Why do so many of our politicians express their belief in American exceptionalism? How many of us Americans agree with them? How do these believers define this exceptionalism? And what definition of American exceptionalism can or should withstand our scrutiny?<\/p>\n
Many Americans would define American exceptionalism in terms of ideals expressed in our founding documents. Jefferson\u2019s Declaration both proclaimed the principles and then listed the grievances that motivated the revolt against the British Monarchy. Subsequently, the Preamble to our Constitution defined the goals\/pursuits that would make us one country. Further, the Constitution defined the structure, role, and constraints of our government. As many have said, America is based upon an idea, born of the Enlightenment, and expressed in these documents. Other countries followed similar paths. For instance, whereas our Declaration touted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the French, by comparison, instituted their democracy on the clarion call of liberte<\/em>, egalite<\/em>, fraternite<\/em>. Though both Americans and the French would agree that citizenship includes living free and equal under a Constitutional system of laws and democratic institutions, they differ on the nature of the society so established. Specifically, fraternite <\/em>implies a community akin to a brotherhood, whereas the \u201cpursuit of happiness\u201d has an individualist connotation. In blunt terms, the French fraternite <\/em>admits a strong social bond where the American pursuit of happiness guarantees the opportunity for personal or individual attainment but, sadly, only for a specific class of Americans. It was assumed that opportunity applied only to the white European settlers of this New World. Unlike the French, America was already a pluralist society, however unwilling its founding fathers were to admit that fact. Obviously, Jefferson never had the Negro slaves in mind when he insisted on adding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution\u2019s first ten Amendments. Remember, he was a slave holder.<\/p>\n There is an irony in Jefferson\u2019s declaration that \u201call men are created equal\u201d and in his insistence that individual rights be added to the Constitution as its initial amendments. By basing \u201cunalienable rights\u201d on the fact of human birth, he laid the legal foundation for law on nature instead of any dictate of the state. But he was also engaged in the most natural human relation with Sally Fleming, who was legally <\/em>one of his slaves, even though her birthright should have guaranteed her \u201clife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.\u201d Despite this personal contradiction, his words created the basis for classical liberalism, the inspiration for the very Conservativism that became the philosophical grounding for our Republican Party, that is, before Trumpian authoritarianism replaced it. But neither he nor the participants in the 1787 Constitutional Convention foresaw a future in which men and women born into slavery would become free American citizens.<\/p>\n What our founding fathers did envision, instead, was a country inhabited by white landowners and homesteaders tasked with building an economy and conquering a continent. The \u201cpursuit of happiness\u201d materialized in a very industrious economy that initially included cotton plantations, foreign trade, railroads, and the individual consignments that eventually metamorphized into commercial and investment banking. From its inception, then, America was characterized by the personal attainments of its white European settlers. It presumed to reward their individual pursuits, abet their personal wealth, and support an evolving economic structure.<\/p>\n In this light, our founding ideals seem more aspirational than descriptive of our nascent nation. \u201cIn order to form a more perfect<\/em> Union\u201d implies that the ideals expressed in the Constitution\u2019s Preamble were merely goals \u201cwe the people\u201d must\/should realize. The reality our forefathers faced was a welcoming land of opportunity for individual American pioneers. That uniquely American characteristic of conquest and discovery was indeed exceptional and revealed itself in actual accomplishments. But the \u201cmore perfect union\u201d defined in our Constitution was a democratic state never realized, but only promised. The promise, not the reality, was and is exceptional. The former inspires, but the latter reveals Americans\u2019 shortcomings. Let\u2019s review the nature of this quintessential American experience.<\/p>\n Americans did build a nation that has proven exceptional in many areas. From its outset, this newly crafted nation was a beehive of activity. Brook Farm, for example, bred a new American intelligentsia. While Horace Greeley and other editors founded American journalism, New England became the birthplace of art, literature, journalism, and the flowering of American culture. It also taught and trained the teachers that crisscrossed the continent, opening small town schoolhouses and educating young Americans. The first half of the 19th century was, literally, an American renaissance. Meanwhile, Greeley\u2019s editorial advice for his readers was \u201cGo West.