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THE NEW ISRAEL: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

“For fifty years the inhabitants of the United States have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They ... have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race.” — Alexis de Tocqueville AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WHITE JACKET; OR, THE WORLD IN A MAN-OF-WAR: Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birth-right —embracing one continent of earth— God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom. At a period when other nations have but lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we can not do a good to America but we give alms to the world.

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1630

In England, William Coddington was chosen as an Assistant of the company (Assistant Judge of Court of Colony of Massachusetts Bay) before his embarkation with John Winthrop. He had lived at Boston in County Lincoln, where the record of St. Botolph’s church shows that he and his wife Mary Moseley Coddington, daughter of Richard Moseley of Ouseden, in County Suffolk had Michael Coddington, baptized on March 8, 1627, who died in two weeks, and Samuel Coddington, born on April 17, 1628, buried on August 21, 1629.

The Winthrop fleet that brought “the Great Emigration” of this year comprised 11 vessels: • Arbella (the flagship) •Ambrose • William and Francis • Talbot • Hopewell • Jewel • Whale •Charles • Success • Mayflower •Trial

Altogether the fleet brought about 700 colonists — here is an attempt at reconstructing a passenger list.

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• DANIEL ABBOTT Cambridge • ROBERT ABELL of Hemington, Leicestershire Boston • WILLIAM AGAR probably of Nazing, Essex Watertown • GEORGE ALCOCK probably of Leicestershire Roxbury • Mrs. - - - Alcock • FRANCIS ALEWORTH • THOMAS ANDREW Watertown • SAMUEL ARCHER Salem • WILLIAM ASPINWALL of Manchester, Leicestershire Boston • Mrs. Elizabeth Aspinwall • Edward Aspinwall • JOHN AUDLEY Boston • JOHN BAKER Charlestown • Mrs. Charity Baker • WILLIAM BALSTON Boston • Mrs. Elizabeth Balston • WILLIAM BARSHAM Watertown • THOMAS BARTLETT Watertown • GREGORY BAXTER perhaps of Sporle, Norfolk Roxbury • WILLIAM BEAMSLEY Boston • Mrs. Anne Beamsley • THOMAS BEECHER of Stepney, Middlesex Charlestown • Mrs. Christian Beecher • EDWARD BELCHER of Guilsborough, Northamptonshire Boston • Mrs. Christian Belcher • Edward Belcher, Jr. • EDWARD BENDALL of Southwark, county Surrey Boston • Mrs. Anne Bendall • JOHN BENHAM Dorchester • JOHN BIGGES of Groton, county Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Mary Bigges • JOHN BLACK Charlestown • JOHN BOGGUST probably of Boxted, Essex • JOHN BOSWELL of London Boston • ZACCHEUS BOSWORTH of Stowe, IX Churches, county Northants Boston • GARRET BOURNE Boston • NATHANIEL BOWMAN Watertown • Mrs. Anna Bowman • SIMON BRADSTREET of Horbling, county Lincoln Cambridge • Mrs. Anne Bradstreet • BENJAMIN BRAND probably of Edwardston, county Suffolk Boston • AUGUSTINE BRATCHER Charlestown • ...... BREASE probably of Edwardston, county Suffolk • WILLIAM BRENTON of Hammersmith, county Middlesex Boston • Isabel Brett • HENRY BRIGHT of Bury Saint Edmunds, county Suffolk Watertown

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• ABRAHAM BROWNE of Hawkdon, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs. Lydia Browne • JAMES BROWNE Boston • RICHARD BROWNE of Hawkdon, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs. Elizabeth Browne • George Browne • Richard Browne, Jr. • WILLIAM BUCKLAND of Essex Boston, Hingham, and Rehoboth • RICHARD BUGBY perhaps Saint John Hackney, Middlesex Roxbury • Mrs. Judith Bugby • RICHARD BULGAR Boston • Mrs..... Bulgar • WILLIAM BURNELL Boston • JEHU BURR probably of Essex Roxbury and Fairfield, Connecticut • Mrs...... Burr • Jehu Burr • ROBERT BURROUGHS • JOHN CABLE probably of Essex Dorchester and Fairfield • THOMAS CAKEBREAD of Hatfield Broadoak, Essex Dedham • Mrs. Sarah Cakebread • CHARLES CHADWICK Watertown • Mrs. Elizabeth Chadwick • Anne Chambers • WILLIAM CHASE probably of county Essex Roxbury • Margery Chauner • WILLIAM CHEESEBROUGHof Boston, Lincolnshire Boston, Rehoboth • Mrs. Anne Cheesebrough • Sarah Cheesebrough • Peter Cheesebrough • Samuel Cheesebrough • Nathaniel Cheesebrough • EPHRAIM CHILD of Bury Saint Edmunds, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs. Elizabeth Child • RICHARD CHURCH perhaps of Polstead, Suffolk Boston • JOHN CLARKE of county Suffolk Boston • WILLIAM CLARKE of London Watertown • Mrs. Elizabeth Clarke • RICHARD CLOUGH Charlestown • .... COBBETT • WILLIAM CODDINGTON of Boston, Lincolnshire Boston and Newport • Mrs. Mary Coddington • WILLIAM COLBRON of Brentwood, Essex Boston • Mrs. Margery Colbron • ANTHONY COLBY Boston and Salisbury • Mrs. Susanna Colby • WILLIAM FROTHINGHAMof Holderness, Yorkshire Charlestown

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• Mrs. Anne Frothingham • JOHN GAGE probably of Polstead, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Amy Gage • WILLIAM GAGER of Suffolk, surgeon Charlestown • HUGH GARRETT Charlestown • RICHARD GARRETT probably of Chelmsford, Essex Boston • Mrs...... Garrett • Hannah Garrett • ..... Garrett • CHRISTOPHER GIBSON of Wendover, county Bucks Dorchester • Mrs. Mary Gibson • Elizabeth Gibson of Saint Andrew the Great, Cambridge Salem • RALPH GLOVER of London Boston • JOHN GLOVER of Rainhill, Lancashire Dorchester • Mrs. Anne Glover • THOMAS GOLDTHWAITE Roxbury • Mrs. Elizabeth Goldthwaite • HENRY GOSNALL probably of Bury Saint Edmunds, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Mary Gosnall • JOHN GOSSE (GOFFE) Watertown • Mrs. Sarah Gosse • JOHN GOULWORTH • RICHARD GRIDLEY of Groton, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Grace Gridley • Joseph Gridley • Abraham Gridley • Bridget Giver of Saffron Walden, Essex Boston • GARRETT HADDON Cambridge, Salisbury • Mrs. Margaret Haddon • ROBERT HALE Charlestown •Mrs. Joan Hale • JOHN HALL of Whitechapel, London Charlestown •Mrs. Joan Hall • Mrs. Phillippa Hammond • ROBERT HARDING probably of Boreham, Essex Boston • THOMAS HARRIS Charlestown • Mrs. Elizabeth Harris • JOHN COLE of Groton, Suffolk Boston • RICE COLE Charlestown • Mrs. Arnold Cole • ROBERT COLE of Navistock, Essex Roxbury • SAMUEL COLE of Mersey, Essex Boston • Mrs. Anne Cole • EDWARD CONVERSE probably of Shenfield, Essex Charlestown • Mrs. Sarah Converse • Phineas Converse

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• John Converse • Josiah Converse • James Converse • Margaret Cooke • WILLIAM COWLISHAW of Nottingham Boston • Mrs. Anne Cowlishaw • JOHN CRABB • GRIFFIN CRAFTS Roxbury • Mrs. Alice Crafts • Hannah Crafts • JOHN CRANWELL of Woodbridge, Suffolk Boston • BENJAMIN CRIBB • JAMES CRUGOTT • WILLIAM DADY probably of Wanstead, Essex Charlestown • Mrs. Dorothy Dady • EDWARD DEEKES Charlestown • Mrs. Jane Deekes • JOHN DEVEREUX probably of Stoke by Nayland, Suffolk • ROBERT DIFFY Watertown • JOHN DILLINGHAM of Bitteswell, Leicestershire Boston • Mrs. Sarah Dillingham • Sarah Dillingham • WILLIAM DIXON Boston and York, Maine • JOHN DOGGETT Watertown and Martha’s Vineyard • Mrs...... Doggett • John Doggett • Thomas Doggett • JAMES DOWNING • THOMAS DUDLEY of Yardley, Northamptonshire Cambridge • Mrs. Dorothy Dudley • Samuel Dudley • Anne Dudley • Patience Dudley • Sarah Dudley • Mercy Dudley • Thomas Dudley • ...... DUTTON • JOHN EDMONDS Boston • Mrs. Mary Edmonds • BIGOD EGGLESTON of Settrington, Yorkshire Dorchester, Windsor • ARTHUR ELLIS • JOHN ELSTON Salem • THOMAS FAYERWEATHER Boston • ROBERT FEAKE of London, goldsmith Watertown • CHARLES FIENNES • ABRAHAM FINCH of Yorkshire (?) Watertown

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• Abraham Finch, Jr. • Daniel Finch • John Finch • JOHN FIRMAN of Nayland, Suffolk Watertown • GILES FIRMIN of Nayland, Suffolk • Mrs. Martha Firmin • EDWARD FITZRANDOLPHof Sutton in Ashfield, Notts Scituate • THOMAS FOX Cambridge • RICHARD FOXWELL probably of London, tailor Boston, Barnstable • Mrs...... Foxier • John Foxwell • SAMUEL FREEMAN of St. Anne, Blackfriars, London Watertown • Mrs. Apphia Freeman • Henry Freeman • THOMAS FRENCH of Assington, Suffolk Boston and Ipswich • Mrs. Susan French • Thomas French, Jr. • Alice French • Dorcas French • Susan French • Anne French • John French • Mary French • HENRY HARWOOD probably of Shenfield, Essex Boston • Mrs. Elizabeth Harwood • .... HAWKE • JOHN HAWKINS • WILLIAM HAWTHORNE of Binfield, Berks Dorchester and Salem • FRANCIS HESSELDEN • Margaret Hoames • (ATHERTON) HOFFE • EDWARD HOPWOOD • JOHN HORNE Salem • SAMUEL HOSIER of Colchester, Essex Watertown • THOMAS HOWLETT of county Suffolk Boston • WILLIAM HUDSON probably of Chatham, Kent Boston • Mrs. Susan Hudson • Francis Hudson • William Hudson • WILLIAM HULBIRT Boston and Northampton • RICHARD HUTCHINS • GEORGE HUTCHINSON of London Charlestown • Mrs. Margaret Hutchinson • THOMAS HUTCHINSON of London Charlestown • MATTHIAS IJONS probably of Roxwell, Essex Boston • Mrs. Anne Lyons

