Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal

Introduction

MICHAEL KAZIN & JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one. —Richard Hofstadter

Just because you’re in this country doesn’t make you an American. No, you’ve got to go farther than that before you can become an American. You’ve got to enjoy the fruits of Americanism.—Malcolm X

They also must understand that what took place in [Abu Ghraib] prison does not represent the America I know. The America I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom. The America I know cares about every individual.—George W. Bush

The topic of this book is vast, protean, and famously contested—and so a definition may be helpful. Americanism has two different meanings. It signifies both what is distinctive about the United States (and the colonies and territories that formed it) and loyalty to that nation, rooted in a defense of its political ideals. Those canonic ideals—self-government, equal opportunity, freedom of speech and association, a belief in progress—were first proclaimed during the era of the Revolution and the early republic and have developed more expansive meanings since then. Thanks to a powerful civil rights movement, full social equality, for example, finally entered the canon in the decades after World War II. But the bundle of ideals we call Americanism has proved remarkably supple over time, which helps to account for its enduring appeal to people in other lands as well as at home.

Its shifting content is not the only thing that distinguishes Americanism from the patriotisms generated by other powerful nation-states. Love of any country requires attachment to its supposed virtues, past and present. Affection for Holy Russia—its fields and forests and Orthodox Church—long predated the Soviet Union and easily survived it. Traditional Japanese patriots revere the uniqueness of their national tongue and of Shinto, a pantheistic faith linked closely with an unbroken imperial house. Americanism, by contrast, has been rooted less in a shared culture than in shared political ideals.

Like Americans, French patriots may pay homage to the Enlightenment-born ideals of their revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—but French patriotism includes a stronger cultural component than does America’s national creed. Americans have always fought more over how to define and apply their national ideals than about the merits of their language or cuisine. The resulting battles to define Americanism have alternately divided the nation and unified it, producing both internal strife and solidarity against foreign enemies. These two tendencies have often crested together during wartime. Americanism’s propensity to generate both conflict and cohesion continues in the early twenty-first century, a time when the United States has no rival on the world stage but when Americanism is fought about nearly everywhere.

The concept itself is nearly as old as the first European settlements to endure on the landmass of North America. John Winthrop was thinking about his church, not a nation, when, in 1630, he told those fellow Puritans who sailed with him to a new world, We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. But Winthrop’s notion that America ought to be a model for Christendom and beyond soon transcended the intra-Protestant dispute that had led to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1763, another New Englander, John Adams, wrote that America’s settlement was the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence. Adams believed his young land was destined to break the grip of feudal laws and customs, thus showing how individuals could free themselves from an irrational, often tyrannical past. During and just after the war for independence, such thinking was commonplace in sermons, pamphlets, and even the diaries of ordinary men and women. The new nation had the potential to be more than what Tom Paine called an asylum for mankind. It had a mission to liberate the world.¹

For many Americans, that messianic ambition was fused with religious meaning. The Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century spawned thousands of new Protestant churches and made the passion of evangelicalism the common discourse of most inhabitants, whether free or slave. Since that spiritual upsurge, the idea that anyone, regardless of learning or social background, can come to Christ has dovetailed with the belief in equal rights emblazoned in the Declaration of Independence. This synthesis of evangelical Protestantism and republicanism was found in no other nation—at least not with such passionate conviction and for such a long period of time.²

Over the past two centuries, Americanism has been put to a variety of uses, benign and belligerent, democratic and demagogic. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, that quasi-religious ideal took luxuriant, imperial form. It inspired the notion of Manifest Destiny, which legimitized the conquest of lands occupied by Native American tribes as well as by Mexicans in the Southwest. It was omnipresent among both Jacksonian Democrats—who defined it as the gospel of rough-hewn, self-made men in conflict with the rich, the proud, [and] the privileged—and their Whig opponents, whose American system called for higher tariffs and a national bank.³ It also animated, in the 1850s, the attempt by the new American Party (the Know-Nothings) to drive Irish immigrants from political power wherever the papists had established a foothold.

At the same time, the national faith was provoking an equally prophetic critique. In the forefront were abolitionists, both black and white, who scored the hypocrisy of a slave-holding republic. In 1829, David Walker demanded that white citizens compare your own language in the Declaration of Independence with your cruelties and murders inflicted . . . on our fathers and on us—men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!!⁴ In the 1850s, William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution a covenant with death, and Frederick Douglass asked, What to the slave is the Fourth of July?