\u201d And American settlers did so and in mass. Together with the American Cavalry, they conquered the Indian Nations and built new communities, subsequently adding new territories and States to the Union. They also brought with them the spirit of a newly formed democracy, which so impressed the foreign historian, Alexis de Tocqueville. He recognized a \u201cnew Anglo<\/em>-American civilization . . . (as) the product of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another . . . forming a marvelous combination . . . the spirit of religion<\/em> (sic) and the spirit of freedom<\/em> (sic).\u201d \u00b9<\/p>\n Alongside these hard-won attainments, America was building a new economy. In the Southern States, Americans built a lucrative cotton trade on the backs of slave labor. In the Northeastern States, one erstwhile banker, Alexander Brown, started a railway to connect his cotton suppliers with his Atlantic export operation. He well represented Tocqueville\u2019s combination of Christian values with business foresight, integrity, and inventiveness. Eventually, his somewhat modest undertaking spawned a railroad industry that crisscrossed the country, connecting the western territories to the New England economy. Meanwhile, New England bankers made their fortunes on proffering consignments for exporting cotton overseas. Tocqueville\u2019s \u201cAnglo-American civilization\u201d was prospering with all the religious fervor and unbounded freedom that so eluded the history of the Old World. From another perspective, it could be concluded that slavery worked better than feudalism (which conclusion I cannot and do not attribute to Tocqueville).<\/p>\n But an economy built on exports and depended upon consignment promises and risky Atlantic crossings gave birth to speculative investments. America\u2019s financial pursuits resulted in an economy that grew in spurts, with speculative driven expansions followed by periodic downturns. The American economy crashed nearly every twenty years throughout the nineteenth century\u2014perhaps the worst crash was spurred by President Andrew Jackson in 1837. On the last day of his second term, he executed his final assault on the central bank by signing his Specie Circular Act that required all government lands be paid-for only in gold and silver coins.<\/p>\n Later, during the Civil War, President Lincoln realized there was not enough specie to pay for the war. So, he passed the Legal Tender Act in 1862 which created \u201cgreenbacks\u201d backed by the government instead of gold or other species. He literally saved the American economy amid a war over the issue of Negro equality under the American Constitution. He was the first President to address both the issue of equality and the economic stability of the American enterprise. Both issues address the nature of our national character and the pursuit of happiness.<\/p>\n After the Civil War, unfettered by war and accelerated by unregulated investment and the efficiencies of assembly-line production, the American economy beget its industrial revolution. The so-called \u201crobber barons\u201d rose to prominence both in wealth and power. But their control over American industry was rebuffed by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act under President Grover Cleveland and the relentless assault of President Theodore Roosevelt. They inadvertently created the issue of unequal distribution of wealth as a threat to the integrity of an American first principle. Specifically, they famously and brazenly were more able to pursue their happiness than other Americans. Their inordinate wealth and control over American industry spawned the actions of a succession of Presidents\u2014from Cleveland to many of his successors\u2014to protect America\u2019s economic expansion via intermittent legal interventions.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the century after America\u2019s founding experienced an incredible expansion of territory, culture, and the nation\u2019s economy. The American pursuit of happiness evolved a country that could not have been foreseen by its founders. The New World breached a continent, defined a unique culture, and unleashed an economy that burned through multiple recessions towards sporadic expansions, but with an ever-growing wealth disparity and an inability\u2014or unwillingness\u2014to resolve inequality in a pluralist population.