American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism. By Deborah L. Madsen. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 1998. Pp. viii, 186. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 1-57806-108-3.)

It is a curiosity that American exceptionalism has lacked a systematic scholar. It has been invoked, approved, damned, and sociologized, but no one has written a full history of the idea's strange career. This brief book is short of being such a work but is a useful sketch, which proceeds upon the presumption that "American exceptionalism permeates every period of American history and is the single most powerful agent in a series of arguments that have been fought down the centuries concerning the identity of America and Americans" (p. 1). The beginning of the story is understood to be Puritan ideology, which begat an errand into the wilderness, the redeemer nation, and the jeremiad. This worldview was secularized and encoded in the fundamental texts, ideology, and imperial practice of the new United States, which, through Manifest Destiny, redeemed many people by killing, conquering, dispossessing, and erasing them from memory. In turn, this creed became foreign policy; the world was understood to be a moral wilderness in need of salvation, an America-in-waiting, a village that might need to be destroyed in order to be saved.

This is a dispiriting narrative, softly written but fiercely argued. Many familiar texts are precised: John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, John L. O'Sullivan, Walt Whitman, and so forth, the staples of the traditional American Studies canon. What is distinctive and valuable in Madsen's book, however, is her careful attention to dissident voices--American Indian, black, Chicano--who have been among the victims and critics of this blithe expansionism but also have sometimes been coopted by the ideology. Quarreling with America can lead to an adoption of its terms. So Madsen looks at earlier authors like Samson Occum, Harriet Jacobs, and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo but carries her contrapuntal narrative down to the present day with writers like D'Arcy McNickle, Toni Morrison, and Angela de Hoyos. She also explores film, notably the westerns of John Ford and the various representations of the Vietnam War, including the Rambo series.

No doubt, this story too much privileges the New England origins of American exceptionalism. Southerners, after all, seized land, murdered, and erased people too and share the dubious laurels of the imperial impulse. But this book is light on historiographical context. Madsen does not notice, for example, Jack P. Greene's The Intellectual Construction of America (Chapel Hill, 1993) or the important if much-criticized work of Seymour Martin Lipset on exceptionalism (American Exceptionalism [New York, 1996]). Likewise, though she does very well in narrating the intellectual presumptions of Reformation theology, Madsen does little with how later paradigms (the Enlightenment, Romanticism) changed matters, perhaps because she believes of exceptionalism that "the basic assumptions and terms of reference do not change" (p. 1). Nonetheless, her book is a good place for a student to begin an exploration of the conundrum of American exceptionalism, which is (after all) so unexceptional. For what culture does not think itself set apart as a chosen people?

MICHAEL O'BRIEN

Miami University