Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s by Barbara J. Keys (review)

Recently, historians have paid a great deal of attention to the 1970s as a decade of profound and enduring transformation. According to Charles Maier, Thomas Borstelmann, and Daniel Sargent, among others, the 1970s wrought changes that were as significant as those of any other period of the twentieth century, while Samuel Moyn has claimed that the decade gave rise to the first movement promoting global human rights. Once dismissed as an era in which nothing happened, bracketed on either side by decades in which everything seemed to have happened, scholars now regard the period between 1971 and 1980 as the origins of the globalized, neo-liberal, deindustrialized, rights-conscious world we live in today.

Into this historiographical moment steps Barbara J. Keys. It is a daunting challenge, given the scholarship that has recently preceded her book, but it is one she succeeds in meeting brilliantly. Reclaiming American Virtue is an original and important book, one that makes contributions to several subfields of American and international history (for example, the histories of the Vietnam War, American politics, and human rights). Using innovative methodologies, such as transnationalism and the history of emotions, Keys crafts a bracing, new historical narrative for modern America.

Keys agrees with Moyn that there was no US human rights movement to speak of before the mid-1970s, when the federal government began to embrace the promotion of individual rights around the world as a legitimate foreign policy goal. This conclusion rests on a particular view of what exactly constitutes “human rights.” For Keys and Moyn, human rights means individual rights (as opposed to group rights), and the main violator of these individual rights is the state. They argue that this conception of human rights as individual rights is the most widespread in the world today. Before its moment of global acceptance in the 1970s, human rights was a platitude, a slogan of good intentions that governments would occasionally trot out to show their normative credentials. When activists petitioned for human rights before the 1970s, they mostly sought redress for groups, usually nations but also races and ethnicities (think of the American civil rights movement), and they envisioned the state as their protector rather than as their chief antagonist. While this periodization is fairly controversial, for it airbrushes from the historical record several groups who promoted a liberal, anti-statist view of human rights long before the 1970s, it is clear from Keys as well as Moyn that Washington, as well as most Americans, were uninterested in the international promotion of individual human rights until the 1970s. The question then becomes, why then?

Keys’ insightful answer is both straightforward and deeply original. The Vietnam War, she argues, caused a great deal of shame and humiliation in the United States, in turn undermining the exceptionalist vision the nation had of itself. If America was different than other nations, and uniquely virtuous, how could anyone explain the war in Vietnam, which was decidedly aggressive and cruel, and humiliatingly unsuccessful? Keys observes that the end of the war immediately preceded the explosion of American interest in human rights, and she suspects that this was not a coincidence. “Crucially,” she writes, the sudden embrace of a human rights crusade “served not as a means of coming to terms with the Vietnam War but as a means of moving past it. Human rights became a way to heal the country by taming the legacy of Vietnam” (3).

Keys’ genealogy of human rights has two main strands, liberal and conservative; after Vietnam, both felt a need to reclaim American virtue, and both believed that the United States still had a redemptive role to play in the world. Human rights nicely served their causes. However, there were also key differences between them. For liberals, Vietnam caused guilt stemming from the atrocities committed by Americans as well as by their South Vietnamese allies. For conservatives, the war caused shame arising from...