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Inventing Un-America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2013

BRIAN STEELE
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Abstract

No writer is more closely bound up with our deepest sense of the meaning of the “American” than Thomas Jefferson and it is difficult to imagine America's national purpose without some reference to his words. Yet Jefferson's projection of American identity also assumed and even constituted, of necessity, the un-American and it is in this sense that the un-American provided the necessary contours of what became the “American.” Jefferson's various projects are often seen in tension with one another. But this dialectic between the American and the un-American helps reconcile many of them. Federalists, Jefferson believed, assumed that governing Americans demanded the force and corruption that had long kept Europeans in order, whereas Americans, he believed, had an experience of history that rendered them capable of transcending such political theory and practicing democratic politics. This paper explores this dialectic between the American and the un-American in Jefferson's thought as a problem of national self-definition and argues that Jefferson's overwhelming confidence about American identity rested to a large degree in the shudder produced by his experience of the other. Years before Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, Jefferson's project of defining the nation created the un-American, rendering Americans ever since profoundly, however paradoxically, ambivalent about the prospects for revolutionary republicanism abroad.

Type
Un-American Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4: The “Un-American” , November 2013 , pp. 881 - 902
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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23 Jefferson's “original Rough draught,” in PTJ, Volume I, 427.

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28 Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in TJW, 1517.

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30 For a brief description of the typical distinction in the literature on nationalism between “civic” and “ethnic” varieties see Ignatieff, Michael, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 5–9Google Scholar. On the invention of this distinction in the work of Hans Kohn see Calhoun, Craig, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (New York: Routledge, 2007), 117–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a persuasive critique of the tradition of identifying American nationalism too exclusively with the civic variety see Smith, Rogers, “Beyond Toqueville, Mydral, and Hartz,” in American Political Science Review, 87 (Sept. 1993), 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813, in ibid., 391.

47 On this point it is worth noting that, unlike later generations who took these characteristics for granted as fixed or rooted in nature, Jefferson always located the peculiarities of American character in history, suggesting that the traits he considered normative for the exercise of democratic republicanism could be lost over time without vigilant attendance to their maintenance. See the important reflections on the nature of this problem in Daniel Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S., eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 21–40, esp. 22–23Google Scholar; and Foner, Eric, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?”, in History Workshop Journal, 17 (1984), 57–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Degler, Carl N., in “In Pursuit of an American History,” in American Historical Review, 92 (Feb. 1987), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McGerr, Michael, “The Price of the New Transnational History,” in American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1056–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On this theme in Jefferson's thought, see Steele, 123–30.

48 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 164; Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1786, in PTJ, Volume X, 448. Like many other observers at the time, Jefferson passed over multiple inequalities in Revolutionary America that would be glaring to later scholars, and Jefferson's confidence about the American common man was predicated, especially in Virginia, to a degree that he was rarely explicit about, upon the enslavement of much of the laboring class. Nevertheless, this theme of unusually widespread prosperity (especially relative to Europe) is as old as the idea of America and remains a prominent component in contemporary American exceptionalism. See Greene, Jack P., The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an effort to quantify American prosperity and social mobility in the late eighteenth century see Main, Jackson Turner, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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59 Jefferson to Justice William Johnson, 12 June 1823, in TJW, 1470. See also Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 16 Jan. 1811, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume III, 305: Hamilton believed “in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men”: a deplorable lack of imagination or attention to American realities, in Jefferson's view.

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66 Romney speech at the New Hampshire Primary, Washington Post, 10 Jan. 2012. Romney, in contrast, claimed that he would “never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the earth.” Romney's campaign tract was similarly entitled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2010).

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69 Douglass to Horace Greeley, 15 April 1846, in Foner, Philip S., ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 147Google Scholar. On this strain in Douglass's thought see Sundquist, Eric J., “Introduction,” in Sundquist, , ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–22, 14–15Google Scholar. For an overview of the literature on American exceptionalism see Lipset, Seymour Martin and Marks, Gary, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: Norton, 2000), 15–41Google Scholar. For a critique of the practice described here see Kaplan, Amy, “A Call for a Truce,” American Literary History, 17 (2005), 141–47, esp. 146CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an affirmation of it see Leo Marx, “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies,” ibid., 118–34, esp. 131–32.

70 Hollinger, David, “The Historian's Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Bender, Thomas, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 381–95, 392Google Scholar; Ross, “Lincoln, and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History (Sept. 2009), 386.

71 See Pells, Richard, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 76–82Google Scholar. Also see Aaron Copland's brief and suggestive description of the banning of his Lincoln Portrait from the Eisenhower inauguration concert at Constitution Hall, in Copland, Aaron and Perlis, Vivian, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), 346–47Google Scholar.

72 See also Edmund S. Morgan's classic argument that the flourishing of democratic republican institutions and individual freedom for whites was inseparable from the institution of black slavery in the early republic: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

73 Jefferson to Thomas Law, 15 Jan. 1811, in PTJ, Retirement Series, Volume III, 298–99. Also see Davis, Fear of Conspiracy, xvi.

74 Hollinger, David, Postethnic America: Beyond Multicultualism (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 134–35Google Scholar; Smith, Rogers, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U. S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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77 Todd Gitlin has suggested that the American left followed the same path in the 1960s: disgusted by the nation's complicity with injustice, many critics denied “its very right to exist,” and thus, to an extent, embraced the right's definition of them as un-American. See Gitlin, Todd, The Intellectuals and the Flag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 131–36Google Scholar.

78 Lincoln to Pierce, Henry L. and Others, 6 April 1859, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1858–1865, ed. Feherenbacher, Don E. (New York: Library of America, 1989), 19Google Scholar.

79 Speech on Kansas–Nebraska, Peoria, Illinois, 16 Oct. 1854, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989) 339–40, 340–41; First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1858–1865, 224. To be clear, Lincoln admitted – most eloquently in the Second Inaugural – that slavery was, in fact, American, after all. His point, though, was that what had become American practice was a violation of American ideology and that the sin demanded repentance and redemption. It seems worth noting, though, by way of clarification, that Lincoln spent his entire political career arguing that slavery was in fact un-American. This is what makes his later admission striking. The point is that he was in a struggle over whether what he considered un-American would remain so.

80 Hendrickson, David C., “A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy,” World Policy Journal (Spring 2004), 102–13, 110 and 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Kaplan, “A Call for a Truce,” 146. Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)Google Scholar.

81 See Smith, Rogers, “Beyond Toqueville, Mydral, and Hartz,” American Political Science Review, 87 (Sept. 1993), 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Smith, Civic Ideals, for extensive discussion and commentary on the ebb and flow of what Smith calls this ascriptive “ideology” and practice in American history.

82 Note, apropos of the critiques of Wolin and Guyatt (see note 76 above), that Jim Crow segregation and the internment of Japanese Americans is (conspicuously?) ignored in Roth's story.

83 See Adams, Michael C. C., The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and especially Bodnar, The “Good War in American Memory.”