k Exceptionalism’s Exceptions: The Changing American Narrative

David Levering Lewis

Abstract: Seven years after 9/11, the American way of life was again shaken to its foundation by the Great Recession of 2008. The logic of an unregulated market economy produced its predetermined result. The American middle class, the historic protagonist of the American narrative, became an endangered species. Against a bleak backdrop of indebtedness, unemployment, and rapid decline in traditional jobs and in the affordability of the essentials of health and education stands the stark wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans. With the vital center no longer holding and consensus fraying, 53 percent of the electorate wagered in 2008 that it could deny race by af½rming its non-importance and thereby audaciously re- invigorate the exceptionalist narrative. The choice before us, however, is still much the same as that posited by W.E.B. Du Bois when he described two antithetical versions of the American narrative: one was based on “freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private pro½t directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power.”

When Ronald Reagan bade farewell from the Oval Of½ce on January 11, 1989, the fortieth Ameri- can president catechized his people with scriptural imagery of a shining City Upon a Hill, “God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds and living in harmony,” that resonated positively with all but the most culturally and politically disaffected.1 For rea- DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, a Fel- sons that have had as much to do with America’s low of the American Academy twentieth-century wealth and power as with the in- since 2002, is the Julius Silver trinsic uniqueness of its national experience, Ameri- University Professor and Profes- sor of History at New York Univer- ca’s leadership presumptions were largely conced- sity. His publications include King: ed by the rest of the world until the catastrophe of A Biography (1970, 1978); The Race 9/11 and rarely questioned by Americans themselves to Fashoda: European Colonialism and before the closing years of the last century. African Resistance in the Scramble for Twenty-two years after the Reagan presidency Africa (1987); W.E.B. Du Bois: The ended only months before the Berlin Wall crumbled, Fight for Equality and the American the disaffected have been joined by a growing num- Century, 1919–1963 (2000), which received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize ber of Americans sobered by how suddenly the pros- for Biography; and God’s Crucible: pect of a Pax Americana has vanished. Dismayed Islam and the Making of Europe, by the steady immiseration of the vaunted middle 570–1215 (2008). class, the billions squandered on two decades of op-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The tional military adventures, and the compe- ideological boilerplate, American excep- Changing tition from new economic powerhouses tionalism became the ready cliché of pol- American Narrative in Asia and South America, they find un- iticians, public intellectuals, journalists, mistakable signs that our exceptionalist and media opinion-molders after Reagan’s presumptions, distilled less than two gen- 1980 election. As a composite of ante- erations ago into a conceptual concen- cedents, the term sometimes displays its trate called American exceptionalism, require historical comprehensiveness with self- a twenty-½rst-century reset. The truth conscious didacticism inflected by chau- seems to be that the “redeemer nation” vinism. Yet this most American concept needs redemption and that the 350-year- derives much of its interpretive substance old narrative of special nationhood will from the enduring observations of two sustain itself only if revised to parse hon- French counts, Alexis de Tocqueville and estly its own history and myths, and as- Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. Equally ½t- similate dissonant domestic and global ting is the problematically acknowledged realities emerging from the shadows cast contribution of an African American by the declining brilliance of its triumphal intellectual, William Edward Burghardt worldview.2 Du Bois, whose citizenship rights the U.S. To be sure, before the term American Supreme Court had reinterpreted and exceptionalism emerged, a myriad of ide- diminished at the end of the nineteenth ational precursors expressed themselves century. in one era of American history to the next. Of the three, de Crèvecoeur’s contri- The predestinarian sermons of the Puri- bution to the making of the American tans embodied the providential dispen- narrative was biographically the most in- sation of the nation and its people. The teresting. Present at the creation of the founders’ documents were impregnat- United States, de Crèvecoeur introduced ed with Enlightenment ideas–Montes- European society to what he limned as a quieu, Smith, and Rousseau American- “new people melted into one” in Letters ized. Works by Emerson and Thoreau, from an American Farmer (1782). He sur- as well as the ½ction and poetry of Haw- vived the French Revolution during a thorne, Melville, and Whitman, channeled visit home and died a naturalized Amer- the democratic ethos. Lincoln enshrined ican (known as Hector St. John) in 1813. the ideal at Gettysburg. Historian Fred- Democracy in America (1835) was less ro- erick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “Frontier mantic in its appreciation of the natives Thesis,” complemented sixteen years later than de Crèvecoeur’s influential memoir, by editor and public intellectual Herbert but Tocqueville certainly thought Jackson- Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909), ian-era Americans were off to a very spe- were perhaps two of the ideal’s most sig- cial future. According to him, Americans’ ni½cant post-Civil War iterations. Turner’s distinguishing characteristics were indi- marching frontier and Croly’s progressive vidualism, faith in popular sovereignty, capitalism were magnets drawing Emma mistrust of government, and, above all, Lazarus’s “huddled masses” in numbers their certainty of living in a land un- unimagined.3 bounded by the fetters of history. Still, he Surprisingly, the term itself–American detected two viruses in the body politic exceptionalism–is of relatively recent vin- whose potential for harm might be per- tage. From its origins in the mid-1930s as manent: an egalitarian insistence on social high-flown political science theory to its conformity and a majoritarian prejudice appropriation during the Cold War as against people from Africa.4

