTES (Sweden). James Taylor Carson is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His scholarship focuses on the ethnohistory of native peoples in the American South, and he has published two books on the subject, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007).

1

Witch-hunting

American Exceptionalism and Global Terrorism

Deborah L. Madsen

for Charles Swann

Introduction

There has emerged in recent discussions of U.S. foreign policy a series of rhetorical dependences between American exceptionalism and the idea of global terrorism. President George W. Bush's image of the “empire of evil,” to designate nation states that sponsor global political terrorism, is entirely consonant with the ideology of American Exceptionalism that posits the United States as a nation uniquely able, and charged with the mission, to oppose this kind of transcendent political evil. From the colonial founding of John Winthrop's “cittie upon a hill,” the understanding of New England's exceptional destiny has depended upon the “visible sainthood” of Puritan leaders who led God's mission into the wilderness of the New World. However, this assumption of sainthood for some relied upon the conviction that others, within the colonial community, were diabolical agents, active agents of Satan, determined to destroy God's New England experiment. Indeed, as Chantal Mouffe has commented in relation to the constitution of the political community as a “social imaginary”:

There will always be a “constitutive outside,” an exterior to the community that is the very condition of its existence. It is crucial to recognize that, since to construct a “we” it is necessary to distinguish it from a “them,” and since all forms of consensus are based on acts of exclusion, the condition of possibility of the political community is at the same time the condition of impossibility of its full realization. (Mouffe 1992, 30)

I take as my starting point this dark underside of American Exceptionalism—the rhetorical basis for the New World claim to an exceptional and divine status. The witchcraft hysteria of the later seventeenth century is relevant here, representing as it does the attempt to engage a force of supernatural evil (an “empire of evil”) that lies outside human comprehension but which threatens the exceptional work of New England Puritanism. Later cultural productions engaging with this relationship between exceptional good and transcendent evil include Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century narrative return to New England witchcraft, as well as Arthur Miller's use of the metaphor of the witch-hunt, and the recent film Good Night, and Good Luck that deals with the McCarthy-era anticommunist crusade. Popular treatments of witchcraft such as the TV series Charmed, and films like Practical Magic and The Blair Witch Project engage the complex representation of witches as alternatively threats of supernatural evil and also potential protectors against this invisible danger.

By offering a survey of this rhetoric of exceptional or “un-American” evil, from the seventeenth century to the present, in a range of cultural forms, I hope to stimulate discussion of the wider implications of the idea of American Exceptionalism for our thinking about the history and culture of the United States.

Exceptionalism “Then”

Two influential but now discredited views of witchcraft assumed either that witches were in fact mentally disturbed persons who could not be diagnosed accurately by primitive early modern medicine, or that witchcraft was a form of genocide practiced against women. In fact, witchcraft was, surprisingly, not connected with the perception of mental illness in the New England colonial period. John Demos, in Entertaining Satan (1982), and others, note that insanity was accepted as a mental disorder without reference to supernatural causes and that, inversely, witchcraft was not necessarily recognized as a sign of insanity.

Similarly, the idea that accusations of witchcraft expressed widespread misogyny, representing what some feminists have called a kind of genocide or “gynocide,” has also been disproved by subsequent researches that show, when taken over a period of centuries, that the number of people executed as witches does not disproportionately include women. Men were executed as witches too; in Salem in 1692, a substantial number of the victims were men. So if witches were neither insane nor the victims of women-hating, what were they?

Increasingly, connections between traumatic experiences and behavior that might lead to accusations of witchcraft are being made by scholars. I am thinking here particularly of Janice Knight's groundbreaking work on Mercy Short who, in March 1690 at the age of fifteen, was taken captive during the French/Sokoki raid on the frontier town of Salmon Falls. She was held captive for nearly eight months. She witnessed the violent deaths of both her parents and three siblings before she was finally redeemed back into the society of Boston. Two years later, in 1692, she was placed under the care of Cotton Mather as he tried to cure her of demonic possession. Mather's account of her afflictions and his efforts to cure her was published as A Brand Pluck'd Out of the Burning. Knight's 2002 essay is a wonderfully readable account that makes the case for demonic possession as a kind of captivity, where the conventional description of possession enables the recovery of a history and the articulation of a degree of suffering that otherwise cannot be adequately expressed. Knight observes:

