87. Cf. Adam Clymer, “Divisive Words: GOP’s 40 Years of Juggling on Race,” New York Times, December 13, 2002; David von Drehle and Dan Balz, “For GOP, South’s Past Rises in Tangle of Pride, Shame,” Washington Post, December 15, 2002.
88. For the continuation of racist attitudes in new forms, see David K. Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), especially its discussion of the University of Chicago study of 1990; Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (New York: Basic Civitas, 1997); see also George M. Fredrickson, “America’s Caste System: Will It Change?” New York Review of Books 44, no. 16 (1997).
89. Sara Diamond, Not By Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 220–228.
90. Cf. Ronald R. Stockton, “The Evangelical Phenomenon: A Falwell–Graham Typology,” in Contemporary Political Involvement: An Analysis and Assessment, ed. Corwin E. Smidt (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 45–69.
91. Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions From Their Origins to the 21st Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 378.
92. Cf. Howard Elinson, “The Implications of Pentecostalist Religion for Intellectualism, Politics and Race Relations,” American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 4 (1965).
93. Cf. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Shaped the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 260–261.
94. Cf. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 134–139.
95. Lind, Next American Nation, 105–106.
96. Cf. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 452–455, 560–572, 603–611.
97. Cf. Lind, Next American Nation, 81.
98. Cf. Michelle Cottle, “Color TV: How Soaps Are Integrating America,” New Republic, August 27, 2001.
99. Cf. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), co-starring Morgan Freeman.
100. Cf. In the Heat of the Night (1967) and A Soldier’s Story (1984) directed by Norman Jewison, and Remember the Titans (2000), starring Denzel Washington.
101. See Shanto Iyengar, Kyu Hahn, Christopher Dial, and Mahzarin R. Banaj, “Understanding Explicit and Implicit Attitudes: A Comparison of Racial Group and Candidate Preferences in the 2008 Election,” http://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2010/iyengar-understanding.pdf.
102. Glenn Beck, cited in Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and David Gelles, “Vanquished by Vitriol,” Financial Times, January 12, 2011.
103. Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama,” New York Times, September 20, 2008.
104. The American National Election Study Evaluations of Government and Society Survey (EGSS), October 2010, cited in Alan I. Abramowitz, “The Race Factor: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions of Obama,” May 12, 2011, “Sabato’s Crystal Ball,” http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/AIA2011051201/.
105. See Jon Cohen and Michael D. Shear, “Poll Shows More Americans Believe that Obama Is a Muslim,” Washington Post, August 19, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/18/AR2010081806913.html.
106. See ANES 2010–2012 Evaluations of Government and Society Study, October 2010 survey, http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/2010_2012EGSS/2009EGSS1Documentation_preliminary_release.pdf.
107. Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 42.
108. Cf. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 40.
109. Lerner, American Civilization, 921.
Chapter Two
1. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1991), 175.
2. Cf. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 1–25. For the original use of the term “American Creed,” see G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1922), quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 31.
3. Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 9.
4. Cf. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 1–18.
5. David Frum, Dead Right (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 130.
6. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2009), quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 183.
7. Quoted in Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 13.
8. Cf. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), especially 125–170.
9. Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, trans. by Henry Reeve (1835; repr., New York: Bantam Classics, 2000), 544ff and passim; cf. also the definitions of the creed in Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 19; in Michael Lind, The Next American Nation, 90–91, 219–233; and in Herbert McClosky, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” American Political Science Review 58, no. 2 (1964). For “the American Proposition,” see USA: The Permanent Revolution (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951), by the editors of Fortune magazine, quoted in Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 305.
10. For the quasi-religious nature of American capitalist ideology, see Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), xiii.
11. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 9, 15, 175, 225–237.
12. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 4.
13. Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2–3, 25.
14. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, quoted in Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 291.
15. Cf. Andrei K. Sitov, “America: Back in the USSR?” ITAR-TASS, Washington, DC, August 4, 2003.
16. Russel Nye, This Almost Chosen People: Essays in the History of American Ideas (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), quoted in William J. Cobb, Jr., The American Foundation Myth in Vietnam: Reigning Paradigms and Raining Bombs (New York: University Press of America, 1998), 4.
17. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 96–98; see also R. A. Humphreys, “The Rule of Law and the American Revolution,” in The Role of Ideology in the American Revolution, ed. John R. Howe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 20–27.
18. Quoted in Lind, The Next American Nation, 225ff.
19. Huntington, American Politics, 104.
20. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 5–8; Cobb, American Foundation Myth, 21.
21. Speech in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 217–220.
22. Cf. Lind, The Next American Nation, 90.
23. Lind, The Next American Nation, vii, 133.
24. Lind, The Next American Nation, 69ff.
25. Cf. Richard Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 6–8, 153–186; Bellah, The Broken Covenant.
26. Quoted in “This is a Different Kind of War,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2001.
27. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002), prologue.
28. Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 378–388.
29. Cf. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, quoted in Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 40–41; see also Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 5–8; Cob
b, American Foundation Myth, 7–10.
30. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters From an American Farmer (repr., New York: Dutton, 1926), 40–44; see also Gordon S. Wood, “Republicanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” in Role of Ideology in the American Revolution, ed. John R. Howe (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 83–91.
31. Cf. Randall Bennett Woods, “Dixie’s Dove: J. William Fulbright, the Vietnam War and the American South,” Journal of Southern History 60, no. 3 (August 1994): 533–552; for Fulbright’s condemnation of American messianism, see his Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 2004), passim.
