American Exceptionalism
Why We're Different
American exceptionalism has come to mean something very different than it originally meant. Coined by Soviet agents in the 1930s struggling to explain why America had proven uniquely resistant to communism, it was meant literally: America was an exception. We did not have the class politics of Europe. We never had feudalism. Our society was upwardly mobile. It did not fit Marx’s theory of societal development.
We also had a tradition of individualism, which confounded communists interested in stirring proletariat solidarity. We were (and are) the most individualistic nation on the planet.
What is striking in learning about, for instance, American labor movements, is that even the working-class left believed in American individualism. When Odette Keun, a Dutch journalist who had studied in the Soviet Union, came to America to observe the New Deal in light of the political transformations happening across Europe, he wrote, “Broadly speaking, labor in America is conservative. It is one of the most flabbergasting discoveries I have made.” The average American union man “clung with intense persistence to the traditional hope of escaping one day — soon — from the ranks of the employee into the ranks of the small entrepreneur, where he would be hampered by the social legislation that would have benefited him as a simple worker.”
In reading the fiction of Jack London, particularly Martin Eden and The Valley of the Moon, one is struck by a similar conclusion. London was very sympathetic to socialism and to the plight of the working class, having risen himself from extreme poverty (the autobiographical Martin Eden tracks with his life). He wrote about those whom he considered to be his own class (even when he became wealthy later in life) – their desires, their beliefs, their hopes, their sympathies. Even the revolutionaries among his characters are proud to be Americans and aren’t entirely hostile to free enterprise.
Interestingly enough, union organizing in The Valley of the Moon comes off as counterproductive, led by thuggish men who differ from organized crime only in their level of sophistication. The hero and heroine achieve a happy ending not via political reform, but by leaving the city, finding a plot of land in the country, starting a business, and becoming successful entrepreneurs. Their story isn’t meant to be political. London is simply telling what he sees as an uplifting tale of working-class Americans who believe that the American Dream has died with the closing of the frontier, but who in the end achieve their version of the American Dream despite all odds. This is what Soviet agents meant when they lamented American exceptionalism and the recalcitrance of even the Americans who should have been sympathetic to communism toward the Soviet cause.
Americanism:
Individualism has taken on a foul taste in some people’s mouths today, being associated more strongly in our minds with controversial figures such as Ayn Rand than with popular figures such as the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder (whose novels are as “rugged” as anything Horatio Alger wrote), but it was once part and parcel of the language of Americans. Calvin Coolidge ran on a platform of “Americanism” and often spoke of individualism – in particular such characteristics as individual responsibility, private ownership of business, and the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence. He saw individualism as both quintessentially American, and stemming directly from the tradition of the American Founding (a tradition he saw himself as upholding).
His was not the radical individualism of Herbert Spencer or Lysander Spooner, nor that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As the historian (and Coolidge biographer) Amity Shlaes writes, “If he pulled back government, it was not out of Randian libertarianism. It was to stop government impinging upon what he, in a 1926 address honoring the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, called ‘things of the spirit.’” Coolidge made frequent references to God in his speeches and did not see “Americanism” or freedom or natural rights as being incompatible with piety.
Modern critics of individualism and the market, who see both as antithetical to family, faith, tradition, community, institutions, and virtue would do well to consider Coolidge, who believed in limits on federal power in order to strengthen such things, not destroy them. Coolidge’s Americanism was a celebration of the American tradition that freedom – rather than mere hollowness where once was government coercion – is the space in which human flourishing can occur, the room for human beings to do the important and necessary things of life.
Egalitarianism and Individualism:
American individualism from the very beginning had an egalitarian flavor. I could cite “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” but better representations of this flavor come in figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or Walt Whitman. Emerson’s attitude towards self-reliance is remarkably subjectivist. He insists that knowledge already exists inside each person, and that books – weighed down as they are by tradition and education and gatekeeping – are a hinderance to this inner knowledge. This variety of individualism is not mine, but it has been influential throughout our history, for populists and for academics and for many in between.
Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this egalitarianism present in the American character, borne of American democracy, an egalitarianism that has both a noble and an ugly side. Unlike European flavors of egalitarianism, it isn’t centered in revolutionary class politics or radical collectivism.
The ugly side of American egalitarianism is the know-nothing attitude displayed both by proud slackers who refuse to get an education under the theory that book learning can’t teach them anything, and by university students insisting (in echo of Emerson) that all knowledge begins with the self and the most important thing one can learn from a book is what one already brings to it (in other words, that book learning can’t teach them anything). Each, in their own way, expresses a quintessentially American point of view, present throughout our nation’s history and very evident today, that nobody else is better than you or me. There is much to love about that point of view, and much not to love.
The noble side is high principle. The belief in doing what is right, even if one is alone. The man or woman who refuses to be cowed by the mob, but who stands upon what he or she believes to be moral. This nobility is captured in the famous painting by Norman Rockwell (“The Freedom of Speech”) of a working-class man standing up to speak at a city council meeting.
