4 Americanism

A short history

Does anti-Americanism really exist?

In discussions of anti-Americanism certain arguments regularly
recur. Criticism of American policies, it is affirmed, must be
distinguished from the broader and often irrational sentiment of
anti-Americanism. It is necessary to make the distinction, we are
told, not only because opposition to America takes many forms
and has many different motivations but because, when closely
analysed, even the most extreme negative reactions to the
United States turn out to have identifiable sources in particular
situations of power relations. Taken to its logical conclusion,
such arguments result in the view that, for all the hatred direc-
ted towards the United States by specific nations or groups on
specific grounds, anti-Americanism as such, i.e. a generalized
opposition to American life and culture, does not exist. ‘There is
no such thing as anti-Americanism in the Middle East’, declared a
member of an audience following a lecture on anti-Americanism
given by the present author, ‘only specific objections to the
record of American policies in the Middle East since 1945.’
Another comment frequently made about anti-Americanism is
that such sentiments reveal more about those voicing them than
about America. ‘Ultimately,’ writes a Canadian resident in the
United States after 9/11, ‘Canadian anti-Americanism says more
about Canada than it does about the United States.’ Similarly in
 Americanism: a short history 95
the French case, notes the author of an essay entitled ‘Does Anti-
Americanism Exist?’, ‘it would be impossible to understand
French anti-Americanism/pro-Americanism . . . without realis-
ing that it is part and parcel of an internal French debate that is
more or less unrelated to American realities’.1 On this view,
America is the pretext or the occasion for emotions and atti-
tudes which have their sources in the situation of the subject.
The case for the existence of a clearly defined sentiment called
anti-Americanism loses further credibility.
A further reason for being sceptical about the nature and sources
of anti-Americanism is that it assumes that there is a high degree
of unity in American society and culture; indeed that there is an
identifiable essence of America which can be associated with the
term ‘Americanism’. Such essentialism, it is claimed, belies the
diverse and conflict-ridden character of American society. ‘Once
you have an appreciation of the conflicting ideologies and cultures
within America’, writes Brendon O’Connor, ‘summing up the
essence of America with a pat definition or examples of Amer-
icanism seems impossible.’2 From this standpoint, postulation of
something called ‘Americanism’ smacks of dated studies of the
‘American character’ in the 1940s and 1950s which assumed the
primacy of unifying and consensual factors in American culture
and history. ‘Consensus history’ of this sort comes with so much
baggage, not least as far as liberal-minded scholars are con-
cerned its association with politically and intellectually con-
servative approaches to the study of the United States, that it
must be rejected on these grounds alone. The revisionist scholar-
ship of the 1960s and the subsequent proliferation of scholarship
across a range of fields presented a kaleidoscopic rather than a
unified picture of the United States, putting paid, so it is said, to
any naı̈ve consensus theories by demonstrating the deep tensions
and fissures beneath the carapace of conformity in the 1950s.3
Such studies had implications for the study of the United States
in general, not merely for the 1950s. If there has been a theme
in study of the United States since the 1960s it has emphasized
the e pluribus rather than the unum in the American motto.
96 Americanism: a short history
In these and other ways it is possible systematically to
deconstruct the notion of anti-Americanism. No one disputes
that the United States has been the target of much opposition
from around the world in recent history, but what is in doubt is
whether such opposition adds up to an integrated concept. The
difficulty alone of establishing a definition of anti-Americanism –
a problem discussed ad nauseam in the literature – demonstrates
the problem of knowing what is being talked about or indeed
whether there is anything to talk about. And yet one is reluctant
to abandon the notion entirely if only because the term’s cur-
rency suggests that there is something to be discussed. It seems
prudent to try another tack, to approach the subject indirectly.
Given the prevalence of the term it is curious how seldom the
spotlight has been turned on the nominal target of anti-Amer-
icanism: namely, ‘Americanism’. One searches in vain in most
histories of American ideas or of American nationalism or even
of anti-Americanism for anything more than passing references
to ‘Americanism’. And yet Americanism does have a history.4
From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, it is
regularly invoked, discussed, and disputed. Furthermore, since
9/11 there has been a resurgence in usage of the term, with
websites devoted to furthering values associated with Amer-
icanism. The purpose of this inquiry is to explore this history
with a view to contributing to our understanding of anti-
Americanism in the present. While the emphasis here is on
Americanism rather than the nature of the reactions to it, the
broad conclusion is that the emotions and ideas we term anti-
American contain a large cultural component. Without denying
that anti-Americanism often takes the form of opposition to
particular policies or that its roots frequently lie in the motives
of those who stand opposed to the United States rather than in
America itself, the claim here is that such attitudes are mixed
with, or intensified by, the projection of Americanism which we
can define as the cultural form in which American nationalism
expresses itself. Of course, Americanism is also the source of
much positive feeling on the part of non-Americans, but it
 Americanism: a short history 97
should come as no surprise that a nation as large, diverse and
successful in so many fields as the United States should arouse
such contradictory feelings and opinions.

Americanism and Americanisms

We can dispose of certain usages of ‘Americanism’ fairly quickly
since they have specialized meanings and restricted ranges of
reference. An ‘Americanism’, noted the critic and historian of
the American language H. L. Mencken, is a ‘word taken into the
English language which has not gained acceptance in English or
retains an element of foreignness’.5 Specific as this use of the term
is, it is nevertheless important to note that it reflects the growing
influence of American culture which is associated with the process
of ‘Americanization’ in the latter decades of the nineteenth century
and the early years of the twentieth. Indeed, the first full-length
study of this theme was published as early as 1901 by the British
journalist W. T. Stead.6 If language is one vital component of
culture, then religion is another. ‘Americanism’ in religion was
the name given by the Roman Catholic church around the turn
of the twentieth century to what was regarded as the American
Catholic bishops’ heretical embrace of extreme forms of modern
principles such as the separation of church and state, free speech,
liberalism in ethics, and in general a predisposition to stake out
their own positions on these and other issues rather than relying
on the authority of the church. Passing reference should also be
given to the view of Julius Streicher, the Nazi ideologue, that
‘Americanism’ was to be equated with ‘the Jewish spirit’.7 Spe-
cialized as these usages are, they demonstrate both a growing
influence of the United States beyond its shores and the projec-
tion of an identifiable national identity.

Americanism as cultural identity

Americanism, as has been suggested, was a facet of the growth of
American nationalism. Nowhere was the question of Americanness
98 Americanism: a short history
more deeply involved than in the field of culture. In the words
of literary historian Richard Ruland ‘the self-conscious effort to
develop a native aesthetic sensibility’8 was an endless focus of
discussion and debate among writers, critics and artists from the
outset. However, it appears that this effort became associated
with an ‘ism’ only after the Civil War. Civil War veteran, uni-
tarian minister and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote
in an article published in Atlantic Monthly in 1870 that

the voyager from Europe who lands on our shores perceives

a difference in the sky above his head; the height seems
loftier, the zenith more remote, the horizon-wall more steep;
the moon appears to hang in middle air, beneath a dome
that arches far beyond it.

