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

During the current presidency of Donald Trump and his insult-generating Twitter account, Carrie Tirado Bramen's American Niceness: A Cultural History provides a reminder that the Ugly American is not this nation's only defining archetype. In five impressively conceived chapters, Bramen makes a compelling case that niceness became an important—and contested—feature of American identity over the course of the nineteenth century. During those years, many Americans increasingly came to see themselves as amiable innocents who were frequently beset by non-white aggressors including Native Americans, African American slaves, and Filipinos, among others. Those groups, of course, were more sinned against than sinning, but white American niceness served to mask or excuse the true nature of the violence being used against them. This idea of niceness became, according to Bramen, "like a permanent get out of jail free card that exempts Americans from acknowledging the consequences of their actions" (9).

Bramen traces the origins of this notion to the nineteenth century, when the U.S. was changing from an agrarian republic into an expansionist imperial power. That period, of course, brought with it some of the ugliest episodes and developments in American history such as Indian Removal, slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars; but the violence of these events was often minimized or explained away because America, at its core, was assumed to be nice and therefore always had friendly and honorable intentions. This belief is still relevant today, given that Bramen's interest in the subject of niceness began as a response to the common post-9/11 question, "Why do they hate us?" She noticed that many Americans seemed to understand that tragic event as a "failure of likability." She characterizes this reaction as a "reflex rather than a reasoned response" because by 2001 niceness had long been our "national default mode" (6–8).

Bramen's penetrating analysis and research unfolds across five chapters that reckon with a variety of nineteenth-century topics: Indian Removal and the nature of Native American hospitality, slavery in the "genteel" Old South, Christianity's new emphasis on the friendly figure of Jesus, the expectations of feminine niceness, and America's supposedly likable style of imperialism in the Philippines. In each chapter, Bramen not only highlights the ways niceness was perverted to excuse nineteenth-century American violence, but she also shows how it was often used (frequently by Harriet Beecher Stowe and other fiction writers) as a standard by which the American power structure could be rightfully critiqued. Bramen does this by making fascinating connections among novels, plays, letters, news articles, and speeches that reinforce each other and conclusively demonstrate how the rhetoric of niceness came to shape Americans' conception of themselves. This singular focus on the nineteenth century highlights Bramen's argument by showing how niceness, hospitality, and likability figured prominently in so many different contemporaneous arguments. However, the book's subtitle unfortunately does not reflect this century-specific approach. Without identifying a time period, the title implicitly promises a much broader look at the development of this idea throughout American history. In fact, there are no twentieth-century examples in these pages.

Readers with an interest in the Midwest will be disappointed if they reach for this title to learn how the common trope of "Minnesota (or Iowa) Nice" figures into the larger narrative of American niceness. Bramen includes only a single paragraph on the subject, in which she acknowledges that Americans more readily accept regional generalizations than national ones. But other than her chapter on southern niceness and slavery, she foregoes further parsing of regional differences, stating that she "will leave that task to others" (18). Sprinkled through her chapters, however, are sections on various nineteenth-century Midwesterners who represented American niceness and/or posed challenges to it. Social reformers Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, along with presidents Abraham Lincoln and William Howard Taft, receive this special attention. Taft is singled...