Yet few radicals rejected the ideals themselves. At the end of his famous Independence Day speech, Douglass predicted the abolition of slavery in his lifetime. He drew his optimism from the great principles of that same Declaration and the genius of American institutions as well as from an enlightened spirit he believed was swelling on both sides of the Atlantic.⁵ Such figures initiated a vital countertradition. Since the antebellum era, dissidents have routinely cited the gap between America’s utopian promise and its disappointing reality.

The Civil War brought two contending versions of Americanism into bloody conflict, the terms of which were not finally settled until Reconstruction had run its course in the mid-1870s. In many ways, the war’s new birth of freedom renewed the national faith. Yet no sooner had Reconstruction begun to wane—as whites North and South started to shake hands across the bloody chasm—then anxiety grew about the weakness of Americanism in the fast-growing, culturally fragmented land. On the eve of the war, Carl Schurz, a German-born reformer and foe of slavery, had confidently predicted that True Americanism, tolerance and equal rights will peacefully overcome all that is not reconcilable. By the 1870s, it seemed that jagged splits along lines of region, race, religion, class, and immigrant status could tear the industrializing society apart.⁶

For the nation’s leaders, it thus seemed essential to Americanize the population if Americanism were to prosper. Never before had patriots engaged in so self-conscious an attempt to make a religion out of citizenship, as Michael Walzer puts it. The massive Grand Army of the Republic created the ritual of Memorial Day to associate love of country with selfless loyalty in battle. Veterans, ministers, and teachers urged that the flag be displayed in every public building and many private ones.

In 1891, Francis Bellamy, a devout Christian attracted to socialism, wrote a short pledge to the Stars and Stripes that he hoped would bind American children to a shared set of convictions. An admirer of the French Revolution, Bellamy mused about including equality and fraternity in the pledge but decided that would be too controversial in a society riven by differences of race and ideology. So he restricted himself to a single phrase defining the republic: one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. His Pledge of Allegiance was quickly adopted by schools throughout the land (Congress added under God in 1954).

As that example suggests, a reassertion of Americanism was not always intended to produce political conformity at the turn of the twentieth century. Dissenters could appropriate the national faith as readily as conservatives. Three years after the Pledge was drafted, Eugene Debs, the railroad unionist who would soon become leader of the Socialist Party, emerged from jail to greet a throng of his supporters. Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives, he declared. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished.⁷

Yet as the United States grappled with a flood of new immigrants and became an imperial power, the most aggressive promoters of Americanism were eager to prop up the established order, and they held political power. These figures were not necessarily conservative, as we now define the term. But Theodore Roosevelt’s praise of the melting pot and of martial virtues stemmed from his fear that immigrants who retained even a shred of loyalty to their native countries weakened America’s resolve in a dangerous world.

Inevitably, such fears intensified during World War I. All but ignoring the First Amendment, the federal government jailed radicals who opposed the war and looked the other way when vigilantes forced German Americans to prostrate themselves before the flag. The new American Legion crafted a 100 per cent Americanism that stressed only the self-protective, coercive aspects of the creed.⁸ In the 1920s, this defensive style of Americanism merged with the desire for cultural homogeneity to produce a spate of restrictive immigration laws. Throughout this period, racists found little difficulty rationalizing racial segregation as an essential component of the American way of life.

Dissidents did not relinquish their claim to the great tradition, but they did have to defend their interpretations of it against official voices. Democrat William Jennings Bryan based his opposition to the U.S. conquest of the Philippines on the difference between imposing one’s will on other peoples through force, as Great Britain had done, and persuading them with the example of altruism. Anglo-Saxon civilization, Bryan declared in 1899, has carried its flag to every clime and defended it with forts and garrisons. American civilization will imprint its flag upon the hearts of all who long for freedom.⁹ But U.S. troops defeated the Philippine insurrection in a savage war. When the conflict ended in 1903, only a small minority of their fellow citizens seemed troubled that the same nation that cherished the Declaration of Independence now had an overseas empire of its own.

The armoring of Americanism at the turn of the twentieth century also produced unexpected consequences. Wartime service in uniform or in defense industries allowed immigrants to legitimize their struggles for justice by draping them in the mantle of Americanism. Those struggles were further validated during World War I as the government enticed ethnic workers with the promise of industrial democracy and the idea that, in America, the People ARE the Government. Even the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, by weakening ties between immigrants and their countries of origin, fostered an Americanization from below that set the stage for a new regime of cultural pluralism that would soon make Americanism a more capacious ideal.

