American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience (review)

It is hard to take this book seriously. In the preface in which Arnon Gutfeld outlines his endeavor, he draws four-fifths of his references from books written before 1970. He recommends “the excellent biographical [presumably, bibliographical] essay” on the frontier in a 1967 book and a “recent...extremely helpful biographical [again, presumably, bibliographical] essay” on the American labor movement in a 1986 book. His five citations on populism include none later than 1965. His six on the New Deal, none later than 1975.

The book is marred by dozens upon dozens upon dozens of mistakes of spelling, grammar, and diction. Many of them are howlers. “Organized capital” defeats “the employers.” The national government passes two great land acts “in the beginning of the nineteenth century,” one in 1785, the other in 1862. Mine owners engage in “mining of minerals.” A footnote refers to an essay on “Violence in American Literature and Folk Love.” The southern militia is “white-armed.” And “in Pennsylvania” the Iron and Coal Police acted “around the country.”

Gutfeld misnames a major railroad and misspells anything he can gets his hands on: the names of cities, people, Indian tribes, even scholarly journals. He bungles Clarence Alvord (first and last names), Robert Berkhofer, Alfred Crosby (four times), John Calhoun, Whitaker Chambers, Alvin Josephy, Adrienne Koch, Reinhold Niebuhr, the French philosophe Volney, and Michael Wallace (Walllace and Wallce on consecutive pages). He has a special propensity for trouble with plurals. He provides the “Cheyennne” the same triple consonant he bestows on Wallace. He pluralizes the “Williams and Mary Quarterly.” He writes of “vigilanties” and—my own favorite—“crisises.”

The argument of American Exceptionalism is as infuriating as are the slovenly ways in which it is advanced. In the first chapter, Gutfeld asks if the European dream of Enlightenment was realized in America. He answers that it was not, but his answer takes the form of a bewildering shaggy dog story that turns on the translation of the Enlightenment into “the Materialist-Deist idea of venture” and the conclusion that that idea “is totally absent from the ideological basis of American exceptionalism.” In effect, he wallows in a succession of impenetrable abstractions, mostly of his own concoction, in order finally to insist that Americans were not guided by abstractions.

Of course, this very rejection of abstraction rests upon an abstraction, “the ideological basis” of our exceptionalism. And when Gutfeld locates that ideological basis in our Puritanism, his position becomes as untenable in practice as it is in principle. He affirms American exceptionalism by denying that the “American ethos” came from Europe, but he never seems to notice that the Puritanism he puts “at the base” of that ethos came from Europe as surely as the Enlightenment did. He defines the distinctiveness of “Puritan America” by its attachment to abundance, progress, and political freedom, but he never sees that Puritanism was explicitly and adamantly opposed to all those ideals.

In the second chapter, Gutfeld sets out what he calls the forces that preserve American exceptionalism. These turn out not to be forces so much as the theorizations of forces of Frederick Jackson Turner, David Potter, Sven Steinmo, and Sacvan Bercovitch. Gutfeld reviews each in turn but makes no effort even to address, let alone resolve, their many contradictions. When he is done, he aligns himself wholly with Bercovitch, the only one of the four who focused primarily—indeed, solely—on myth and ideology. And then, having pronounced American identity first and foremost a matter of ideology rooted in myth, he summarily abandons Bercovitch and takes up a hodge-podge of other theorizations. The first two of them, Michael Kammen’s and David Wrobel’s, stand opposed to Bercovitch on every essential element of Gutfeld’s exposition. Four of the five of them are frontier theories, though Bercovitch could not be more adamant that American exceptionalism arose in the settled east, not the frontier west. Several of them see the frontier...