Here, he went on,

one wishes to be convinced that the intellectual man inhales

a deeper breath, and walks a bolder tread; that philosopher
and artist are here more buoyant, more fresh, more fertile;
that the human race has here escaped at one bound from
the despondency of ages, as from their wrongs.

Furthermore,

the true and healthy Americanism is to be found, let us

believe, in this attitude of hope; an attitude not necessarily
connected with culture nor with the absence of culture but
with the consciousness of a new impulse given to all human
progress.

It seemed ‘unspeakably important’, he concluded, ‘that all persons

among us, and especially the student and the writer should be
pervaded with Americanism . . . [which] includes the faith that
national-self-government is not a chimera but that, with whatever
inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are steadily establishing it here’.9
 Americanism: a short history 99
With Higginson we are not yet in the realms of ideology or
of militant nationalism but rather of aspiration and hope. His
writings on this subject are in the ‘optative mood’, as Emerson
described that sense of endless possibility experienced by the
writers and artists of the mid-nineteenth century. American
nationhood was still in the making. If it is hard to define exactly
what is meant by ‘Americanism’ at this stage, it is evidently a
quality which emerged in the encounter with a physical and
social environment which was unlike anything in the Old
World. Higginson’s reflections on the cultural effects of the
American environment stood in a tradition going back at least to
Crêvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782).10 Indeed
it could be argued that the urge to define, assert and celebrate
the American difference from Europe was the leading pre-
occupation of the major American writers of the nineteenth
century. More ambivalent in approach was Henry James, whose
exile from America did not, however, mean total repudiation of
‘Americanism’. It remained a source of fascination throughout
his life and in a sense constituted the chief subject of his
work. In his remarkable account of a visit made to America in
1904–5, published as The American Scene (1907), James medi-
tated on the grandeur of Washington, DC and wondered what
effect the elaborate design of the city would have on the
consciousness of Americans and whether it would indeed, as
seemed intended, ‘prepare thereby the American voter, on the
spot and in the pride of possession, quite a new civic con-
sciousness’. In the absence of any conclusive evidence, James
observed that:

There is always, in America, yet another lively source of

interest involved in the execution of such designs, and clo-
sely involved just in proportion as the high intention, the
formal majesty of the thing seems assured. It comes back to
what we constantly feel, throughout the country, to what
the American scene everywhere depends on for half its
appeal or its effect; to the fact that the social conditions, the
100 Americanism: a short history
material, pressing or pervasive, make the particular experiment
or ‘demonstration’, whatever it may pretend to, practically a
new and incalculable thing. This general Americanism is
often the one tag of character attaching to the case after
every other appears to have abandoned it. The thing is
happening, or will have to happen, in the American way –
that American way which is more different from all other
native ways, taking country with country, than any of these
latter are different from each other; and the question is of
how, each time, the American way will see it through.11

Tangled up in James’ elaborate prose is as categorical assertion

of ‘American exceptionalism’ as one can find in this period,
though it is hardly an unambiguous celebration of it. Its
importance for the present theme is that it identifies certain
qualities as distinctively American, even if their precise char-
acter is ‘incalculable’. It is apparently enough that it is ‘new’.
America will express itself, and has no choice but to do so in its
own way.
Responses to this aspect of American culture have been as
varied and often ambiguous as the American expressions of it.
Europeans have frequently celebrated America’s opportunities
and aspirations, as in Goethe’s line: ‘America, you have it better
than our continent . . . you have no ruined castles.’12 But just as
often Europeans have been irritated or worse at inflated claims
by some Americans for their culture and institutions – both
when America was an upstart nation during the nineteenth
century and when it took over Europe’s role in the twentieth, at
which point irritation frequently turned to resentment when
American claims for its culture were combined with the power
effectively to project it.

Old-fashioned Americanism
Later on others would adopt this seeming determinism of the
American way and give it a more militant and threatening
 Americanism: a short history 101
political and ideological cast. Meanwhile, though, there were
other shades of meaning to ‘Americanism’ in the post-Civil War
decades which were more consonant with the cultural forms of
Higginson and James, but which also indicate political applica-
tions. In James Russell Lowell’s biography of Abraham Lincoln
the president emerges as the epitome of the republican idea in
his modesty, simplicity, and ‘unconsciousness of self’:

Mr Lincoln has never studied Quintilian but he has, in the

earnest simplicity and unaffected Americanism of his own
character, one art of oratory worth all the rest. He forgets
himself so entirely in his object as to give his ‘I’ the sym-
pathetic and persuasive ‘we’ with the great body of his
countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-
edged processes of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving
at his conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic,
he is so evidently our representative man, that, when he
speaks, it seems as if the people were listening to their own
thinking aloud.13

Similar qualities were celebrated in America before Lincoln and

also long after him. Benjamin Franklin’s doubtless more studied
cultivation of simplicity famously endeared him to the courts of
Europe as to Americans. In a very different era, when Henry
Wallace referred in his speech accepting the nomination as pre-
sidential candidate for the Progressive Party in 1948 to ‘the old-
fashioned Americanism that was built for us by Jefferson, Jack-
son, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson’, he
had the same homely, essentially pre-industrial values associated
with heartland America in mind. This notion of Americanism,
which has perhaps the same relationship to reality as a Christ-
mas card to Christmas, draws on images of an idealized past and
also certain qualities taken to be of perennial value to America’s
well-being as a society. Such values are embodied in individuals,
but in their representative character they image the process
whereby individualism becomes a social value.
102 Americanism: a short history
Americanism as individualism
There are several steps on the way from this picture of a har-
monious relationship between individualism as a private value
and a public ethic to a more embattled and ideological concep-
tion of Americanism as individualism which emerges in the late
nineteenth century. On this theme, as on many others, Tocque-
ville remains an essential guide. Individualism was a central
theme of his Democracy in America and he used the term in the
awareness that it was a new coinage. ‘Individualism’, he wrote,
‘is a recent expression arising from a new idea. Our fathers
knew only selfishness.’ The novel element in individualism,
which distinguished it from selfishness, was that its effects were
felt not just in personal behaviour but throughout society:

individualism disposes each citizen to isolate himself from

the mass and to withdraw to one side with his family and
friends, so that after having thus created a little society for
his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to
itself.14