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• EDMUND JAMES of Earls Barton, Northants Watertown • Mrs. Reana James • THOMAS JAMES of Earls Barton, Northants Salem • Mrs. Elizabeth James • WILLIAM JAMES of Earls Barton, Northants Salem • Mrs. Elizabeth James • JOHN JARVIS Boston • DAVY JOHNSON Dorchester • FRANCIS JOHNSON of London Salem • Mrs. Joan Johnson • ISAAC JOHNSON of Clipsham, Rutland Boston • Lady Arbella Johnson • JOHN JOHNSON Roxbury • Mrs. Margaret Johnson • RICHARD JOHNSON Charlestown • Mrs. Alice Johnson • Bethia Jones Boston • EDWARD JONES of Chester, mercer Charlestown • LEWIS KIDBY of Groton, Suffolk Boston • Mrs.... Kidby • .....Kidby • Edward Kidby • HENRY KINGSBURY of Groton, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Margaret Kingsbury • Henry Kingsbury, Jr. • THOMAS KINGSBURY • NICHOLAS KNAPP probably of Bures Saint Mary, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs. Elinor Knapp • WILLIAM KNAPP probably of Bures Saint Mary, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs..... Knapp • John Knapp • Anne Knapp • Judith Knapp • Mary Knapp • James Knapp • John Knapp • William Knapp, Jr. • GEORGE KNOWER of London Charlestown • THOMAS KNOWER of London, clothier Charlestown • EDWARD LAMB Watertown • THOMAS LAMB Roxbury • Mrs. Elizabeth Lamb • Thomas Lamb, Jr. • John Lamb • Samuel Lamb • ROGER LAMB

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• HENRY LAWSON • WILLIAM LEARNED probably of Bermondsey, Surrey Charlestown • Mrs. Judith Learned • WILLIAM LEATHERLAND Boston • JOHN LEGGE Lynn • EDMOND LOCKWOOD of Combs, Suffolk Cambridge • Mrs. Elizabeth Lockwood • ...... Lockwood • ROBERT LOCKWOOD of Combs, Suffolk Watertown • RICHARD LYNTON probably from London Watertown • Mrs...... Lynton • Anna Lynton • Lydia Lynton •HENRY LYNN Boston •Mrs. Sarah Lynn • JOHN MASTERS Watertown • Mrs. Jane Masters • Sarah Masters • Lydia Masters • Elizabeth Masters • Nathaniel Masters • Abraham Masters • THOMAS MATSON of London, gunsmith Boston • Mrs. Amy Matson • THOMAS MAYHEW of Tisbury, Wilts Watertown, Martha’s Vineyard • Mrs...... Mayhew • Thomas Mayhew, Jr. • (ALEXANDER) MILLER probably the servant of Israel Stoughton • RICHARD MILLET • JOHN MILLS probably of Lavenham, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Susan Mills • Joy Mills • Mary Mills • John Mills • Susanna Mills • Recompense Mills • ROGER MOREY of Dorsetshire Salem • RALPH MORLEY of London Charlestown • Mrs. Katherine Morley • RICHARD MORRIS probably of London Boston • Mrs. Leonora Morris • THOMAS MORRIS probably of Nottingham Boston • Mrs. Sarah Morris • Mary Morton • THOMAS MOULTON Charlestown • Mrs. Jane Moulton

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• RALPH MOUSALL probably of London Charlestown • Mrs. Alice Mousall • THOMAS MUNT probably of Colchester, Essex Boston •Mrs. Dorothy Munt • GREGORY NASH Charlestown • Mrs...... Nash • Anne Needham • ..... NICOLLS • INCREASE NOWELL of London Charlestown • Mrs. Parnell Nowell • JOHN ODLIN (see Audley) • JOHN PAGE of Dedham, Essex Watertown • Mrs. Phoebe Page • John Page, Jr. •Daniel Page • THOMAS PAINTER Boston and Hingham • Mrs. Katherine Painter • ABRAHAM PALMER of Canterbury, Kent Charlestown • Mrs. Grace Palmer • EDWARD PALSFORD • RICHARD PALSGRAVE probably of London Charlestown • Mrs. Anne Palsgrave • John Palsgrave • Anna Palsgrave • Mary Palsgrave • Sarah Palsgrave • ROBERT PARKE probably of Bures, county Suffolk • Mrs. Martha Parke • Thomas Parke • ...... Parke • ...... Parke • ...... Parke • ROBERTPARKER Boston • Capt. DANIEL PATRICK Watertown • Mrs...... Patrick • WILLIAM PELHAM Boston • JAMES PEMBERTON Charlestown • Mrs. Alice Pemberton • JOHN PEMBERTON Boston • Mrs. Elizabeth Pemberton •JAMES PENN Boston • Mrs. Katherine Penn • WILLIAM PENN of Birmingham, Warwick Charlestown • JAMES PENNIMAN of Widford, county Essex Boston • Mrs. Lydia Penniman • ISAAC PERRY Boston

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• Anne Pettit Salem • Rev. GEORGE PHILLIPS of Raynham, Norfolk Watertown • Mrs...... Phillips • Samuel Phillips • Abigail Phillips • Elizabeth Phillips • JOHN PHILLIPS Dorchester • Mrs. Joan Phillips • JOHN PHILLIPS Plymouth • JOHN PICKERING probably of Suffolk Cambridge • Mrs. Esther Pickering • George Pickering • John Pickering • Joan Pickering • JOHN PICKWORTH • JOHN PIERCE Dorchester • Mrs. Parnell Pierce • Experience Pierce • Mercy Pierce • Samuel Pierce • JOSIAH PLAISTOW of Ramsden Crays, Essex Boston • Mrs. ANNE POLLARD came from Saffron Walden, Essex, as a girl • JOHN POND of Groton, Suffolk Boston • ROBERT POND of Groton, Suffolk Dorchester • Mrs. Mary Pond • JOHN PORTER perhaps of Bromfield, Essex Roxbury • Mrs. Margaret Porter • ...... Porter • ...... Porter • ...... Porter • ...... Porter • ABRAHAM PRATT of London, surgeon Roxbury •Mrs. Jane Pratt • WILLIAM PYNCHON of Writtle, Essex Dorchester • Mrs. Agnes Pynchon • John Pynchon • Anne Pynchon • Mary Pynchon • Margaret Pynchon • EDWARD RAINSFORD Dorchester • Mrs...... Rainsford • PHILIP RATCLIFFE probably of London Salem • THOMAS RAWLINS Roxbury • Mrs. Mary Rawlins • Thomas Rawlins • Nathaniel Rawlins

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• John Rawlins • Joan Rawlins • Mary Rawlins • THOMAS READE of Wickford, Essex Salem • Mrs. Priscilla Reade • JOSEPH READING Boston • MILES READING Boston • .... REEDER • JOHN REVELL • ROBERT REYNOLDS probably of Boxford, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Mary Reynolds • Nathaniel Reynolds • Ruth Reynolds • Tabitha Reynolds • Sarah Reynolds • EZEKIEL RICHARDSON of Westmill, county Herts Charlestown • Mrs. Susanna Richardson • ROBERT ROYCE perhaps of Exning, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Elizabeth Royce • JOHN RUGGLES probably of Glemsford, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Frances Ruggles • ...... Ruggles • JEFFREY RUGGLES of Sudbury, Suffolk • Mrs. Margaret Ruggles • JOHN SALES of Lavenham, Suffolk Charlestown • Mrs...... Sales • Phoebe Sales • Sir RICHARD SALTONSTALLof London Watertown • Richard Saltonstall, Jr. • Samuel Saltonstall • Robert Saltonstall • Rosamond Saltonstall • Grace Saltonstall • ROBERT SAMPSON • JOHN SANFORD perhaps of High Ongar, Essex Boston • Rev. GILES SAXTON of Yorkshire Charlestown • ROBERT SCOTT Boston • JOHN SEAMAN Watertown • ROBERT SEELY Watertown • ...... SARGEANT • ROBERT SHARPE of Roxwell, Essex Boston • THOMAS SHARPE of London, leather-seller Boston • Mrs...... Sharpe • ...... Sharpe • Thomas Sharpe • ...... SHUT

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• ...... SIMPSON • ...... SMEAD of Coggeshall, Essex • Mrs. Judith Smead • William Smead • ...... SMITH of Buxhall, Suffolk • Mrs..... Smith • ...... Smith • ...... Smith • FRANCIS SMYTH perhaps of Dunmow, Essex Roxbury • Mrs..... Smyth • ISAAC STEARNS of Stoke Nayland, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs. Mary Stearns • John Stearns • Abigail Stearns • Elizabeth Stearns • Hannah Stearns • ELIAS STILEMAN of Saint Andrew Undershaft, London Salem • Mrs. Judith Stileman • Elias Stileman, Jr. • ISRAEL STOUGHTON of Coggeshall, Essex Dorchester • Mrs. Elizabeth Stoughton • THOMAS STOUGHTON of Coggeshall, Essex Dorchester • Mrs..... Stoughton • WILLIAM SUMNER of Bicester, Oxford Dorchester • Mrs. Mary Sumner • William Sumner, Jr. • PHILIP SWADDON Watertown • Anna Swanson • WILLIAM TALMADGE of Newton Stacey, Hants Boston • Mrs...... • GREGORY TAYLOR Watertown • Mrs. Achsah Taylor • JOHN TAYLOR of Haverhill, Suffolk Boston • Mrs...... Taylor • ...... Taylor • WILLIAM TIMEWELL • EDWARD TOMLINS of London Lynn • NATHANIEL TURNER probably of London Saugus • ROBERT TURNER probably of Southwark, Surrey Boston • ARTHUR TYNDAL of Great Maplestead, Essex Boston • Capt. JOHN UNDERHILL of Holland Boston • Mrs. Helen Underhill • WILLIAM VASSALL of Prittlewell, Essex Charlestown • Mrs. Anne Vassall • Judith Vassall • Francis Vassall

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• John Vassall • Anne Vassall • THOMAS WADE • ROBERT WALKER of Manchester, Lancashire Boston •Mrs. Sarah Walker • ...... WALL • Mrs...... Wall • THOMAS WARD probably of Bedingham, Norfolk Dedham • JOHN WARREN of Nayland, Suffolk Watertown • Mrs. Margaret Warren • WILLIAM WATERBURY of Sudbury, Suffolk Boston • Mrs. Alice Waterbury • JOHN WATERS of Nayland, Suffolk Charlestown • Mrs. Frances Waters •Mary Waters • ...... Waters • ...... Waters • ...... WEAVER • RICHARD WEBB of Nayland, Suffolk Cambridge • Mrs. Elizabeth Webb • JONAS WEED Watertown • JOIST WEILLUST of Holland Boston • ROBERT WELDON Charlestown • Mrs. Elizabeth Weldon • FRANCIS WESTON Salem • Mrs. Margaret Weston • Lucy Weston • SAMUEL WILBORE Boston • Mrs. Anne Wilbore • Mrs. PRUDENCE WILKINSON Charlestown • Sarah Wilkinson • John Wilkinson • Elizabeth Wilkinson • THOMAS WILLIAMS Charlestown • THOMAS WILLIAMS als HARRIS • Robert Williams • ...... WILSBY • Rev. JOHN WILSON of Sudbury, Suffolk Boston • DAVID WILTON Dorchester • Elizabeth Wing • JOHN WINTHROP of Croton, Suffolk Boston • Henry Winthrop • Stephen Winthrop • Samuel Winthrop • WILLIAM WOODS Boston • JOHN WOOLRICH probably of London Charlestown

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• Mrs. Sarah Woolrich • ...... WORMWOOD • RICHARD WRIGHT of Stepney, Middlesex Boston • Mrs. Margaret Wright • Elinor Wright

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• ROBERT WRIGHT of London Boston

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1637

The Council of the Narragansett of the bay of Rhode Island decided to ally with the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut in its war against the Mohegan tribe known locally as the “Pequot” or “Mankillers” (they knew themselves not as mankillers but as “the fox people”). Because of their location outside the boundaries of the United Puritan Colonies, their political and military autonomy, and the peculiar religious views of the most prominent white minister in their midst, the Reverend Roger Williams, Narragansett tribespeople were at that time able to discourage a flock of other ministers who were attempting to dissuade them from their religion.

