Cold War Culture Unit Four: American Exceptionalisms

1
Cold War CultureUnit Four American
Exceptionalisms

• The Invention of National Literature and the
  Example of Moby-Dick
• March 30, 2006
• Professor Zeigler

2
Two Stories, Together at Last

• American
• Exceptionalism

• Moby-Dick (1852)

3
What is American Exceptionalism?

• The theory that the United States is unique among
  nation-states, and that this unrivaled character
  affords the nation license and/or entails special
  responsibilities.
• This conceit is also represented in narrative
  form as the driving historical idea of American
  cultural identity from the Puritans to the
  Persian Gulf Wars I and II.

4
Variants of American Exceptionalism

• To differentiate examples of American
  Exceptionalism, read for how U.S. specialness
  is justified.
• Is American Exceptionalism Providential?
• Is American Exceptionalism ethnological?
• Is American Exceptionalism an accident of
  history?
• Is American Exceptionalism pathological?

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Exceptionalisms in American History

• Pre-national A Puritan Errand (Winthrop, 1630)
• Questions of American Character (de Crèvecouer,
  1782)
• A Past Without Caste (de Tocqueville, 1835/40)
• Regarding Reds (Sombart, 1906)
• Cold War Consensus History (Hartz, 1951)
• Post Cold War Policeman of the World.

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John Winthrops City on a Hill (1630)

• Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke and
  to provide for our posterity is to followe the
  Counsell of Micah, to doe Justly, to love mercy,
  to walke humbly with our God, for this end, wee
  must be knitt together in this worke as one man,
  wee must entertaine each other in brotherly
  Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our
  selves of our superfluities, for the supply of
  others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar
  Commerce together in all meekenes, gentlenes,
  patience and liberallity, wee must delight in
  eache other, make others Condicions our owne
  rejoyce together, mourne together, labour, and
  suffer together, allwayes haveing before our eyes
  our Commission and Community in the worke, our
  Community as members of the same body, soe shall
  wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of
  peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to
  dwell among us, as his owne people and will
  commaund a blessing upon us in all our wayes, soe
  that wee shall see much more of his wisdome power
  goodnes and truthe then formerly wee have beene
  acquainted with, wee shall finde that the God of
  Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be
  able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when
  hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men
  shall say of succeeding plantacions the lord
  make it like that of New England for wee must
  Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a
  Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us soe
  that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in
  this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him
  to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall
  be made a story and a byword through the world

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Letters from an American Farmer, 1782
Different from Winthrops call to his Puritan
community to work collectively to install the
city on hill, de Crèvecouers third letter, What
Is an American? concentrates on the exceptional
character of individual Americans
Here are no aristocratical families, no courts,
no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion,
no invisible power giving to a few a very visible
one no great manufacturers employing thousands,
no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the
poor are not so far removed from each other as
they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we
are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to
West Florida. We are a people of cultivators,
scattered over an immense territory communicating
with each other by means of good roads and
navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of
mild government, all respecting the laws, without
dreading their power, because they are equitable.
We are all animated with the spirit of an
industry which is unfettered and unrestrained,
because each person works for himself.
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Democracy in America (1835/1840)
Alexis de Tocqueville is credited with coining
the term American Exceptionalism. In his
massive travelogue, he concentrates on how the
absence of a feudal history defines the United
States
MANY important observations suggest themselves
upon the social condition of the Anglo-Americans
but there is one that takes precedence of all the
rest. The social condition of the Americans is
eminently democratic this was its character at
the foundation of the colonies, and it is still
more strongly marked at the present day. (Vol. I,
Ch. 3)
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Why Is there No Socialism in the United States?
(1906)
German Sociologist Werner Sombarts essay has a
special importance in any genealogy of American
Exceptionalism as it relates to the history of
anti-Communism in the United States. His study
is motivated by the observation that nothing
analogous to the revolutionary movements of 19th
century Europe takes place in the United States.
Sombart explains that the lack of a history of
class struggle means that the populace of the
United States lacks the political habits and
resentments necessary to fuel revolution. In
fact, he regards the relative affluence of life
for workers in the United States to result in
socialisms foundering on the shoals of roast
beef and apple pie. A Marxist, Sombart remained
optimistic that socialism could emerge with
changing conditions in the United States.
10
The Liberal Tradition in America (1951)
Embracing de Tocquevilles description of
American history as free from the constraints
of caste inherited by European nation-states from
the continents feudal past, Hartz argues that
the dominant political philosophy of the United
States has always been that of John Locke.
Hartzs book was especially influential among
Cold War era historians, who came to be known as
consensus historians because their variant of
Exceptionalism insists that the U.S. has been
special because of the relative lack of
ideological strife in the nations history.
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Exceptional Literature
Mid-century American literature studies
contributed to the myth of Exceptionalism by
privileging texts that affirm and express the
United States historical and cultural
differences from the canonical texts of British
literary history that had dominated the
institutionalized study of literature at
universities. In the first decades of the 20th
century, a common argument among the faculty in
English Departments across the country concerned
whether there is an American literary tradition.
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Moby-Dick, a Novel of the Cold War?