Individualism, he suggested, was associated with the growing

conditions of equality and the advent of the democratic idea
which had progressed further and faster in America than any-
where else. Tocqueville recognized that even in America indivi-
dualism was mixed with other values which mitigated its worst
effects,15 but there was no disguising its centrality in American
society. Tocqueville’s insight has proved of lasting significance
and interest to generations of observers of the United States.
Any number of examples could be offered to show how deep
individualism goes in American culture, but the concern here is
specifically to illustrate its connections with the theme of
Americanism. One starting point could be Grover Cleveland’s
presidential inaugural address of 1893 in the perhaps unlikely
context of a discussion of the tariff issue. It is hard now to
comprehend the degree to which the tariff issue dominated
 Americanism: a short history 103
national party politics through the nineteenth century and
through the first three decades of the twentieth. The tariff
aroused emotions which extended far beyond the economics of
the issue; the debate linked with fundamental questions of the
role of government and ultimately with moral values. Cleve-
land’s party, the Democrats, were historically in favour of low
tariffs which were taken to be of benefit to farmers and the
working man, but Cleveland’s rhetoric shows very clearly his
belief that a great deal more was at stake. The adoption of
‘protection for protection’s sake’, he declared, was ‘the bane of
republican institutions and the constant peril of our government
by the people. It degrades to the purposes of wily craft the plan
of rule our fathers established and . . . perverts the patriotic
sentiments of our countrymen’. And why was the protective
tariff so evil? Because it introduced ‘paternalism’, undermined
‘self-reliance’, and puts ‘in its place dependence upon govern-
mental favouritism’. In short, ‘it stifles the spirit of true Amer-
icanism and stupefies every ennobling trait of American
citizenship’. The lesson for the American people must be that
‘while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support
their Government, its functions do not include the support of
the people’.16 Once again an effort of imagination is required to
grasp the reality that for many Americans, and particularly those
in power and/or possessing wealth, the function of government
was simply, as the late nineteenth-century sociologist William
Graham Sumner is reported to have said, ‘to protect property
and the honor of women’. This admittedly extreme argument
by the high priest of atomistic individualism did not, of course,
go unchallenged but Cleveland’s statement is close enough to it
to suggest that it spoke to the views of many Americans. The
early nineteenth-century argument for ‘internal improvements’
notwithstanding, it is a largely twentieth-century notion that
government should be a supplier of goods and services and an
active intervener in the economy and society rather than merely
a protector of rights and guarantor of external security (an
essential function not listed in Sumner’s formulation). Needless
104 Americanism: a short history
to say, such anti-statist views often co-existed with a predis-
position on the part of business leaders to accept any govern-
ment largesse which might be available. The private companies
which built America’s transcontinental railroads sought and
gained enormous grants from government. Theoretical con-
sistency could not necessarily be expected in this field or any
other. The key point is that American ‘individualism’ was in
principle suspicious of government, and in the nineteenth-
century context for a significant proportion of Americans
Americanism and individualism were different names for the
same thing. Among the most influential ideologists of individu-
alism was Andrew Carnegie who, in his Darwinian proclama-
tion of the ‘Gospel of Wealth’ (1899) spoke of the ‘intense
individualism’ which was the basis of American and indeed of
Western society. More than a generation later President Herbert
Hoover extolled the virtues of ‘rugged individualism’ in defi-
ance of the growing resort to ‘collectivist’ ideas as the depres-
sion took root in the United States.
The advent in the early twentieth century of very different
attitudes towards the role of government, stimulated by war and
depression, did not lead to the disappearance of the equation
between Americanism and individualism, as the example of
Hoover demonstrates. It only led to become more extreme and
more shrill expressions of it. As progressives and liberals pushed
for governmental intervention in the economy and social affairs
to regulate the growing power of corporations and to provide
safety nets for the poor and unemployed, the advocates of
Americanism as individualism mounted a rearguard action
which resonated strongly with many Americans who felt that
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and comparable innovations were
against the American way. The beginning of the Cold War
intensified the emotions surrounding this issue because the
United States was now faced with an enemy whose values were
diametrically opposed to those of the United States. In 1946, the
year of Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech which sym-
bolized the end of any expectation that the wartime alliance
 Americanism: a short history 105
with the Soviet Union could be salvaged, the novelist and poli-
tical writer Ayn Rand published her Textbook of Americanism. In
truth her ideas were the product, not merely of the outbreak of
the Cold War but of her own personal experience of flight
from the revolutionary Russia in 1917 and her subsequent
dedication to combating communism and Soviet power by any
means she could. ‘The basic issue in the world today’, she
wrote, ‘is between two principles: Individualism and Collecti-
vism.’ According to individualism, ‘the power of society is
limited by the inalienable individual rights of man. Society may
only make such laws as do not violate these rights.’ Meanwhile,
collectivism says that ‘the power of society is unlimited. Society
may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in
any manner it wishes.’ The United States was self-evidently an
embodiment of the principle of individualism and the United
States Constitution was the guarantor of that principle. The
‘proper function of government’ was ‘to protect the individual
rights of man; this means to protect man against brute force’.
Rand took to its logical conclusion the view that there is no
such thing as society in her assertion that ‘there are no crimes
against ‘‘society’’; all crimes are committed against specific men,
against individuals’.17
Ayn Rand was briefly an influential figure in the anti-communist
cause of the 1940s and 1950s by virtue of her novels – notably
The Fountainhead which was turned into a film starring Gary
Cooper – and her very public stand against communism. In
1947 she appeared as a friendly witness before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities.18 We shall return to the
issue of anti-communism under another heading, but for the
moment it is important to note the elements of continuity
between Ayn Rand’s notion of Americanism as individualism
and that of figures such as Grover Cleveland, with the singular
difference that Ayn Rand’s tone is noticeably more militant
and combative, as befits the ideological climate of the Cold
War. To the militant American individualist, much of the
political evolution in America from Franklin Roosevelt’s New
106 Americanism: a short history
Deal onwards has constituted a violation of American individu-
alism and indeed of Americanism. Yet however valid individu-
alism remains as a cultural value, as a basis for a political ethic it
has been firmly marginalized. The intense anti-statism associated
with figures such as Ayn Rand has become a minority and an
embattled position, even if it continues to resonate because of
the depths of its roots in American society and history. To the
extent that it has continued to resonate with Americans it has
also been regarded with bewilderment by many Europeans for
whom such expressions of individualism are deeply anachro-
nistic and out of keeping with the strong statist tradition in
Europe.