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The Massachusetts militia massacred a Pequot village at Mystic. They killed about 600; taking 30 males offshore, they drowned them in the sort of event that is described as a “noyage”; their women and children were sold or handed around as slaves.1

(For most nations, wars are about power and self-interest, but for Americans, they have always been about righteousness. American look at war as an epic struggle between good and evil. As Dubya recently put the

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matter, it is up to our nation “to defend the hopes of all mankind.” This sort of attitude began long before we were a nation, for in 1630 Governor John Winthrop had planted a great Biblical aspiration on American soil: “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” It is no accident that soon afterward his colonists had launched this war against Indian “devil worshippers.” The bodies of so many “frying in the fire,” according to William Bradford, seemed “a sweet sacrifice to God.” The anxieties of the Indian conflicts would next lead the society straight into internal hunts for “witches.” American Exceptionalism means, it seems, never needing to say that you are sorry.)

The Reverend Roger Williams wrote to Governor John Winthrop about the successful expedition against the “Pequot” or “Fox People”: “It having again pleased the Most High to put into our hands another miserable

1. A few Pequot warriors would elude capture and obtain refuge with other New England Algonquin groups. Most of those captured were executed but the Reverend Williams proposed that as a humanitarian measure, instead, they should be sold for a profit, and so about 1,400 persons would be exported. The peace treaty would systematically dismember what remained of the tribe in a manner designed to ensure that the Pequot could no longer function as a cohesive grouping. Some women and children would be distributed as “servants” to white households. The Narragansett and Eastern Niantic would accept some of the Pequot women and children, and one band was exiled to Long Island and became subject to the Metoac. For the most part, these Pequot would be absorbed by their “hosts” within a few years and would disappear. The remainder were placed under the Mohegan, and it is from this group that the two current Pequot tribes have evolved. The Mohegans would treat their Pequot guests so badly that by 1655 the English would be forced to remove them. Two reservations would be established for the Pequots in 1666 and 1683. By 1762 there would be only 140 Pequots and the decline would continue until a low point of 66 was reached as of the 1910 census. At present, the State of Connecticut recognizes two Pequot tribes: the Mashantucket and the Paucatuck. The 600 Paucatuck (Eastern Pequot) have retained the Lantern Hill Reservation (226 acres) at North Stonington but are not federally recognized. The Mashantucket (Western Pequot) received federal recognition in 1983.

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drove of Adam’s degenerate seed, and our brethren by nature, I am bold (if I may not offend in it) to request the keeping and bringing up of one of the children.”

The Pequot slaves were transported to the West Indies aboard the 1st American slave ship, the Desire.2 On its return voyage, the ship transported a cargo of African slaves to Connecticut. (Refer to A WONDERFUL VICTORY OVER THE ENEMIES OF GOD and MASSACRE AT FORT MYSTIC.) INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

Hugh Peter wrote to John Winthrop, Jr. that he had heard of a “dividend” of women and children from the Pequod captives and that he would appreciate being sent his own share, “a young woman or girl and a boy if you think good.”

2. The slave ship Desire, 120 tons, was constructed at Marblehead, Massachusetts and was one of the 1st ships, if not the very 1st, built in the colonies. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

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1656

A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, proposed that the reason why the Christians so hate the Jews must be that they were noting unsatisfactory traits in themselves, and getting rid of their self-doubts by projecting these very traits upon the other group.

Noting that one characteristic of Christian worship was a meal of human flesh and blood represented symbolically by bread and wine, the sacrament of communion, he cited as an example of this sort of projection and inversion how the Christians professed to believe that the Jews needed the innocent blood of Christian children in order to mix the dough for their unleavened Passover matzoh, and how consequently the Christians would go on a rampage out of their places of worship on a holy day, killing local Jews. ANTISEMITISM

In consideration of loans to the Commonwealth, Lord Protector Cromwell’s government belatedly granted to a group of Marranos3 who had begun to enter England from Rouen in the 1630s permission to openly practice their Jewish religion. JUDAISM

On the basis of contact first with these Jews in England, and then with native Americans in Penn’s Woods, Friend William Penn would hypothesize that the American Indians were perhaps the Lost Tribes of Israel: “A man would think himself in Dukes Place or Bury Street in London, where he seeth them.” Native American faces looked to him like the faces of Jews he had seen in England, and their languages sounded a lot to him like Hebrew. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

1775

The Reverend Elihu Spencer and the Reverend Alexander McWhorter, who had in 1766 attempted to persuade irregular congregations in North Carolina to affiliate with the Presbyterian church organization, returned to western North Carolina at the invitation of its Provincial Congress to attempt to persuade loyalist congregations to join in the revolutionary cause.

Although he wasn’t exactly the first American 10-lost-tribes-of-Israel theorist (Dan Vogel’s “INDIAN ORIGINS AND THE BOOK OF MORMON has is an extensive appendix of such theorists), in this year James Adair put out a THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS; PARTICULARLY THOSE NATIONS ADJOINING THE MISSISIPPI, EAST AND WEST FLORIDA, GEORGIA, SOUTH AND NORTH CAROLINA, AND VIRGINIA: CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR ORIGIN, LANGUAGE, MANNERS, RELIGIOUS AND CIVIL CUSTOMS, LAWS, FORM OF GOVERNMENT, PUNISHMENTS, CONDUCT IN WAR AND DOMESTIC LIFE, THEIR HABITS, DIET, AGRICULTURE, 3. Marrano = a Spanish or Portuguese Jew of the late Middle Ages who converted to Christianity, especially one forcibly converted but adhering secretly to Judaism.

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MANUFACTURES, DISEASES AND METHODS OF CURE, AND OTHER PARTICULARS, SUFFICIENT TO RENDER IT A COMPLETE INDIAN SYSTEM.

PERUSE AN EXTRACT READ THE ENTIRE BOOK

WITH OBSERVATIONS ON FORMER HISTORIANS, THE CONDUCT OF OUR COLONY GOVERNORS, SUPERINTENDENTS, MISSIONARIES, &C. ALSO AN APPENDIX, CONTAINING A DESCRIPTION OF THE FLORIDAS, AND THE MISSISIPPI LANDS, WITH THEIR PRODUCTIONS — THE BENEFITS OF COLONISING GEORGIANA, AND CIVILIZING THE INDIANS — AND THE WAY TO MAKE ALL THE COLONIES MORE VALUABLE TO THE MOTHER COUNTRY. WITH A NEW MAP OF THE COUNTRY REFERRED TO IN THE HISTORY. BY JAMES ADAIR, ESQUIRE, A TRADER WITH THE INDIANS, AND RESIDENT IN THEIR COUNTRY FOR FORTY YEARS (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, in the Poultry) that would become one of the more influential treatises of American Exceptionalism. This would be followed in 1816 by Elias Boudinot’s STAR IN THE WEST and in about 1820 by Ethan Smith’s VIEWS OF THE HEBREWS (many have presumed that Smith’s book, the most exclusively religious of these texts, must have influenced Joseph Smith’s BOOK OF MORMON, but this is problematic), and then by Josiah Priestly’s AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES. Adair was a sort of frontier white outlaw who had gone native and become Leatherstocking, and in his pseudo-anthropological text he made not only an extensive underinformed comparison between Israelite and Indian languages, but also a comparison of torture techniques, and of eating customs, and of religious beliefs — such as he knew about or supposed he knew about. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would correspond about Adair, dissing his religious theories but allowing themselves to be influenced by his disclosures about the American natives, some of which he apparently made up because he was so utterly convinced that they were really Israelites. James Fenimore Cooper would rely upon this crap and would feature a 10-tribes theorist in his 1848 novel OAK OPENINGS.

1816

Along the lines of James Adair’s 1775 HISTORY OF THE INDIANS ..., in this year Elias Boudinot put out a STAR IN THE WEST that because of its 10-lost-tribes-of-Israel theories would become a part of American Exceptionalism. This would be followed in about 1820 by Ethan Smith’s VIEWS OF THE HEBREWS (many have presumed that Smith’s book, the most exclusively religious of these texts, must have influenced Joseph Smith’s BOOK OF MORMON, but this is problematic), and then by Josiah Priestly’s AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES. James Fenimore Cooper would rely upon this crap and would feature a 10-tribes theorist in his 1848 novel OAK OPENINGS.

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1820

From this year into 1824 Alexis de Tocqueville would be living in Metz with his father while attending secondary school and the College Royal (at which he would study rhetoric and philosophy).

Abraham Lincoln also was able to attend school, but only briefly.

Along the lines of James Adair’s 1775 HISTORY OF THE INDIANS ... and Elias Boudinot’s 1816 STAR IN THE WEST, that had featured 10-lost-tribes-of-Israel theories that fueled the doctrines of American Exceptionalism, at about this point Ethan Smith put out his VIEWS OF THE HEBREWS. Many have presumed that this effort, the most exclusively religious of such texts, must have influenced Joseph Smith’s BOOK OF MORMON — but this is problematic. James Fenimore Cooper would rely upon this crap and would feature a 10-tribes theorist in his 1848 novel OAK OPENINGS.

