A brief reconstruction of American Exceptionalism-Part 4

In the last chapter I discussed the effects of American exceptionalism on the American policies until the First World War. I also discussed how the exceptional thinking influenced American concepts of “Manifest Destiny” which lead to an aggressive and imperial foreign policy during the early 1900-s in places like Philippines.

In this part I will discuss the development of American exceptionalism from the First World War into the end of the Second World War. Alike the previous periods of American exceptional experience, this particular period will also be marked by the profound fear, anxiety and paranoia among the American exceptionalists.

As we have mentioned previously, the puritans, the forefathers of the American exceptionalists considered American landmass as a God given gift to them and they naturally considered any ideas particularly those coming out of what they considered “Old Europe” as abhorrent and irreconcilably alien to their way of life.

The American exceptionalists were reluctant at best to participate in the First World War when it broke out in 1914. The primary reason behind this was the attitude of the American elite not to get involved in a conflict which they considered being in a far away continent and which did not directly threaten them or their interests. To put it simply the American elite did not wanted to get involved in a conflict which were not their own making and from which they did not have much to gain from. Another reason was that the American army at the time was no match for some of the European armies like Germany. This attitude on the part of the American exceptionalists not to get involved in a foreign conflict is coined by the historians as “isolationism”. This attitude will change soon due to certain events that would force them directly into the conflict.

Although the American elite did not take any direct combat role until 1918, it greatly profited from the war by selling military equipment to the entente powers i.e. Britain, France and Russia. Now the central powers and particularly the Germans wanted to stop this. The Germans decided to wreck havoc in the major sea lanes of the world by targeting any ship which they thought to be cooperating with the allies. The American merchant ships were regularly getting sunk by the German U-boats. This was creating a huge amount of public pressure upon the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson to join the allies in the war against the Germans. Another event which also forced the hand of the president Woodrow Wilson to join the war was the Zimmermann telegram. In 1917, the British intelligence caught a telegram from the foreign secretary of German empire Arthur Zimmermann. The telegram promised Mexico German aid for joining the war against the U.S. for getting back lost Mexican territories such as Texas and Arizona, in case the U.S. decided to join the war against Germany.

The Zimmermann telegram along with an all-out and unrestrained total submarine warfare by the Germans against the neutral particularly American ships ultimately led President Woodrow Wilson to declare war against Germany in 1918.
When a student of history looks at the American decision to join the war so late in the day, he will obviously think of certain motives. The primary reason was that the American exceptionalists did not want to be excluded from the process of sharing the war spoils. Another reason was that the American elite did join the war when they knew it for sure that the entente powers will win in the end. They also calculated that America will find a lot of potential profit for rebuilding war-torn Europe after the war was over.
All these led to President Wilson to join the First World War in 1918.

The U.S. as well as the entente powers ended up in the winning side. But the loss of life and property was in colossal proportions all over Europe. Some of the monarchies who have been ruling some of the European empires for centuries, ended up in the ash hip of the history. The Hapsburgs of Austria, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the Romanovs in Russia and the Ottomans in Turkey all were no more. New states and new nations were coming into being for the first time in history. The old great empires were coming at an end.

Among all the tumultuous changes after the First World War, the most significant event was the Russian revolution in 1917. The Romanov dynasty which had ruled the Great Russian landmass for centuries was no more. The people who replaced the Romanovs were called Marxists i.e. followers of the legendary philosopher Karl Marx. The motto of the new rulers of Russia was also unique in human history. Instead of national pride and militarism which were regular norms of the day, the communists in Soviet Union (the new government replacing the Russian empire) talked about hitherto unheard things such as “classless society”, “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “unity of working class people all over the world”. This was a unique experience in terms of human history. Instead of the narrow national sentiments, the communists led by Vladimir Lenin were talking about universal rights for the downtrodden workers and peasants in the world. Instead of any national or religious overtones, for the first time in the Western history there was a government which was calling for universal values. Undoubtedly in the years to come, the reverberations of the Russian revolution would be heard all over the world as well as in the U.S.A.

From the beginning the American exceptionalists were opposed to the ideas of communism. The Soviet Union had eliminated all the existing ruling classes of the Czarist Russia which included the rich landlords and the priesthood. The American exceptionalists had a deep feeling of paranoia about anything that challenges the existing order. Apart from that the American exceptionalists considered any idea coming from Europe to be a possible pollutant which may well end up polluting the body politic of the divinely gifted America. So the American exceptionalists from it’s very beginning were opposed to the ideals of Marx.