Americanism and Americanization

Nothing gets closer to the heart of nationhood than ideas about
who should be admitted as members of the nation and on what
terms. In the well-worn cliché, America is a nation of immi-
grants. At times of high immigration, such as has been the case
since the 1960s, intense public debate takes place about the
impact on society of large numbers of new citizens, in addition
to the issues posed by illegal immigration. The debate has been
particularly heated in recent years because the main sources of
recent immigration (as a result of changes in immigration law
in the 1960s) have been Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean
rather than the ‘old stock’ countries of Europe and Canada. The
result has been anxiety that immigration on this scale and of
this type will challenge the values as well as the ethnic compo-
sition of American society. Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?
(2004) is the most discussed of these polemics, but the issue
became of huge national significance in the spring of 2006 as
Congress moved to legislate on illegal immigration. What is
significant about this debate, so far as a discussion of Amer-
icanism is concerned, is that while the primary focus is on
immigration it also exposes a divide in elite attitudes between
broadly conservative and liberal positions, the conservatives
 Americanism: a short history 107
presenting themselves as the true Americans, defending inher-
ited values and traditions, and liberals being portrayed as un-
American to the extent that they endorse policies which are
regarded as compromising American identity.
A comparable debate took place between the 1880s and the
early 1920s, at which point immigration restriction legislation
was passed which severely limited the numbers of incomers and
also defined the national origins of permitted immigrants in
ways which stemmed the tide of ‘new’ immigrants. The fear
was not only that many of these immigrants adhered to reli-
gious faiths – predominantly Catholicism and Judaism – which
challenged the dominance of Protestant Christianity, but that
they were from countries such as Russia, Poland and Italy which
had no experience of democratic politics or liberal society. Many
were of peasant origin. Such people could be easily manipulated
by unscrupulous political bosses. There were doubts about
whether they could assimilate – become true Americans.
It was in this context that the call came to be heard for the
assertion of ‘true Americanism’ or ‘100 per cent Americanism’
in a bid to reaffirm the traditional terms and values of American
citizenship. Such calls were not against all immigration but
rather for its regulation in the service of Americanism. Among
the most prominent advocates of this stance was Theodore
Roosevelt, who in 1894 published a call to patriotic arms enti-
tled ‘True Americanism’. Significantly, Roosevelt’s target was not
only immigrants but ‘Europeanized’ intellectuals whose allegiance
to Americanism was as open to doubt as that of certain immi-
grants. The debate in America, then as now, divided the elite.
‘Americanism’, he said, ‘is a question of spirit, conviction, and
purpose, not of creed or birthplace.’ But what precisely was
‘Americanism’? In the first place it meant an allegiance to the
nation rather than a section or local area – an important priority
in a nation which was not only large in extent but had experienced
a civil war in the not too distant past. America must think nation-
ally and act nationally, its writers ‘write as Americans’. Second,
Americans must embrace patriotism and eschew cosmopolitanism.
108 Americanism: a short history
Americanism was a positive choice; passive citizenship would
not do. ‘One may fall very short of treason’, Roosevelt declared,

and yet be an undesirable citizen in the community. The

man who becomes Europeanized, who loses his power of
doing good work on this side of the water, and who loses
his love for his native land, is not a traitor; but he is a silly
and undesirable citizen.

Nor was Roosevelt in any doubt that America was the best of
countries. This advocate of ‘the strenuous life’ had nothing but
contempt for those Americans who hankered after European
culture. Such individuals were ‘weaklings who seek to be other
than Americans’. Should they choose to live in Europe (was he
thinking of Henry James?), ‘he becomes a second-rate Eur-
opean, because he is over-civilized, over-sensitive, over-refined,
and has lost the hardihood and manly courage by which alone
he can conquer in the keen struggle of our national life’. The
third aspect of Americanism meant thorough assimilation of
newcomers into the national life, a deliberate cutting off of
themselves from the language, customs and way of life of the
old country. In short, the immigrant must become ‘thoroughly
Americanized’.19 Woodrow Wilson urged the same result, if
with less strenuous breast-beating, when he told a group of
newly naturalized citizens in Philadelphia in 1915, that

a man who thinks of himself as belonging to particular

national group in America has not yet become an American,
and the man who goes among you to trade upon your
nationality is no worthy son to live under the stars and
stripes.20

As American participation in the First World War loomed,

Theodore Roosevelt’s temperature rose further. To fail to embrace
‘thorough-going Americanism’ was to be ‘un-American’. Nor,
once again, was this simply a matter for immigrants: ‘we must
 Americanism: a short history 109
make Americanism and Americanization mean the same thing to
the native born and to the foreign born; to the men and to the
women; to the rich and to the poor; to the employer and to the
wage-worker’.21 Americanism was the ultimate solvent of all
differences.
It should not be thought that this form of Americanism went
uncontested. Henry James, who doubtless felt himself personally
attacked in Roosevelt’s comments on the Europeanized Amer-
ican, noted that Roosevelt ‘appears to propose . . . to tighten the
screws of the national consciousness as they have never been
tightened before’, and this at a time when the connections
between nations were becoming ever closer and more ramified
by virtue of the global expansion of transport and communica-
tions. James refused to rise to Roosevelt’s bait, kept his tone
level and contented himself with noting the ‘puerility of his
simplifications’.22 In a very different key was the approach taken
by essayist and political radical Randolph Bourne to the sort of
argument presented by Roosevelt. His writings are of particular
value to the historian of Americanism since Bourne was not
content merely with a critique of the model proposed by the
likes of Roosevelt but proposed an alternative model of citizen-
ship which is of continuing relevance. His starting point was the
failure of the melting pot theory – a point which he shared with
the advocates of immigration restriction, if for very different
reasons. The outbreak of the war in Europe in 1914 had starkly
revealed the existence of ‘diverse nationalistic feelings among
our great alien population’ which in turn had provoked ‘hard-
hearted Brahmins’ to righteous indignation at the ‘spectre of the
immigrant refusing to be melted’ along with insistence on for-
cible assimilation ‘to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they
unquestioningly label ‘‘American’’’. The conclusion should be,
not to admit the failure of Americanization but ‘rather to urge
us to investigation of what Americanism might rightly mean’. In
Bourne’s view it meant in the first instance acknowledging that
America was ‘a unique sociological fabric’. Exceptionalism was
evidently not a preserve of militant nationalists. America’s unique
110 Americanism: a short history
feature lay in the absence of a ‘native ‘‘American’’ culture’.
There was no distinctively American culture, but ‘rather a fed-
eration of cultures’. Furthermore, to accept this fact about Amer-
ica was at last to look to the future rather than the past. So long
as Americanism was thought of in terms of the melting pot,

our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was

something to which Americans were to be moulded. In the
light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must per-
petuate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies
in the future. It will be what we all together make out of
this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future with a
new key.

