Table Of ContentAmericanism
Ameri
Edited by Michael Kazin & Joseph A. McCartin
★
canism
★
New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal
the university of north carolina press
Chapel Hill
∫ 2006 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Set in Cycles and Quadraat Sans by
Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
This book was published with the assistance of
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North Carolina Press.
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Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Americanism : new perspectives on the history of an
ideal / edited by Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8078-3010-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8078-3010-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. National characteristics, American. 2. United States—
Politics and government. 3. United States—Foreign
relations. I. Kazin, Michael, 1948– II. McCartin, Joseph
Anthony III. Title.
e169.1.a52 2006
973—dc22 2005031396
10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin
Introduction 1
i. whose america?
Mia Bay
See Your Declaration Americans!!!:
Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary
Tradition in Free Black Politics 25
Robert Shalhope
Anticipating Americanism:
An Individual Perspective on Republicanism
in the Early Republic 53
Jonathan Hansen
True Americanism:
Progressive Era Intellectuals and
the Problem of Liberal Nationalism 73
Stephen J. Whitfield
The American Century of Henry R. Luce 90
Mae M. Ngai
The Unlovely Residue of Outworn Prejudices:
The Hart-Celler Act and the Politics of Immigration Reform,
1945–1965 108
Gary Gerstle
In the Shadow of Vietnam:
Liberal Nationalism and the Problem of War 128
Alan Wolfe
Religious Diversity:
The American Experiment That Works 153
ii. americanism in the world
Alan McPherson
Americanism against American Empire 169
Jun Furuya
Japanese Intellectuals Define America, from the 1920s
through World War II 192
Louis Menand
The Promise of Freedom, the Friend of Authority:
American Culture in Postwar France 205
Rob Kroes
French Views of American Modernity:
From Text to Subtext 221
Melani McAlister
Su√ering Sisters?
American Feminists and the Problem of
Female Genital Surgeries 242
Contributors 263
Acknowledgments 265
Index 267
vi } Contents
Americanism
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michael kazin & joseph a. mccartin
H H H H
H Introduction
It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.
—Richard Hofstadter
Just because you’re in this country doesn’t make you an American. No,
you’ve got to go farther than that before you can become an American.
You’ve got to enjoy the fruits of Americanism.—Malcolm X
They also must understand that what took place in [Abu Ghraib]
prison does not represent the America I know. The America I know
is a compassionate country that believes in freedom. The America I
know cares about every individual.—George W. Bush
The topic of this book is vast, protean, and famously contested—
and so a definition may be helpful. ‘‘Americanism’’ has two di√erent mean-
ings. It signifies both what is distinctive about the United States (and the
colonies and territories that formed it) and loyalty to that nation, rooted in
a defense of its political ideals. Those canonic ideals—self-government,
equal opportunity, freedom of speech and association, a belief in prog-
ress—were first proclaimed during the era of the Revolution and the early
republic and have developed more expansive meanings since then. Thanks
to a powerful civil rights movement, full social equality, for example, finally
entered the canon in the decades after World War II. But the bundle of
ideals we call Americanism has proved remarkably supple over time, which
helps to account for its enduring appeal to people in other lands as well as
at home.
Its shifting content is not the only thing that distinguishes Americanism
from the patriotisms generated by other powerful nation-states. Love of
any country requires attachment to its supposed virtues, past and present.
A√ection for ‘‘Holy Russia’’—its fields and forests and Orthodox Church—
long predated the Soviet Union and easily survived it. Traditional Japanese
patriots revere the uniqueness of their national tongue and of Shinto, a
pantheistic faith linked closely with an unbroken imperial house. Ameri-
canism, by contrast, has been rooted less in a shared culture than in shared
political ideals.
Like Americans, French patriots may pay homage to the Enlightenment-
born ideals of their revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—but French
patriotism includes a stronger cultural component than does America’s
national creed. Americans have always fought more over how to define and
apply their national ideals than about the merits of their language or cui-
sine. The resulting battles to define Americanism have alternately divided
the nation and unified it, producing both internal strife and solidarity
against foreign enemies. These two tendencies have often crested together
during wartime. Americanism’s propensity to generate both conflict and
cohesion continues in the early twenty-first century, a time when the
United States has no rival on the world stage but when ‘‘Americanism’’ is
fought about nearly everywhere.
The concept itself is nearly as old as the first European settlements to
endure on the landmass of North America. John Winthrop was thinking
about his church, not a nation, when, in 1630, he told those fellow Puritans
who sailed with him to a new world, ‘‘We must consider that we shall be as
a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’’ But Winthrop’s
notion that America ought to be a model for Christendom and beyond
soon transcended the intra-Protestant dispute that had led to the founding
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1763, another New Englander, John
Adams, wrote that America’s settlement was ‘‘the opening of a grand scene
and design in Providence.’’ Adams believed his young land was destined to
break the grip of feudal laws and customs, thus showing how individuals
could free themselves from an irrational, often tyrannical past. During and
just after the war for independence, such thinking was commonplace in
sermons, pamphlets, and even the diaries of ordinary men and women.
The new nation had the potential to be more than what Tom Paine called
‘‘an asylum for mankind.’’ It had a mission to liberate the world.∞
For many Americans, that messianic ambition was fused with religious
meaning. The Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century
spawned thousands of new Protestant churches and made the passion of
evangelicalism the common discourse of most inhabitants, whether free or
slave. Since that spiritual upsurge, the idea that anyone, regardless of learn-
ing or social background, can ‘‘come to Christ’’ has dovetailed with the
belief in equal rights emblazoned in the Declaration of Independence. This
synthesis of evangelical Protestantism and republicanism was found in no
other nation—at least not with such passionate conviction and for such a
long period of time.≤
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