American Niceness: A Cultural History by Carrie Tirado Bramen (review)

At a time when lunatic partisans gun down their perceived enemies in places of worship; in a moment dominated by "sadopopulism," a term coined by historian Timothy Snyder for a brand of populism energized by the sufferings of others; at a time where the US president bullies and debases just about everyone he encounters: amid all of this meanness, I found the experience of reading Carrie Tirado Bramen's American Niceness: A Cultural History to be especially provocative and opportune.

We live in a nasty, ugly, not-nice America, especially at the current moment. Bramen's book focuses deeply and expertly on texts from long ago—especially from the nineteenth century—but ultimately, like all consequential historical scholarship, she's interested in how understanding the past might help us in the present. How might a history of American niceness guide us through our present nastiness?

The nineteenth century was also a very nasty time, but it is an apt period in which to concentrate a study of niceness because amid the violence and dehumanization of slavery and native genocide the nineteenth century was as W. E. B. Du Bois writes in 1903 "the first century of human sympathy" where "clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise" (qtd. in Bramen, 14). Niceness in America, as we will see, takes shape in oscillation between the ethical depravities and the ethical expansions of the nineteenth century. With the major crises of the century in mind, Bramen organizes her history of niceness around identity categories, and, indeed, one of the important points of the book is that niceness is always interleaved with questions of race, gender, foreignness, and other forms of difference. There are chapters dedicated to the way discourses of niceness circulate around Native Americans, African Americans, and women in the nineteenth century (with some glances backward and forward), as well as a chapter about niceness in the United States' imperial ventures in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter that deviates somewhat from this organizational schema charts the conversion across the nineteenth century of a harsh Calvinist Christ into a nice, forgiving Jesus, although this chapter too pays close attention to gender and race in this important transformation in US Protestantism. Within this organizational framework, we encounter a dazzling variety of texts. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every canonical writer of the long nineteenth century plays a role, as well as lesser-known authors, ephemera like escaped slave notices, and several works of visual arts and performance.

But niceness? Is there really anything it might teach that could make it worthy of deep consideration? The word makes one cringe with its banality and vacuity. In a 1932 essay quoted by Bramen, the British intellectual Maurice Samuel vividly captures the vacuity: "the word nice indicates a pleasing absence of character. It's the best a man can be without being anything" (194). He's a "nice guy," we might say, backhandedly. Bramen notes that historically and etymologically niceness is related to "foolishness," "stupidity," and "triviality" (141, 152). It smacks of bourgeois quietism. But niceness can be much worse than vanilla emptiness. Bramen cites testimony before Congress about the Philippine-American War by William Howard Taft (at the time in 1902 governor of the occupied Philippines): "there was never a war conducted, whether against inferior races or not, in which there was more compassion and more restraint and more generosity" than Americans displayed in their brutal confrontation with the Filipinos (255). Even when it came to the "water cure"—Taft's nice turn of phrase for waterboarding—the future president tells of cordial interactions where Filipinos "would not say anything until they were tortured; that they must have an excuse for saying what they proposed to say" (255). The American torturers were simply fulfilling the desires of the...