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1839

Here’s John L. O’Sullivan on our manifest national destiny in an article “The Great Nation of Futurity” in his The United States Magazine and Democratic Review:

America is destined for better deeds.... We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will ... set limits on our onward march. Providence is with us.... The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation ... is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High — the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere — its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union ... comprising hundreds of happy millions ... governed by God’s natural law of equality, the law of brotherhood.... Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement.... [All of] this is our high destiny ... we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man.... For this blessed mission ... has America been chosen.

“For fifty years the inhabitants of the United States have been repeatedly and constantly told that they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They ... have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race.” — Alexis de Tocqueville AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

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1845

The housesitting Nathaniel Hawthornes were obliged to leave the Manse when its owner, Samuel Ripley the son of Ezra Ripley, decided to move his family back to Concord — despite the fact that Hawthorne had a book in press about the house, MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE [Per Lawrence Buell’s THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, pages 323-4]: The emotional fact of the matter, if not the literal truth, is that from the very start of the transcendentalist movement Concord was poised to become a spot to which literary pilgrims might repair in the sense of having forsaken the profane metropolis for the sacred grove; the attraction of Thoreau’s haunts as a magnet for pilgrims was an intensification of a liminoid structure extant from the time Margaret Fuller started visiting the Emersons in the 1830s, long before Thoreau became famous. Thoreau, indeed, can be said to have realized the Emersonian vision and gone beyond it. The first canonical work outside the transcendentalist ranks that celebrated Concord as a place of notable bucolic philosophers and literati was the title essay of Hawthorne’s MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE (1845), which renders in a a droller and more ruminative way the epistolary lyricism expressed, especially by Sophia Hawthorne, during the Hawthornes’ honeymoon period in the house where Waldo Emerson composed NATURE. In “Mosses,” too, we see the start of the tradition of urbanite self-consciousness about entering this liminal world and falling under its spell. Hawthorne achieves a certain distance from it by poking fun at the mystics as well as at his own self-rustication during this interval of lotus-eating. In time, the Hawthornian formula of mythic pastoralism made more earthy [??] or plausible through a bemused detachment became the well-worn formula of popular journalistic reports of Concord visits.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne left Concord for Salem, he gave Ellery Channing the blue frock coat he had worn while at Brook Farm.

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(At that point Hawthorne had gone to law in an attempt to recover the investment of $1,500.00 he had made

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upon joining this commune.)

AGENDA OF BROOK FARM: “In order more effectually to promote the great purposes of human culture; to establish the external relations of life on a basis of wisdom and purity; to apply the principles of justice and love to our social organization in accordance with the laws of Divine Providence; to substitute a system of brotherly coöperation for one of selfish competition; to secure to our children, and to those who may be entrusted to our care, the benefits of the highest, physical, intellectual, and moral education in the present state of human knowledge, the resources at our command will permit....”

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Here is what he would have to say about this transition in his life, later, in THE SCARLET LETTER

THE SCARLET LETTER: Such were some of the people with whom I now found myself connected. I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits; and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm; BROOK FARM after living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the WALDO EMERSON Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau ELLERY CHANNING about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearthstone – it was time, at length, that LONGFELLOW I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. BRONSON ALCOTT Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I looked upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.

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The following is from Hawthorne’s 1852 THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE and describes the situation at the communitarian experiment during this period:

The [“Blithedale”] Community were now beginning to form their permanent plans. One of our purposes was to erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it, after Fourier; but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my remembrance) where the great and general family should have its abiding-place. Individual members, too, who made it a point of religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were selecting sites for their cottages, by the wood-side, or on the breezy swells, or in the sheltered nook of some little valley, according as their taste might lean towards snugness or the picturesque. Altogether, by projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a show of novelty to existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil, beneath our feet, had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a hitherto unwedded bride.

Summer: Initial public mention in America of the phrase “manifest destiny”:

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“There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

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This first known use of the phrase “Manifest Destiny” occurred in an article by John L. O’Sullivan in his The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. O’Sullivan returned to his perennial theme of American white (actually, less inclusive than merely American, less inclusive than merely white, “Anglo-Saxon”) exceptionalism in an article in which he advocated continued territorial expansion of a nation dominated by this subclass of whites in a generally westward direction, a generally continental direction which definitely did not exclude great expansion southwestward (Texas) as well.

[I am] in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union ... up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it ... in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.... It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretense that the Annexation [of Texas] has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous — of military conquest ... — of aggrandizement at the expense of justice.... This view of the question is wholly unfounded.... California will, probably, next fall away from [the Federation of Mexico].... Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country.... The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on [California’s] borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plow and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meetinghouses.... [All this will happen] in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous workings of principles.... And [the Californians] will have a right to independence — to self-government — to the possession of the homes conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings and sacrifices — a better and a truer right than the artificial title of sovereignty in Mexico a thousand miles away.... The day is not distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and the Pacific would again flow together into one....

DEMOCRATIC REVIEW AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

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“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT

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1848

From this year into 1850 Waldo Emerson would be crafting his essay on “Religion,” that in 1856 he would

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publish as part of his ENGLISH TRAITS: England felt the full heat of the Christianity which fermented Europe, and drew, like the chemistry of fire, a firm line between barbarism and culture. The power of the religious sentiment put an end to human sacrifices, checked appetite, inspired the crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants, inspired self-respect, set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded liberty, created the religious architecture, –York, Newstead, Westminster, Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Beverley, and Dundee,– works to which the key is lost, with the sentiment which created them; inspired the English Bible, the liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Richard of Devizes. The priest translated the Vulgate, and translated the sanctities of old hagiology into English virtues on English ground. It was a certain affirmative or aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man awoke refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the northern savages exasperated Christianity into power. It lived by the love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found attached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite from labor for the boor on the Sabbath, and on church festivals. “The lord who compelled his boor to labor between sunset on Saturday and sunset on Sunday, forfeited him altogether.” The priest came out of the people, and sympathized with his class. The church was the mediator, check, and democratic principle, in Europe. Latimer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, Sir Harry Vane, George Fox, William Penn, Bunyan are the democrats, as well as the saints of their times. The Catholic church, thrown on this toiling, serious people, has made in fourteen centuries a massive system, close fitted to the manners and genius of the country, at once domestical and stately. In the long time, it has blended with every thing in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day of the year, every town and market and headland and monument, and has coupled itself with the almanac, that no court can be held, no field ploughed, no horse shod, without some leave from the church. All maxims of prudence or shop or farm are fixed and dated by the church. Hence, its strength in the agricultural districts. The distribution of land into parishes enforces a church sanction to every civil privilege; and the gradation of the clergy,– prelates for the rich, and curates for the poor,– with the fact that a classical education has been secured to the clergyman, makes them “the link which unites the sequestered peasantry with the intellectual advancement of the age” [Wordsworth].

According to one account (that of a tertiary historian named Daniel J. Boorstin, a personage not to be confused with the fine Thoreau scholar Daniel J. Bernstein), it was Waldo who, in constructing the phrase “the celebrities of wealth and fashion” upon the basis of the French import “Causes Célèbres” in his lecture “Natural Aristocracy” in this year, managed to originate our supremely functional modern concept of

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“celebrity”:4 Our age has produced a new kind of eminence. This is as characteristic of our culture and our century as was the divinity of Greek gods in the sixth century B.C. or the chivalry of knights and courtly lovers in the middle ages. It has not yet driven heroism, sainthood, or martyrdom completely out of our consciousness. But with every decade it overshadows them more. All older forms of greatness now survive only in the shadow of this new form. This new kind of eminence is “celebrity.” The word “celebrity” (from the latin celebritas for “multitude” or “fame” and celeber meaning “frequented,” “populous,” or “famous”) originally meant not a person but a condition — as the Oxford English Dictionary says, “the condition of being much talked about; famousness, notoriety.” In this sense its use dates from at least the early seventeenth century. Even then it had a weaker meaning than “fame” or “renown.” Matthew Arnold, for example, remarked in the nineteenth century that while the philosopher Spinoza’s followers had “celebrity,” Spinoza himself had “fame.” For us, however, “celebrity” means primarily a person — “a person of celebrity.” This usage of the world significantly dates from the early years of the Graphic Revolution, the first example being about 1850. Emerson spoke of “the celebrities of wealth and fashion” (1848). Now American dictionaries define a celebrity as “a famous or well-publicized person.” The celebrity in the distinctive modern sense could not have existed in any earlier age, or in America before the Graphic Revolution. The celebrity is a person who is known for his well- knownness. His qualities –or rather his lack of qualities– illustrate our peculiar problems. He is neither good nor bad, great nor petty. He is the human pseudo-event. He has been fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness. He is morally neutral. The product of no conspiracy, of no group promoting vice or emptiness, he is made by honest, industrious men of high professional ethics doing their job, “informing” and educating us. He is made by all of us who willingly read about him, who like to see him on television, who buy recordings of his voice, and talk about him to our friends. His relation to morality and even to reality is highly ambiguous. He is like the woman in an Elinor Glyn novel who describes another by saying, “She is like a figure in an Elinor Glyn novel.”

4.This entry is being constructed on October 3, 1995, the day that we are all learning that OJ has been unjustly accused.

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This Emerson lecture would be published as the chapter “Aristocracy” in ENGLISH TRAITS in 1856: Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the Court is thought to have put a check on the gross vices of the aristocracy; [page 871] yet gaming, racing, drinking, and mistresses, bring them down, and the democrat can still gather scandals, if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying the gossip of the last generation of dukes served by bailiffs, with all their plate in pawn; of great lords living by the showing of their houses; and of an old man wheeled in his chair from room to room, whilst his chambers are exhibited to the visitor for money; of ruined dukes and earls living in exile for debt. The historic names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts, Marlboroughs, and Hertfords, have gained no new lustre, and now and then darker scandals break out, ominous as the new chapters added under the Orleans dynasty to the “Causes Célèbres” in France. Even peers, who are men of worth and public spirit, are over-taken and embarrassed by their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire, willing to be the Mecaenas and Lucullus of his island, is reported to have said, that he cannot live at Chatsworth but one month in the year. Their many houses eat them up. They cannot sell them, because they are entailed. They will not let them, for pride’s sake, but keep them empty, aired, and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of four or five thousand pounds a year. The spending is for a great part in servants, in many houses exceeding a hundred. Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, because it squanders such vast power of benefit, has the mischief of crime. “They might be little Providences on earth,” said my friend, “and they are, for the most part, jockeys and fops.” Campbell says, “acquaintance with the nobility, I could never keep up. It requires a life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties.” I suppose, too, that a feeling of self-respect is driving cultivated men out of this society, as if the noble were slow to receive the lessons of the times, and had not learned to disguise his pride of place. A man of wit, who is also one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion, confessed to his friend, that he could not enter their houses without being made to feel that they were great lords, and he a low plebeian. With the tribe of artistes, including the musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps no terms, but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and Mario sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and other grandees, a cord was stretched between the singer and the company. [page 872]

Of course this is all contingent upon Boorstin’s rereading of citations in the OED, a rereading which ignores not only Miss Mulock’s use of the term as of some date in 1849 as coming months too late but also Hooker’s prior use (as of 1600), Johnson’s prior use (as of 1751), and Arnold’s prior use (as of 1838) as pertaining not to status of personages so much as to conditions of being.5

But even before Emerson would have this usage generally distributed as of 1856 this helpful little trope had entered the general lexicon, as in the following 1851 title: N. Parker Willis, HURRY-GRAPHS; OR, SKETCHES

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OF SCENERY, CELEBRITIES AND SOCIETY, TAKEN FROM LIFE (NT: Charles Scribner). In fact, by the year 1855 Emerson himself would be being rated as a celebrity (without credit being offered that it was he himself who had allegedly originated this usage), as witness the review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS by Evart A. and George L. Duyckinck titled “Henry David Thoreau,” in their CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN

5.Here, per the OED, are these other uses: 1600: “The dignity and celebrity of mother cities should be respected” (condition rather than person). 1751: “I did not find myself yet enriched in proportion to my celebrity” (condition rather than person). 1838: “Recommended to public notice by the celebrity of their family” (condition rather than person). 1849: “Did you see any of those ‘celebrities,’ as you call them?” (person rather than condition — but published some months subsequent to the Emerson lecture in Edinburgh in November 1848).