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 As the visiting aristocrat well knew, One theory was based on “freedom, in- David Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, telligence and power for all men; the other Levering Lewis speaking for most of their founding peers, was industry for private pro½t directed by had deplored the African presence in their an autocracy determined at any price to hard-won new republic as an aesthetic amass wealth and power.”6 and cultural blemish. Blemishes were ac- Du Bois’s American Assumption was knowledged at three-½fths per capita for a binary paradigm. It honored John taxation and representation, but the men Winthrop’s providential parable, Jeffer- at Philadelphia intended to preclude in son’s Arcadian nostrums, Tocqueville’s perpetuity the possibility of citizenship exceptionalist insights, and Henry Clay’s for blemishes. Tocqueville fretted, never- “American System” as the building blocks theless, that the tensions inherent in the of the national edi½ce at its best, then pro- institution of slavery would eventually ceeded to expose the widening cracks of tax the American political system beyond class and race in the façade. The best of its capacity to compromise. “From what- times had been the period from 1820 ever point one departs, one almost always to 1860, when, according to Du Bois, the arrives at this ½rst fact,” he noted.5 theory of compensated democracy con- Indeed, he predicted that this “½rst fact” verged more closely than ever before or would be a permanent feature of democra- since with reality of opportunity for ordi- cy in America. Tocqueville died two years nary citizens. It was during the Manifest before Americans’ capacity for viable com- Destiny decades of freedom from gov- promise ½nally exhausted itself. ernment interference, freedom of eco- nomic opportunity, and the “ever possi- One hundred years after the publication ble increase of industrial income” that of Democracy in America, Du Bois antici- the American Assumption of wealth as pated the neologism American exceptional- “mainly the result of its owner’s effort ism a score of years before it entered aca- and that any average worker can by thrift demic usage to become a canonical meta- become a capitalist” seemed to be nearly phor of the national experience. Writing true for white men, Du Bois conceded. in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860– Although this realization of democracy 1880 of the failure of racial democracy in for white people was seemingly true in the South after the Civil War, Du Bois one half of the nation, the paradigm of coined the phrase “the American Assump- equality faltered badly in the Cotton tion” to explain what he saw as the fatal Kingdom, the nation’s other half, where downside of government at the command the racialized social order presented the of unrestrained capitalism. In this 1935 American Assumption’s “most sinister howitzer of a book demolishing seventy- contradiction.”7 ½ve years of historical consensus, Du Bois The conflict between the republic’s two insisted that biracial accommodation halves resolved the institutional contra- based on the ballot box and the school- diction of slavery in a democracy, but its house had prospered in the defeated Con- outcome fatally undermined private enter- federacy for a half-decade until unlikely prise as a system uncorrupted by oligop- success gave way to everlasting greed. As oly and left the problem of genuine cit- the uplift idealism of the war succumbed izenship for black people to be resolved to the political economy of triumphant by future generations. For as Du Bois in- plutocracy, “two theories of the future of sisted in “Looking Forward,” his book’s America” clashed, according to Du Bois. trenchant seventh chapter, the incorpo-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The ration of ex-slaves was the central ques- simply “questions about the distribution Changing tion confronting the republic. As a good of power.”9 American Narrative progressive historian steeped in Marx, Marxist historians insisted that serious Du Bois pronounced the captains of un- students of the national experience must regulated wealth as winners in the contest distinguish between the persistent myth between the “two theories” of the Amer- of a putatively benign private enterprise ican future. The validity of the American system and the present reality of a rapa- Assumption “ceased with the Civil War,” cious, cartelized market economy. Du Bois Du Bois declared, even though its mys- served up a characteristically withering tique would inform a simulacrum of indictment of unregulated capitalism in a broadly based economic opportunity land forgone of equal opportunity seven until the Great Depression, when, he said, decades after Appomattox: “It went with “it died with a great wail of despair.”8 ruthless indifference towards waste, Du Bois’s American Assumption neol- death, ugliness and disaster, and yet reared ogism and American exceptionalism were the most stupendous machine for ef½- synonymous terms derived, ironically, cient organization of work which the from Joseph Stalin’s then-recent denun- world has ever seen.”10 Thirteen years ciation of the American Communist after Du Bois’s Marxist hyperbole, the Party’s ideological heterodoxy that Amer- consensus historian Richard Hofstadter ican capitalism’s special resiliency jus- expressed a similar judgment even as he ti½ed exceptional adversarial tactics. The began distancing himself from progres- irony was especially incongruous because sive colleagues. With far less spleen, Hof- its Soviet originators de½ned American stadter opined in The American Political Tra- exceptionalism as a colossal historical dition and the Men Who Made It (1948) that, fallacy that imagined itself exempt from despite its “strong bias in favor of egali- the iron laws of economic determinism, tarian democracy,” America “has been a whereas most American academics and democracy in cupidity rather than a de- public intellectuals, with Du Bois, John mocracy of fraternity.”11 Dewey, and Charles Beard being the The neo-orthodox theologian Rein- notable exceptions, avidly embraced a hold Niebuhr also lamented the loss of a phrase they regarded as an inspired en- simpler era when the national destiny capsulation of 160 years of impeccable was understood as “God’s effort to make national history. To Du Bois and like- a new beginning in the history of man- minded American socialists and engaged kind.”12 But where Du Bois saw unregu- progressives determined to lift the ½g leaf lated wealth and race prejudice as excep- of liberty from exploitative wealth and tionalism’s prime corrupters, Niebuhr de- power, the cant of exceptionalism served plored the sin of hubris and a religion of merely to keep the Moloch of laissez-faire materialism that offered “the management on life support even as its vital signs of history”–state-sponsored panaceas– failed in the wake of the Great Crash of as the antidote for human frailty. Reaction 1929. Dewey, Du Bois’s naacp colleague to both thinkers’ philippics has sometimes and fellow progressive, scoffed at disin- been profoundly unwelcome, as with the genuous invocations of liberty “by the adverse response to Niebuhrian elements managers and bene½ciaries of the exist- present in Jimmy Carter’s memorable ing economic system.” Questions about “malaise” meditation or the electorate’s liberty, Dewey declared in his aptly named ultimate alienation from the Du Boisian Individualism Old and New (1930), were precepts of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 Society. Most Americans lived their lives build Western Europe on the condition David in ways that allowed them the luxury of that it marginalize its communist parties Levering Lewis high disregard for well-informed criti- and join nato. In his ½nal address to the cisms of their society. The mantra