There is danger in this, too. Each of us can believe our own fables. On the one hand, you have a man like Frederick Douglass, and on the other you have one like Timothy McVeigh. Somewhere in between, you have a controversial one like John Brown – a hero to some and a villain to others – who carried into action principles Douglass believed to be moral and just.
Some today would like to have us believe that radical self-expression began with the 1960s left, but it probably wasn’t invented by Emerson and Thoreau either, who were merely articulating something many Americans of their day already believed. Each man in his own way embodied both the high principle of standing for what is moral even if you stand alone, and the subjectivism which holds that truth lies inside of us rather than traditions.
And while libertarians sometimes get blamed for introducing “you can’t tell me what to do” into the American psyche, in reality the notion that moral principle is embodied by the individual standing alone against the crowd goes back centuries. This notion is aptly summed up by a quotation from a Marvel comic book (partially paraphrasing a quotation from Mark Twain),[1] spoken by (you guessed it) Captain America:
“Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — “No, you move.”1
Better than almost any American, Mark Twain embodied the principle that the height of moral courage was to stand alone when standing alone was required to do the right thing. Twain famously bucked peer pressure in order to vote against his party (the Republicans – he voted for Grover Cleveland against James Blaine in 1884). When told only a “Mugwump,” would do such a thing, he declared himself to be a Mugwump and proudly crossed the aisle (voting was public, not secret ballot, in those days). He also created such characters as Huck Finn, an uneducated boy who went against everything ingrained in him by tradition and community and helped a slave run away, and Colonel Sherburn, an aristocratic man who stared down a mob and laughed.
Egalitarianism and individualism are separate strains in the American character. But they have influenced each other and they have influenced the course of our history. And both can be found in a few key words from the Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal,” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness.”
Neither Red Nor Blue:
You can see that above I have cited a variety of figures throughout American history, literary, political, and cultural. Some of these were on the left. Others were on the right. Marxists like to say that the dividing line between right and left is individualism vs. collectivism. Ayn Rand agreed. But Jack London didn’t, and neither would have Thoreau or Rockwell or Emerson in all likelihood. In our day, there are those who argue that the dividing line is community or nationhood on the right vs. individualism on the left, but Calvin Coolidge certainly didn’t see it that way.
What is instead clear is that there has been an individualistic character to both the American right and the American left. Certainly not in all cases. Russell Kirk, Woodrow Wilson, Woody Guthrie, and Brent Bozell were all skeptical of individualism. But the Soviets (to Stalin’s chagrin) were right: America was an exception among nations, and we were an exception because the American people, by and large, on left and right and center, retained a belief – often an unexpressed belief – that the fundamental unit of society was the individual. Many Americans don’t realize that their words or actions or choices betray such a belief. Many don’t believe they really share much in common with partisans on the other side, who live different lives in entirely different regions of the country, but when Americans go abroad, we stick out like a sore thumb – whether we vote red or blue, live in a city or on a farm, attend church or skip it. Having traveled all over this country, I can say that we share more in common than many people like to admit.
It galls us, as we are individualistic to a fault, but you don’t get to pick and choose what to keep or throw away about your country. It’s an all or nothing package deal. Sort of like family. You don’t have to celebrate all of the holidays, or like all of the culture or the history of the tradition, in fact many people don’t, but it’s still all yours. Most of us didn’t choose our nation at all. We were born here, and it is ours whether we like it or not, unless we renounce our citizenship and move to Argentina. Those who did choose America, our immigrants, didn’t get to say, “I want to be an American, but I don’t want that part…” when they swore an oath to the Constitution. Becoming a naturalized American isn’t multiple choice.
This isn’t a very individualistic fact: that we don’t get to choose everything about our country, and may not get to choose it at all, but that we will still be stamped by it whether we like it or not. We have to take the things we don’t like with the things we do. And one of the things which, for almost all of us, will be both a source of annoyance and pride, is the individualistic character of our culture, a character which all but the Amish and the most dedicated Marxists will reflect. Some Americans would like to disavow this character of our nation. But each of us doesn’t get to remake America according to our own subjective whim. To the extent that this is what those who seek to disavow America’s tradition of individualism would do (and it is), they are only reflecting the individualistic culture which raised them more than they would care to admit.
There is both something to admire and something to find frustrating about that character. But on the two-hundred and forty-eighth anniversary of the signing of the document which declared that we are all “endowed by [our] Creator with certain inalienable rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” we must recognize that this character is ours, and that there is something good and noble and worth celebrating about it. For in a world which tells people that they don’t matter, that their lives are of no consequence except as a vehicle for the whims of their leaders, that there is nothing better for them except obedience, we live in a country which tells people that they do matter and that their lives are their own. That is why we are the exception in human history.
A quotation which is based upon an obscure passage of Twain’s. Parts of the passage attributed to him may be apocryphal, but the first paragraph given by this source is likely written by Twain (at least, as far as my research efforts can discern).