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LITERATURE (NY: Scribner, 1855), Volume II, pages 653-56:

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Two of the most noticeable books in American literature on the score of a certain quaint study of natural history and scenery, are Mr. Thoreau’s volumes on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, and Life in the Woods. The author is a humorist in the old English sense of the word, a man of humors, of Concord, Mass., where, in the neighborhood of Emerson and Hawthorne, and in the enjoyment of their society, he leads, if we may take his books as the interpreter of his career, a meditative philosophic life. We find his name on the Harvard list of graduates of 1837. In 1849, having previously been a contributor to the Dial, and occupied himself in school-keeping and trade in an experimental way, he published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. … His next book was published with equal deliberation. It is the story of a humor of the author, which occupied him a term of two years and two months, commencing in March, 1845. Walden, or Life in the Woods, was published in Boston in 1854. The oddity of its record attracted universal attention. A gentleman and scholar retires one morning from the world, strips himself of all superfluities, and with a borrowed axe and minimum of pecuniary capital, settles himself as a squatter in the wood, on the edge of a New England pond near Concord. He did not own the land, but was permitted to enjoy it. He felled a few pines, hewed timbers, and for boards bought out the shanty of James Collins, an Irish laborer on the adjacent Fitchburg railroad, for the sum of four dollars twenty-five cents. He was assisted in the raising by Emerson, George W. Curtis, and other celebrities of Concord, whose presence gave the rafters an artistic flavor. Starting early in the spring, he secured long before winter by the labor of his hands “a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick fire-place opposite.” The exact cost of the house is given:— [Reprints “Economy,” page 49.3-25.]

The rest of the account from Mr. Thoreau’s ledger is curious, and will show “upon what meats this same Caesar fed,” that he came to interest the public so greatly in his housekeeping:— [Reprints “Economy,” pages 58.34-60.31.]

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He had nothing further to do after his “family baking,” which, the family consisting of a unit, could not have been large or have come round very often, than to read, think, and observe. Homer appears to have been his favorite book. The thinking was unlimited, and the observation that of a man with an instinctive tact for the wonders of natural history. He sees and describes insects, birds, such “small deer” as approached him, with a felicity which would have gained him the heart of Izaak Walton and Alexander Wilson. A topographical and hydrographical survey of Walden Pond is as faithful, exact, and labored, as if it had employed a government or admiralty commission. As in the author’s previous work, the immediate incident is frequently only the introduction to higher themes. The realities around him are occasionally veiled by a hazy atmosphere of transcendental speculation, through which the essayist sometimes stumbles into abysmal depths of the bathetic. We have more pleasure, however, in dwelling upon the shrewd humors of this modern contemplative Jacques of the forest, and his fresh, nice observation of books and men, which has occasionally something of a poetic vein. He who would acquire a new sensation of the world about him, would do well to retire from cities to the banks of Walden pond; and he who would open his eyes to the opportunities of country life, in its associations of fields and men, may loiter with profit along the author’s journey on the Merrimack, where natural history, local antiquities, records, and tradition, are exhausted in vitalizing the scene. A CHARACTER—FROM WALDEN. [Reprints “Visitors,” pages 144.13-145.36.] A BATTLE OF ANTS—FROM WALDEN. [Reprints “Brute Neighbors,” pages 228.26-232.11.]

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In 1869 Louisa May Alcott would make use of this “Emersonian” trope in Part II of LITTLE WOMEN: … a select symposium, held in honor of several celebrities. Jo went prepared to bow down and adore the mighty ones whom she had worshiped with youthful enthusiasm afar off. But her reverence for genius received a severe shock that night, and it took her some time to recover from the discovery that the great creatures were only men and women after all. Imagine her dismay, on stealing a glance of timid admiration at the poet whose lines suggested an ethereal being fed on ‘spirit, fire, and dew,’ to behold him devouring his supper with an ardor which flushed his intellectual countenance. Turning as from a fallen idol, she made other discoveries which rapidly dispelled her romantic illusions. The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum; the famous divine flirted openly with one of the Madame de Staëls of the age, who looked daggers at another Corinne, who was amiably satirizing her, after outmaneuvering her in efforts to absorb the profound philosopher, who imbibed tea Johnsonianly and appeared to slumber, the loquacity of the lady rendering speech impossible. The scientific celebrities, forgetting their mollusks and glacial periods, gossiped about art, while devoting themselves to oysters and ices with characteristic energy; the young musician, who was charming the city like a second Orpheus, talked horses; and the specimen of the British nobility present happened to be the most ordinary man of the party.

And by 1882 Walt Whitman would be treating the new term celebrity for the new phenomenon of the public

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personality as a natural and intrinsic part of the English language: Besides Fulton ferry, off and on for years, I knew and frequented Broadway — that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. Here I saw, during those times, Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, William Henry Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, William Cullen Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents. I remember seeing James Fenimore Cooper in a court-room in Chambers street, back of the city hall, where he was carrying on a law case — (I think it was a charge of libel he had brought against some one.) I also remember seeing Edgar A. Poe, and having a short interview with him, (it must have been in 1845 or ’6,) in his office, second story of a corner building, (Duane or Pearl street.) He was editor and owner or part owner of “the Broadway Journal.” [Page 702] The visit was about a piece of mine he had publish’d. Poe was very cordial, in a quiet way, appear’d well in person, dress, &c. I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner and matter; very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded. For another of my reminiscences, here on the west side, just below Houston street, I once saw (it must have been about 1832, of a sharp, bright January day) a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs, for a ride. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw. (You needn’t think all the best animals are brought up nowadays; never was such horseflesh as fifty years ago on Long Island, or south, or in New York city; folks look’d for spirit and mettle in a nag, not tame speed merely.) Well, I, a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, stopp’d and gazed long at the spectacle of that fur-swathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants, and the careful seating of him in the sleigh. I remember the spirited, champing horses, the driver with his whip, and a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. The old man, the subject of so much attention, I can almost see now. It was John Jacob Astor.

In his novel OAK OPENINGS, James Fenimore Cooper inserted a character to spout the 10-lost-tribes-of-Israel doctrine of American Exceptionalism.

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1914

August 5: Karol Szymanowski wrote from his home near Elisavetgrad, Russia (Kirovgrad, Ukraine), at which he had just arrived following a harrowing journey from London. He had meant to travel by way of Vienna but, fearing he would not be able to leave Austria, had instead gone by way of Berlin and Warsaw.

The first traffic lights were erected, in Cleveland.

Nicaragua and the United States signed the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty. The US took over economic control of Nicaragua, and gained military and territorial concessions.

German forces attacked at Liège, Belgium, with waves of troops moving into fields of Belgian machinegun fire and being repulsed.

At noon, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia.

Montenegro declared war on Austria-Hungary.

President Woodrow Wilson tendered the good offices of the United States of America, in the interests of peace.(Eventually President Wilson would declare that through America’s participation in World War I we WORLD WAR I

would “show the world a new and heretofore unheard of motive in warfare,” to wit, righteousness. The righteous might of our arms would make the world safe for democracy.) “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

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1918

President Woodrow Wilson had declared that through America’s participation in World War I we would “show the world a new and heretofore unheard of motive in warfare,” to wit, righteousness. The righteous might of our arms had made the world safe for democracy.

(deathmask) Fort Bragg was established in North Carolina. Our War Department had organized “moral zones” around military camps such as this to protect our boys from liquor and loose women (one in eight of these Johnnies was currently getting it in his gun, contracting syphilis). We would continue the great crusade against the Demon Rum back home – Prohibition. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM WORLD WAR I

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“Killing to end war, that’s like fucking to restore virginity.” — Vietnam-era protest poster

Woodrow Wilson’s ethos was found to be an unattractive one, by Dr. Sigmund Freud: When a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible.6

1950

February 9, “Lincoln Day”: In America, the era of “McCarthyism” erupted as undistinguished first-term Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) delivered his famous “I have in my pocket” speech to a Republican women’s club at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming that the US State Department was harboring “205 Communists that were made known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”7 (The list he had in his pocket, which he never disclosed, must have been a list that had been compiled by some homophobe, not of persons in the State Department suspected of Communist sympathies but of “effete” employees suspected of homosexual tendencies, and the Senator’s straightforward, although unstated, reasoning was that, since in a homophobic society such as ours these homosexuals were liable to blackmail, any such State Department personnel suspected by anyone of homosexuality, “the pinks and lavenders,” according to the categories of the Senator, might be through fear of exposure “turned” into internal moles for the Soviet intelligence apparatus. –Actually,

6. Freud spent his final years, while dying of cancer in England, in the writing of a Presidential biography. Freud assures us that Wilson, the highbrow president-elect, had asserted, before witnesses, that “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States,” and that “Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented it,” and commented in regard to these sound bites that “I do not know how to avoid the conclusion that a man who is capable of taking the illusions of religion so literally and is so sure of a special personal intimacy with the Almighty is unfitted for relations with ordinary children of men. As everyone knows, the hostile camp during the war also sheltered a chosen darling of Providence: the German kaiser. It was most regrettable that later on the other side a second appeared. No one gained thereby: respect for God was not increased.” Freud’s observations may now be generalized from President Wilson into remarks about a lowbrow President not yet born, George W. Bush, who, we know, has made similar self-privileging assertions. “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

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since the junior senator had a thing for jailbait teeners, it might be said that we were more in danger of his being blackmailed and turned by the Russkis: all they would have needed to do was provide such a man with a piece of this jailbait, and from that point he would have been high on their list of resources. Soon afterward, the junior senator, since in addition to being a sex addict he was also an alcoholic substance abuser, could not remember the number that he had mentioned, and so he invented another different number.) Soon McCarthy’s

7. In later versions of the speech, the number would be sometimes 57, sometimes 81. Eventually he would provide the names of 9 people, but none of these still worked at the Department of State, and one never had. In the course of this speech Senator McCarthy alleged that “One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape the policy.” In saying that, the Senator was plagiarizing some oratory that Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-California) had just stood and delivered on the floor of the US House of Representatives on January 26th. What Representative Nixon had said was “The great lesson which should be learned from the Alger Hiss case is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get 30 pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon ... but this is a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape the policy.” “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

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face would be on the cover of TIME, and of Newsweek.