ad- nation, Franklin D. Roosevelt had spoken dressed to foreigners was “Love it or leave movingly of the New Deal’s un½nished it!” Intellectual or political nonconformi- egalitarian goals, summoning Americans ty by fellow citizens risked the label “un- to make them their ½rst order of business American.” The distinctive feature of the after the imminent restoration of peace.13 American narrative at all times and in Four years later, their 1948 per capita every iteration was a serene, even sunny, incomes four times larger than those of belief in a teleology of better days. the British, French, Germans, and Italians combined, Americans overwhelmingly, Until the most recent period in the na- and mostly without much reflection, em- tion’s history, that curious serenity and braced prosperity in lieu of progressivism. optimism were proof against crippling The social democrats and their politically doubt, disunity, or despair. Only twice maladroit communist allies found them- has the narrative come close to failure– selves drowning in a rising tide of un- nearly irreparably in 1861, traumatically precedented prosperity that promised to after 1929. The “wail of despair” Du Bois lift every American into the middle class. heard with the onset of the Great Depres- The “wail of despair” was barely a whisper sion was sharp enough to embolden all by the time the ½rst generation of college- those who decided that capitalism had fa- educated, suburbanite consumers creat- tally malfunctioned and was too serious a ed by the G.I. Bill voted any ticket but system to be left to the ministrations of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in the capitalists. For the ½rst time in history, a pivotal 1948 presidential election. majority of Americans embraced the novel The post–World War II land of liberty premise–cutting straight across the grain assumed global obligations with an evan- of laissez-faire self-reliance and rugged gelizing con½dence that would have as- individualism–that government should tonished Woodrow Wilson. Publisher of guarantee its citizens a minimum of Time and Life, Henry Luce, had already health, housing, education, and retirement given the world its peacetime marching income. Unions won collective bargain- orders in “The American Century,” a sig- ing rights and unemployment insurance nature 1941 editorial in Life. The Truman for unskilled workers, black and white. Doctrine’s throwing down the military Federal rural electri½cation began the rad- gauntlet to the Soviet Union in March ical transformation of the Deep South. 1947 caught most Americans by surprise. Impressive as many of these accomplish- Many had still not quite assimilated the ments were, the New Deal’s alphabetical- ominousness of Churchill’s “iron curtain” ly innovative programs to jumpstart the speech. The writ of the Monroe Doctrine, economy faltered badly, especially after reinterpreted by George Kennan, Dean the 1936 election. Acheson, and John Foster Dulles, ran to World War II saved the New Deal, en- three continents. A new national security abling it to save American capitalism, state (secretly authorized in April 1950) which in turn equipped America’s “great- sprang from an increasingly potent post- est generation” (together with Russia’s) war military-industrial-½nancial com- to defeat fascism, put the world economy plex, insinuating itself into congression- on the dollar at Bretton Woods, and re- al independence, civil liberties, public

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The schools, and higher education. cia-pro- than two hundred years since the rat- Changing grammed artistic and cultural initiatives i½cation of the U.S. Constitution (pace American 14 Narrative spanned much of the planet. Canadians in the early nineteenth century The speed with which the obligation and Mexicans in Texas and California). came to shape world history would have Nearly sixty years have elapsed since the been understood by the Pilgrims as a overthrow of Iran’s democracy, an act of divine commandment. Some thirty years Niebuhrian “innocency” whose ongoing before his turn at the helm of leadership, consequences for the United States have Ronald Reagan recognized that Ameri- been almost as dire as for Iran: Jimmy cans had not been able to escape destiny, Carter’s election defeat and a decade of “nor should we try to do so,” he enjoined. Reaganomics and New Deal dismantle- “The leadership of the free world was ment; compounded by a decade of Alan thrust upon us two centuries ago in that Greenspan’s regulatory insouciance; and little hall at Philadelphia.”15 Isolationists the present nuclearized complexities of faithful to George Washington’s advice the Middle East. The story we have told to remain unentangled by foreign com- ourselves depicts us as history’s 911 emer- mitments went almost entirely unheard. gency rescuers, responding to distress ap- Translated as realpolitik, however, mak- peals, saving lives and liberty, providing ing the world safe for democracy meant technical assistance and matériel, and de- saving it from communism, which en- parting the moment the patient’s demo- tailed as often as not supporting un- cratic life signs are stabilized. The narra- democratic regimes and corrupt incom- tive was splendidly validated after Pearl petency around the world. American Harbor, but sixty years later, the national exceptionalism abroad professed a high- leadership misappropriated the excep- minded innocence of motives that was tionalist narrative written by its “greatest unique in the annals of empire-building. generation” in order to justify actions in Nor was the profession of it explainable the September 11 aftermath, the conse- merely as the rank hypocrisy of power. quences of which have been, mostly, de- It was not surprising that the nation’s monstrably lamentable. By 1980, when the people wished blindly “to preserve inno- revisionist diplomatic historian William cency [sic] by disavowing the responsibil- Appleman Williams’s incisive summing ities of power,” as Niebuhr insisted in The up appeared under the title Empire as a Irony of American History (1952).16 True, Way of Life, a good many erstwhile critics outright military seizures of territory virtually conceded the truth of chronic have generally been fairly brief, with the foreign adventurism.17 exception of Hawaii, Haiti, and the Phil- ippines, until the decade following 9/11. Looking back from the seventies, econ- The citizenry has been inculcated with omists would speak of the “golden era of the gospel of anti-imperialism by its pol- American capitalism,” a quarter-century iticians, diplomatic historians, and col- from 1945 to 1971, the year the United umnists, not to mention generations of States ended international convertibility elementary and high school teachers. A of the dollar into gold and one year after nation conceived in revolt against the the country’s domestic oil production tyranny of an empire does not perpetrate peaked. It was the greatest story of pro- imperialism, we have been taught. ductive and ½nancial transformation yet Indeed, empire has been the love that told until the rise of modern China. The dared not acknowledge itself in the more United States had more than one-half of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 the world’s