Godfrey Hodgson “The Myth Of American Exceptionalism”, Yale Univ. Press, 2009, 190 pps  

Summary of books thesis:  “The City upon a hill”, a beacon and example for the whole world, that’s how many if not most Americans see themselves.  The author agrees that this vision was possibly literally true for Americans in the period following the Revolution and may have pertained until the Civil War.  Nowhere else did so many citizens own land and other assets that conferred full citizenship, and public education was more generally available in the U.S. than in many parts of Europe.  Ideology, franchise, landowning, and public education: American achievement in those four areas are enough to justify a claim for American exceptionalism for this period preceding the industrial revolution.  Although American exceptionalism was no longer a legitimate characterization following the Civil War, it was not an intrinsically corrupting idea.  But in the past thirty years or so it has had a corrupting influence brought on by hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system.

My Notes:

Pg. xii: American economic and social equality are being undermined by the sheer cost of health care and education as well as by residential segregation; segregation this time by economic status.  Also, political journalism makes little pretense of open inquiry, unblushingly promoting conservative ideology and the economic interests of the privileged.

Pg. 10:  American Exceptionalism: the core of this belief is the idea that the U.S. is not just the richest and most powerful of the world’s more than two hundred states but is also politically and morally exceptional.  Exceptionalists minimize the contributions of other nations and cultures to the rule of law and to the evolution of political democracy.  Especially since Woodrow Wilson, exceptionalists have proclaimed that the United States has a destiny and a duty to expand its power and the influence of its institutions and its beliefs until they dominate the world.  In recent decades an economic dimension has been added to this traditional faith in the American Constitution and in the principle of government with the consent of the governed.  For many American leaders and publicists today, capitalism, in the particular form it has taken in the U.S., must be spread alongside freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.

Pg. 14:  Much of the history Americans are taught in high school and even college is not so very different from Parson Weems’s discredited but beloved story about George Washington and the cherry tree. 

Pg. 35:  The American Revolution did create the world’s first large republic, followed a few years later by France, another large republic (soon to become ruled by a dictator).  There had been other republics but of limited size: Athens, imperial cities of medieval Germany, or Geneva, or Venice, Florence, and the other republics of Renaissance Italy.  The American republic would be governed with the consent of the governed (the white male property owners).  It replaced divine right, and hereditary right, and customary legitimacy, with the supreme authority of the people.

Pg. 37:  The U.S. lagged many years behind in allowing women to vote: U.S. (1920), New Zeeland (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), Norway (1913), and Denmark (1915).  Also, in 1918 the following allowed women to vote: Austria, Canada, Hungary, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

Pg. 52:  Washington, in his farewell address, did not warn against “entangling alliances.”  He did say it was America’s true policy “to steer clear of permanent alliances”; he added that we may “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”  He was not saying the U.S. should never entangle itself with those corrupt Europeans.  He was taking a stand in what was the burning political question of the time: whether the U.S. should side with Britain, from whom they had just become independent, or with France, which had been their ally but had now been transformed by revolution, terror, and the emerging militarism that was replacing the original purity of the revolution’s aims.

Pg. 85:  In 1950 the Truman administration accepted the strategy contained in National Security Council memorandum 68.  This was a strategy of armed containment of communism.  It implied massive rearmament.   In a few short years it quadrupled defense expenditure.  Over time, it transformed the US. Into a national security state.  In this same year, the Korean War broke out.

Pg. 86:  In many instances the U.S. often through the CIA, intervened in local politics, overthrowing governments or preventing what Washington saw as undesirable changes of government.  This is widely known to have happened in the Philippines from 1950 to 1953, in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954, in Cuba in 1961 and 1963, in South Vietnam in 1963, and in Chile in 1973.  Then there are the secret interventions such as the Congo from 1960 to 1965, Indonesia in 1965 (where the CIA was deeply implicated in a repression in which at least five hundred thousand communist and Chinese Indonesians were killed), Brazil in 1964, and India in the early 1970s.  Even in Western European countries such as France, Italy, Greece, and Portugal, the CIA interfered clandestinely at one time or another to influence elections.

Pg. 99:  Many exceptionalist today, starting with George W. Bush, base their case on religion.  It was the deity, according to them, who singled out the U.S. for his purposes.  Yet the Founders, to take an obvious example, were hardly conspicuous for their religious belief; deism, among them was as common as orthodoxy.

Pg. 100: Once America was exceptional in its contempt for militarism and its suspicion of standing armies.   However, the U.S. allocation of 0.18 percent of its GNP to foreign-aid is exceptional among the developed nations where Sweden donates 1.2 percent of GNP, Norway 0.89 percent, the Netherlands 0.81, Britain, France, and Germany gave 0.51, 0.47, and 0.36 respectively.

Pg. 128:  The U.S. is exceptional among developed democratic nations in the number and proportion of prison inmates.  More than 2.1 million Americans are in prison.  Only Russia held a higher proportion of its citizens in jail.  The U.S. has 686 Americans out of every 100,000 in prison.  That compares with 139 per 100,000 in Britain, 102 in Canada, 96 in Germany, 85 in France, and lower figures in the rest of Western Europe.  The practice of American politics and the conduct of the American government, have caused many to see it as exceptional in a negative sense, both in its methods and in its outcomes.  The gap between wealth and poverty is higher than anywhere else, and is steadily growing.  Yet, the average income in the U.S. is still almost the highest of all but Norway.  In math and science the U.S. placed twenty-fourth out of twenty-nine in testing to international standards (PISA: Program for International Student Assessment). 

Pg. 139:  Out of the 192 nations and territories of the world, the U.S. ranks forty-eighth in life expectancy.  If you limit yourself to sovereign states, the U.S. is twenty-ninth.  In 2006 eight children out of every thousand died before the age of five; thirty-three countries or territories in the world do better than that. 

Pg. 161:  Economic historians distinguish a series of successive phases in the development of capitalism, for example, petty capitalism, mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism, and finance capitalism.