Exceptionalism's Exceptions
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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- © 2012 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 101 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.4 102 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences 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.