During the 1930s and World War II, New Deal liberals managed to daub the nationalist faith with a tolerant, populist hue. The federal government hired artists to paint historical murals in post offices that highlighted the heroism of farmers and workers. It also published guides to every big city and region that documented the riches of local histories and cultures. In the new National Archives building next to the National Mall, the founding documents of the United States were displayed as if they were the relics of secular saints. Meanwhile, filmmakers and wartime propagandists like Frank Capra depicted America as one big, friendly house for ordinary people of all religions and races (even if most politely kept to their own rooms).

Yet the left’s attempt to marry class-consciousness to nationalism did not hold up well over time. During the Great Depression, CIO organizers described their nascent unions as expressions of working-class Americanism, while pro-Soviet radicals portrayed Communism as Twentieth Century Americanism.¹⁰ But domestic opponents ridiculed these leftist twists on a common theme, and they all but vanished during the Cold War. That new global conflict recast Americanism as the antithesis of Communism and identified the national creed as the last best hope of a world threatened by totalitarianism and yearning for freedom.

The subsequent hunt for un-American activities—which stretched far beyond the House committee of that name—brought to a close the long period during which no single political faction controlled the meaning of the national canon. To be sure, the civil rights struggle of the late 1950s and early 1960s did briefly reinvigorate the dissident tradition. But, by the late 1960s, Americanism had become virtually the exclusive property of the cultural and political right.

The politics of the Vietnam War played a critical role in this change. In a decisive break with tradition, leading activists in the protest movements of the era took issue not just with government policies but with the ideals from which those policies were supposedly drawn. Young radicals did not seek to draw attention to the distance between America’s promise and its reality as much as to debunk the national creed itself as inherently reactionary and destructive. Many black, Native American, and Chicano militants viewed themselves as victims of Americanism, while white New Leftists dismissed appeals to patriotism as a smokescreen for imperialist war and the squelching of dissent.

That cynical view held firm among dissenters through the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond, despite a sprinkling of posters declaring that peace is patriotic. In 2001, Noam Chomsky, one of the most popular writers on the left, dismissed patriotism as the governing elite’s way of telling its subjects, You shut up and be obedient, and I’ll relentlessly advance my own interests.¹¹ Meanwhile, conservatives redoubled their efforts to claim Americanism as their cause. They successfully yoked to their larger purposes such rituals as saluting the flag, honoring the founding fathers, and singing patriotic songs—from God Bless America to Lee Greenwood’s Proud to Be an American. But their victory occurred largely by default.

The passionate anti-Americanism that emerged in the Vietnam era raises the question: how did the ideals grow powerful and attractive enough to require a fury of debunking? In fact, scholars, journalists, and other commentators have been dissecting the living corpus of Americanism as long as there has been a United States.

Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, this literature focused on how the manners and mores of the natives enabled a rather unique form of democracy to flourish. Tocqueville, an aristocrat who spent just nine months in the United States, claimed that a rough equality of conditions both stabilized America and generated the tireless pursuit of self-interest that he regarded with fearful fascination. Six decades later, Frederick Jackson Turner—raised in Wisconsin—held that the frontier is the line of most rapid Americanization. He argued that Americans’ individualism, inventiveness, restless, nervous energy, faith in progress, and hatred of pretense and big government all stemmed from the experience of living on the border between civilization and savagery. Despite or because of their many blind spots (racial, temporal, ideological), these two nineteenth-century interpretations became benchmarks for all future examinations of the subject.¹²

But most scholarly explorations of the American character that proliferated in the early to mid-twentieth century adopted a more critical or, at least, a more ironic view. The historian Charles Beard narrowed the interplay of conflict and motivation in America to their economic components. From the making of the Constitution to the onset of World War II, the drive to acquire wealth and defeat one’s competitors became, for Beard, nearly the only factor propelling key events from one generation to the next. During the 1950s, the historian David Potter made plenty itself the key to Americanism. He claimed that everything from modes of toilet training to styles of advertising could be traced to the abundance of land, commodities, and leisure time. The political scientist Louis Hartz and the historian Richard Hofstadter argued that political debate and conflict in the United States revolved around a narrowly liberal, capitalist, rather anti-intellectual worldview. Americans—in their relentless, thoroughgoing modernity—had gained world power without wisdom and material progress without good taste.¹³