In defiance of the Rooseveltian injunction to spurn cosmopoli-

tanism, Bourne embraced the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’.23
Bourne’s acceptance of the possibility of dual allegiance to the
old country and the new, coupled with his advocacy of ‘dual
citizenship’, was highly provocative in the climate of the times,
which was one of a military ‘preparedness’ campaign in which
a premium was placed on national unity. In a sense Bourne’s
article was an anti-war manifesto even before American entry
into the First World War, which came a year after the essay was
published. The story of Bourne’s stance against the war, his
death in the flu epidemic of 1918, and the posthumous pub-
lication of his coruscating manuscript ‘The State’ made him the
stuff of legend for the radical left. As far as the theme of
Americanism is concerned, Bourne’s significance lies in the fact
that he demonstrated an alternative pluralistic reading of the
American project which has nevertheless always had to run the
gauntlet of the less complicated and apparently more plausible
idea of unitary nationalism.
However, Bourne’s stance was and has remained a minority
position, not merely because of the inflammatory potential of
the immigration issue but because war, and hence pressure for
loyalty to the nation, has featured so large in the twentieth and
 Americanism: a short history 111
twenty-first centuries. The First World War posed a particular
challenge to the United States, both because America had large
sections of population from belligerents on both sides, and
because participation meant the abandonment of the hallowed
principle of non-entanglement in European affairs. Indeed,
Wilson had sought for two years to avoid entering the war in
part in order not to provoke splits in the nation, and he fought
the election of 1916 on the slogan ‘He kept us out of the war.’
However, once the decision was made to embark on a mission
to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, Wilson believed it
possible to avoid the development of ‘war-mindedness’ and
announced with great optimism that America’s participation
would be on a more detached and benign basis then of the
other belligerents because America’s was not for gain. It was not
to be. Wilson and his government became caught up in the
emotions of war, not least because of the existence of consider-
able domestic opposition which challenged the government to
make its case vigorously. The government resorted not only to
Espionage and Sedition Acts to silence the most radical voices
but also to modern techniques of advertising and propaganda to
sell the message of the war to the people. Former journalist
George Creel, made head of a Committee for Public Informa-
tion, was charged with this task, which he took up with relish,
employing the concept of ‘Americanism’ as his most important
tool. The title of his account of this campaign was How We
Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on
Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of
the Globe (1920). The fight for Americanism became indissolubly
linked with the war effort.
After the First World War it is rare to find ‘Americanism’ used
in anything other than a highly charged way, embodying asso-
ciations with militant nationalism, the drive for unity in the
nation and conformity to a limited and uncomplicated set of
ideals. There were occasional challenges, as we shall see, but
they were sporadic and generally ineffective. More characteristic
of the post-First World War period was the appropriation of the
112 Americanism: a short history
term by the Ku Klux Klan.24 Originally founded during the
post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, the Klan’s goal was to
resist the efforts by the North to impose its will on the defeated
South. Using tactics of intimidation and terror, the Klan waged a
guerrilla war against the Reconstruction governments, whose
members in some instances now included former slaves, with
the aim of reasserting white supremacy in the South. The orga-
nization faded by the early 1870s as the North grew weary of
Reconstruction, but it was revived in 1915, coinciding with the
screening of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation which gave a
rendering of Reconstruction which was sympathetic to the
Southern position. By the early 1920s it had accumulated
around a million members and held significant political power
in half a dozen states in the North as well as the South. The
Klan’s target now was wider than it had been in its first incar-
nation. Its self-styled responsibility was to ‘speak for the great
mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock’. Under the banner
of ‘Americanism’ the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Hiram Evans,
sought to defend and promote the interests of the ‘Nordic race,
the race which, with all its faults, has given the world almost
the whole of modern civilization’. Behind his message was the
sense of marginalization, which was at once moral, economic,
political and social, of ‘Nordic Americans’ over the last
generation – in effect the period of industrialization and urba-
nization in America. The Nordic American, said Evans, ‘is a
stranger in large parts of the land his father gave him’, a con-
sequence of a falling birth-rate among old stock Americans,
economic disasters caused by immigrant taking over American
jobs, ‘moral breakdown’ including the violation of the ‘sacred-
ness of the Sabbath’, and the assumption of political control by
urban ‘bosses’ commanding the votes of ‘every kind of inhabi-
tants except the Americans’. The First World War, Evans con-
cluded, had revealed the true cause of the troubles of the old
stock Americans, which was the disloyalty of numerous inco-
mers or aliens whose passage to the United States apparently did
not alter their national allegiance.
 Americanism: a short history 113
Like Randolph Bourne, Hiram Evans regarded the melting pot
theory as having failed, but he drew the opposite conclusion:
namely, that the fault lay with those who apparently refused to
melt rather than with the society which demanded that they do
so. The Jews were singled out as being among those who ‘most
determinedly refuse to melt’ but the charge extended somewhat
indiscriminately to Catholics and to the swathes of recently
arrived ‘aliens’ in cities. Between 1900 and 1914 close to a
million immigrants arrived in the US, bringing the proportion
of foreign-born in the United States to a new high. African-
Americans were also targets, and to that extent the Klan of 1915
was a holdover from the post-Civil War decade.25
However, the animus of the new Klan was also directed at
what it regarded as the moral decay of the nation, which could
be summed up in the word ‘liberalism’. This meant a departure
from the moral and religious values which lay at the heart of
American civilization. Liberalism denied the reality of the dif-
ference between right and wrong and it undermined religion by
casting doubt on the literal meaning of the Bible. The real
authors of decline, Evans was convinced, were a certain section
of the ruling elite who had presided over the betrayal of
‘Americanism’.26 The immigrants and ethnics who refused to
melt were merely pawns in the game. The Klan’s fight was thus
a revolt of the ‘plain people’ against what Evans termed ‘intel-
lectually mongrelised liberals’,27 and to that extent was only
one episode in the long series of culture wars in the United
States which have pitted the American heartland – as much
sociological as a geographical conception – against the sophis-
ticated intellectualized urban elites. Long before the era of
Senator McCarthy, liberalism was presented as a polar opposite
to Americanism. Liberalism was simply un-American. ‘Liberal-
ism’, Evans thundered, ‘is today charged in the mind of most
Americans with nothing less than national, racial and spiritual
reason.’28
The Americanism of the KKK was backward-looking and
inward-looking. While some of the sources of the Klan’s anxieties
114 Americanism: a short history
lay in the conditions in Europe which led people to emigrate to
the United States, the Klan was scarcely interested in these
remote causes. It was the local effect of immigration in the
United States which preoccupied the Klan. It was backward-
looking in that it sought the revival of a clearer, simpler America
in which the small man was king. The Klan was acutely aware of
its image as a collection of ‘hicks’, ‘rubes’, and ‘drivers of
second-hand Fords’, and recognized that its lack of public rela-
tions skills was a serious handicap. But it wore its garb of sim-
plicity with pride and rested its case on the conviction that its
cause was right and was based on ancient values going back to
the dawn of civilization. However, because its Americanism
excluded so many categories of Americans, because its methods
were so often vicious and illegal, and because elements of its
leadership were revealed to be corrupt, it was unable to present
itself as anything other than a pressure group for a discontented
minority, however significant its message might prove to be in
the short term. As a vehicle for the promotion of Americanism
the KKK’s success was limited, even if as a white supremacist
organization it continued to exist in the South.
The KKK can hardly be taken as representative of American
attitudes, but it did express anxieties which have surfaced on a
number of occasions in the past and continue to have echoes in
present debates about American national identity. From outside
America, this strain of Americanism as Americanization looks
deeply troubling, given the historical experience in twentieth-
century Europe of demands to submerge one’s identity into that
of the nation. While it is true that the phenomenon of large-
scale immigration from developing nations is shared by all
developed countries, meaning that issues of assimilation are
universal, in no other country does the debate about immi-
gration seem to attach so firmly to the question of national
identity. The explicitness of the American national creed strikes
many outside observers as potentially threatening not only to
incomers to America but also, in its sweeping universalism, to
the life of other cultures and nations. In a globalizing world,
 Americanism: a short history 115
America’s ideas about its own identity have implications far beyond
America’s shores.