manufacturing capacity, sup- of social engineering gone awry on their David plied a third of the world’s exports, and far left, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Levering Lewis produced the greatest amount of oil, steel, subcommittee ready with subpoena on automobiles, and electronics. The gdp their far right, professors and liberals hud- rose from $294 billion in 1950 to $526 bil- dled on the safe middle ground staked out lion by 1960, and all classes of white citi- by Americans for Democratic Action.21 zens more or less evenly bene½ted from Moreover, many wanted to know, what this prodigious growth.18 was so flawed about American capital- A national narrative ½guratively script- ism? Many thoughtful people embraced ed by Midas and, literally, by Madison Niebuhr’s judgment that the problem Avenue and Detroit inspired a qualitative- with capitalism was not the system itself ly mixed run of celebratory appreciations but the people who corrupted it.22 Arthur of exceptionalism by leading academics, Schlesinger, Jr., snapped that pejorative such as historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., denotations of capitalism “belonged to David Potter, and Daniel Boorstin; lit- the vocabulary of demagoguery, not the erary scholars Henry Nash Smith and vocabulary of analysis.”23 Skeptics of the R.W.B. Lewis; and political scientist Louis prodigious excellence of the system were Hartz. A redoubled self-consciousness soon warned to enlighten themselves by about the essence of the national charac- reading Strategy and Structure (1962), Har- ter informed their writings, the best of vard Business School economist Alfred which melded admiration and perspicac- Chandler’s authoritative demonstration ity. In revisiting Turner’s marching fron- that Adam Smith’s invisible hand no lon- tier, Potter enlarged its scope to embrace ger ruled the marketplace. The market, the full sweep of the American economy Chandler posited, was now expertly and and the opportunities it was supposed to rationally guided by capitalism’s new be able to bestow on everybody.19 Appro- managerial class.24 priately, writer Shepherd Mead’s book In contrast, Eisenhower-era novelists How to Succeed in Business without Really Try- served up nuanced critiques of material- ing enjoyed great popularity when it was istic conformity and its sometimes un- published in 1952. As a Broadway musical appealing existential outcomes. Journal- ten years later, it recon½rmed the sanguine ist William Hollingsworth Whyte’s The upward-mobility ideology of Dale Car- Organization Man (1953) and novelist negie in song and dance.20 Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flan- The “golden era” played predictable fa- nel Suit (1955) toyed in mildly subversive vorites among the intelligentsia. The trac- ways with anomie, risk-aversion, and tion once exercised in the profession by conformity in a bland decade centered the progressive historians of the Beard/ on the television show Father Knows Best Beale/Du Bois/Parrington/Turner per- (1954–1960) and the ge kitchen commer- suasion was sadly diminished in a time of cial. Social scientists of the period kept self-congratulatory consensus. Not only a safe distance from Marx, but the sub- were the progressives’ themes of machi- sisting influences of Veblen and Weber, nations and exploitation by the powerful combined with an acceptable Freud, called interpretive exaggerations, their im- pushed at least a few to unmask some dis- plicit solutions of political activism and tressful socioeconomic realities. Sociolo- government oversight were deemed divi- gists David Riesman and Nathan Glazer’s sive and dangerously wrongheaded. With “other-directed” Americans took their the Soviet Union as an obscene example signi½cant cues from a “Lonely Crowd,”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The a mass of pliable people, respectful of cor- ies of race, gender, class, and empire. Race Changing porate authority and devoid of existential would be at the forefront, shattering the American Narrative gyroscopes. The outlier in the group was mold for the second time and permanent- the neo-Marxist-Weberian sociologist ly altering the sociosexual shape of things C. Wright Mills, whose schematic The as never before. Power Elite (1956) should have alarmed its Tocqueville worried that color preju- large mainstream readership.25 Instead, dice might become American democra- many readers admired the elite’s power cy’s greatest failure–even observing that and envied its lifestyles without gauging the prejudice “rejecting Negroes seems the meaning of Mills’s data, which showed to increase in proportion to their emanci- American society hardening into strata of pation.”28 Du Bois certi½ed racism’s in- self-perpetuating, interlocked privilege in- tractability more than a hundred years ago creasingly unaccountable to the citizenry. with a prophecy many Americans can still To be sure, although the average Amer- recite from memory. “The problem of the ican would remain innocent of the con- twentieth century,” he stipulated in The ceptual convenience of the exceptionalist Souls of Black Folk (1903), his great African tagline well into the 1970s, she or he could American manifesto, “is the problem of have offered a ready enumeration of its the color-line–the relation of the darker essential components, without needing to and lighter races of men.”29 Eighty-½ve read Tocqueville, Bryce, Wells, Du Bois, years later, historian Eric Foner con½rmed or even Hofstadter and Schlesinger, both Du Bois’s once-controversial counter- of whose classic interpretations of the na- narrative: that the too-brief interval of tion’s de½ning political and social char- interracial reform after the Civil War was acteristics (The American Political Tradition followed by Redemption, almost two de- and The Vital Center) had appeared within cades of hard-fought political realignment months of each other at the end of the ending in the defeat of the interracially 1940s. For many, it was simply a matter of promising People’s Party, the ½nal elimi- birthright that to be an American was to nation of the African American franchise be exceptional.26 Almost surely, Hofstad- in the South, and the imposition of Jim ter’s unsurpassed exceptionalist aphorism Crow.30 that “it has been our fate as a nation not People of color all but disappeared from to have ideologies, but to be one” would the American narrative in 1896 after the have fully satis½ed the average man or Supreme Court’s seven-to-one decision in woman in the 1950s.27 Yet if America’s ide- Plessy v. Ferguson dismissed, with appall- ology was being American, then Hofstad- ing legal casuistry, the application of the ter’s maxim, like any syllogism, was more Fourteenth Amendment to a Louisiana clever than instructive. law regulating seating accommodations on trains. The enforced separation of the From the beginning, whole categories races imposed no badge of inferiority, of Americans had been excluded from the Chief Justice Henry Billings Brown ruled: vital center or enjoyed no meaningful “But if this be so, it is not by reason of role in the political tradition (namely, the anything found in the act, but solely ethnically cleansed American Indian). It because the colored race chooses to put was the categories missing from the ex- that construction upon it.”31 Ten percent ceptionalism paradigm that ½nally began of the country’s population was rendered to break the bien-pensant mold: the four “separate but equal,” a condition it was unacknowledged or suppressed categor- enjoined not to view as a disability, even

