How "Exceptional" is the United States?

Historically Speaking May/June 2008 Historically Speaking May/June 2008 Vol. DC No. 5 Contents How "Exceptional"Is2 the United States? Alonzo L. Hamby Beyond Music: Hindemith's Opera6 Mathis der Maler as Political Document Peter Paret The U.S. Army, Counterinsurgency, and the 9 Lessons ofHistory Brian McAllister Linn Religion inAmerican History:12 An Interview with Stephen Pmthero Conducted by Randall J. Stephens Encountering the New: A Forum The Encounter with the New:1 6 A BriefHistory Theodore K. Rabb What is the West?19 Ricardo Duchesne Innovation and Human History21 David Christian The Encounter with the New Revisited 23 Theodore K. Rabb Jobs and Freedom25 Robert M. Zieger Living History: Writing about27 Contemporary Evangelicalism Nicholas Guyatt Apocalyptic Religious Movements in29 American History Stephen J. Stein More Than Fluff: Protestant Revivals in32 the 1950s John G. Turner AIDS and Medieval Leprosy:33 A "Distant Mirror? Luke Demaitre 77ie Year ofthe Great Red Scare36 Anthony Read An Interview with Michael J. Klarman on39 Race andAmerican Legal History Conducted by Randall J. Stephens /s There a Viable Populist Cultural41 Historyofthe United States? David A. Horowitz MilitaryEducation and Social Mobilityin the 43 Late Antebellum South Jennifer R. Green How "Exceptional" Is the United States? Alonzo L. Hamby The idea of America as an exceptional place emerged almost concurrendy with Columbus 's voyages and remains alive today, partiy as wishful fantasy, pardy as European condescension, partly as empirical history. The wishful myth envisions America as a New World, an Edenic place of virgin land, filled with riches and opportunity, a place in which the virtuous can make a fresh start and build a society free from all the failings of the Old World. America is, in the phrase of Thomas Paine, a place to "begin the world anew." European condescension depicts America (commonly understood after 1 776 to be the United States) as a land of innocents out of touch with the realities of human nature. Americans are naive and simpleminded. Europeans, understandinghuman nature and the world as itworks, possess a wisdom that their cousins across the Adantic ignore at their peril. At their worst, Americans are blundering naifs trying to remake the world and simply doing damage in the process. The myths and symbols of a newworld, whether seen from the American or the European perspective , create an ideological fog that gets in the way of historical inquiry. They can neither be wholly discounted nor casually accepted. Itmayjustbe possible to gauge degrees of difference without reference to virtue or naivete. The American Revolution—the culmination of a century and a half of separate development—didindeed occur in an "age of democratic revolutions," as Robert R. Palmer reminded us many years ago. But only the United States emerged from those upheavals as a functioningdemocracy. Itwas thatpalpable democratic uniqueness that attracted Alexis de Tocqueville two generations later. His reference pointwas the French Revolution, which had promised democracy , but had brought forth terror, dictatorship, Napoleon, national defeat, and reaction. A liberalminded aristocrat, he visited the United States to explore whether democracy was in the long run compatible with individual freedom. The mid-19th-century surge of liberalism in Europe had a significant impact in Britain—the one major nation in which liberal ideas had a firm foothold—but much less so on the Continent. The The myths and symbols of a new world, whether seen from the American or the European perspective, create an ideological fog that gets in the way of historical inquiry. revolutions of 1848 failed to deliver on their promise. Louis Kossuth's triumphal tour was across the U.S., not through the streets of Budapest. France soon found itself ruled by Napoleon III, Germany not by liberal '48ers (many of whom fled to the U.S.) but by Bismarck. The first major American historians, whether gifted literary amateurs or Ph.D.-holding professionals, largely assumed a continuity between American and "Anglo-Saxon" or "Teutonic" institutions and ideas. They were usually nationalist enough to celebrate American strength and to believe that the American way might amount to a higher development . They also were patrician enough to consider American culture crude and to worry that the United States mightbe, in contrastto Britain or...