Americanism as political ideology: anti-communism

and beyond
The twentieth century presented new challenges to the advo-
cates of Americanism, and these grew largely from the United
States’ growing international involvement. The First World War
was a turning point. While the history textbooks still often
speak of a ‘retreat to isolationism’ in the interwar period, fol-
lowing the Senate’s failure to approve the Treaty of Versailles and
the consequent American absence from the League of Nations,
in actuality the First World War initiated new connections
between America and the world across the spectrum of eco-
nomic, cultural, and even political relations. The United States’
new status as an international creditor created complex eco-
nomic ties with European nations; its largest companies estab-
lished branches in several European countries, including such
new multinationals as Ford and Proctor and Gamble. American
music and American films swept Europe. The United States was
a key player in efforts to control naval armaments in the 1920s.
None of this amounted to the assumption by the United States
of an international political role consonant with its economic
power – it is important not to replace the fiction of isolationism
with the fiction of total involvement – but the First World War
did initiate a sea-change in American perceptions of the outside
world and the outside world’s perception of America.
One of the many new organizations established in the wake of
World War I, reflecting America’s new relationship with the world
beyond its shores, was the American Legion. Founded in Paris in
1919 by officers of the American Expeditionary Force, its goal
was, in the words of the preamble to the Legion’s constitution:

To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of

America; to maintain law and order; to foster and perpetuate
116 Americanism: a short history
a one hundred percent Americanism; to preserve the mem-
ories and incidents of our association in the Great Wars; to
inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community,
state and nation; to combat the autocracy of both the classes
and the masses; to make right the master of might; to pro-
mote peace and goodwill on earth; to safeguard and trans-
mit to Posterity the principles of justice, freedom and
democracy, to consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by
our devotion to mutual helpfulness.29

The Legion was a civilian organization, though membership was

limited to members of the armed forces, including the Coast
Guard. No ranks existed in the organization and no military
titles were to be used. It was also ‘absolutely non-political’,
though politicians over the years have often found it in their
interest to accept invitations to address the organization.
Besides, the term ‘non-political’ meant only that the Legion
would not engage in partisan political activity, not that it would
avoid political questions in its work. Indeed the Legion took a
lead in the drive, which began in the 1930s, against ‘un-American
activity’ and was an active promoter of Americanism from the
outset, as its constitution promised. This continues today.
In a general way it is clear what the Legion was for since it
was spelled out in the preamble to the constitution quoted
above. Its message was sharper edged, however, when it came to
defining what it was against, as is evident in its 1937 publica-
tion Isms: A Review of Alien Isms, Revolutionary Communism and Their
Active Sympathizers in the United States. From the start the Legion was
sensitized to the dangers of communism. The year the Legion
was founded (1919) was also the year in which the third
Communist International was established, with the goal of pro-
moting communism globally. Isms was produced by a sub-group
of the Legion called the National Americanism Commission,
and the report took the form of a detailed history of ‘un-
American activity’ in the United States from the foundation of
the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), through recognition
 Americanism: a short history 117
of the Soviet Union by the United States in 1933 (a move
initiated by the incoming President Franklin Roosevelt and
which the Legion deplored) to details of Soviet subversion in
the United States and its use of front organizations such as
labour and pacifist groups, and data on communist propaganda
outlets such as bookshops, newspapers, and magazines. It was
the sort of material which would become familiar in the anti-
communist drive after World War II. Indeed, the forerunner of
the post-war House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HCUA), the Dies Committee, was set up in 1938, in part at the
prompting of the American Legion. The book ends with a short
section on Nazism, reprinted from a Congressional committee,
though it is clear that for the Legion (as for the Dies Commit-
tee) communism presented by far the deepest challenge to the
United States. Communism was godless, it was destructive of
private property, it sought to destroy representative democracy
and ultimately to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat by
means of world revolution.30
The agenda of the HCUA and of Senator McCarthy after the
Second World War was essentially that of the American Legion,
which had pushed hard for such a committee to be established
and supported its message at every opportunity. Despite this
element of consistency, the important change in the post-war
decade was that anti-communism now had a national platform
and was able to exert considerable pressure on the Truman
administration. The external fact of the outbreak of Cold War
was the obvious trigger for change. Its effect was to render
suspect all political opinion left of a not very precisely defined
centre, the litmus test being the attitude to communism itself.
Open support for communism was clearly beyond the pale, as
was fellow-travelling (that is, endorsement short of actually
joining the Party). Equally suspect, however, were views which
tended to show an understanding of the Soviet position, one
example being that of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace,
who was forced to resign after making a speech in which he
conceded that the Soviets had a right to a sphere of influence in
118 Americanism: a short history
Eastern Europe to match that of the United States in Latin America.
His crime was that of assuming a moral equivalence between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Those who called themselves
liberals were thus forced to redefine their liberalism in such a way
as to meet the anti-communist test. An example here is Arthur
Schlesinger Jr’s re-casting of liberalism as ‘the vital center’ which
sought explicitly to avoid any confusion between liberalism and
sympathy – however mild – for communism or Marxism.31
Historians dispute about how far Truman was himself
responsible for fomenting the anti-communist crusade. Was the
cornerstone of his foreign policy – the so-called Truman Doc-
trine of support for free peoples everywhere against the threat
of communism – an overreaction which helped to heighten
tension with the Soviet Union and raise the temperature at
home? Was his Loyalty Programme of 1947, which required
government employees to undergo stringent checks on their
political opinions, a clever move to head off more drastic legis-
lation by a hostile Congress, or did it play into the hands of
vigilante-like apostles of Americanism? Conceivably both pro-
positions were true.32 Certainly Truman and his administration,
along with actors, writers, union leaders and others, came
under virulent attack for being ‘soft on communism’ and via
Congressional investigations in many cases were forced to make
an account of their stance towards communism. In this climate,
as journalist Gary Wills has written, ‘it was not enough to be
American in citizenship or residence – one must be American in
one’s thoughts. There was such a thing as Americanism. And
lacking right thinking could make an American citizen un-
American.’33 Wills’ comments were those of a historian and
critic bewailing the excesses of the times. For those such as J.
Edgar Hoover, who had cut his teeth as an anti-communist in
the post-World War I ‘Red Scare’, Americanism was the solu-
tion, not the problem. In testimony before the HCUA in 1947
he asked: ‘What can we do? And what should be our course of
action?’ The best antidote to communism, he answered, was
‘vigorous, intelligent old-fashioned Americanism with external
 Americanism: a short history 119
vigilance’.34 There is some irony in his employment of the phrase
‘old-fashioned Americanism’, given, as we have seen, Henry
Wallace’s use of the same term in the election of 1948 when he
stood as a Progressive, the party he formed which was well to
the left of the Democrats and was even endorsed by the CPUSA.
Evidently ‘old-fashioned Americanism’ meant very different
things to different people.
The Cold War had the effect of cementing the association of
Americanism with a militant national ideology. It went so deep
and was so hard to shift because it was a response to a real
external threat which challenged not only American power but
also American values. The Soviet system was not only different
but systematically opposed to the values of the United States
since Marxism-Leninism was founded in direct contradistinction
to the capitalist West. But this notion of Americanism took such
a hold also because it was congruent with earlier notions: with
Americanism as an exceptionalist culture, Americanism as indi-
vidualism, and Americanism as Americanization. As suggested
earlier, an element of continuity in values is of the essence in
American history.
As a focus for anti-Americanism, the projection of American
political ideology did not begin or end with the Cold War.
Indeed, the war on terror since 9/11 brought American ideo-
logical militancy once again to the fore in the form of the neo-
conservative-influenced agenda of George W. Bush. Americanism
has appeared resurgent in Bush’s America, as we shall see later.
America is mobilized again, and when America mobilizes,
Americanism provides essential fuel both for the national mis-
sion and for the negative reaction to it from outside. To put it
bluntly, such occasions remind others of how different America
is and of how much power it has to project that difference.