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 as it saw itself legally barred from street plemented the Southern agenda of re- David cars, Pullmans, theaters, movie houses, inforced “blackness,” stigmatized and Levering Lewis parks, public schools, municipal librar- ostracized.32 ies, drinking fountains, public toilets, The color dichotomy imposed by Plessy sports stadiums, and hospitals reserved and rationalized with the excision of for white citizens. “Mulatto” from the U.S. Census after 1920 With that decision, people of color relieved the immigrant, once he departed lived in a world that paralleled the larger from Ellis Island, of confusion about the white world. Occasionally, some super- most desirable American phenotypes. star captured the admiration of the ma- People of color, now called a race, served jority, thereby reaf½rming the nation’s as reverse examples of appropriate citi- opportunity creed: Joe Louis, decking the zenship. Most newcomers quickly ½gured Nazi prize½ghter Max Schmelling in out who were the people they should take 1938; Marian Anderson’s soaring con- care not to imitate or respect–a mudsill tralto shaming bigotry from the steps of population below a rising tide of generally the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday optimistic immigrants. To be sure, the new in 1939; Charles Drew, honored by the race was a beehive with an economy sup- American Board of Surgery for organiz- porting ½nancial institutions, large reli- ing the Red Cross Blood Bank in 1943; gious establishments, newspaper and cos- Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers in metics empires, liberal arts colleges, and 1947; Ralph Bunche receiving the Nobel a fairly diversi½ed professional class: all Peace Prize in 1950. To be fair to the rec- separate, but in a few cases equal. ord, there were African American leaders, Meanwhile, elites North and South such as Booker Washington and Robert succumbed to hysteria over pseudo- R. Moton, and a considerable number of eugenics and supposedly well-sourced black professionals who, as Jim Crow’s predictions of an unassimilable surge of bene½ciaries, defended Plessy. millions immigrating after World War I Plessy’s effects on the nation’s melting- on top of the twenty million who arrived pot leitmotif were immense in their power between 1880 and 1910. As more southern simultaneously to obscure and sustain and eastern Europeans stood poised to the mythos of cultural harmony, ideolog- disembark, old-stock Americans lament- ical conformity, and middle-class content- ed the Protestant republic vanishing in a ment. By judicial sleight of hand, e pluri- “non-white” sea of unmeltable languages, bus unum became e pluribus duo, in histo- religions, and cultures. The “menacing” rian Matthew Jacobson’s sardonic para- influx ½nally ended when Congress en- phrase. Plessy’s elimination of blacks acted the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. solved a problem of even greater com- plexity and exigency: the assimilation By 1954, the covert dynamic of race, class, of quasi-whites. Hysteria over the insuf- and economics had succeeded so well in ½cient “whiteness” of European immi- assimilating ethnic Europeans as to make grants peaked in the North and Northeast possible, even necessary, the national re- about a decade after the white suprema- consideration of the biracial solution or- cist South invented its “one drop” identi- dained by Plessy v. Ferguson. If American ty rule to solve a well-grounded fear of ideals had meaning, their guardians real- extensive racial admixture. The two chal- ized that the defeat of fascism and the lenges were symmetrically reinforcing: containment of communism in Europe, the “whitening up” of immigrants com- the unfolding horrors of genocide, anti-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The colonial unrest in Asia and Africa, fdr’s The Brown decision was unanimous Changing Four Freedoms, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s and unambiguous–at ½rst. In a key foot- American Narrative Universal Declaration of Human Rights note, the decision referenced psycholo- demanded much more than recycled pie- gists Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s poi- ties. This time, the ideology of liberty and gnant ½ndings that black children ex- democracy had to matter. The of½cial pressed a preference for white dolls over count of Nazi Germany’s six million mur- black. After a ½fty-eight-year detour, the dered Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs sent pub- United States was back at the starting lic avowal of genetic differences into the point for racial equality only months closet. The shameful resemblance of the after Ralph Ellison’s runaway best seller, Jim Crow South’s laws and practices to Invisible Man, won the National Book the defeated Third Reich’s Nuremberg Award for ½ction. Black Americans were laws put the United States at a major and elated. Even Du Bois, by then a caustic growing disadvantage with the Soviet Marxist critic of his country’s every ac- Union in winning the hearts and minds tion, wondered how the “miracle” had of the planet’s dark-skinned majority. happened.35 A year later, elation would Brown v. Board of Education, released on give way to apprehension, to be followed May 17, 1954, surprised the public with a by a decade of presidential neutrality and unanimous decision nullifying Plessy. organized Southern resistance to inte- However, a Gallup poll found that while gration. Whether it was ingenuous con- 54 percent of Americans approved, 41 per- ½dence in Myrdal’s American Creed or, cent did not.33 Ten years after the publi- more pragmatically, the price paid for their cation of Swedish economist Gunnar unanimity, the justices departed from es- Myrdal’s two-volume An American Dilem- tablished practice by deferring an en- ma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democ- forcement decree by a full calendar year. racy (1944), the nine justices rei½ed what When they reconvened on May 31, 1955, it had become the ruling paradigm of was not to order an immediate end of pub- Myrdalian liberalism. Recruited by the lic school segregation, but to declare Brown Carnegie Corporation in 1938 to conduct enforced “with all deliberate speed.” a massive social science study of the Brown I restored the full force of the Four- “problem,” the Scandinavian became the teenth Amendment. Brown II accommo- American Negro’s Tocqueville. In Myr- dated the casuistry of Chief Justice Brown dal’s formulation, racism was an imper- in the Plessy case. fection in the social order, a moral insult That the American Creed has failed to to the nation’s founding ideals and thus resolve the American dilemma as medi- a paradox in the “American Creed” that ated ½fty-seven years ago through Brown becomes ever more intolerable. Myrdal’s is in meaningful measure due to the iron- introduction to An American Dilemma de- ic fact that one of Europe’s leading econ- scribed