As with many of the Salem accusers, Short was single, young, female, and powerless, held captive and left orphaned as a result of the war on the Maine frontier. Karlsen reports that of the 21 possessed women we can trace, “seventeen had lost one or both of their parents,” most often as a result of the war…. Like Short, these girls became refugees, arriving in Salem or Boston, and lacking financial or emotional support, they began a life of servitude. (Knight 2002, 42)

Living under the governance of a family not their own, these women felt excluded, dependent, and subservient. As with many of these orphans, Short's history of possession seems to replay her feelings of abandonment and isolation, and it returns her to the origins of her plight: the experience of captivity. (ibid., 42)

I have dwelt on this description because it seems to me that what is significant here is the status of Mercy Short, and others who were orphaned as a consequence of frontier conflicts, as outsiders: abandoned, isolated, excluded. They were made to feel their dependency upon and subservience to those who had not undergone the traumatizing experience of living out a dramatic failure of social protection.

To an extent, the logic of exceptionalist rhetoric demands that the failure of society to protect becomes a refusal of protection. For in order to have “saints,” we must have “sinners”; to have insiders, we must have the outsiders who define them by opposition; to have a protected coterie of those who belong, we have to have those who are denied the protection of belonging, whether that protection takes the form of military defense or the legal protection of civil rights.

John Winthrop's 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered to the passengers of the Arbella, probably on the eve of their departure for Massachusetts from Southampton, invokes the now-famous image of the “cittie upon a hill”:

[T]he eyes of all people are upon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the ways of god and all professoures for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing … (Winthrop 2005, 317)

Winthrop's sermon is essentially a blueprint for the conduct of an ideal Christian society, the society that is to be the model for the rest of the world. However, he warns that failure to sustain this Christian ideal will result in the unloosing of un-Christian sentiment: “wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the ways of god” and this will result in the (at least spiritual) exile of these Puritan pioneers. These two warnings—against empowering the ungodly and against risking the loss of the land—are taken up but with rather different emphases by that spokesperson of the third generation of New Englanders, Cotton Mather.

Cotton Mather, in “The Wonders of the Invisible World” (1692), describes the land colonized by New Englanders as originally belonging to the Devil, who is just waiting to claim his lands back:

The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil's territories; and it may easily be supposed that the devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus, that He should have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession. (Mather 2005, 509)

In these terms, the exceptional nature of New England lies in the ability to win back for Christians and for the Christian God, territory that is possessed by Satan. But in order to do this, those visible saints must engage in continuous combat with the invisible agents of Satan, who will use any means to retake what they believe is theirs. Mather declares:

I believe that never were more satanical devices used for the unsettling of any people under the sun, than what have been employed for the extirpation of the vine which God has here planted, casting out the heathen, and preparing a room before it, and causing it to take deep root … (ibid., 510)

It is in the face of the success of the Puritan colonists, then, that the Salem events have been designed by Satan as a last-ditch effort to remove, or “unsettle” the settlers:

[T]he devil is now making one attempt more upon us; an attempt more difficult, more surprising, more snarled with unintelligible circumstances than any that we have hitherto encountered; an attempt so critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon enjoy halcyon days with all the vultures of hell trodden under our feet. (ibid., 510)

Both Winthrop and Mather express exceptionalist visions of New England, but the terms on which these visions are conceptualized are quite different: Winthrop posits a community of visible saints, where Mather envisions an army of invisible Satanic agents. They are similarly divided on the subject of America's exceptional mission: Winthrop's “errand into the wilderness” versus Mather's continual battle against a supernatural “axis of evil.” They agree that the fufillment of the divine mission upon which the New England colonists are embarked will result in a period of unimaginable bliss, but where Winthrop expresses a positive vision based on the realization of an ideal Christian community, Mather bases his vision on the decisive defeat of Satan and his demonic agents. It is Mather's vision that informs contemporary expressions of exceptionalist rhetoric, such as the following:

States like [North Korea, Iran, Iraq], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world…. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight … some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it; if they do not act, America will. (Bush 2002)

Such proclamations come, of course, from President George W. Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, but this kind of rhetoric characterizes much that is said by this administration. The 2002 address drew to a conclusion with the promise: “America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere.”