Alternative Americanism
For all that has been said in the foregoing pages, it is evident
that Americanism as it has been characterized here was not the
120 Americanism: a short history
only or even at all times the dominant idea in the United States.
And yet even those opposed to the versions of militant Amer-
icanism described above felt a need to address Americanism in
their own terms. We have already seen that Henry James and
Randolph Bourne in their very different ways set direct chal-
lenges to the narrow and oppressive Americanism expressed by
Theodore Roosevelt. Bourne’s was a case for a pluralistic and
liberal Americanism which accepted diversity and mixed loyal-
ties on the part of the American citizens. A different version of
an argument for mixed loyalties was mounted by the CPUSA in
its bid in the late 1930s to appropriate the label for its own
purposes. ‘Communism’, said Willam Z. Foster, ‘is twentieth
century Americanism.’ The immediate occasion for the CPUSA’s
partial accommodation to non-socialist ‘progressive’ parties was
the need to establish a common front against the rise of fascism.
Many in the party accused the leadership of selling out, but it
has been pointed out that the CPUSA’s Americanism was seized
on enthusiastically by young second-generation immigrants in
the Party, many of them Jewish, who saw in the CPUSA a possible
vehicle for their assimilation to American life. ‘As Communists’,
writes Maurice Isserman, ‘they were part of an organization in
which (in numbers admittedly unrepresentative of the country
as a whole) they could meet and work with Connecticut Yankees,
Georgia and Harlem blacks, Northwestern Finns, and Midwestern
Poles.’ The party served as ‘a bridge between the Russian origins
and socialist beliefs of their parents and the ‘‘progressive’’ bor-
derlands of New Deal America’.35 Needless to say, such a move
cut little ice with the establishment guardians of ‘true Amer-
icanism’. It was regarded as a subversive ploy and doubtless also
as a perversion of the word Americanism. The CPUSA’s bid for
Americanism was launched at the time the American Legion was
compiling its report on ‘alien isms’. Nevertheless, it is of some
significance that two such opposite-leaning groups should have
appealed to the same symbol. In principle, Americanism is a
consensual ideology; yet everything depends on how it is defined
and who manages to dictate the definition.
 Americanism: a short history 121
Complications of another sort are introduced by the example
of gangster Al Capone, who did for organized crime what the
CPUSA attempted to do for communism – to align it with the
American way. In an interview held in 1929 with British jour-
nalist Claud Cockburn, Capone protested his loyalty to ‘the
American system’. ‘Listen’, said Capone,

don’t you get the idea I’m one of those goddam radicals.
Don’t get the idea I’m knocking the American system. . . .
My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they’re
going to stay that way. . . . This American system of ours,
call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call it what you like,
gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only
we seize it with both hands and make the most of it.36

It is possible that Capone’s protestations would receive more

credence among the guardians of Americanism in the United
States than would the claims of the CPUSA, since Capone’s
individualism and ethic of opportunity sat more comfortably
with the commonly accepted meaning of Americanism.
Further perspectives on Americanism can be gained from a
range of scholarly works which appeared in the decade after the
Second World War. Max Lerner, Louis Hartz, and the British
author and Labour Party politician Harold Laski published com-
prehensive studies of American culture and history of the sort
which few have attempted since then except in the form of
multi-authored encyclopaedic compilations. Each of these stu-
dies constituted in its own way a critique of Americanism,
written in a period in which a strident and ideological form of
Americanism was current. In his interpretation of American
democracy which is notable for its balanced view of the United
States, Laski wrote that Americanism was flawed to the extent
that it became a

beatification of things as they are, which is a denial of one

of the central principles of American history, the right of
122 Americanism: a short history
Americans to change the substance of their social institu-
tions and the directions they may seek in their voyage
through life.

