American Exceptionalism

A New History of an Old Idea

Ian Tyrrell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226812120
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America's exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America's exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

1

The Puritans and American Chosenness

Democratic rights, individualism, and high levels of belief in a special religious destiny are all traits associated with American exceptionalism that, to varying degrees, have been traced to the Puritan influence. Democracy and individualism are the easiest to assess, and the verdict is largely negative. This is not to deny the Puritan contribution to the foundational myths of the United States. Rather, understanding those myths requires attention to the subsequent history of the United States and its mythmaking processes.1

Political, Economic, and Religious Contributions of Puritanism

The term Puritan originally applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony settled in 1630, not the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Though these two colonies had distinct historical, doctrinal, and organizational origins, in the nineteenth century the two settlements and the terms used to describe them became blurred in American memory as both Puritan and Pilgrim. But the legacy of 1630 has been better placed to resonate with American exceptionalism in the twentieth century because of that colony’s religious justification, especially as expressed in John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” address.

The Puritans brought with them to North America a decentralized idea of church government. Authority was founded not on bishops and archbishops, as in the Church of England, or on the papacy, as in the Roman Catholic Church, but on congregations that could select their own ministers and conduct internal affairs. Alexis de Tocqueville noted these arrangements as the forerunner of a democratic tradition: “Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.”2 In modern America, particularly in the struggle with fascism in World War II, it was tempting to reach back to Puritan origins to find a compatibility though not a complete correlation with American ideals. This was the path of the Harvard University philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, who sought in Puritanism and Democracy (1944) the roots of American cohesion and purpose in the face of wartime threats. In more recent times, early Puritanism has even been invoked as the bedrock of a more vital and direct democracy than the constitutional liberalism prevalent after the American Revolution.3

Either way, a link between the growth of American democracy and early Puritan governance is far from clear, partly because seventeenth-century New England was more geographically, politically, and socially diverse than the old stereotypes of bigotry and killjoy behavior allow. Attributing Puritan contributions is also complicated by the development of comparable politicoeconomic features in other British North American colonies not founded on Calvinism.4 With a stretch, the case for pioneer “democratic” status may be made for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wherein a participatory religious society with an elective franchise was conceived as a self-governing entity. Yet that colony’s religiopolitical hierarchy expelled dissenters and, as early as 1636–38, Puritan settlers began to exterminate or remove those Native Americans they found troublesome, essentially because these indigenous peoples took issue with the European concept of (private) land ownership entailing exclusive property rights.5 As the colony developed in the second half of the seventeenth century, its legislative franchise was far from universal, let alone broadly accessed in practice by adult (white) males. At most, the Puritans could be described as “Godly republicans” rather than democrats in their early preference for a self-governing religious polity since freemen had to be church members to qualify for voting. Only if we include Roger Williams’s protests on behalf of religious dissent leading to the founding of Rhode Island can we find a compatible pluralistic and “democratic” alternative within Puritanism, but Williams was concerned with nurturing religious rather than political freedom. Under the Rhode Island Royal Charter of 1663, voting was restricted to landowners, and that state was one of the last to enact (white) manhood suffrage in nineteenth-century America.6

The Puritans have been credited with pioneering still other features associated with American exceptionalism. Political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset claimed that a deeply ingrained “Calvinistic Puritanism” was bequeathed to Americans as exceptional self-reliance, competitive individualism, and acquisitiveness.7 Lipset’s idea had foundations in Max Weber’s thesis on the causal link between the rise of capitalism and Protestantism.8 In contrast, American Puritan writers gave priority to theology, covenant, and community rather than individualism.9 Yet religious and politicoeconomic ideas were part of the same intellectual and theological matrix.10 None of the early colonies was precapitalist because they all depended on private property, markets, and capital accumulation. Puritanism alone can hardly account for individualism in American exceptionalist thought and politics and, even less, its later antistatist attitudes and laissez-faire practices that Lipset identified as exceptional. For one, acquisitive individualism was far from absent in the many British North American colonies outside Puritan New England. For another, the Puritans focused on a self-regulated duty of obedience to a community rather than the liberty to do what one liked. To the extent that the latter-day Protestantism of the nineteenth century could be held to underpin the capitalist market economy through doctrines of hard work and self-improvement, the dominant theology had been changed by non-Calvinist (Arminian) views stressing free will and individual conscience.11

Though the Puritan legacy to American religious culture has been more considerable, its contribution to exceptionalism has become too closely identified with the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Since the 1960s, American politicians seeking the roots of exceptionalism have often referred to Winthrop’s warning to the colonists in “A Modell of Christian Charity.” In this lay “sermon,” probably written before the colonists set foot in New England, Winthrop evoked the Christian symbolism of the “City upon a Hill,” challenging his followers to serve as an inspiration to the churches of Christendom and invoking the authority of God as judge of their collective enterprise.12

Historians have convincingly debunked the common misconception that modern U.S. exceptionalism could be traced to Winthrop’s address. They have shown how politicians and conservative clerics retrospectively revived and distorted Winthrop’s idea of a City upon a Hill and turned it into a patriotic slogan in the late twentieth century. This idea thrived as a result of Christian fundamentalism’s post-1945 turn to political activity and the emergence of the Moral Majority and its successor movements since the 1970s. The content of this special status in enacting God’s plan for the world was not the same as for the Puritans of Winthrop’s time, not least because of the simple fact that the United States did not exist in the seventeenth century. More important, Winthrop’s now-famous address concerned the spiritual purpose of a covenant with God and the requirement of a this-worldly rectitude in a religious community. The text was not even published until 1838, and early republican thought did not single out Winthrop to legitimate expressions of the nation’s special position and destiny.13

