American Exceptionalism, From the Outside Looking In

It is easy to think of American exceptionalism as the refuge of scoundrel politicians, the sort of unfit elected official too frightened to face the challenges of the day or to formulate any serious public policy, except perhaps drafting a contract against America. It is likewise easy to think of American exceptionalism as the propaganda spewed year after year at U.S. schoolchildren, so they might retain gullible innocence through adult citizenship. And it is easy to think of American exceptionalism as a sheath for the systemic infliction of inequality and injustice, to protect and hide unearned privilege that might otherwise crumble.

Ian Tyrrell studiously concentrates on the fascinating history rather than the terrible folly of American exceptionalism. Indeed, Tyrrell is the perfect historian to write such a history as he has been investigating American exceptionalism at least since the 1991 publication of his oft-cited “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” in the American Historical Review.¹ An early convert to transnational history, Tyrrell urged Americanist historians to escape their national confines and exceptionalist reflexes in order to convey the full complexity of U.S. history.

Published thirty years later, American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea can effortlessly assume and incorporate the transnational throughout its analysis. Exceptionalism is no longer an unthinking reflex to be avoided, but a timely subject worth painstaking dissection. Tyrrell sets up his account as a “peculiar tale” full of surprises, and this is indeed the case, with each of the eleven chapters replete with rich detail and incisive analysis. This is the kind of supremely rewarding book that obliges one to take voluminous notes covering the full span of U.S. history from the early seventeenth century to the present day. One might, of course, dip into a specific chapter for a specific research or teaching need, but the book contains a surfeit of temptations for the historian.

Jack P. Greene had in 1993 already pointed out one irony in the history of American exceptionalism: that it was invented not by Americans, but by Europeans. In an era of colliding cultures inaugurated by Christopher Columbus in 1492, it was Europeans who already in the sixteenth century were trumpeting the imagined blessings of the “New World,” in order to promote more and more extractive capitalism and settler colonialism, heedless of their terrible rapacity. The “New World” was portrayed as fundamentally distinctive from Europe, and the British North American colonies as fundamentally distinctive from Britain, an opportunistic belief which was gradually internalized by colonial Britons and then proudly, by 1800, proclaimed by revolutionary and national Americans. American exceptionalism was, in this trajectory, a cultural inheritance.

Tyrrell points out that American “exceptionalism” did not become an -ism until the 1920s, when—in another irony—the -ism was first voiced by American dissidents puzzled by the lack of socialist sentiment in the United States. Reaching this pivotal juncture in his story only in Chapter Nine, Tyrrell first delivers a long, shifting, and multi-faceted history of the many underlying ideas that would carry forward into the versions of American “exceptionalism” peddled across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Fundamental to Tyrrell’s story is that the ideas and the -ism both changed over time, within specific historical contexts that are carefully reconstructed. Fundamental, too, is that there were always competing ideas about American exceptionalism in any given historical moment. In other words, American exceptionalism was not—and is not—one thing. It was many things, continually changing in meaning.

Tyrrell does not waste words on debunking the nonsensical ideas or beliefs comprising “patriotic” American exceptionalism. Such debunking would amount to proverbially shooting fish in a barrel, and would be beside the point, since exceptionalist ideas and beliefs tend to appeal to emotional fantasies, detached from empirical reality. What is infinitely more compelling in American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea are the competing notions of exceptionalist ideas or beliefs in every given historical context across U.S. history, and who sought to use those notions for what purposes. At the heart of Tyrrell’s analysis are attempts to make exceptionalist ideas or beliefs usable and hegemonic, both in an historical moment and, sometimes, also in the fabricated memories of that historical moment. For this reason, Chapter One examines not only the so-called “Puritans” in the colonial era, but subsequent memories of Puritans deployed by various constituencies later in U.S. history. The same holds true in Chapter Two, which focuses on the American Revolution, and on manipulated memories of the American Revolution afterward. So the book proceeds through canonical eras of U.S. history.

The consistent purpose behind ideas and beliefs of American exceptionalism was to erase any aura of contestation, and to buttress claims to cultural hegemony as if such claims represented unity—albeit as preferred by one constituency, and as contested by another. Such contestation could manifest itself in a commitment to politics, or economics, or religion, as the basis of American exceptionalism. In the 1830s and 1840s, for instance, historian and U.S. Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft invested in politics, politician and diplomat Edward Everett in economics, and minister Lyman Beecher in religion, each modality as their particular imagined foundation to American exceptionalism. In each case, exceptionalism comprised a paradoxical blend of past, present, and future. How could the United States be made exceptional when it was imagined to be already exceptional? The motivating force behind ideas and beliefs was to proclaim exceptionalism as already existing, while at the same time advancing a particular version of exceptionalism in need of support toward its ambitions of hegemony. Competing in the 1850s were Northern versus Southern versions of American exceptionalism, and this kind of cultural competition over what supposedly constituted exceptionalism has characterized every era of U.S. history.

Such cultural competition is grist for Tyrrell’s mill throughout American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea. Hence the multiple modalities and ceaseless shifts in American exceptionalism, reflective of the multiplicity and dynamism of U.S. history from beginning to end. Chapter Eleven finally brings the story to the present day, through the U.S. presidential administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Indeed, Tyrrell sees Obama’s presidency as prompting a surge of exceptionalist talk among racist reactionaries, and Trump’s presidency as prompting another surge of exceptionalist talk among traumatized progressives. Like exceptionalist ideas in earlier eras of U.S. history, exceptionalist talk—as -ism—could take both positive and negative forms. For instance, allowing immigration could be seen as an exceptionalist disaster by reactionaries; similarly, blocking immigration could be seen as an exceptionalist disaster by progressives.

American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea altogether leans more toward an intellectual than a cultural history. As such, it is dominated by white male authors, with the main exception of Chapter Five, focused on Catherine Beecher, offered in contrast to her father Lyman, the subject of Chapter Four. This opens the door to further research. Tyrrell’s very welcome contribution is to construct a long narrative of U.S. history, and to spotlight the varied usabilities and changing deployment of American exceptionalism. The fact that exceptionalist ideas and beliefs have had and continue to have such an intense grip on U.S. history and life renders exceptionalism of signal importance for historical study from as many angles as possible. As an historian whose academic career has been based in Australia, Tyrrell offers the distinct advantage of looking from the outside in.

Author Biography

Konstantin Dierks is associate professor of History at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN, United States). His first book, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America was published in 2009, and he is currently at work on a book about globalization of the United States, 1815–1861.

Footnotes