As a consequence of Cold War anxiety this McCarthyist witch hunt would terminate the careers of many career government servants without warning and without benefits. Many of the men persecuted and dismissed would be closet-homosexual government employees. For years and years, no regular-guy-type US politician such as

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Dwight David Eisenhower would be eager to be depicted by these Red-baiters as “soft on Communism.”

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

“Lists of the disloyal have been compiled!” — Roman Senator Crassus, played by Sir Lawrence Olivier in the 1961 Hollywood movie “Spartacus”

Eventually Henry Thoreau would be on the list as well, on account of his disloyal advocacy of “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.” “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” TIMELINE OF ESSAYS

“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT

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1953

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Columnist Drew Pearson had been collecting rumors, that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) was a closet queer. Accusations of homosexual incidents had been appearing in the Las Vegas newspaper. In this year the suspect Senator got married with one of the researchers in his office.

After a brief honeymoon the couple would adopt a baby, renaming it Tierney Elizabeth McCarthy.

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Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

The edge of the wilderness was close by. Out of it Indian tribes marauded from time to time, and Reverend Parris had parishioners who had lost relatives to the heathen. In other words, Miller’s play only pretended to be about witches and witchhunts. Actually, it was about the Red Scare of the Cold War of the 1950s, and about the dangerous antics of Senator McCarthy –subjects familiar to the author– and about the spasms of self-righteousness that we refer to under the rubric American Exceptionalism, analogizing this contemporary spasm with the Red Scare of King William’s War of 1688- 1699, rather than about the actual history of the feckless personages of Salem, Massachusetts. This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used

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by the academic historian.

What Miller presented was psychology: a depiction of how we use suspicion in our management of others. He portrayed the cunning with which we choose who it is we are going to be suspicious of, how carefully we select the issues and ideas about which we are going to be suspicious, and how useful we can make our suspiciousnesses be in the control of the others whom we need –in order to make our own lives work, of course– to control.

Those who do not learn from History are required to repeat the course. While the play “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller purports to be about one spasm of suspiciousness in American history (the Salem witch trials of the 17th Century), it was motivated by the author’s personal experience during another spasm of suspiciousness in American history (the unAmerican activities of the McCarthy investigators three centuries later). We had not learned from the history of Salem, and so we were required to repeat the course in Washington. Since that play was first presented we have had yet a third spasm of suspiciousness in American history (the McMarten child sexual abuse trial and many other trials suspiciously similar to it in their wilful suspension of disbelief), and so Arthur Miller has cooperated in the transformation of his play into the current movie “The Crucible.” We had not learned from the history re-enacted in Washington DC in the 1950s, and so we were required to repeat the course in Southern California in the 1970s. In fact the history of the culture of the United States of America has been marred by repeated spasms of suspiciousness, as we have continuously refused to learn our lesson about the manipulation of citizens through officious suspiciousness. In the spasm associated with Salem we managed one set of citizens by means of our suspiciousness, in the spasm associated with Washington we managed another set of citizens by means of our suspiciousness, in the spasm associated with Los Angeles we managed yet a third set of citizens by means of our suspiciousness. It would seem that the management of citizens through officious suspiciousness has a whole lot to do with the nature of our history. What we have been doing to one another throughout our history as a national culture is very, very serious. Nothing like the Salem experience should ever have been allowed to go down in our culture. Nothing

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like the Washington experience should ever have been allowed to go down in our culture. Nothing like the Los Angeles experience should ever have been allowed to go down in our culture. I have lived through several such spasms in my own lifetime, as has Arthur Miller, and I am just sick of it. —And this sort of egregiously nonsensical abuse is going to keep happening and keep happening, until we grow up by learning the nature of the sort of stunt we have been continuously pulling on ourselves!

As an example of the manner in which the play is non-historical –is not actually about Salem and witches– consider that Miller has the witchcraft mania being brought to an end through the courage and sacrifice of one of its victims while being hanged. In actual fact, none of this mania’s victims had any influence whatever upon bring it to an end. The witchcraft mania was brought to an end, finally, by the authorities who had been countenancing it, and it was brought to an end when the newest round of accusations began to move up the social ladder. Those better situated in society came to recognize that they also were at risk if they allowed such unfettered suspiciousness — and the moment they came to this recognition they brought the whole affair to a screeching halt.

“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT

1957

Communism, declared LIFE magazine (which knows about such things), amounted to “Satan in action.” This issue of the magazine would not be seized by the Post Office as offensive. How could it be considered offensive, to suggest that the United States of America was an exceptional nation, uniquely righteous, destined to led the world into the path of righteousness? AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

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1950

February 9, “Lincoln Day”: In America, the era of “McCarthyism” erupted as undistinguished first-term Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) delivered his famous “I have in my pocket” speech to a Republican women’s club at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming that the US State Department was harboring “205 Communists that were made known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”8 (The list he had in his pocket, which he never disclosed, must have been a list that had been compiled by some homophobe, not of persons in the State Department suspected of Communist sympathies but of “effete” employees suspected of homosexual tendencies, and the Senator’s straightforward, although unstated, reasoning was that, since in a homophobic society such as ours these homosexuals were liable to blackmail, any such State Department personnel suspected by anyone of homosexuality, “the pinks and lavenders,” according to the categories of the Senator, might be through fear of exposure “turned” into internal moles for the Soviet intelligence apparatus. –Actually,

8. In later versions of the speech, the number would be sometimes 57, sometimes 81. Eventually he would provide the names of 9 people, but none of these still worked at the Department of State, and one never had. In the course of this speech Senator McCarthy alleged that “One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape the policy.” In saying that, the Senator was plagiarizing some oratory that Congressman Richard M. Nixon (R-California) had just stood and delivered on the floor of the US House of Representatives on January 26th. What Representative Nixon had said was “The great lesson which should be learned from the Alger Hiss case is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get 30 pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon ... but this is a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape the policy.” “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

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since the junior senator had a thing for jailbait teeners, it might be said that we were more in danger of his being blackmailed and turned by the Russkis: all they would have needed to do was provide such a man with a piece of this jailbait, and from that point he would have been high on their list of resources. Soon afterward, the junior senator, since in addition to being a sex addict he was also an alcoholic substance abuser, could not remember the number that he had mentioned, and so he invented another different number.) Soon McCarthy’s face would be on the cover of TIME, and of Newsweek.

As a consequence of Cold War anxiety this McCarthyist witch hunt would terminate the careers of many career government servants without warning and without benefits. Many of the men persecuted and dismissed would

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be closet-homosexual government employees. For years and years, no regular-guy-type US politician such as Dwight David Eisenhower would be eager to be depicted by these Red-baiters as “soft on Communism.”

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

“Lists of the disloyal have been compiled!” — Roman Senator Crassus, played by Sir Lawrence Olivier in the 1961 Hollywood movie “Spartacus”

Eventually Henry Thoreau would be on the list as well, on account of his disloyal advocacy of “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.” “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” TIMELINE OF ESSAYS

“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT

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1992

The “Different Drummer” restaurant at the railroad depot in Concord became the “Aigo Bistro.”

America’s strategic thinkers schemed a radically new foreign-policy doctrine for the post-Cold War world. They were intending to cause America to step to the beat of a different drummer. Their work product was a Defense Planning Guidance tract that’s since been termed “Dick Cheney’s masterwork.” In this curious document the most important of America’s exceptional qualities, which entitle Washington DC to be the capitol city of the world, rather than being its old-style American-Exceptionalist Chosen-of-God status, or its melting-pot virtue, or its democratic values, or its wise capitalist system for the mobilization of economic energies, was its sheer military dominance. Might, it would seem, in the mind of Mr. Cheney, made right. Cheney called for the preservation of a US nuclear arsenal strong enough to prevent the development of nuclear capabilities by any more 3rd-world nations. Clearly this was intended to be a first-strike capability, for he demanded a doctrine of unilateral military action, one of the preemptive use of force, which amounted to a major departure from anything that had been schemed before in our nation’s puzzle palace on the Potomac. America was to be, and was to remain, and was to preserve itself, as the world’s sole superpower. These new exceptionalists at the Pentagon argued for liberating the United States of America from any constraints imposed by our having other nations as our allies, and from any constraints imposed by our having entered into binding international treaties. To their way of thinking the US Constitution outlawed any such bowing and scraping to any superior authority such as international law, and outlawed any transfer, any pooling, any delegation of sovereignty, to any international entity such as the United Nations. Until the events of September 11th, Cheney’s new exceptionalism would be a doctrine in search of a cause. It lacked, its proponents continually moaned, the necessity and legitimacy that could be obtained only through the trauma of another Pearl Harbor sneak attack. Its proponents would long for such a legitimation. They would bide their time. They would function as a “sleeper cell” inside the Pentagon, ready to spring to life in the hour of the nation’s need. They did not plan September the 11th, but they longed for it as such an occasion was to be their great releasant.9

9. Update: Dick Cheney now has a heartbeat.

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2001

September 11: As we all remember, something important happened on this day.

Following the massive attacks by Saudi Arabian terrorists against the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC, the FBI dedicated 7,000 of its 11,000 Special Agents and thousands of FBI support personnel to the PENTTBOM Pentagon, Twin Towers Bombing investigation.

READ THE FULL REPORT

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ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTS

However, something of greater importance than this was happening on this day.