The 1960s assault on every kind of establishment quickly made this paradigm seem passé. Young scholars, most of whom leaned leftward, scorned the notion of a unitary American character as both condescending and simplistic. A few historians—Ernest Tuveson and William Apple-man Williams, most notably—drew attention to the ideological roots of the aggressive foreign policy pursued by presidents from James K. Polk to Lyndon B. Johnson. Specialists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries debated whether republicanism, the desire for a moral commonwealth, influenced more Americans at the founding than did the liberal demand for rights. But most young historians rejected all attempts to view Americans as having one character, one set of ideals, or even the same history. The nation, they argued, was smaller than the sum of its diverse and constantly changing parts—immigrants, black people, workers of all skill levels, women from each of these groups, and more. Even if they did not accept Chomsky’s view that Americanism was hardly more than a device to force millions of citizens to do the state’s bidding, the social historians of the 1970s saw little value in identifying and exploring the uses of common national ideals. Their main concern was with the distinctive histories of their chosen groups.¹⁴

Such insular approaches could not long endure. In the 1980s, two changes—one in politics, the other in scholarship—began a modest revival in studies of Americanism, as culture and ideology. Ronald Reagan swept into the White House in 1981 at the head of a conservative mass movement. The right’s defense of national virtue dovetailed with such events as the Iran hostage crisis, which began in 1979, and the victory of the U.S. hockey squad over its Soviet rival during the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. One could not dismiss the fact that millions of citizens responded to these events with flag-waving ardor. Scholars like Gary Gerstle and Cecelia O’Leary began to investigate, with a discerning empathy, how a variety of groups and thinkers used patriotic language in earlier eras for ends both self-interested and visionary.¹⁵

Meanwhile, such non-American scholars as Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Linda Colley were taking a fresh, sophisticated look at nationalism—as an emotional phenomenon as well as a political reality. The modern nation might be an imagined community, as Anderson dubbed it. But to imagine that one could explain the course of U.S. history without paying attention to the national faith began to seem like ignoring the obvious.¹⁶

Early in the twenty-first century, American scholars have renewed the debate about whether that faith is worth defending. One school of interpretation adds nuance and detail to the view of Americanism as form of manipulation, shaped by the changing attitudes of politicians and thinkers and the needs of business, the military, churches, and other powerful institutions. Thus literary scholar Amy Kaplan and historian Matthew Frye Jacobson view the national canon as thoroughly imperial, shot through with racial myopia and reinforced by messianic arrogance. According to Jacobson, America’s trumpeted greatness in the period from Reconstruction to World War I was dependent on "the dollars, the labor, and, not least, the very image, of the many peoples with whom Americans increasingly came into contact and whom they blithely identified as inferiors. Kaplan argues that the denial of empire has structured the discourse of American exceptionalism. In her view, American exceptionalism is largely an argument for boundless expansion." It is not simply that these scholars warn against the dangers inherent in romanticizing the national faith. They suggest that the long history of Americanism has been a cruel and dangerous illusion.¹⁷

At the same time, another influential group of scholars has offered a measured defense of America’s civic religion. In the past, argues historian James Kloppenberg, enlightened leaders and movements have employed the oft-cited principles of equality and pluralism to battle for just treatment for minorities and for just struggles against tyrants, both at home and abroad. The philosopher Richard Rorty echoes this aspirational nationalism when he challenges the left to reject the cultural politics of academia and to articulate instead a nonsectarian vision for a patriotic left. David Hollinger sees an emerging postethnic ideal in American culture, with its mosaic of new immigrants, that might transcend racial fears and defeat imperial overreach. Such works, in the pragmatic tradition, assume that Americanism, as resource rather than blind faith, can help forge a more humanitarian order.¹⁸

This debate suddenly seemed a great deal less academic after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. In their grief and shock, many Americans believed that the nation’s ideals were also under siege. With or without the urging of the Bush administration, citizens began flying the flag and, as in World War II, made God Bless America the surrogate national anthem.