In this vision, America is defined by its capacity to triumph over evil, to bring “liberty and justice” to everyone, to make “American” that which we might call “un-American.” But what is meant by this term un-American? If Americans live in America, do un-Americans live in un-America? Where would we locate this un-America? In a central scene of the film The Blair Witch Project, the three students find themselves more than just lost in the woods: they are lost in another “America”—un-America. This is the devil's territory, full of indeterminate threat and a place of fear. Above all, it is a place they stumble into, unexpectedly, though the film works to suggest that this alternative reality, this extra spatial dimension, has been there all along. The emphasis on the map that directs the students' movements underlines this attention to physical and spiritual geography. The history of the Blair Witch, painstakingly built up through the movie and its supporting artifacts, is the history of vulnerable individuals who accidentally find themselves in this parallel dimension of evil.

Of course, this identification of the wilderness as Satan's domain is hardly new: Mary Rowlandson, in her captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682)—published ten years before the witchcraft events in Salem—depicts the wilderness as a scene of spiritual desolation, inhabited by Native American Indians who are alternately the agents of a chastizing God or of the Devil. She describes her first night in captivity: “This was the dolefulest night that ever my eyes saw. Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell” (Rowlandson 2005, 445). We should remember here Mercy Short's experience of captivity; unlike Mary, who was an adult, Mercy was an adolescent when she was captured; Mary's captivity lasted for nearly three months, Mercy's for nearly eight; Mary was forcibly removed around New England but Mercy was taken as far as francophone Canada in the course of her captivity. Perhaps the most important difference between them is that the conditions of life that greeted their redemption were very different. Mary was finally reunited with her husband and surviving children in Boston where, she says:

In that poor, and distressed, and beggarly condition I was received in; I was kindly entertained in several houses. So much love I received from several (some of whom I knew, and others I knew not) that I am not capable to declare it. But the Lord knows them all by name. The Lord reward them sevenfold into their bosoms of His spirituals, for their temporals. The twenty pounds, the price of my redemption, was raised by some Boston gentlemen, and Mrs. Usher, whose bounty and religious charity, I would not forget to make mention of. Then Mr. Thomas Shepard of Charlestown received us into his house, where we continued eleven weeks; and a father and mother they were to us. And many more tender-hearted friends we met with in that place. (Rowlandson 2005, 465)

In contrast, Mercy Short was returned to Salem as an orphan, reduced to the “poor, and distressed, and beggarly condition” from which Mary's neighbors quickly relieved her. And yet, Mary confesses at the conclusion of her narrative that she suffered the consequences of her traumatic experience, as she lay awake at nights fearful that God might see fit to punish her again by removing her from the protections and comforts of colonial society.

Mary lives in fear of experi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction: The Shining of America
• 1. Witch-hunting: American Exceptionalism and Global Terrorism
• 2. Both East and West: Asia and the Origins of American Exceptionalism
• 3. “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind”: American Universalism and Exceptionalism in the Early Republic
• 4. Burlesquing America's Errand: Savage Satire in Irving's History of New York and Melville's The Confidence-Man
• 5. Exclusion Acts: How Popular Westerns Brokered the Atlantic Diaspora
• 6. America as “World-Salvation”: Josiah Strong, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Global Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism
• 7. American Exceptionalism and Immigration Debates in the Modern United States
• 8. Giving the People What They Want: The African American Exception as Racial Cliché in Percival Everett's Erasure
• 9. “Just an American Boy”: American Exceptionalism and Steve Earle versus Capital Punishment
• 10. Oprah's Vigilante Sentimentalism
• 11. The City under the Hill: Allegorical Tradition and H. P. Lovecraft's America
• Afterword: American Exceptionalism in American Intellectual Conversation, or How I Finally Submitted to Literary Criticism
• Notes on Contributors