It is not surprising that interest was low at that time, because it was not the Puritans who made the first European settlements in North America. The Spanish had been in North America since 1519, and the English established the Jamestown colony in 1607. There the Church of England had a favored position as a state-supported church. Only by the 1820s did the focus, not on Winthrop’s colony but generically on New England, become highlighted in the remembering of the young nation’s colonial history. A marker of this shift was future Whig senator Daniel Webster’s reference to the “Pilgrims” as the country’s de facto founders and the model for its progress, recorded in his December 22, 1820, address for the Plymouth Colony’s bicentennial. The idea’s emergence reflected a move to shore up New England’s political and cultural authority as the republic expanded west, and as the New England economy became far less important in American economic growth.14

Modern formulations of the City upon a Hill metaphor from Ronald Reagan’s time onward have avoided these complexities and misapplied the label. Indeed, Reagan added the adjective shining to the image of the City, thus converting it from a provisional singularity and warning to remain true to God’s covenant into a self-congratulatory endorsement of this-worldly success.15 As historian Daniel Rodgers has related, this story of a spiritual city as the light of the world is complicated, and the concept is a malleable one.16

Conceptualizing Chosen Nations and Peoples

Despite the mistaken modern use, it remains true that the Puritans bequeathed to eighteenth-century Americans, particularly New Englanders, the idea of the North American colonies as chosen by God for a special task. For the Puritans this circumstance came to mean New England as the elect “nation.” Puritan clergy even went so far as to contemplate the colonies as a successor “nation” to Israel in terms of God’s favor. They derived the belief in a Protestant “elect” from Britain and took the idea of chosenness and the role of providence in history as their own with the failure of the Puritan revolution in Britain and the resumption of a monarchy in 1660 associated, under the Stuarts, with Roman Catholic sympathies. As early as 1674, the Reverend Thomas Thatcher of Boston exhorted the Congregational Church: “we are the people that do succeed Israel.”17 The Reverend Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, first published in 1702, told the story of the early Pilgrim settlements and God’s providential role in their development, while chastising the inhabitants for their collective failings before God.18

In the eighteenth century, the growing material prosperity of the North American colonies fueled the persistent idea that “America,” however defined, was exceptionally endowed with resources, and the notion spread well beyond New England that the millennial kingdom prophesized in the Bible might find its critical center in that “America.” The rise of Jonathan Edwards of Connecticut as a magnetic preacher in the First Great Awakening of the Calvinist churches in the 1740s encouraged these expectations, especially when he proclaimed, “The latter-day glory is probably to begin in America.”19 This was a religious prediction concerning Christ’s return but, when the American Revolution broke out in 1775–76, the established churches in New England and dissenters across the American colonies appropriated the language of a new Israel to the fledgling United States. Biblical typology was used to justify and explain the revolution. Thereby the notion arose of the United States as the chosen instrument of God.

This idea of a chosen nation is important in American exceptionalism, but chosenness has been a broader concept than seeing the United States as merely Christian. A Christian status does not mean an exceptional one, because there were known to be other Christian nation-states in Europe at the time of the American Revolution. The chosen nation idea does not necessarily rely on Protestant evangelical belief, and it is compatible with the notion of a civil religion above sectarian disputes, or even non-Christian religions.20 Unlike the idea of a Christian nation, chosenness cannot be refuted by resort to the absence of Christian provisions within the American state structure. In conception, the realm of the chosen nation is more theoretical, and more idealist; that is, chosenness becomes treated as immanent in history.21

On the other hand, from an empirical viewpoint, any number of cases can be enumerated to show that the idea of chosenness has been widely spread internationally, just as the idea of a Christian nation has. Ethiopia has perhaps as strong a claim as any to an enduring chosen status running back to biblical times. Its claim came with a Hebraic connection through the Old Testament and with early Christian conversion. One could also cite Protestant Britain of the seventeenth century, Israel, Armenia and Georgia (in the Caucuses), the nineteenth-century Boer states in southern Africa, and the early Dutch Republic, among others. Owing to their common derivation from Calvinism, Puritans and Boers staked a covenantal status, but some other “national” claims are not Christian at all.22 Japanese exceptionalism has been often cast as uniqueness enhanced by an urge to express ethnic superiority over neighbor nations such as China and Korea, but the Japanese Empire also exhibited a chosen status. Japanese society was considered “like no other,” and Japanese culture invoked “the protection of the deities” under a “divine nation,” but without acceptance of a “universalistic mission.”23 Whether Christian or not, some groups have applied the old idea of chosenness to a modern nation-state, as Americans have done, while others, such as Rastafarians and Mennonites, have asserted a chosen people status without making the transition to nation. Within the United States, the idea of a chosen people has also applied to enslaved and emancipated African Americans in the nineteenth-century South.24 Either as a people or as a nation, in no respect were Americans exceptional in claiming chosenness. Only the history of how the idea applied in practice could possibly rank as such.

Preachers and politicians in the early republic drew on the Puritan legacy of chosenness to assert a special status for the United States but applied it to political and ideological purposes. Some evocations stressed parallels in practical action. The legitimacy of the republic’s legal foundations, like many other things, became the subject of biblical analogy in the new republic.25 Second U.S. president John Adams noted that, like the United States, “the government of the Hebrews, instituted by God, had a judge, the great Sanhedrim, and general assemblies of the people.” With this rhetorical flourish, Adams could assert a tendentious Hebraic parallel with the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution. Others suggested deeper links indicating a divine providence. New England clergy and politicians found matches with the troubles of the Jewish people in “ancient Israel.” Writers and sermonizers proclaimed that the situation of the American people in the Revolutionary War was similar to the delivery of the Jews out of Egyptian bondage in biblical times.26 The Reverend John Cushing of Massachusetts made this point through a Fourth of July oration...