the American Negro as “a prob- omists eschewed economics as central lem in the heart of the American. . . . This to the problem that he and an army of is the central viewpoint of this treatise. social scientists were charged to explain. Though our study includes economics, Guided by the Carnegie-Myrdal ½ndings, social, and political race relations, at bot- the Court’s decision addressed the prob- tom our problem is the moral dilemma of lem in terms of interracial psychology, the American–the conflict between his whereas its origins and substantive ame- moral valuations on various levels of con- lioration were in reality economic. By log- sciousness and generality.”34 ical extension to the full range of Ameri-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 can public life, Brown was a prescription fronted with Frederick Douglass’s Fif- David for enlightened national self-interest teenth Amendment admonitions.38 Still, Levering Lewis based on an anticipated upwelling of prog- a combination of sympathy from the civil ress resulting from intimate and educat- rights establishment and sexist under- ed group contact.36 estimation of the gender issue’s signi½- cance led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act be- Ten years after Brown and nearly a cen- coming law with discrimination prohib- tury after the Civil War, the third major ited on grounds of “race, color, religion, revision of the national narrative came sex, or national origin.”39 In When Every- as African Americans’ rising frustrations thing Changed (2010), one of author Gail over non-enforcement of “all deliberate Collins’s interviewees recalls never once speed” boiled over.37 The 1964 Civil Rights having seen a female professor while a Act was enacted in a climate of ferocious student at the University of California, racial confrontations pressed nightly on Berkeley. “Worse yet,” she says of 1960, national television by Martin Luther King, “I didn’t even notice.”40 Jr.’s nonviolent campaign in Birmingham, In 1964, the Student Nonviolent Coor- Alabama, and black student activism gone dinating Committee (sncc, often re- viral in the Deep South after its lunch- ferred to as Snick) organized the Missis- counter and freedom-rides phases. For sippi Freedom Summer, recruiting stu- better and worse, most Americans took it dent volunteers to register African Amer- for granted that civil rights meant racial icans to vote. The ideas and experiences rights; sexual rights seemed only inci- that a pivotal cohort of college women dental until the black freedom struggle took away from the extraordinary interra- stimulated gender rights activism. In the cial group catharsis they experienced that interim between Brown’s checkered im- summer helped ground American femi- plementation and the temporary consoli- nism’s so-called second wave. The Free- dation of the Great Society, the women’s dom Summer brought together college- movement caught the high winds of so- age black and white women as equals in a cial change generated by the black civil black-run organization for the ½rst time rights movement. in the history of the women’s movement. The familiar story of race and gender Feminism’s future cadres of leading pro- ½nally cohabiting the exceptionalist nar- fessionals, writers, academics, and jour- rative is literally one of black humor. No nalists emerged from this experience so- federal law made it a crime to discrimi- bered and somewhat embittered by what nate on the basis of sex. The U.S. Senate they saw as institutionalized hypocrisy had failed to approve the Equal Rights and gendered hierarchy in a movement Amendment (era) with the required two- supposedly pledged to the broadest pos- thirds majority the year before Brown. sible inculcation of democracy. Writer When Howard Smith, courtly Virginia Anne Moody and the women who came racist and chairman of the House Rules of age in Mississippi admiring civil rights Committee, amused his male colleagues leader Fannie Lou Hamer and reading by inserting the word sex into the mark- Betty Friedan ended their Freedom Sum- up of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights mer committed to an “naacp for wom- Act, the maneuver panicked members of en,” a “fully equal partnership of the the civil rights establishment and orga- sexes” that became the National Organi- nized labor. era advocates (mostly afflu- zation for Women (now) in 1966, two ent white women) were immediately con- years later.41

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Lyndon Johnson, with his Texas pop- historic civil rights allies, divided over edu- Changing ulist understanding that an ideal is worth cational quotas and community control American Narrative only what you can pay for it, had commit- of urban public schools, black power, and ted billions in seed-money to make Great Israel. Woodstock was a parallel universe Society projects economically feasible. of free love, pot, and protest music for the Johnson’s actions repeatedly commended boomer generation. Women had gained themselves to an Aeschylus. Six months their civil rights with Title VII; feminists after his remarkable “We Shall Over- were pushing hard for reproductive rights. come” speech to Congress, the president Historian Allen Matusow entitled his his- signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act with tory of a fractious decade of race, reform, King and Rosa Parks looking on, then and reaction The Unraveling of America.43 proceeded to send 144,000 troops to Viet- When Johnson signed the Immigration nam.42 Whether the socioeconomic mo- and Nationality Act and the Voting Rights mentum of the Great Society could have Act, both in 1965, he predicted, as did the repositioned a sizable mass of black peo- legislation’s congressional and pressure- ple and survived the genuinely experi- group sponsors, that the societal impact enced, but also politically instigated, egal- of the ½rst would be relatively small, itarian consternation of many white peo- but that the political consequences of ple is moot. The president who could have the second civil rights legislation would been the nation’s greatest since Lincoln be seismic. Prescient about the Voting destroyed himself in a war against god- Rights Act, Johnson would be stupe½ed less communism that his imperturbable forty-½ve years later to see the demo- defense secretary eventually discovered graphic momentum unleashed after re- to have been based on a false conception. peal of the racialist 1924 Johnson-Reed At the end of the 1960s, the country be- Immigration Act and dramatically re- gan to suffer from narrative indigestion. corded in the 2010 U.S. Census. In a burst Myrdal’s American Creed was dismissed of melting-pot euphoria, lbj and the 89th as a liberal illusion. Martin Luther King, Congress enriched and complicated the Jr. and Robert Kennedy’s American dream original narrative of an American racial went up in flames after Memphis. dyad of white and black. The 2030 U.S. As imperial and domestic events (the Census is almost certain to be complexly 1965 Watts race riots in Los Angeles ap- multiracial and multicultural. Johnson’s palled most Americans, black and white) prediction, that with the 1965 Voting eroded the solid closure in income dis- Rights Act he had signed away