Neither the attacks of 9/11 nor the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed in their wake really changed the terms on which historians and other commentators discussed the politics of Americanism. If anything, they hardened positions on each side. For critics in the United States and around the world, talk about defending American values was largely an excuse to promote the Christian right, enrich oil companies, and drive the nation into a war against Iraq that its architects hoped would remake the Middle East in America’s image. A Manichean discourse was promoted, writes Anatol Lieven, which identified American values as the terrorists’ target, with those values both absolutely good in themselves and identical with the good of the world. Liberal patriots tried to straddle the gulf between angry anti-imperialists on the left and the governing juggernaut on the right but found the task increasingly difficult once the Iraq war began. For their part, most conservatives backed President Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy and applauded his claim that the advance of human freedom—the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time—now depends on us. Our nation—this generation—will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future.¹⁹

The conflict of words and symbols drew new attention to an ongoing debate about the degree to which, in the context of world history, America is an exceptional nation. From Tocqueville to Hartz, leading interpreters, whether admirers or critics, focused on what seemed distinctive about the character and ideology of Americans and viewed the development of the nation as unique. The list of exceptional qualities is a lengthy one. It includes the primacy of individual identity over communal ties, belief in almost unlimited social mobility, absence of an established state church and the consequent flourishing of both diverse denominations and grassroots piety, and a potent tradition of antiauthoritarian and anticentralist politics. One should also add the remarkable self-confidence of most Americans, particularly white ones, that they live in a nation blessed by God that has a right, even a duty, to help other nations become more like the United States. Over the decades, the exceptionalist argument was repeated so often—by scholars, journalists, and politicians—that it hardened into cliché.²⁰

But, since the 1960s, most American historians have come to reject the idea that every nation has unique, timeless qualities of its own. Cultural essentialism, they argue, ignores the fact that powerful institutions invent and promote traditions. What is more, exceptionalist thinking can legitimize an aggressive foreign policy, causing grief to nations weaker and less fortunate than the United States. Cosmopolitan in their tastes and left-leaning in their politics, these scholars see more danger than insight in analyses that place the United States in a category different from all other countries.²¹

The growing field of world history has further marginalized exceptionalist thinking. American scholars increasingly want to decenter U.S. history, to see the country, in Thomas Bender’s term, as merely one province in an interconnected world that European colonizers began to create during the fifteenth century. Thus such topics as the Atlantic trade in minerals, foodstuffs, and slaves and the international exchange of ideas and proposals about reforming industrial, capitalist societies take the place of a default narrative that, implicitly or explicitly, sees America as a distinct case. In 1998, Janice Radway gave a presidential address to the American Studies Association in which she criticized, in jargonized prose, the name of her own group. A society that was not hemmed in by the need to peg cultural analysis of community and identity-formation to geography, she argued, might better be able to attend to the full variety of cultural negotiations, negotiations that do not recognize national borders but flow across them to solicit the identifications of attentive and like-minded individuals. Dismissing the notion of a bounded national territory and a concomitant national identity, Radway wondered whether it made sense to perpetuate a specifically ‘American’ studies at all. As David Hollinger writes, with tongue held firmly in cheek, Historians have less use for the United States than they once did.²²

Most non-American scholars, however, continue to view the history and the culture of the United States as, if not exceptional, at least distinct in significant ways from those of other powerful nations in Europe and Asia. They tend to assume the unity of something called America, of a promised land or a hegemonic behemoth that bestrides the world—represented by powerful individuals, large and prosperous groups, and a national culture and state. This America is the apotheosis of one version of modernism: it subverts traditional cultures, destabilizes and sometimes overthrows indigenous rulers, and spreads its ideology, its effervescent popular culture, and even its form of government wherever and whenever it can. As Charles Bright and Michael Geyer observe, Today people around the world think of America as the first democracy or, alternatively, as the land of McDonald’s.²³ In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of these same people have also come to regard America as home to the world’s most powerful and least restrained military apparatus.

Perhaps, some exceptionalisms, some nationalist ideologies, are more equal than others. For over two hundred years, the idea of America—as new Jerusalem or new Rome or something in between—has had a uniquely potent meaning for a broad variety of people outside the United States: from French aristocrats like Tocqueville to European Communists like Antonio Gramsci to Saudi terrorists like Mohammed Atta to teenagers all over the world with Nikes on their feet and posters of Eminem, Britney Spears, and Michael Jordan on their walls. Recently, non-American scholars have joined U.S. historians in concentrating on the fragmented, disputatious nature of American society and the influence of those factors on the development of nationalist ideology. But there remains a persistent inclination among academics as well as ordinary citizens in other lands to view America as a whole—to examine how it uses and abuses its ideology both within the nation’s borders and outside them.