• The story of how Moby-Dick becomes a novel of the
  Cold War should instruct us in the significance
  of national literature.
• For literary historiography we can also derive a
  lesson from Moby-Dick about reception
  histories. The contexts of readings make
  meaning.
• The Cold War reception of Moby-Dick rewards the
  novel with hypercanonicity, which explains why
  the story is such a common reference in popular
  culture.

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Even if you have not read the novel, you probably
know about the basic elements of the story. This
Classic for Kids includes the famous opening
line, Captain Ahabs drive to kill Moby Dick, the
big angry whale, and a whole lot of maritime
violence.
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Who told thee that? cried Ahab then pausing,
Aye, Starbuck aye, my hearties all around it
was Moby Dick that dismasted me Moby Dick that
brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.
Aye, aye, he shouted with a terrific, loud,
animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken
moose Moby-Dick, page 139
15
Ahab dies.
The narrator, Ishmael, survives.
16
The Melville Revival

• Before Moby-Dick could receive its Cold War
  interpretation, Melvilles reputation had to be
  rehabilitated.
• The Melville Revival is typically described as
  starting on the centenary of his birth 1919.

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American Studies

• In 1936, Harvard instituted a PhD in American
  Civilization.
• A distinguished member of the faculty, Perry
  Miller, was the leading proponent of the idea
  that American national culture has been shaped by
  Protestant theology such as Winthrops.
• Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the 1893
  essay The Significance of the Frontier in
  American History, was on the faculty in the
  years before the foundation of the program.
• F.O. Matthiessen wrote the most important
  scholarly text in the programs first few years
  American Renaissance Art and Expression in the
  Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941).

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F.O. Matthiessens American Renaissance (1941)

• Matthiessens encyclopedic volume concentrates on
  five years of publishing, 1850-1855.
• The major texts that distinguish this period for
  him are Emersons Representative Men, Hawthornes
  The Scarlet Letter The House of Seven Gables,
  Melvilles Moby-Dick Pierre, Thoreaus Walden,
  and Whitmans Leaves of Grass.

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Matthiessens Vision of National Literature

• The big five all wrote literature for
  democracy in a double sense. They felt that it
  was incumbent upon their generation to give
  fulfillment to the potentialities freed by the
  Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate
  with Americas political opportunity. Their
  tones were sometimes optimistic, sometimes
  blatantly, even dangerously expansive, sometimes
  disillusioned, even despairing, but what emerges
  from the total pattern of their achievement is
  literature for our democracy (American
  Renaissance, xv).

20
Call Me Ishmael
According to Matthiessens reading of Moby-Dick,
the narrator Ishmael is the novels exemplar.
The only survivor of the destruction of the
whaling ship Pequod, Ishmael -- if that is indeed
his name may be caught up in Ahabs
metaphysical vision of the White Whale as evil,
but he reconciles himself to the skepticism
inspired by Moby Dicks existence by turning to
the fraternity of the crew, especially his friend
and former bedmate, the harpooner Queequeg.
Ishmael begins and ends the narrative in
isolation, but his experience instructs us in the
value of human sympathy. Ahab, in contrast,
insists on his isolation from and authority over
everything. He pledges to defy even the sun.
(440-443)
21
The Canonical Thesis
From the publication of Matthiessens American
Renaissance in 1941 until the emergence of the
New Americanists after Donald Peases essay
Moby-Dick and the Cold War in 1985, the
dominant interpretation of Melvilles most famous
novel pitted the monomaniacal Ahab against the
sole survivor and narrator Ishmael. In this
reading, Ahab represents an authoritarianism that
anticipates the emergence of totalitarianism in
the 20th century, and Ishmael speaks for the
American principle of individual liberty that is
his nations unique responsibility to preserve
and promote.
22
Mattys reading of Moby-Dick hinges on his
interpretation of The Quarterdeck, which you
read for today. What happens in the
episode? How does Ahab interact with his
crew? How does Starbuck respond to Ahab? Is
exceptionalism of any sort legible in the
chapter?
23
To sustain the interpretation of Ahab as an
authoritarian character who represents the
antithesis of the democratic Ishmael, it is
necessary to reconcile Ahabs unAmerican
iconicity with the proximity of his Quarterdeck
speech to Exceptionalist jeremiads such as
Winthrops sermon.
24
The Postwar Adaptation of Matthiessen

• With the popularity of the theory of
  totalitarianism during the 1950s (e.g. Hannah
  Arendts The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1950),
  Matthiessens reading of the novel in terms of
  the conflict of Ahab and Ishmael could be shifted
  intact from the tacit subtext of National
  Socialism to the explicit context of the Cold
  War.

