A history of American exceptionalism through the lens of one phrase, taken from a 1630 Puritan sermon, forgotten for centuries, then exhumed and read back through the history of the USA. It's an intellectual detective story, replete with breathtaking switchbacks and poignant ironies; exactly the experience other people seem to get from watching Adam Curtis films, though the copies I get have always been mysteriously replaced with a hodge-podge of stock footage, tendentious claims and minor Radiohead. Van Engen has meticulously researched that sermon's history, context and transmission, demonstrating that the setting in which it was originally delivered shows it to have about as much relevance to most subsequent uses as the Hymn to Love in 1 Corinthians' initial meaning does to its frequent appearances as a wedding reading. Not that misreading it is the limit; people have added bits; claimed it was printed at the time, when it wasn't for more than 200 years; insisted that it has always been a big deal, when it patently hasn't. Not to mention conflating the Puritans with the Pilgrims (I'd never entirely twigged that they weren't synonymous, though granted, American history isn't as big a deal over here as it is there, for obvious reasons). And then there's the need to find a teleology and imply, or outright state, that the Puritans knew exactly what they were doing in founding a nation, and indeed, that they thought of themselves as a new nation from the off. That 'founding' itself being a choice, of course; they weren't the first settlers, or even the first Anglo-Saxon settlers, but there have been so very many ingenious reasons why the Spanish and Dutch and Jamestown somehow don't count: as van Engen wryly notes, "An origin story, it turns out, can come at any time. So long as something is called the "first" of its kind, all that comes before can be ignored, dismissed, or explained away." It's not a comparison he makes, but I was reminded of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas supposedly founds a city that is already there, and doesn't even get renamed after him, and we're meant to care about this transparent imposition on a history that doesn't have any meaningful room for it. Well, this is the history of a more recent attempt at the same project.

Some players are familiar: JFK, the first President to use the image; Reagan, the one who really hammered it home as part of his brand, and the nation's. Others, not so much, like Perry Miller, father of American Studies as a discipline, who first brought the text to national attention, or James Savage, the banker and antiquary (the former profession is important – there's also a whole subplot elsewhere in which certain myths of origin only get firmly established because of Emma Willard's textbooks, which are themselves only a big deal because of her school, which itself only exists because she needs to get the family out of a hole after her husband gets done for embezzling). Savage and Perry both end up as rather tragic Casaubon figures, one succeeding in creating a desperately dry reference work which he gradually realised even most historians would never bother to consult; Miller constantly insisting he had nearly finished a mammoth unified field theory of American intellectual life, which in reality was very much unfinished and very likely unfinishable. Worse, Miller, who was haunted by the notion that nations' success bore the seeds of their decline, and strove to save America from that, ended up instead putting the bow on it, his awareness of history's ironies not enough to exempt him from participating in them. Because JFK used the phrase almost properly, to say that the world's eyes were on the US - but then in memory of him, LBJ elided it a little, suggesting the job was pretty much done, that it meant America was top nation. And there the rot sets in...

Of course, if the erasure of other settlers involved some intellectual gymnastics, how much more so the awkward fact that the vast, uninhabited continent in which the Puritans providentially founded their noble, destined experiment was, well, a bit...inhabited? The chapter 'A White History of America' goes into the horrific detail of how Savage, initially not too bad for his time on the question of indigenous rights, hardened over time for the chief reason that they were messing up his story. If the book has a hero it may be William Apess, a Methodist minister of part-Pequot descent, who unstintingly pointed out the double-standards which were being applied as America began taking an interest in, and at the same time finessing, its own history. Van Engen also points out the gaping hole in Miller's attempts at a grand history of American thought which, despite coming after WEB du Bois and Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, never once touches on the problem of racism in America. And for all my incredibly low opinion of Puritans (it seemed par for the course that, having supposedly headed to America in the name of religious liberty and toleration, they would of course only mean liberty and toleration for themselves, and soon end up whipping and hanging Quakers), I was still surprised to learn that they had been slaveholders and slave traders too, so well established was the myth of their being so terribly industrious and different in all ways from the indolent, slaveholding south. There's one especially choice section where van Engen runs through the textbooks which helped to spread this version of events, pointing out what a disproportionate amount of the country's historians were from New England, and how New England's history and myths thus became America's, but also how the same events would be described differently for the different settlements - so that if Jamestown struggled it was punishment for their lack of forethought, but when New Englanders did, it was character-building. British readers may be reminded of the compare and contrast of rightwing press coverage of Kate Middleton as against Meghan Markle.

