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The Myth of American Exceptionalism

Yale University Press

Chapter One

It has been our fate as a nation not to have an ideology, but to be one. Richard Hofstadter

Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us."

The sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered by John Winthrop on the eve of the Massachusetts Bay Company's sailing for New England in 1630 has been called "the greatest sermon of the millennium" and "a kind of Ur-text of American literature," though curiously there is not a single contemporary reference to anyone's having heard it delivered, and in fact the precise circumstances under which it was delivered are therefore unsure. It has certainly become one of the sacred texts of that account of American history known as "American Exceptionalism."

In recent years, Winthrop's sermon has been made popular by President Ronald Reagan, who quoted it, to the thrilled approval of hispolitical partisans, in one of his most successful speeches, to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974. He returned to the theme in his last address from the White House in January 1989. The image clearly meant a great deal to him, and it has meant a lot to his followers. "In my mind," he explained as he left office, "it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, 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. That's how I saw it and see it still."

Reagan and others have spoken and written as if John Winthrop had a vision of a republic that would be an exemplar and a model to the world. That is, however, a serious misunderstanding of who Winthrop was, of what he was saying, and of what he probably had in mind. Of course, if it is seen as a prophecy of the history of the United States, it is an anachronism. Winthrop was not an American. He was an Englishman, albeit one whose religious beliefs put him at odds with the contemporary government of King Charles I and his domineering archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Winthrop later went out of his way to emphasize that he saw himself as a loyal subject of the English king, and that the colony he helped to found was, by his wish, subject to the laws of England. Winthrop and the political party to which he belonged decided to fight a king whom they saw as a "man of blood," and they defeated and killed him. That did not make them any the less Englishmen. The values they fought for, freedom and justice, are not exceptionally American values.

Reagan imagined Winthrop preaching on board the Arabella off the coast of Massachusetts. In fact the ship was called Arbella. The sermon was probably preached in the church of the Holy Rood in Southampton, England, or perhaps on board the good ship Arbella in the nearby port. It was certainly preached before Winthrop ever set foot in North America.

More important, he was of course not preaching to Americans about the future of the United States of America. There were no Americans then, and the foundation of the United States was a century and a half in the future. Most historians would agree that there was no distinctively American consciousness for at least a century after Winthrop's sermon. Winthrop could not therefore have anticipated that the United States would be as a city upon a hill. He could not possibly have imagined a United States. He was preaching to Englishmen, and expressing his determination that the colony, or in contemporary language the "plantation," that he and his friends were setting out to found, would be an example to other English colonies, in North America and elsewhere. At the time, it is interesting to reflect that those British colonies included those settled by Scots Protestants in northern Ireland. We have no means of knowing whether Winthrop was thinking specifically of them. But in their context and their real meaning the sermon that Winthrop preached and the sermon that Ronald Reagan used to inspire a conservative shift in American politics some 350 years later have virtually nothing in common.

Another of the beloved texts of American exceptionalism also looks a little different when its context is examined. "What then is the American, this new man?" asked J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur in a book first published in 1782, just before the triumph of the American Revolution. He answered himself in words that have resonated for generations of American patriots. "He is an American, who, leaving behind all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys, and the new rank he holds." Ringing words, indeed. But knowledge of their author and their context significantly alters their meaning.

Crèvecoeur (his real name was Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur) described himself as an "American farmer," and it is safe to say that ninety-nine of a hundred Americans who have encountered his famous statement have assumed that he either was, or in due course became, an immigrant to the United States and lived the rest of his life in Jeffersonian simplicity in America. Yet that was not the case. He was a French nobleman who had lived in England and in Canada and who before the Revolution bought an estate of some three hundred acres in upstate New York, which he farmed with the help of slaves, though he implies in his writing that he disapproved of slavery as an institution. He was naturalized there in 1764, not, therefore, as an American, but as a British subject. In 1769 he married an American woman, Mehitabel Tippett, by whom he had three children. In 1780 he returned to France, as he said, to secure his inheritance and his estates to his children. That inheritance, incidentally, included a title of the kind that is forbidden by the United States Constitution.

After independence, through the influence of the countess of Houdetot, the former mistress of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was made the French consul in New York and remained for seven years a Frenchman in New York. In 1790 he returned to France for good, and there frequented the most aristocratic society. His friends included the king's former minister Turgot and Turgot's sister, the duchess de Beauvilliers, as well as the La Rochefoucaulds, Rohan-Chabots and the rest of the gratin, the "upper crust," of French royalist society. Crèvecoeur was a friend of Franklin's and an acquaintance of Jefferson's. He loved the American wilderness and wrote a delightful travel book, which he dedicated to the Abbé Raynal as if it were written by "a simple cultivator of the earth." He was sympathetic to the poor immigrants from Scotland or from Germany he met, and emphatic about how much better their life would be in America than in Europe. But he did not join them.

So far from deciding himself to become "this new man," he chose to spend the last twenty-three years of his life in Paris and on his estates, in the heart of that aristocratic milieu whose corruptions he had pretended to reject. In this he was not alone but was writing in the then-fashionable tradition of praising the simple life of the backwoods. In the age of the French Revolution other writers from aristocratic backgrounds, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the author of Paul et Virginie, and the great Francois-René de Chateaubriand, not to mention in the next generation Alexis de Tocqueville, praised the simplicity of the frontier but managed to resist its temptations.

A few years after the death of Crèvecoeur, John Quincy Adams, son of the second president of the United States, made a bold claim on behalf of the settlers who later came to be known as the Pilgrim Fathers, which has also entered the litany of exceptionalism. William Bradford, in his wonderful account of the settlement of Plymouth Plantation, describes how he and his friends decided to make what he called a "combination," or as we might say a compact or a covenant, "occasioned partly by the discontented and mutinous speeches" let fall by some of the "strangers"-those among the passengers, that is, who were not part of the separatist congregation that had traveled first from England to Leiden, in Holland, and then to the coast of New England.