32. Richard Cohen, “Blame, Blindness…,” Washington Post, February 3, 2004.
33. Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Purely American: Innocent Nation, Wicked World,” Harper’s (April 1980).
34. Fulbright, Arrogance of Power, 27.
35. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 11.
36. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Joseph Reeve with an introduction by Joseph Epstein (New York: Bantam Classics, 2000), 305.
37. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Middle America Observed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 206.
38. John Higham, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 5–28; see also Sidney E. Mead, The Nation With the Soul of a Church (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 71–77.
39. Quoted in Mead, Nation With the Soul of a Church, 25.
40. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, 171.
41. Cf. Will Herberg, “America’s Civil Religion: What It Is and Whence It Comes,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Russell E. Richey and Donald G Jones (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21; and Bellah, Broken Covenant, passim.
42. Adam Gamoran, “Civil Religion in American Schools,” Sociological Analysis 51, no. 3 (1990): 235–256, quoting Fay Adams and Ernest W. Tiegs, Our People (Lexington, MA: Ginn).
43. Each of Hughes’ chapters in Myths America Lives By is followed by a coda commenting on the theme he has just explored from a black point of view; see also Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31–32.
44. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 58–59.
45. Cf. Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 268–292.
46. Cf. Alterman, What Liberal Media?, 268–292.
47. W. H. Auden, “To Keep the Human Spirit Breathing,” speech upon acceptance of the 1967 Medal for Literature, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, November 30, 1967. Speech reproduced in the Washington Post Book World, December 24, 1967.
48. Quoted in Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 304.
49. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 160–181; for Melville’s later disillusionment, see Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 180–181.
50. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 218.
51. For an analysis of Apocalypse Now, see John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 188–204.
52. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 349–350.
53. Cf. Stanley Hoffmann, “The High and the Mighty,” American Prospect, January 13, 2003.
54. Cf. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 643–654.
55. Stanley Hoffmann, “The Great Pretender,” New York Review of Books 34, no. 9 (May 28, 1987): see also Hoffmann, “The Vicar’s Revenge,” New York Review of Books vol. 31, no.9 (May 31, 1984).
56. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 793.
57. Wills, Reagan’s America, 94.
58. William H. McNeill, “The Care and Repair of Public Myth,” Foreign Affairs (Fall 1982), reprinted in McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For a critique of this essay, see Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 626–628.
59. Cf. Cobb, American Foundation Myth, 196–198.
60. Hellmann, American Myth, 222.
61. Hellmann, American Myth, 135–136. See also Cobb, American Foundation Myth, 151–192.
62. Cf. Baritz, Backfire, 341.
63. Cf. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 632–633.
64. Cf. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), xxi.
65. Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: What History Textbooks Have Taught Our Children About Their Country, and How and Why Those Textbooks Have Changed in Different Decades (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 100–101, 218.
66. Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 101; for a choice selection of some of the more idiotic words and actions by proponents of political correctness, see David E. Bernstein, You Can’t Say That: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Anti-Discrimination Laws (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2003).
67. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 124–126, 149–277.
68. Lind, The Next American Nation, 273.
69. Andrew Gumbel, “What Americans Know,” The Independent (London), September 8, 2003, The passages quoted are from the original unpublished draft of the article, kindly supplied by the author.
70. For the continuing sanitization of the American Civil War, and the elimination of blacks and slavery from presentations of the conflict, see Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 189–204.
71. National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2001); see also Brian Friel, “Don’t Know Much About History,” August 2, 2003; Cheryl Wetzstein, “Seniors’ History Scores Abysmal,” Washington Times, June 10, 2002; Georgie Anne Geyer, “What happened to Geography—And Just Where is Iraq?,” Tulsa World, November 27, 2002; for a comparison to levels of knowledge in the 1940s, see Scott Fornek, “What We Don’t Know Hasn’t Hurt Us,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 31, 2003.
72. Lind, The Next American Nation, 139–188.
73. Lynne Cheney and illus. Robin Preiss Glasser, America: A Patriotic Primer (New York: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 2002).
74. Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation? (1882), transl. Martin Thom, in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45.
75. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 189.
76. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 189.
77. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 833.
78. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 20; see also Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 23; for a comparison with U.S. official language during the Vietnam War, see Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 219–220.
79. The full text of Bush’s speech is to be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html.
80. The White House, National Security Strategy 2002, prologue.
81. Full text at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601–3.html http://www.whitehouse.gov for June 1, 2002.
82. Cf. Edmund Pelligrino et al. The Teaching of
Values and the Successor Generation (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council of the United States, 1983).
83. From George Bush’s speech, “A Distinctly American Internationalism,” delivered at the Reagan Presidential Library, November 19, 1999, quoted in Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 201; see also James W. Ceaser, “Providence and the President: George W. Bush’s Theory of History,” Weekly Standard, March 10, 2003.
84. Cf. Max Boot, “George W. Bush: The “W” Stands for Woodrow,” Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2002,; David Ignatius, “Wilsonian Course for War,” Washington Post, August 30, 2002; William Safire, “Post-Oslo Mideast,” New York Times, June 27, 2002; “Bush the Crusader,” editorial, Christian Science Monitor, August 30, 2002, Walter LaFeber, “Alliance with the Option to Act Alone,” The Washington Post, October 6, 2002; for postwar justifications along these lines, see George Melloan, “Protecting Human Rights Is a Valid Foreign Policy Goal,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2003; Jim Hoagland, “Clarity: The Best Weapon,” Washington Post, June 1, 2003; and Thomas L. Friedman, “Because We Could,” Washington Post, June 4, 2003.
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