On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney contrasts his vision of American greatness with what he claims is Barack Obama's proclivity for apologizing for it. The "president doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do," Romney has charged. All countries have their own brand of chest-thumping nationalism, but almost none is as patently universal -- even messianic -- as this belief in America's special character and role in the world. While the mission may be centuries old, the phrase only recently entered the political lexicon, after it was first uttered by none other than Joseph Stalin. Today the term is experiencing a resurgence in an age of anxiety about American decline.
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1630
As the Massachusetts Bay Company
sets sail from England to the New World, Puritan lawyer John Winthrop urges his fellow passengers on the Arabella
to "be as a city upon a hill," alluding to a phrase from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. The colonists must make New
England a model for future settlements, he notes, as the "eyes of all people
are upon us."
1776
In "Common Sense," revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas
Paine describes America as a beacon of liberty for the world. "Freedom hath
been hunted round the globe," he explains. "Asia, and Africa, have long
expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her
warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for
mankind."
1840
Reflecting on his
travels in the United States in his seminal work, Democracy in America, French intellectual Alexis de
Tocqueville writes that the "position of
the Americans" is "quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic
people will ever be placed in a similar one."
1898
"There is but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name 'American.' That is the national devotion to ice-water.… I suppose we do stand alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves." --Mark Twain
1914
U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson infuses Paine's notion of the United States as a
bastion of freedom with missionary zeal, arguing
that what makes America unique is its duty to spread liberty abroad. "I want you to take these great engines of force out onto
the seas like adventurers enlisted for the elevation of the spirit of the human
race," Wilson tells U.S. Naval Academy graduates. "For that is the only
distinction that America has."
1929-1930
Coining a new
term, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin condemns
the "heresy of American exceptionalism" while expelling American communist
leader Jay Lovestone and his followers from the Communist International for arguing that U.S. capitalism constitutes an
exception to Marxism's universal laws. Within a year, the Communist Party USA has adopted Stalin's disparaging term. "The storm of
the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of
American exceptionalism," the party declares,
gloating about the Great Depression.
1941
Echoing
Wilson, magazine publisher Henry Luce urges
the United States to enter World War II and exchange
isolationism for an "American century" in which it acts as the "powerhouse" of
those ideals that are "especially American."
1950s
A group of
American historians -- including Daniel Boorstin,
Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and David Potter -- argues
that the United States forged a "consensus" of liberal values over time that
enabled it to sidestep movements such as fascism and socialism. But they
question whether this unique national character can be reproduced elsewhere. As
Boorstin writes, "nothing could be more un-American than to urge other
countries to imitate America."
1961
President
John F. Kennedy suggests that America's distinctiveness stems from its
determination to exemplify and defend freedom all over the world. He invokes Winthrop's "city upon a hill" and declares: "More than any other people on Earth,
we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their
duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free."
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