There is reason to believe that there was another reason for this "combination." The Mayflower had been navigating for a landfall around the mouth of the Hudson, but its skipper had been forced to turn back by heavy seas at Pollock Rip, the dangerous shoal off the southern elbow of Cape Cod. That meant that the Pilgrims would be obliged to settle north of the boundary of the English colony of Virginia, which might lead to trouble. So William Brewster, Bradford, and the other leaders of the expedition made virtually all the adult males on board the Mayflower sign the following declaration:

We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony.

That is the text of what has come to be called the Mayflower Compact. Now listen to what John Quincy Adams had to say about it. It was, said the sixth president, "perhaps, the only instance in human history of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government."

In other words, Adams was presenting the Mayflower Compact as a real, historical example of the imaginary "social contract" posited by political theorists, from Hobbes by way of John Locke to Rousseau, as the foundation of political society. With all due respect to the sixth president of the United States, that is anachronistic nonsense.

Brewster, Bradford, and their friends were not penning a state paper, still less prefiguring a future constitution. Caught, as they emerged from a storm-tossed voyage across the Atlantic, between the danger of mutiny from some of their own party and the possibility of legal difficulty because the weather might force them to settle where they had no legal right to do so, they had taken the precaution of getting the members of their party, half of whom would be dead of disease within three or four months, to agree to stick together. In it, they went out of their way to proclaim their loyalty to the king of England. It was a practical business document, and it also no doubt reflected the custom among separatist churches like the one the Pilgrims (as Bradford called them in retrospect) meant to found somewhere near Cape Cod Bay, of binding its members to a covenant. That was not nothing, but that was all.

Even more extravagant is the interpretation put by one of the greatest of modern historians of the religious and literary culture of New England, the Harvard professor Perry Miller. In 1952 Miller gave a lecture at Brown University for which he borrowed his title, Errand into the Wilderness, from a sermon preached by the Reverend Samuel Danforth in 1670. Miller explains that his thinking on the subject of "the massive narrative of the movement of European culture into" what he interestingly called "the vacant wilderness of America" began in Africa, where he found himself supervising the unloading of drums of American oil. (That was, of course, in the days when Africa imported oil from America, rather than exporting it to America.) In 1952 it might have seemed pedantic to point out that the wilderness was not quite vacant. That is not the case now. Miller's massive erudition in the literature of Puritan New England led him to conclude that the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Company was "not just an organization of immigrants seeking advantage and opportunity." It was "an essential maneuver in the drama of Christendom."

The Bay Company was not a battered remnant of suffering Separatists thrown up on a rocky shore; it was an organized task force of Christians, executing a flank attack on the corruptions of Christendom. These Puritans did not flee to America; they went in order to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe.... This was the large unspoken assumption in the errand of 1630: if the conscious intention were realized, not only would a federated Jehovah bless the new land, but He would bring back these temporary colonials to govern England.

Now this is not as baldly anachronistic as many modern citations of John Winthrop's Arbella sermon or John Quincy Adams's interpretation of the Mayflower Compact. Miller was correct in pointing out that the Massachusetts Bay Company was very different in its personnel and its motivation from the Pilgrim Fathers who founded Plymouth. The Pilgrims were a tiny band of impoverished provincial zealots, driven out of England by fear of persecution first to liberal Holland, and then out of Holland mainly by fear that, after the twelve-year truce ended, Spanish victories in Holland would hand them over (the unhappy word rendition comes to mind) to the mercies of the Spanish Inquisition. The "great migration" of the Bay Company, on the other hand, was backed and led by some of the most powerful and incidentally the wealthiest members of the Protestant and parliamentary party that actually would, within little more than a decade, challenge the king, defeat him in the field, and eventually put him to death on a scaffold outside the banqueting hall of his own palace of Whitehall. Miller was a learned and talented historian. But it is profoundly unhistorical to wish "unspoken assumptions" onto groups of long-dead actors without evidence.

Ideology was involved, however, and power politics, not only in 1630 but also in 1952. Perry Miller was writing at the height of the Cold War, when it was important to equip Europe with an ideology to rival that of Soviet communism. In fact, with contemporaries like Daniel Boorstin and the Canadian SacVan Bercovitz, Miller was one of the founders of the academic discipline of "American Studies," which in its early days did indeed seek to supply the United States with an official ideology to combat the influence of communism. It was all the easier, too, in 1952 to emphasize the exceptional character of American civilization because at that time the United States was, more than ever before or since, incomparably more prosperous than any other nation on earth, untainted, thanks largely to Franklin D. Roosevelt, by any serious kowtowing to fascism, and virtually unchallenged in its economic and military power.

Even so, the claims of 1950s American intellectuals, most of whom thought of themselves as liberals, read extravagantly today. Max Lerner published in 1957 a book, more than one thousand pages long, called America as a Civilization. In dithyrambic rhythms he lauded the exceptional American:

He is the double figure in Marlowe, of Tamerlane and Dr. Faustus, the one sweeping like a footloose barbarian across the plains to overleap the barriers of earlier civilization, the other breaking the taboos against knowledge and experience, even at the cost of his soul.... Thus the great themes of the Renaissance and the Reformation are fulfilled in the American as the archetypal modern man-the discovery of new areas, the charting of skies, the lure of power, the realization of self in works, the magic of science, the consciousness of the individual, the sense of the unity of history.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Myth of American Exceptionalism by GODFREY HODGSON Copyright © 2009 by Godfrey Hodgson. Excerpted by permission.
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