Interestingly, as it drew closer to the present day, the book didn't end up where I expected. It would be easy to see Trump's America First rhetoric as American exceptionalism with the mask dropped, but to van Engen they're distinct phenomena; he's all too aware that the high-handed condescension of the latter has many dangers, but still sees it as distinct from the utter and unabashed lack of principle in the former. I'm not sure I agree, but even if the exceptionalism was only a civil pretence, the last few years have helped to remind me that civil pretences are less bad than the alternative. Notwithstanding which disagreement, I can't but find this a fascinating and timely look at how national myths are constructed, the impact they have, the battles fought for them, and the lengths people will go to in building and claiming them.

(Netgalley ARC)

On April 8, 1630, the Arbella stood off Massachusetts Bay, part of a fleet of Puritan-filled ships organized as the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with John Winthrop elected as their first governor. Governor Winthrop preached a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity” that called upon the company to embrace the virtue of charity in the community they would found, a mutual care for each other. He concluded with this peroration describing the consequence of such charity:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

As significant as the sermon would later become, it appears it was more or less forgotten in the concerns of settlement. It’s survival in handwritten manuscript form is a story in itself. In fact, it was forgotten for two hundred years, and only came into political parlance in the 1960’s when the “city on the hill” portion was first quoted by John F. Kennedy. In succeeding years it would turn up in the speeches of nearly every American president. Until President Trump.

Abram C. Van Engen traces the fascinating story of this sermon from its beginnings to the present in his new work, City on a Hill. He considers its initial import as a call to loving community among the Puritans. He follows the history of the manuscript, how it existed in obscurity among papers from the colony’s early years. He profiles archivists like Jeremy Belknap at Harvard and Ebenezer Hazard in New York, who passionately, tirelessly, and often at personal cost collected and contributed these materials at some of the earliest examples of the preservation of historical materials in Harvard and at the New York Historical Society. It was in New York that the sermon was stored, but not noticed for many years.

Van Engen considers the decision to center this historical archival work around the Puritans, rather than earlier arrivals to North America–the Pilgrims, the Dutch in New York, the Jamestown settlers, the French, the Spanish, and the Native peoples. The account was a New England account, a religious account focused on God’s providence. It shaped first the New England consciousness, and then a wider American consciousness, even while the sermon, apart from brief notice in the 1830’s continued to be ignored. He explores why it remained obscure as a lengthy sermon as opposed to a concise statement like the Mayflower Compact.

He then introduces the scholars that brought this Puritan heritage to national notice from Weber to Perry Miller to his successor Sacvan Bercovitch. An striking part of this account are his chapters on Perry Miller, who was concerned about the materialism that arose from Puritan values, and held up “A Model of Christian Charity” as the epitome of the spiritual values that even atheist Miller wanted to see embraced, incorporating it into anthologies used in teaching American history. I hope some day Van Engen follows up with a full-length study of Miller, a brilliant and tragic figure.

Miller’s work was the likely source of Kennedy’s use. Van Engen then follows its usage through successive presidents, culminating in Ronald Reagen who more than anyone appropriated the image for the country’s exceptionalist destiny, no where more movingly than his Farewell Address on January 11, 1989:

The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the shining “city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important, because he was an early Pilgrim – an early “Freedom Man.” He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat, and, like the other pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace – a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.

As Van Engen concludes this book, he notes President Trump’s lack of use of this language and contends that it represents a significant shift from rhetoric focused around American ideals to American interests. He argues that our current president focuses not on what makes us exceptional but on what we have in common with all nations–that we put our interests first. The vision of exceptionalism is one of being first. Van Engen wonders whether this shift in rhetoric is a longer term shift or one confined to this administration, acknowledging the flaws in each approach.

This is an important work in so many ways, from tracing the sermon’s origins and after history, to the ways the sermon has been misappropriated, ignoring the body of Winthrop’s appeal, to exploring the ways a focus on Puritan origins has blinded us to other aspects of the American story–the Native peoples, African slaves, settlement in other parts of the country, and the ways the religious focus of the message has been transformed into a founding document of America’s civil religion.