<\/p>\n Of course, alongside economic development, a new social order and culture evolved after the Revolution and somehow withstood the gruesome experience of the Civil War. While most Americans are probably not aware of Brook Farm and the American renaissance, they do know about European settlers, western expansion, the sub-culture of slavery that extended for nearly a quarter of a millennium before the 13th Amendment was ratified, and the inventiveness and industriousness of our ancestors who built a juggernaut of an economy. These were our forefathers\u2019 major pursuits from the 17th through the 19th centuries. America\u2019s founding ideals of liberty and equality were never extended to the conquered Indian nations, however, nor fully realized by the freed slaves. But the resources of a continent and the inventive industriousness of American settlers, bankers, plantations, and businesses unleashed an economic juggernaut that overcame myriad recessions. Although America did not fully realize its democratic ideals of a pluralist society of equals, it built an industrial revolution that promised unfettered wealth for many. The promise of wealth at hand overshadowed any concern over an unrealized ideal that promised universal equality under the law. \u201cWe the people\u201d was segregated by race, income, and opportunity in a harshly stratified social structure. The divide between the rich and poor mirrored the stratification of classes between white and non-white. It was a capitalist picture in which the individual pursuit of happiness was framed.<\/p>\n The 20th century opened with a dynamic Theodore Roosevelt at the helm and with many captains of industry at the forefront of a new American era of wealth and power. So befuddled was the historian Henry Adams by the growth and complexity of the American economy that he claimed, \u201cthe new American\u2014the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electrical power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined\u2014must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature.\u201d \u00b2 With this hyperbole, he may have been the first to attribute exceptionalism to a new generation of Americans. But take note, his accreditation of an almost divine exceptionalism is delineated by an economic progress spurred by American inventiveness, scientific prowess, and the harnessing of the forces of nature. At the heart of American exceptionalism, then, is capitalism as the engine that spurs human ingenuity, science, and a mastery of nature and that ignites an ever-expanding economy.<\/p>\n The new century began by interweaving American finance and politics with its entry onto the world stage. To quote Zachary Karabell, \u201cas dollar diplomacy evolved and expanded from Taft to Wilson, as it became simply \u2018American diplomacy\u2019 . . . a handful of firms became the de facto deputies of the U.S. government, and the government became the de facto agents of these financial interests.\u201d \u00b3 But as America\u2019s wealth grew, so did the depth of its economic pitfalls and the creativity of its recoveries. The Panic of 1907 aroused American bankers to mobilize and call for a central authority to become the banker of last resort and the backstop in a financial panic. President Wilson, who initially favored a government-controlled central bank, compromised with the banking community to create a hybrid. In 1913, the Federal Reserve Act established that hybrid, more controlled by private banks but governed by Presidential appointees. After World War I, America emerged as Europe\u2019s main creditor, replacing the Bank of England in that role. Not only was America\u2019s GDP the largest in the world, but it had also become Europe\u2019s banker, providing liquidity to its war-torn nations. But American hegemony still had major hurdles. The Excess Profits Tax Act of 1917 curtailed excessive wartime profiteering, eliminating shared profit ventures established by American bankers. Cross-Atlantic partnerships dissolved. And the British pound remained preeminent in international commerce. Not only was America not ready to assume the world leadership role pursued by President Wilson\u2019s League of Nations\u2019 initiative, but it also pulled back from the temptation to capitalize on its economic power.<\/p>\n Then came the Great Depression and the withering of bank liquidity. As the banking system collapsed, so did individual savings. While the economy self-destructed, unemployment and soup lines grew. Shortly after taking office, Franklin Roosevelt turned to Congress for legislation that would address the banking crisis. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 changed the nature of banking and investing by divorcing investment banking from commercial banking. Speculation would still have its risks for the investor, but it could no longer bring down a nation\u2019s economy\u2014or so it was believed at the time. And that belief may have affected President Clinton\u2019s relaxation of some parts of Glass-Steagall. Partly as a result, his successor witnessed the near collapse of the financial sector in the 2008 Great Recession over the debacle of sub-prime mortgage derivatives. Once again, a new Administration had to rescue the nation from its speculative tendencies. While President Obama, like Roosevelt before him, attempted to bail out Americans from financial disaster with a Federal stimulus, Congress moved to pass the Dodd-Frank Act. It prohibited banks from making speculative investments by regulating high-risk financial products, required bank stress test to assure adequate liquidity, and provided tougher oversight of the financial, insurance, and credit industries. (Former President Trump weakened some of this oversight by suppressing the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that held banks accountable for unfair loan practices.)<\/p>\n