What could have been of greater importance than the deaths in the Twin Towers that happened on this day? Ever since 1992, America’s strategic thinkers had been scheming a radically new foreign-policy doctrine for the post-Cold War world. Their work product had been a Defense Planning Guidance tract that’s now termed “Dick Cheney’s masterwork.” In this curious document the most important of America’s exceptional qualities, which entitle it to rule the world, rather than being its old-style American-Exceptionalist Chosen-of-God status, or its melting-pot virtue, or its democratic values, or its wise capitalist system for the mobilization of economic energies, is its sheer military dominance. Might, it would seem, in the mind of Mr. Cheney, makes right. Cheney called for the preservation of a US nuclear arsenal strong enough to prevent the development of nuclear capabilities by any more 3rd-world nations. Clearly this was intended to be a first-strike capability, for he demanded a doctrine of unilateral military action, one of the preemptive use of force, which amounted to a major departure from anything that had been schemed before in our nation’s puzzle palace. America was to be, and was to remain, and was to preserve itself, as the world’s sole superpower. These new exceptionalists at the Pentagon argued for liberating the United States of America from any constraints imposed by our having other nations as our allies, and from any constraints imposed by our having entered into binding international treaties. To their way of thinking the US Constitution outlawed any such bowing and scraping to any superior authority such as international law, and outlawed any transfer, any pooling, any delegation of sovereignty, to any international entity such as the United Nations. Until the events of this day on Manhattan Island, Cheney’s new exceptionalism had been a doctrine in search of a cause. It had lacked, its proponents had continually moaned, the necessity and legitimacy that could be obtained only through the trauma of another Pearl Harbor sneak attack. Its proponents had cooled their heels a long time waiting for such a legitimation. They had functioned as a “sleeper cell” inside the Pentagon in Washington DC, ready to spring to life in the hour of the nation’s need. They had not planned September the 11th, but they had longed for something like the collapse of the Twin Towers and if they could have prevented it from happening they would not have prevented it from happening: such an occasion had been viewed as their great releasant, their opportunity. They promptly called on all loyal Americans to support a permanent total “war” against global terrorism. Our cause –defeat of the terrorists– was the world’s cause. Soon the Dubya administration would widen the war from a struggle to dig out and destroy transnational terrorists to a struggle to dominate any regime that might conveniently be suspected of planning to offer them shelter or weaponry, such as Iraq or North Korea. (Never mind that the perps of 9/11 had, to a man, been middle-class Saudi Arabians. Never mind that the anthrax attack that had killed several postal workers had been made using US anthrax produced in a US laboratory of the sort which previously we had spread around widely, for instance giving some to Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and had been manufactured obviously by some unidentified, disaffected US germ-warfare specialist. Never mind that actually Iraq didn’t have at this time any weapons of mass destruction at all, not biological and not chemical and not nuclear.) “To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.”

— Rebecca West

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Could anyone ever concoct a more airtight legitimation story than this one? Unfortunately, yes, someone would indeed be able to concoct a more airtight legitimation story than this one! Soon a person named Ernest L. Martin would be publishing a treatise THE BIRTH OF CHRIST RECALCULATED which would be insisting that Jesus Christ’s date of birth must have been September 11th (in 3 BCE, that is, precisely 2003 years before). This author would be basing this calculation in part upon an eclipse of the moon that is known to have occurred shortly before the death of Herod because it was reported by Flavius Josephus in ANTIQUITIES. However, the reason why it never so much as occurred to anybody before, that this lunar eclipse might have been momentous, and that September 11th might actually be Christmas Day, is that until the US was attacked on this day in this manner nobody had learned that this was a day of very special significance. The Moslem terrorists hadn’t so much brazenly assaulted the United States of America, you see, as they had impiously assaulted the entire Christian religion. –The complete, perfectly airtight legitimation story for a Crusade! – Destroy the infidel! SKY EVENT “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

September 20: In a nationally televised address to a joint session of the federal Congress, President Dubya, born-again Christian, intoned: “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” READ THE FULL TEXT

Free Translation: “Now I get to do exactly whatever I want, and none of you are going to be able to do a thing about it.” “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling

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2002

September: The Bush administration begins to ardently push for war with Iraq, with Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card explaining why they waited until September. “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” An “Office of Special Plans” had been created, at the Pentagon, that had come to constitute a kind of “shadow government” and was functioning as the President’s main source of intelligence on Iraq.

Dubya, in 2000 during his campaign, had been telling the American electorate that he planned to be moderate in our foreign affairs. We all got the idea that the guy really wasn’t all that interested in going out and killing a whole bunch of foreigners, not with our germ bombs, not with our poison gas, not with our atomic bombs, and not even, or not very much, with our more conventional weaponry such as the new improved incendiary gels that had superceded the Korean-Police-Action-era “napalm” (we had in 2001 entirely purged our inventories of this obsolete form of the incendiary gel). In this month, however, he unveiled an entirely new National Security Strategy for the United States of America, which was based upon Dick Cheney’s entirely immoderate defense draft of 1992. Getting past the blurb that this document promises, that we “will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world,” what it turned out to be about is our not hesitating to go it alone, our not hesitating to indulge in preemptive action, and our liberating ourselves not only from treaty obligations but even from the constraints of the United Nations. It is a straightforwardly righteous manifesto of American Exceptionalism. It is “moral clarity.” From now on it will be the United States of America that will be the sole judge of the legitimacy of its own preemptive strikes — and the sole judge of the legitimacy of anyone else’s preemptive strikes as well. A new era has begun. WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, are only to be feared if they should fall into the hands of rogue states that “reject basic human values and hate the US and everything for which it stands.” Our own WMDs are jes’ fine thank you. Our selfless and benevolent policy of democratization is a mere mask for a reckless new policy of satellitization and clientelism. Oh, by the way, not to worry, we are going to prevent US nationals from ever having to appear before the International Criminal Court, no matter what sort of war crimes they may commit, so you can feel free to just go forth and do your duty. The scholar Pierre Hassner has termed this sort of attitude “Wilsonianism in boots” — but he’s only a Frenchman and what would a Frenchman be prepared to understand? We will start out with “regime change” in Bagdad, and Iraq will become a model of democracy to be emulated by all Arab states. We are going to renew “the entire region from which it springs.” Our moderation knows no bounds. Our self-righteousness is impeccable. “To understand is not to forgive. It is only to understand. It is not an end but a beginning.”

— Rebecca West

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2003

Measured by the %age of the Gross National Product that is contributed to foreign aid, the three highest providers of aid to others are the nation of Denmark, which contributes more than 1%, Norway, and the Netherlands. The lowest contributors are Australia, Portugal, Australia, the UK, and the USA. The United Kingdom, next lowest on the list, contributes 0.23%, and the United States of America, lowest on the list, contributes 0.10%.

During this year American Exceptionalism again raised its ugly head: “The High and the Mighty: Bush’s national-security strategy and the new American hubris” by Stanley Hoffmann http://www.prospect.org/authors/hoffmann-s.html Every nation sees itself as being in some way exceptional. Only the United States, though, has tried to develop foreign policies that reflect its exceptionalism. While other countries are content –or obliged– to practice a balance-of-power politics in the world, from the beginning most American leaders have argued that the United States, by dint of its unique geography and the superiority –indeed, the universality– of its democratic values, can and should pursue a loftier policy. This sense of special mission has always left ample room for contradiction. It never, for instance, stopped the United States from pursuing national advantage just as fiercely as any other country did. And it drove American policy in two different directions at once. One, which became less tenable as the United States’ might grew, was toward isolationism. The other, more crusading impulse was toward making the world safe for democracy, which entailed working in concert with other nations, though not relinquishing American distrust of cynical European-style alliances. But until now, the debate over what kind of foreign policy American Exceptionalism demands was always conducted in those terms: geography and democracy, distance and engagement, realism and idealism. With the coming of the Bush administration, American exceptionalism has become something entirely new and particularly troubling. The first indication that America’s strategic thinkers were working on a radically new foreign-policy doctrine for the post- Cold War world came in 1992 with the Defense Planning Guidance draft, a tract that’s been called “Dick Cheney’s masterwork.” It produced such an outcry that it had to be toned down before it was published. The draft, however, assumed that the most important of America’s unique qualities was its military dominance. The Cheney draft also introduced the idea that

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unilateral military action, the preemptive use of force and the maintenance of a U.S. nuclear arsenal strong enough to deter the development of nuclear programs elsewhere were now appropriate U.S. policies. This was a major departure from anything exceptionalism had meant before. It called on the United States neither to cultivate its own garden nor to pursue a world mission through multilateral organizations that would define and legitimize common goals. Instead, it demanded of America only that it be, remain and act as the world’s sole superpower. It was a doctrine with puzzling gaps. For instance, it proposed to deter challengers and carry out interventions but provided little guidance about where the more dangerous challenges and the more necessary interventions might occur. Nor did it explain how the unilateralism it favored could be reconciled with the many international agreements the United States had reached over the previous 40-plus years. Nonetheless, the Cheney approach found a great deal of support in the present administration. When George W. Bush came to power, the doctrine that seemed to be in favor among his advisers was realism: a concentration on those conflicts that could impair the global balance of power or important regional balances, and a retreat from involvement in conflicts either devoid of such significance (as in Africa) or entirely hopeless (such as the Palestinian issue). However, the Republican mood was not calculating so much as it was deeply distrustful of others. This was the mood that brought us the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, the withdrawal from the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the scuttling of the Land Mine Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The extraordinary vendetta conducted (largely but not exclusively by John Bolton, Bush’s controversial undersecretary of state) against the International Criminal Court revealed not just the administration’s paranoia –conjuring nightmares of a malevolent United Nations indicting innocent American soldiers and officers– but also how punitive it could be against countries (allies or not) unwilling to meet its demands. The “new exceptionalism” perfectly suited this mood, and four types with significant clout in the Bush administration have pressed the doctrine forward. There are, first of all, the sheriffs, such as Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who see the world as a High Noon struggle between foes and friends. They were disappointed when Ronald Reagan turned from his evil-empire days to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev, which they felt softened the Soviet Union’s fall. Second, and with an equally black-and-white view of international actors and events, there are the new imperialists –the pundits Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, for instance– who believe that the good the United States does for the world justifies all means. These were the thinkers who were frustrated by the (in their eyes truncated) ending of the Gulf War in 1991.