inde½nite- parities between middle-class black and ly his party’s historic command of the white families, the national narrative South’s white electorate, proved accurate. sounded themes of zero-sum injustice. African Americans remember the sym- Conservative media broadcast the Great bolism of Ronald Reagan kicking off Society as ½nanced by white working- his 1980 presidential campaign in Phil- class tax dollars. Catholic philosopher adelphia, Mississippi, where mention was Michael Novak’s unmeltable ethnics re- made not of Goodman, Chaney, and Sch- appeared, mobilized against school bus- werner, the slaughtered young civil rights ing, permissive lifestyles, disrespect for workers, but of Jefferson Davis and Robert the flag, law and order breakdown, and E. Lee. When Reagan captured the South an emerging gay liberation movement in 1980 (Jimmy Carter’s Georgia except- launched by the Stonewall riots in June ed) and again in the 1984 landslide, with 1969. Middle-class blacks and liberal Jews, George H.W. Bush following in 1988,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 pollsters and pundits proclaimed a his- increasingly not to be able to work at all. David toric and fundamental realignment in na- What’s the Matter with Kansas?, indeed, Levering Lewis tional politics.44 Still, it took much more asked journalist Thomas Frank of people than the gop’s winning of the South to ready to vote against their own self-inter- win the hearts and minds of much of the ests.46 The Radical Right tapped into those rest of America. The beginnings of neo- ancient underground veins of American conservative, or Radical Right, political nativism, fundamentalism, and anti-intel- success antedated the Reagan Revolution lectualism, into paranoia, violence, and by some three decades, however; it dated gender consternation, to produce an alloy back to the beginnings of the Cold War combining, as seldom before, the politics and the origins of a group of intellectuals of resentment with that of economic roy- cultivated and promoted by the cia, back alism. This squaring of political and cul- to the 1964 Goldwater presidential run. A tural circles amounted to an epic achieve- British observer tracked its history in a ment that was meant to spell the death of book whose title is its argument: The government in the life of the market, the World Turned Right Side Up.45 end of the regulated market economy and Reagan was the smiling face and good- of the social services dependent on tax cheer voice of an ideology that seemed to revenues derived from it. The rightward erupt with dumbfounding suddenness to shift in market deregulation, the ½nancial- mock the narratives of Hofstadter consen- ization of the economy, and debt-½nanced sus and Schlesinger vital centrism. After consumption continued under the Dem- years of false starts around the conserva- ocratic version of Reagan, William Jeffer- tive publications the National Review and son Clinton. The American Spectator, after years spent brooding in a handful of conservative, On the morning of September 11, 2001, second-tier think tanks and foundations American exceptionalism experienced its and the moneyed purlieus of Orange greatest trauma since Pearl Harbor. Nine- County, after devising an emotive politi- teen anonymous young Muslim men in cal language (coded for race and gender) hijacked airplanes inflicted a morti½ca- aimed at working-class whites and their tion upon the world’s colossus, a nation struggling suburban cousins, the new neo- whose military-industrial complex stood conservatism, or Radical Right, emerged ready to ½ght three simultaneous cam- as a powerful, vote-getting synthesis of paigns, even though the implosion of the antitheses and a major shift in the Amer- Soviet Union deprived the U.S. Pentagon ican narrative: populism bonded to plu- of any credible menace that justi½ed the tocracy. Yet it seamlessly wove together arsenal at its disposal. Niebuhr might have two long threads of that narrative in order invoked our besetting imperial “innocen- to swear by a Jeffersonian wariness of gov- cy” in helpful, partial explanation of what ernment and a Jacksonian resentment of Americans almost universally regarded old money and elite culture. as an unjusti½ed act of madness. Few had The Radical Right made it possible for seen or remembered cnn reporter Peter the employees of industries that were be- Arnett’s revealing interview with Osama ing merged, downsized, or outsourced, or bin Laden in the mountains of Jalalabad had completely disappeared, to vote for four years before 9/11. Bin Laden spoke politicians beholden to the very people then of his hatred for the United States who were forcing these employees to work with little display of passion: “It wants to for lower wages and fewer bene½ts, and occupy our countries, steal our resources,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The impose on us agents to rule us . . . and essentials of health and education stands Changing wants us to agree to all these. If we refuse the stark wealth of the top 1 percent of American 47 Narrative to do so, it will say, ‘You are terrorists.’” Americans–current owners of 42 percent A decade of imperial overreach has proved of the nation’s ½nancial wealth, up from to have been a counterproductive response 34.6 percent four years ago.48 to a perversion of Islam. All else seeming to fail, the vital center Seven years after 9/11, the American way no longer holding and consensus fraying, of life was again shaken to its foundation 53 percent of the electorate wagered in by the Great Recession of 2008. The logic 2008 that it could deny race by af½rm- of an unregulated market economy pro- ing its non-importance, and thereby au- duced its predetermined result. Wall Street daciously transform the exceptionalist shuddered and well over $7 trillion evap- narrative. The choice before us, however, orated in the housing bubble. Homeown- is still much the same as that posited by ers lost 55 percent of their housing wealth, Du Bois when he described two antithet- for many their major asset and symbol of ical versions of the American narrative: success. The American middle class, the one based on “freedom, intelligence and historic protagonist of the American nar- power for all men; the other was industry rative, became an endangered species. for private pro½t directed by an autocracy Against a bleak backdrop of indebtedness, determined at any price to amass wealth unemployment, and rapid decline in tra- and power.” ditional jobs and the affordability of the