In Laski’s analysis Americanism was an analytical term describ-

ing the complex of values which constituted American ‘civili-
zation’, but it always had the potential to be simplified and
reduced to a rigid formula.37 Max Lerner, in a comparably
compendious volume entitled America as a Civilization (1957),
offered the perhaps predictable liberal critique of Americanism
that it was a device used by politicians for enforcing ideological
conformity and discriminating against ethnic minorities.38
Louis Hartz’s influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955)
explored the arresting thesis that the defining characteristic of
the American political tradition was an irrational devotion to
the rational liberal philosophy of John Locke. In Hartz’s analysis,
‘Lockean liberalism’ and ‘Americanism’ were the same thing
and they brought with them ‘the danger of unanimity’ and (in
Tocqueville’s phrase) ‘the tyranny of opinion’. The ‘compulsive
power’ of liberalism was so great that it ‘posed a threat to lib-
erty itself’.39 Hartz’s thesis provoked much debate on the
grounds that it apparently took to an extreme the consensus
theory of American history, but for present purposes the
important point is that Hartz was deeply out of sympathy with
the consensus.
And yet, for all the critiques one can find of Americanism, for
all the counter-currents and alternatives on offer at various
points in America’s past, these were not generally the loudest or
most effective voices when it came to debates about the core
values of the United States. Carl Schurz, a German émigré from
the revolutions of 1848 who became influential in the liberal
reform movement of the late nineteenth century in America,
aimed to rescue Americanism from the hyper-patriotism of fig-
ures such as Theodore Roosevelt when, in a lecture given in
1896, he sought to distance Americanism from jingoism and
militarism. America, he said, should not
 Americanism: a short history 123
swagger among the nations of the world, with a chip on its
shoulder, shaking its fist in everybody’s face. . . . It should be
so invariably just and fair, so trustworthy, so good-
tempered, so conciliatory, that other nations would instinc-
tively turn to it as their mutual friend and natural adjuster
of their differences, thus making it the greatest preserver of
the world’s peace.

Is not this, he concluded, ‘good Americanism’ to set against the

recent ‘loose speech about ‘‘Americanism’’’.40 However, it is the
Roosevelts rather that the Schurzes who have been heard down
the years in America, and it is the militant voices which have
generally been projected abroad and become associated in the
minds of non-Americans with ‘Americanism’. During the 1920s
the philosopher John Dewey suggested that ‘Americanism as a
form of culture did not exist, before the war, for Europeans.
Now it does exist and as a menace.’ Moreover, he noted with
some alarm, ‘no world-conquest, whether that of Rome or
Christendom, compares with that of ‘‘Americanism’’ in extent or
effectiveness’.41
The association Dewey made between war and the projection
of Americanism surely helps to account for its salience in the
twentieth century. It is clear also that an elective affinity exists
between Americanism and conservatism.42 It has always been
easier for those on the right to substantiate their claims to be
representative of American values. There is always the sense that
liberal and leftist ideas have their sources outside America and
that the allegiance of those who hold such ideas is compromised
thereby, however hard those on the left have asserted that they
too are real Americans. These conclusions hold true today. The
presidency of George W. Bush is living proof of the continuity
of Americanism. Americanism is news in a way it has not been
since the early years of the Cold War. Among the many websites
which have sprung up since the new millennium is ‘Common
Sense Americanism’, whose list of contributors reads like an
honour role of post-Second World War American conservative
124 Americanism: a short history
intellectuals and journalists, including William F. Buckley,
Robert Novak, William Safire, Phyllis Schlafly, George Will, Jack
Kemp, Charles Krauthammer, and Rush Limbaugh.43 The orga-
nization is devoted to ‘rediscovering our foundations’ and aims
to restore faith in and promote knowledge of the US Constitu-
tion and an array of values which are conceived to underpin
the ‘unique and successful experience we call Americanism’.
These values include, among others, ‘faith in a greater power’,
‘a rooted concept of morality’, and ‘the role of truth’. To this
site must be added the activities of the American Legion,
the Americanism Education League and associations such as
the Freemasons which continue to promote the value of
Americanism.44
Perhaps it is not surprising that in a climate of mobilization
for a war on terror, challenges should have arisen to the concept
of Americanism purveyed by such organizations and implicitly
by the Bush administration itself. Under the headline ‘The War
on Americanism’, one dissenter declared: ‘forget the war on
terrorism. The president is now engaged in a full-blown war on
Americanism.’ If, he said, Americanism ‘includes such essentials
as freedom, responsibility, justice, humanity, respect and
fairness . . . then George Bush is indeed at war with
Americanism’ – witness Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, numer-
ous violations of international law, violations of civil rights at
home, equivocation on global warming, and so on. ‘However
counterintuitive’, this critic concluded,

it is hard to reach but one conclusion about a president who

has bankrupted America morally, fiscally and militarily, who
has alienated the world and deeply divided his own country,
and who has trampled roughshod over our most sacred
liberties, as if he were some sort of self-appointed king.45

This voice can be added to those of earlier dissenters from

conservative Americanism, but as in the cases already discussed
it is a small voice of protest against a dominant tradition. For the
 Americanism: a short history 125
most part Americanism was and remains a conservative pre-
serve. The values listed by ‘Common Sense Americanism’ as
being fundamental to Americanism are among those most fer-
vently invoked by the Bush administration. The first of these
principles, ‘faith in a greater power’, is integral to the politics of
George W. Bush and many in his administration, as is the
emphasis on the founding values and their continuity in Amer-
ican history. ‘I will bring the values of our history to the care of
our times’, declared President Bush in his first inaugural
address.46 Of no less significance is a factor which is harder to
be precise about but which is nevertheless essential to Bush and
to the advocates of Americanism: namely, an unembarrassed
sense of national pride which goes beyond simple patriotism or
indeed the ‘old fashioned Americanism’ of the nineteenth cen-
tury, but extends to the conviction that America stands for
something much larger than the nation, that America is indeed
an ‘ism’. It is surely plausible to conclude that part of what we
term anti-Americanism attaches to this potent element in
America’s culture.
As we have seen, Americanism has a long history and has
accumulated a variety of mutually reinforcing associations along
the way. At the same time it has resisted attempts by liberals and
others to soften its edges or to inject complications or counter-
propositions into the concept. The issue for non-Americans
must be how to keep in mind that the complex of abstractions
called ‘Americanism’ does not represent the whole of America,
try as its advocates might to suggest that it does. As far as
American advocates of Americanism are concerned, one must
assume that there will continue to be a competition for the right
to define the content of the term. For the foreseeable future it
appears that the Right will maintain its ascendancy. Its hold
looks simply too powerful to be easily dislodged. American
progressives and liberals might reflect on whether it is wise to
seek the mantle of ‘Americanism’ for themselves, since the
associations of the term are so strongly with a tradition of
thought which is inimical to liberalism.47 Moreover, it must be
126 Americanism: a short history
asked whether it is wise to seek to define the nation’s values in
terms of a one-word slogan, not merely because it is so reduc-
tive and resistant to complexity but because in its very goal of
inclusiveness it is bound to exclude many people and ideas. This
does not mean abandoning the justified and necessary attempt
to reinstate liberalism and progressivism in the American main-
stream, but it does mean challenging the notion that American
ideals can usefully be described in terms of ‘Americanism’.
‘Americanism’ may be the problem, not the solution.