What makes Americanism exceptional is thus its confluence with the realities of historical development itself. Ultimately, Americanism demands understanding on its own terms because of the unrivaled power for good or ill that the United States now wields in the world. As Hollinger wrote in 2002, the United States is the most successful nationalist project in all of modern history. . . . Two-and-one-quarter centuries after its founding and 135 years after its Civil War, the United States is the most powerful nation-state in the world and the only twenty-first century power that operates under a constitution written in the eighteenth century. Its significance is measured by its sheer longevity, its influence in the world arena, and its absorption of a variety of peoples through immigration, conquest, and enslavement and emancipation.²⁴

The success of the American nation has, in turn, bestowed tremendous power on the notion of Americanism, with all its contradictions and silences. It allows Mormons from Utah and Pentecostalists from Missouri to go into the world, converting people to a faith marked by the material success of its adherents as much as by the appeal of their doctrines and ceremonies. It has also given dissident groups in the United States the ability to inspire analogous movements in other parts of the globe. The U.S. movement for black freedom helped galvanize the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, and the radical feminist movement (although indebted to texts by non-Americans like Juliet Mitchell and Simone de Beauvoir) helped spark like-minded insurgencies on every continent. The same is true of the gay and lesbian rights movement, spawned in the United States at the end of the 1960s.²⁵

The recent rise of anti-Americanism notwithstanding, one cannot neglect the worldwide appeal of Americanist ideology in the laudable desire to internationalize the study and teaching of U.S. history. The very perception that a distinct set of American values exists was greatly boosted, particularly from World War II onward, by the unmatched power and allure of the United States itself. Of course, no civilizing mission proceeds by discourse alone. Yet without a well-developed, internally persuasive ideology, no national mission, whether humane or barbarous, ever gains much sway. Nor can one hope to advance a more benevolent Americanism without understanding the history of the nation’s public ideology and learning how to speak effectively within its idioms. It is toward that end that we have organized this volume.

The original essays gathered here testify to the growing interest in Americanism among historically minded intellectuals. The dozen authors include both renowned scholars and younger ones who are gaining influence in the academic fields of history and American studies. They further an understanding of the concept in all its complexity—as an ideology, an articulation of America’s rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style pregnant with political meaning. By illuminating some of the significant ways in which Americanism has been defined and contested over the past two centuries, they help us grasp the potential and limitations of the ideals it represents and of the term itself in our own time.

A central theme pursued in the essays is the inescapable conflict that Americanism provokes, within each articulator and interpreter of the national faith as well as between patriots and their critics. Nearly every significant naysayer also pays tribute to Americanism, in principle, while most tributes contain a degree of sadness that U.S. citizens are not living up to the high promise of their ideals. This internal tug-of-war provides tension and drama to the ideological history, while ensuring that the concept will never lose its significance, its freshness, and its power to inspire and provoke.

We have separated the essays into two sections: one concerns debates and narratives within the United States, and the other examines what people abroad have made of the Americanist mission. This division is, inevitably, somewhat arbitrary: several of the essays cross national boundaries or adopt a comparative perspective.

Each contribution in the first section—Whose America?—focuses on a particular group of citizens who sought to mold national ideals into a form that could further their interests and advance their beliefs.

Four essays span the period from the early republic to the beginning of World War II. Mia Bay describes how free black men and women interpreted the American Revolution as a set of promises only the abolitionist movement could fulfill. The founders’ ideology both legitimized the struggle against slavery and gave activists a language with which to challenge their opponents, among whom was Thomas Jefferson himself. By examining the extraordinary diary of a Vermont farmer named Hiram Harwood, Robert Shalhope provides a fresh look at the long-running debate about whether republicanism or liberalism reigned in the new nation. Together with his relatives and neighbors, Harwood was alternately exhilarated at the egalitarian accomplishments of his society and fearful that new forms of hierarchy would destroy them. In the republicanism of this small producer, Shalhope finds a precursor to the Americanism that would emerge in the mid-nineteenth century. Jonathan Hansen analyzes the effort by a variety of Progressive intellectuals—from Jane Addams to W. E. B. Du Bois to Randolph Bourne—to define a strain of Americanism that would both celebrate ethnic and racial difference and nurture a unified civic culture. Stephen Whitfield offers a close, ironic reading of Henry Luce’s famous 1941 editorial that heralded the start of an American Century. Whitfield argues that the vision expressed in the publisher’s manifesto was remarkably liberal in its time and has proved quite prescient in ours.

The next three essays examine vital topics in the making of Americanism during and just after the long Cold War. Mae Ngai explains how liberal scholars and policymakers, most of whom were the children of European immigrants, shaped the epochal 1965 reform of immigration law around a conception of equal rights derived from