25
Richard Chases Cold War Liberal Revision of
Matthiessen
Author of the influential The American Novel and
Its Tradition (1957), Richard Chase published an
earlier monograph Herman Melville A Critical
Study (1949). In both texts, he adopts
Matthiessens thesis, but with an additional
anti-Communist twist. While his admiration for
the novel revolves around Melvilles proleptic
intelligence about the danger unchecked
authoritarianism represents for liberal
democracy, he does not understand Ahab to be like
Hitler or Stalin. Instead, Ahab is like what
Sidney Hook called a ritualistic liberal and
what Arthur Schlesinger referred to as a
doughface.
26
From Richard Chases Preface to Herman Melville
(1949) My second purpose is to contribute a book
on Melville to a movement which may be described
(once again) as the new liberalism that newly
invigorated secular thought at the dark center of
the twentieth century which, whatever our
cultural wreckage and disappointment, now begins
to ransom liberalism from the ruinous sellouts,
failures, and defeats of the thirties. The new
liberalism must justify its claims to superiority
over the old liberalism. It must present a
vision of life capable, by a continuous act of
imaginative criticism, of avoiding the old
mistakes . . . . I have the conviction that if
our liberalism is serious about its new vision of
life, if it has the necessary will to survive, it
must come to terms with Herman Melville. (vii)
27
Chase reads Ahab as a bad American, aka a Soft
Liberal
Liberal-progressive thinking in America has been
remarkable for the magnitude of the rejections it
has made. Ahab himself was a progressive
American. Where but in Moby-Dick shall we find
such a terrifying picture of a man rejecting all
connection with his family, his culture, his own
sexuality even, expunging the colors from the
rainbow, rejecting the stained imperfections of
life for a vision of spotless purity and
rectitude attainable only in death, drifting into
a terrible future, jamming himself on, like a
father turned into a raging child, toward a
catastrophe which annihilates a whole world.
(Herman Melville ix)
28
From Donald Peases Moby-Dick and the Cold War
(1985)
in the Cold War as drama, the Cold War paradigm
occupies all the positions and all the
oppositions as well. Consequently, all the
oppositions whether of the Batista regime
against Cuban rebels, Ishmael against Ahab, or,
as was reported in a recent psychoanalytic case
study, the mind against the body can be read in
terms of our freedom versus their
totalitarianism. Since the Cold War paradigm
confines totalizing operations to the work of the
other superpower, the Cold War drama is free to
expose even its own totalization of the globe as
the work of the other superpower.
29
John Hustons film adaptation of Moby-Dick (1955)

• Clip 1 Ahab binds the crew to his will.
• Clip 2 Starbuck and Ahab debate the economics
  of whaling and the virtues of the market.
• Clip 3 Ahab attacks Moby-Dick Starbuck
  converts?
• Does Hustons adaptation affirm the Cold War
  reading of Ahabs authoritarianism as an offense
  against the United States?

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Exceptional C.L.R. James

• Born and educated in Trinidad, where he published
  the now classic West Indian novel Minty Alley
  (written in 1928, published in 1936), James moved
  to England in 1932 to develop his career as a
  writer, including his work in journalism covering
  cricket. Also in 1932, he published The Case for
  West Indian Self-Government with the Hogarth
  Press of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
• In England, he read Marx in earnest for the first
  time and became involved in Trotskyite political
  activism. He published Black Jacobins (1938), a
  history of the late 18th century slave uprising
  in Haiti the first successful slave revolt in
  the modern West.
• At the invitation of the Trotskyite Socialist
  Workers Party in the United States, in 1938 he
  traveled to the United States on a six-month work
  visa to write for the Partys journal, The New
  Internationalist, and to consult Party leaders,
  including Trotsky, on the so-called Negro
  Question.

31
More on C.L.R. James

• In violation of his visa, James stayed in the
  United States for more than 13 years. Living in
  Reno near the end of the 1940s, he applied for
  naturalization. While his application was still
  pending, he was apprehended as an alien
  subversive, as defined by the nativist
  McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952.
• With his status, James was disallowed from
  speaking before the law on behalf of his
  immigration case. He authored Mariners during
  his detention on Ellis Island, completing it in
  1952 and distributing copies to Congressional
  Representatives to no avail. He was deported in
  1953.
• From 1968-81, he returned to the United States to
  lecture publicly and to teach at Federal City
  College in D.C. With the emergence of Black
  Nationalism in the late 1960s, his writings
  enjoyed a resurgent influence, which led to the
  (re)publication of many of his titles.