endnotes 1 “Farewell Speech–President Reagan’s Farewell Speech from the Oval Of½ce,” January 11, 1989, Reagan Foundation; available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKVsq2daR8Q. 2 The following are but a few of the recent books conveying an end-of-days prognosis: Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropoli- tan Books/Holt, 2008); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); and Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). 3 Aaron Gutfeld, American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience (Brigh- ton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 26; Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 2, 10, 36; Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), chap. 1. 4 Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2005); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mans½eld and Delba Winthrop (1835; London: The Folio Soci- ety, 2002); David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York: Holt, 2009). 5 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 326. 6 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, with an introduction by David Levering Lewis (1935; New York: Atheneum, 1992), 182. 7 Ibid., 183. 8 Ibid. 9 Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 435.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 10 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 182. David 11 Levering Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948; New York: Lewis Vintage, 1989), xxxvii. 12 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner, 1952), chap. 1. 13 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Farewell Address to the Nation, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 484. 14 David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004). 15 Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, 176. 16 Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, quoted in Bacevich, The Limits of Power, 4. 17 See William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Pub- lishing, 1959); and William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, Also a Few Thoughts About an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). By contrast, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, a Bush-era meditation by historian Niall Ferguson in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s advice to his Atlantic cousins, would appear to settle the debate, whether or not one com- mends Ferguson’s applause for empire. See Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005). 18 Bacevich, The Limits of Power, 25. 19 Cf. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s combative The Vital Center, David Potter’s nuanced People of Plen- ty, Daniel Boorstin’s effusive trilogy, The Americans, Henry Nash Smith’s discerning Virgin Land, R.W.B. Lewis’s rich The American Adam, and Louis Hartz’s Panglossian The Liberal Tra- dition in America; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1958–1973); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The Ameri- can West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpre- tation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 20 Cf. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). 21 That Du Bois narrowly escaped federal prison in 1951 for his published opinions while Colum- bia University’s proli½c Allan Nevins absolved John D. Rockefeller of robber-baron taint in two volumes the previous year could be read only as Cold War paradox. 22 Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, ix. 23 Quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American His- torical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 300. 24 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1962). 25 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). 26 Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; Schlesinger, The Vital Center; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 19. 27 Hofstadter, quoted in Byron Shafer, ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Excep- tionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16. 28 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 330.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 The 29 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Ltd., 1973), 13. Changing 30 American Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Un½nished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Narrative Row, 1988). Howard University historian and Du Bois acolyte, Rayford W. Logan, called the period after 1890 the “nadir” for black people in his seminal book, originally titled The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. See Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (1954; New York: Da Capo Press, 1997). 31 Quoted in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage, 1977), 80; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979). 32 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 109; Matthew Guterl, The Color of Race in America: 1900–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 33 Gallup Poll data are taken from “Snapshots In Time: The Public in the Civil Rights Era,” http://www.publicagenda.org/civilrights/civilrights.htm. 34 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1944), 1, lxxi. See David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Holt, 2000), esp. chap. 12; David W. Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of “An American Dilemma,” 1944–1969 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Walter A. Jack- son, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938– 1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 35 Quoted in Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, II, 557. 36 Legal scholar Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., found the expectation sadly wanting ½fty years later; see Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). 37 Eisenhower had barely concealed his antipathy for Brown, and the Kennedy assassination terminated tentative civil rights responses. On Eisenhower’s hostility to Brown, see Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President: The Renowned One-Volume Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 367–368. 38 Congresswoman Edith Green lectured era advocates that, however badly women have been treated, “there has been ten times as much discrimination against the Negro”; quoted in Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from the 1960s to the Present (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 78. 39 When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission timidly took seriously Title VII’s sexual nondiscrimination mandate, the arbitral New Republic demanded to know why “a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House [should] be treated by a responsible administrative body with this kind of seriousness?”; quoted in Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2000), 73. 40Collins, When Everything Changed, 12. 41 Quoted in Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131. See also Rosen, The World Split Open. 42 Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1978 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); reviewed by David Levering Lewis, “The Mission,” The New Yorker, January 23 and 30, 2006, 86–91. 43 Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 44 Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00132 by guest on 25 September 2021 45 Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in David America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of Levering a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Lewis 46 Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Holt, 2004); Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (New York: Holt, 2008). 47 Quoted in Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 247. 48 Rex Nutting, “How the Bubble Destroyed the Middle Class,” Marketwatch, July 8, 2011.

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