Is America Really So Unique?

A new book with new ideas about what makes America different.

In 2004 Ian Kilroy, an Irish citizen who had lived in the United States for a year and a half, complained that “there is the belief [in America] that U.S. citizenship is worth more than citizenship of other countries. Because many Americans believe that life in the U.S. is superior to that in other countries, because they believe that the U.S. is safer and more democratic than other nations, they feel that they are privileged to belong to ‘the greatest nation on earth.’ It is, of course, easy to maintain this belief, based as it is on ignorance of the outside world. Because Americans have so few holidays—about two weeks a year—they hardly ever travel abroad. Consequently, they know no reality other than their own.”

Disregard the acid tone and sheer unfairness of this charge (Kilroy might consider that the United States has one of the highest rates of immigration in the developed world, making it by definition a more cosmopolitan nation than he imagines). But he was probably right about one thing: Americans do like to think of themselves as different.

From 1630, when John Winthrop urged his fellow Puritans to build a “city upon a hill,” through the 1830s, when the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville noted something peculiar about the American spirit, to the 1950s, when a generation of “consensus” historians credited the absence of a feudal past with the seeming nonexistence of bloody social strife in America, the idea of “American exceptionalism” has demonstrated tremendous staying power. “The position of the Americans is . . . exceptional,” Tocqueville wrote, “and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”

Recently some scholars have challenged this persistent notion that America is somehow immune from the broader currents of history. Daniel Rodgers, a Princeton historian, best summed up their position when he posed the rhetorical question, “Is America different?” and answered, “Patently yes. And, indeed, yes, even if another subject were to be introduced in the place of ‘America,’ so that the question came to read ‘Is Argentina different?’ or Afghanistan.”

In his new book, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (Hill and Wang, $24), Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California at Davis, tackles head-on the old shibboleth of “American exceptionalism.” He argues against Rodgers and others, maintaining that America has in fact exhibited a pattern of economic and political development that sets it apart from Europe. But he distinguishes himself from most proponents of exceptionalism by framing his story in the context of globalization. Not the twenty-first-century globalization we hear so much about in the news, but that earlier nineteenth-century wave of globalization that saw massive transfers of capital, labor, and ideas between and across continents.

He argues that America rose to dominance on the back of European money and European migration, but that America’s singular geography and history led it to use these global resources to construct a wholly unique system of institutions and traditions.

A central claim of his book is that America embarked on an imperial career no less grandiose than those of its European counterparts, but whereas European countries looked to other parts of the world for new markets, resources, and territorial conquest, America focused its energies on its own Western frontier. Because westward expansion required little in the way of a massive army or colonial infrastructure, America developed a much leaner central state than its European competitors.

In Rauchway’s words, “As for the peculiar American empire, it lay west of the Mississippi. . . . The newly settled West served the same purpose for America as overseas countries served for the European power, providing a wealth of natural resources that industrial metropolises could turn into finished goods.” The difference, he continues, is that “the United States could forge these links more cheaply than other empires. The country needed no great navy to reach its colonial hinterlands on the prairies. . . . Nor did it need to fight off competing empires.”

Comparing America’s conquest of the West to Russia’s subjugation of Turkistan, Rauchway points out that Russian colonial staff eventually accounted for roughly 2 percent of Turkistan’s population, whereas American territorial staff in the West never exceeded 0.8 percent of the area’s population.

Unlike colonial subjects of European states, residents of the American West were represented in the national government. In fact, upon achieving statehood, Western territories enjoyed representation disproportionate to their small populations, by virtue of having two seats each in the Senate. Thus in the United States colonial subjects were in fact citizens who enjoyed an outlet to vent their frustrations.

This relates to Rauchway’s second big point, which seeks to answer a classic question in the larger body of exceptionalist literature. The German social scientist Werner Sombart put this question most directly in his 1906 tract Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Rauchway’s answer is complicated. First, he explains, America accepted a large stream of European immigrants and, unlike other countries that also welcomed newcomers, drew an unusually diverse population of adventurers and refugees. A case in point: in Argentina, Italians composed 39 percent of all immigrants. In the United States they accounted for only 10 percent.

Because of their cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity, immigrants found it difficult to forge class consciousness that transcended their disparate ethnic identities. Moreover, high repatriation rates suggest that many immigrants traveled to the United States to make quick money and return home. For such newcomers it made little sense to sacrifice short-term economic goals in the interest of long-term union-building and political agitation. This is not a new argument. Historians like Harvard University’s Lizabeth Cohen have made this point in far greater detail. But Rauchway adds a new dimension to the story.

Acknowledging that immigration drove down industrial wages, he argues that many native-born Americans picked up stakes and moved West. In fact, while the foreign-born population stood at about 15 percent in 1910, homegrown migrants, most of whom traveled westward, accounted for 19 percent of the total population. If immigrants didn’t have the will or wherewithal to forge a strong critique of capitalism, these homegrown migrants did, which explains why American socialism thrived in strange places, like rural Oklahoma, defying the general trajectory of European socialist development, which was centered among the urban working classes.

If socialism (or, more generally, a radical critique of capitalism) developed among a different population in America—that is, among westward migrants—it also developed a distinct approach to national politics. And herein lies Rauchway’s third big argument.

In Europe the working classes forged strong socialist parties that demanded a welfare state, a safety net to provide against the vicissitudes of the new global economy. In America, those who had the means and motive to criticize capitalist development were concentrated in the colonial West. Their anger was aimed not at the capitalist system per se but toward immigrants (who drove down wages) and Eastern and foreign financial institutions.

Consider, for instance, the most powerful, radical political movement of the nineteenth century, 1890s populism. Populism, the historian Richard Hofstadter once argued, was suffused with a paranoid and irrational hatred of English bankers, Jews, and foreign money. Such discoveries led Hofstadter to write off the populists as cranks. But not so fast.

Rauchway’s book is a cautionary tale for conservatives who celebrate America’s go-it-alone spirit of adventurism and conquest. The West may have been “tamed” by good-old American blood, sweat, and tears, but its conquest was financed largely by foreign capital. The British, who were America’s largest creditors, invested their money in many other places too. But whereas Britain normally placed between 20 percent and 66 percent of its foreign investments in government securities—thus aiding the development of large, public-sector infrastructure projects in countries like Canada—in the United States, which had a leaner central state, only 6 percent of British capital went directly to the federal government. Sixty percent went to private firms, railroad companies and the like, which used this much-needed capital infusion to cut a wide swath across the Western frontier.

So when agrarian populists railed against the perfidious influence of foreign money, Eastern holding companies, and distant capitalists, their rhetoric, however heated, exaggerated, and bigoted it might have been, was not without a kernel of truth. That is why American-style radicalism was more anticolonial than socialist, and why the demands of American radicals focused more on the regulation of utilities, railroads, and banks than on the construction of a European-style welfare state.

There’s much more to Rauchway’s provocative book, and the author certainly doesn’t deliver a death blow to opponents of American exceptionalism. But Blessed Among Nations combines the same fluid writing style, bold interpretive approach, and ambitious agenda that made the work of mid-twentieth century historians like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward so important and so broadly relevant. Professional historians have made a habit of lamenting the disappearance of this kind of engaging public scholarship. With his new book, Eric Rauchway has reintroduced it to a new generation of Americans.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).