32
Jamess Current Reception

• Jamess work has contributed to the development
  of different fields within the disciplines of
  cultural / textual studies
• Post-colonial Studies
• Historical Materialism / Marxism
• American Studies
• That scholars working in these various modes
  quarrel over which field offers the best account
  of Jamess significance reflects the
  interdisciplinary character of his writings.

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C.L.R. Jamess Mariners
Jamess Mariners opens with a discussion of the
exchange between Ahab and Starbuck in The
Quarterdeck. He also argues that Ahab is a
totalitarian character. How is Jamess argument
different from those of the mainstream
Melvilleans?
Composed during his detention in Ellis Island,
Jamess Mariners cuts against the grain of the
canonical Cold War thesis that concentrates on
an opposition between the authoritarian Ahab and
the democratic Ishmael. For James, as well
read, Ishmael is an intellectual Ahab. Who in
the novel, then, does James prefer?
34
James writes The writer of this book confesses
frankly that it is only since the end of World
War II, that the emergence of the people of the
Far East and of Africa into the daily headlines,
the spread of Russian totalitarianism, the
emergence of America as a power in every quarter
of the globe, it is only this that has enabled
him to see the range, the power and the boldness
of Melville (19)
35
James writes The contrast is between Ahab and
the crew, and Melville traces this at every level
from the basic human functions to the philosophic
conceptions of society. We have seen that they
eat differently. They sleep differently. In the
fore-castle where the off-duty watch is sleeping
you would have almost thought you were standing
in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and
counsellors. There they lay in their triangular
oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness
a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
Ahab cannot sleep at all, or when he does, he
sleeps standing straight up or in his chair,
shouting about the blood spouting from Moby Dick.
(28-29)
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Homework for Tuesday, April 4
Read C.L.R. Jamess Mariners, chapters two,
three, and four. Well read chapters six and
seven for April 6. As you begin chapter two,
consider Jamess relationship to American
Exceptionalism.
37
Select Bibliography
The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Walter
Benn Michaels and Donald Pease, eds. Baltimore
and London The Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Chase,
Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition.
Baltimore and London The Johns Hopkins
University, 1957. ---. Herman Melville A
Critical Study. New York Macmillan,
1949. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Nick Selby,
ed. New York Columbia UP, 1998. Madsen,
Deborah. American Exceptionalism. Edinburgh,
UK Edinburgh UP, 1988. Matthiessen, F.O.
American Renaissance Art and Expression in the
Age of Emerson and Whitman. London, Oxford, New
York Oxford UP, 1941. Melville, Herman. 1967.
Moby-Dick. New York and London Norton,
2002. Noble, David. Death of a Nation American
Culture and the End of Exceptionalism.
Minneapolis and London University of Minnesota,
2002. Pease, Donald. Moby-Dick and the Cold
War. The American Renaissance Reconsidered.
Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease, eds.
Baltimore and London The Johns Hopkins UP, 1985
113-155.
38
American Exceptionalism Extras
On-line resources The text of Winthrops sermon
from the good people at Wikipedia
http//en.wikisource.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill Cr
èvecouers Letters from a Farmer from the
Crossroads Project at UVA http//xroads.virginia
.edu/HYPER/CREV/home.html De Tocquevilles
Democracy in America http//xroads.virginia.edu/
HYPER/DETOC/home.html Sourcewatch tracks
references to a shining city on a hill in
recent American politics http//www.sourcewatch.o
rg/wiki.phtml?titleAmerica_is_a_shining_city_upon
_a_hill An appendix of slides follows.
39
F.O.M. the death of Matthiessen It was much
stronger than they said. Noisier. Everything in
it more colored. Wilder. More at the center
calm. Everything was more violent than ever they
said. Who tried to guard us from suicide and
life. We in our wars were more than they had told
us. Now that descent figures stand about the
horizon, I have begun to see the living
faces, The storm, the morning, all more than they
ever said. Of the new dead, that friend who died
today, Angel of suicides, gather him in
now. Defend us from doing what he had to do. Who
threw himself away.
In Body of Waking (1958), poet Muriel Rukeyser
included a brief elegy in response to
Matthiessens suicide. For Leftist
intellectuals, Matthiessens suicide in 1950 was
understood as a tragic casualty of a Cold War
environment that contributed to the Queer
scholars personal depression.
40
In a 1958 review of Max Lerners America as a
Civilization published in The New Republic,
sociologist Daniel Bell criticizes the
assumptions of Cold War American Studies
It may well be that Lerners is the last of such
synoptic efforts to encompass the entire range of
American experience because the rubric itself
is at fault, that the ambiguity lies really in
the term America, which is a cluster of many
meanings. To ask, What is the secret of America?
Is to pose a metaphysical question whose purpose
is either ideological or mythopoetic. And
unfortunately the emphasis on seeing America in
such terms is reinforced by the postwar emergence
of American Studies programs an effort to
prove to the rest of the world that America has
a culture too. (101)