Within this narrative, Van Engen also highlights both the significant contribution and blind spots of archivists and curators in American historiography. Van Engen shows how our histories are shaped by what is collected. In the process, Van Engen also faces us with crucial questions of the substance of the rhetoric we use to describe our sense of national purpose and character at a time where we may be witnessing a sea change in that sense.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

This book is a detailed history of efforts of many people to preserve the early documents and communications of the 13 colonies and then our nation after 1789 and yet before the advent of modern preservation techniques. When I say a detailed history I definitely mean very detailed. Only read this book if you like micro-histories. Even with that proviso every reader should skip chapters 5 through 10. In my view these chapters are only surplusage.

In this meticulously researched monograph, Abram C. Van Engen details how against the backdrop of the Cold War, a once obscure document -- John Winthrop's 1630 sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity" -- became a key component of the narrative of American exceptionalism. As Van Engen shows, this sermon attracted little attention at the time it was first delivered. The now famous sermon in which John Winthrop uttered the words, "for we must consider that we should be as a city upon a hill" would not appear in print in America or England for over 200 years after Winthrop first uttered those words as part of this sermon. And even then, when the incomplete sermon was first published in 1836 as part of an anthology, the sermon received little attention. There were other documents, such as the Mayflower Compact (1620) and the now long-forgotten Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England (1643) that at that time were considered much more essential to the origin story of the United States. In fact, it was not until 1979 that American literary history had any use for this obscure document that most of us today remember as required reading in either high school or college.

And just as that text remains required reading in most American literature classes today, so too should Van Engen's monograph become required reading for all students of American history, because it offers a fascinating and eye opening look into the politics of collective memory and the ways in which history has been mobilized to support one particular narrative of America -- that of American exceptionalism -- at the expense of other possible narratives that might have been more inclusionary, The rise of the narrative of American exceptionalism meant that the importance of people and events that did not fit that narrative had to be marginalized or consigned to the dustbins of history. So for example, Native Americans had to be recast as a people without a culture, and the Spanish and Dutch settlement of America, both of which pre-dated Anglo-Saxon settlement in New England, had to be shown as an inferior and different type of settlement from what came later. These transformations and re-imaginings did not take place overnight, nor were they always the product of pre-meditation; luck came into play on multiple occasions in the rise of this particular narrative. As the author shows the sermon, which was originally a religious text having nothing to do with nationalism, had to undergo multiple transformations before Ronald Reagan in his 1984 farewell address famously used it to support a narrative of American exceptionalism and of American individualism.

This process of transformation is still ongoing, as the author makes clear. At the funeral of George Bush Sr., the reference to Winthrop's "city on a hill" seemed for the first time, personal, in that it was used to describe the behavior of one man, rather than to depict the calling of a nation: "And it seemed to mourn, along with other speeches of that day, the passing of a time -- regardless of politics, when the elected representatives of the nation might garner some basic sense of respect for their hill." In short, its usage in this setting, seemed to signal new values, those of decorum, stateliness, grandeur, and the dignity of office that with any luck a future president will again model. For as the author notes, Trump's "America First" narrative is the exact opposite of the narrative of American exceptionalism. In this new narrative, the United States is just another nation among many nations, whose goal is to pursue its self-interests and win (with winning defined as having the most wealth/material acquisition. It is a narrative and worldview "based in the utter absence of any higher moral good" -- one in which "the rich get richer; the poor stay poor; and the bonds between individuals remain abstract, insubstantial and unimportant." In short, it advances a modern-day "survival of the fittest" in which those who are weak both within the nation and across the globe are left behind, as there is no longer any moral imperative or responsibility as part of the national story.

This is not to say that the narrative of American exceptionalism is without hazards. As the author is quick to point out, the narrative of American exceptionalism contained an implicit expansionist thread that created an "unwillingness or inability to recognize the civilization, culture, or contributions of other peoples; and an extension of American interests dressed up in the guise of being good for all the world." But understanding the hazards of each narrative and the context in which different meanings of America emerge, perhaps allows us to stumble into the future as a people a bit less blindly.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and author for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.