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A third and less important group sees in everything a contest between America’s traditional political and religious values and all who attack them, be they secular and dissolute liberals or Islamic terrorists. This group I call the American fundamentalists. And finally there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States — two democracies that, they say, are both surrounded by foes and both forced to rely on military power to survive. These analysts look at foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. A discerning reader might object that many of my new exceptionalists are no more than realists drunk with America’s new might as the only superpower. This is true, but that headiness makes all the difference. Whereas the hallmark of past realists –theorists and diplomats such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, even Henry Kissinger– was the kind of discerning prudence and moderation that Thucydides once praised, the new voices are nothing if not excessive and triumphalist. What are the new exceptionalists’ main arguments for liberating the United States from the constraints imposed by allies and treaties? Most bizarre may be the claim that the US Constitution allows no bowing to a superior law, such as international law, and no transfer, pooling or delegation of sovereignty to any international organization. Also far out there is law professor W. Michael Reisman’s argument that because the United States, as a result of its strength, is responsible for world order, it is justified in rejecting whatever parts of international law it decides would make order more difficult. Somewhat subtler is the claim of benevolent imperialism, developed in particular by the policy analyst Robert Kagan, who has called the United States “a Behemoth with a conscience.” In an article in which valid criticisms of current European policy are mixed with a great deal of condescending hubris, Kagan explains that Europeans think they approach problems with “greater nuance and sophistication” than the United States, but their concentration on “challenges” such as “ethnic conflict, immigration, organized crime, poverty and environmental degradation,” rather than on the kinds of “threats” that preoccupy the United States, demonstrates their weakness — and their reliance on the protection of American military power. And then there is the argument of brute force: We have it in abundance, others do not. Hence allies, when they do not bend to our will, are both nuisances and unnecessary, and international laws and organizations that stand in our path can

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be ignored. This case has been made by Bolton and Rumsfeld. It should be noted that these voices, though they all agree about the prerogatives of American power, offer no consensus concerning its mission. In Bolton and Rumsfeld’s view, US might should be deployed only on behalf of a very narrowly defined national interest (and not squandered in humanitarian flings), while some of their colleagues would make the United States responsible for maintaining order throughout the world. Indeed, until September 11, the new exceptionalism was a doctrine in search of a cause. But after that traumatic day, Americans were called to wage a “war” on global terrorism, a cause as compelling as any administration could ask for. This was a mission that would define the Bush presidency; it would be the great simplifier. It also had the advantage of providing a lever for domestic mobilization (and diversion from controversial domestic issues). It flattered exceptionalists of all tendencies by emphasizing the indispensable role of the United States. And it appealed especially to the more idealistic among them by stressing that America’s cause –the defense against terrorism– was also the world’s. As they had been in the Cold War, self-interest and morality, power and values, the sheriff and the missionary were back together again. But there are signal difficulties. Just as many issues in the Cold War-era could not be squeezed into the corset of the Soviet- American conflict, it is unlikely that all important problems now can be fitted into this new straitjacket. And even those that can may not be best addressed by primarily military means. The phenomenon of terrorism is extraordinarily heterogeneous. If terrorism is defined as deliberate, deadly attacks on the innocent, it must encompass not only “private” suicide bombers but also state terrorism — from carpet bombings to totalitarian police tactics. And it must encompass the multiplicity of reasons for the resort to terrorism: a will to self- determination (as in the case of the Palestinians or the Chechens), a fight over territory (as in Kashmir), a form of domestic action against a repressive regime (in the Sudan, in the Algeria of the 1990s), a religious holy war (al-Qaeda) and so on. Obviously one size doesn’t fit all, yet responding to acts of terrorism and ignoring their causes could well contribute to the global destabilization sought by the terrorists. Moreover, when the enemy is so ill-defined, there is the danger of continual extensions of the “war.” Since September 11, the Bush administration has widened it from a fight against transnational terrorists to a fight against the regimes that give them shelter. (Never mind that al-Qaeda has found hiding places in many nations, the United States included.) More controversially, the administration has since expanded the target from countries that aid terrorists to countries with weapons of mass destruction (so long as they are also hostile

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to the United States — unlike, say, Israel, Pakistan or India). The result is a world order rendered even shakier than it was before, as other countries are incited to use the capacious new American doctrine for their own ends: the Indians against the Pakistanis, the Russians against the Chechen rebels (and occasionally the Georgians), Ariel Sharon’s government in Israel against not only Palestinian terrorists but the Palestinian Authority and Yasir Arafat. The war on terrorism has become a vast tent under which all kinds of settlements of accounts can fit — including our own quarrels with the bizarre “axis of evil.” Bush, during the campaign of 2000, spoke about the need for modesty in foreign affairs. How far from this we are now can be seen in the new National Security Strategy of the United States of America, dated September 2002. This is the final avatar of Cheney’s 1992 defense draft. It is something of a hodgepodge, speaking about primacy and balance of power, as well as using traditional Wilsonian language (“We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”). It talks about organizing coalitions but also about not hesitating to act alone in self- defense. Still, in the main, the 2002 strategy statement codifies all the new aspects of exceptionalism: It adopts the doctrine of preemptive action –while warning others not to use preemption as a pretext for aggression– and, making no mention of the United Nations in this context, presumes that the United States is the sole judge of the legitimacy of its own or anyone else’s preemptive strikes. The document emphasizes the deadly threat posed by weapons of mass destruction — should they fall into the hands of rogue states that “reject basic human values and hate the U.S. and everything for which it stands.” It promises to maintain whatever military capability is needed to defeat any attempt by any state to impose its will on the United States or its allies, and to dissuade potential adversaries from building up their own forces to equal or surpass ours. Last but not least, it reaffirms the determination to protect U.S. nationals from the International Criminal Court. In sum, the Bush doctrine proclaims the emancipation of a colossus from international constraints (including from the restraints that the United States itself enshrined in networks of international and regional organizations after World War II). In context, it amounts to a doctrine of global domination. There is something breathtakingly unrealistic about this grand exceptionalism — what the French scholar Pierre Hassner has called “Wilsonianism in boots.” Take the promise that American leaders are now making under the rubric of “regime change,” the promise that we will try to replace the tyrannical regimes of the world with democracies. If actually attempted, this would topple friendly tyrants on whom the same US policy makers rely. But in any case, we don’t have the skill or the knowledge it

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would take to manipulate the domestic politics of many countries, or even to choose the right leaders for other people. It is blind hubris to assume that we will “improve” the world by projecting on others a model of democracy that has worked – not without upheavals– in the rich and multicultural United States but has little immediate relevance in much of the rest of the world. The successful “regime change” in Germany and Japan after World War II is no model. It required a prolonged occupation and followed a devastating total war. These are not the circumstances today. Today what we would see as a selfless or benevolent policy of democratization would be received as a policy of satellitization and clientelism. And how long would the American public support a strategy of frequent preemptive uses of force — and concomitant “wartime” restrictions on liberties at home? Sooner rather than later, Americans would suffer from battle fatigue, especially if officials continue to tell them that their nation is both the most powerful in history and the most threatened. A world that is tamed by American might but whose imperial master has little enthusiasm for peacekeeping operations and little patience with nation building would be doomed. To have a chance of stability, an international system dominated by one superpower would require a code of cooperation among its states, with restraints on the mighty as well as the weak. Otherwise, the United States will appear more threatening to the rest of the world than the enemies we hope to defeat. But, alas, all the new exceptionalism offers is a mix of force and faith — a huge force that is often unusable or counterproductive and a grandiose faith in the appeal of an American model that is actually as widely resented as admired. Iraq is seen by the new exceptionalists as the best place to test the new doctrine: It has a horrid regime, a record of aggressions and violations of UN demands, and a history of relentless questing for weapons of mass destruction. Where better to demonstrate what the journalist Mark Danner has called an “evangelical” determination “to remake the world” and deal with the “evil of terror” by making new “the entire region from which it springs”? (Iraq also has oil, which is certainly a potent factor at a time when our alliance with Saudi Arabia is in trouble.) But while the threat that Saddam Hussein [Saddam Husayn Al- Tikriti] poses to his neighbors and to U.S. interests is undeniable, is this a threat that calls for and justifies preventive action? After all, we contained the Soviet Union, its huge army and its enormous arsenal of weapons for almost 50 years without preemptive military action. In truth, our attempt to eliminate Hussein and his weapons may well provoke the very disaster that we say we want to prevent. The optimism of those who tell us that we’ll win easily, that Hussein’s regime will crumble and democracy will then prevail

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in a liberated nation, is eerily reminiscent of the disastrously wishful thinking of the Vietnam War. And even if militarily victorious, a U.S. administration with deep doubts about nation building and very little help from other nations would then be stuck running a vast Muslim country racked by ethnic and religious divisions and aspirations for revenge — a sure formula for further anti-Americanism and terrorism in the Muslim world. Meanwhile, our unilateral action would have shaken many of our carefully built alliances in Europe and the Middle East. These are alliances that even a sole superpower needs. What the unilateralists forget is that we cannot achieve any of our new goals –from finding terrorists to creating democracies– alone. But if we want those alliances to last, it is in our interest to concentrate on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and the war on terrorism before we turn on Iraq. (Indeed, for some of the hawks in the Bush administration, one of the attractions of an early war on Iraq is that it would postpone and render even more difficult an evenhanded solution to the Palestinian problem.) As for the “the moral clarity” that Bush’s supporters say he wants to impose on world politics and believes a confrontation with Hussein’s regime will provide, I quote the valuable words of Bryan Hehir, the former head of the Harvard Divinity School: “The invocation of moral reasoning for any contemplated policy decisions is to be welcomed as long as the complexity of moral issues is given adequate attention. Moral reasoning can indeed support military action, at times obligate such action. It also, equally importantly, can restrain or deny legitimacy to the use of force. To invoke the moral factor is to submit to the full range of its discipline.” The questionable moral character of a preemptive strike, an intervention and a unilateral action is compounded by a policy that involves all three. Moreover, the fact that great powers set precedents in world politics means that each choice they make must be measured by the consequences of the precedent they set. Eroding at one stroke the established international principles of deterrence, nonintervention and international authorization of military action is –at the least– morally reckless. After all, there is an alternative available for dealing with Iraq: It is a collective, UN-supported policy of containment, including a strong border-monitoring system and thorough weapons inspectors. The United States, in other words, could present itself not as the lone sheriff but as the trustee of the society of states. And it should do just that. The greatest chance of success in the task of eliminating Iraq’s arsenal lies not in attacking Hussein now (and thereby activating his capacity to destroy quasi-hostages –Iraq’s Kurds– and neighbors) but in creating a coalition that will press for this elimination. The Bush administration, obviously divided, does show signs of understanding this, but it still insists on preserving the

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possibility of unilateral action. Empire, or the dream of empire, has invariably gone to the heads of the imperialists. Today’s American dream of a benevolent empire is sustained by an illusion of the world’s gratitude, but in fact it rests only on America’s ever more flattering self- image. Given its preponderance in all forms of power, hard and soft (to use Harvard University Dean Joseph Nye’s useful distinction), the United States is bound to remain the most important state actor in the world. But it does have a choice. In the words of Pierre Hassner, “The choice is between an attempt at authoritarian, global US rule tempered by anarchic resistance, on the one hand, and, on the other, hegemony tempered by law, concert and consent.”

During this year the American president flew to Bagdad to be with the troops and posture with a prop:

Here is the turkey

His sneak Thanksgiving visit was such a success, we hear, that he is contemplating making it an annual event.

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 20 Miles Avenue, Providence RI 02906. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 11, 2013

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules

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which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.

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