Class consciousness also played a very important role in shaping the hatred of the American exceptionalists against Marxist ideas. The rich American industrialist class had a terrible fear of their workers striking en masse for equal rights, it was natural only that they opposed the communist ideas. The American clergy feared communism since they believed that communists will convert their folk to atheism and there will be no work left for them. They also feared that Communism as an atheist and anti-religious idea. The political elite feared communism since they thought that the Communist influence will create rebellion against American hegemony in countries like Cuba and the Philippines.

Communism was considered an alien and foreign, European ideology by the American exceptionalists which they thought was about to destroy the American way of life. Thereby they any one even remotely involved with communism as “un-Americans”. The fear of communist ideas was so great in the mind of the American exceptionalists that a mere mention of the word “revolution” was enough to create paranoia among the American exceptionalists. So much was the fear of the communism among the American exceptionalists that they could not differentiate between the ideas of Communism or socialism or anarchism.

Some of the most common ideas about Communism in the American exceptional mind were as following:

1. Communism would destroy traditional society norms like family and marriage.
2. Women will be made state property under Communism.
3. People will be made to starve under Communism.
4. A strong and omnipotent state which will control all aspects of public life under Communism.
5. Religion and Church will be abolished under Communism.

The American exceptionalists not only were so fearful about Communism but from the beginning made every effort to annihilate and obliterate Communism from the face of the earth.

The exceptionalists decided to make a coordinated effort at both home and abroad for destroying abroad.

The U.S. senate had created a committee called the Overman committee for looking into issues regarding German sabotage acts inside U.S during the First World War In 1919, one after the end of the war, the committee’s mandate was extended to monitor any communist activities inside the U.S. to study any effort to incite the overthrow of the Government of U.S. The committee in its final presentations presented an alarming image of communism as an imminent threat to the U.S. government and American exceptional values. The committee also tried to show communism as a German ploy against the U.S. by pointing out that Karl Marx and Frederic Engels were Germans.
Some prominent U.S. politicians at the time like the U.S. senator Knute Nelson tried to portray American progressives and liberals as agents of communism and Soviet Union.
The Senator Knute Nelson made the comment "Then they have really rendered a service to the various classes of progressives and reformers that we have here in this country."

Some American anti-communists even spread news that Women have been made state property in the Soviet Union. Undoubtedly this was nothing but untrue.
Even the American mass media started sensationalism as a chip trick to gain market share as well as spreading government sponsored propaganda. Some of the headlines described Russians and communists in general as "assassins and madmen," "human scum," "crime mad," and "beasts." After a peaceful march by workers in Cleveland, Ohio in 1919 was violently broken by the authorities The Salt Lake City Tribune did not think anyone had a right to march. It published: "Free speech has been carried to the point where it is an unrestrained menace."

The American exceptionalists had long feared that the African-American community which was facing oppression because of the racial segregation laws might join the international communist movement and create a rebellion inside the U.S.A.
African American communities faced large scale organized racial violence during this time. One of the most infamous events during this time was in Chicago. Chicago's beaches along Lake Michigan were segregated in practice, if not by law. A black youth who swam into the area customarily reserved for whites was stoned and drowned. Blacks responded violently when the police refused to take action. Violence between mobs and gangs lasted 13 days. The resulting 38 fatalities included 23 blacks and 15 whites. Injuries numbered 537 injured, and 1,000 black families were left homeless. Unofficial numbers were much higher. Hundreds of mostly black homes and businesses on the South Side were destroyed by mobs, and a militia force of several thousand was called in to restore order. In mid-summer, in the middle of the Chicago riots, a "federal official" told the New York Times that the violence resulted from "an agitation, which involves the I.W.W., Bolshevism and the worst features of other extreme radical movements." He supported that claim with copies of Negro publications that called for alliances with leftist groups, praised the Soviet regime, and contrasted the courage of jailed Socialist Eugene V. Debs with the "school boy rhetoric" of traditional black leaders. The Times characterized the publications as "vicious and apparently well financed," mentioned "certain factions of the radical Socialist elements," and reported it all under the headline: "Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt."

American exceptionalists were fearful of any organized worker’s unions. Workers’ unions were considered as mouthpieces for propagating and practicing communism. When the policemen in Boston went onto strike in 1919 for an increase in their wages and betterments in their working conditions, Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis denied that police officers had any right to form a union. The strikers were called "deserters" and "agents of Lenin." The Philadelphia Public Ledger viewed the Boston violence in the same light as many other of 1919's events: "Bolshevism in the United States is no longer a specter. Boston in chaos reveals its sinister substance." President Woodrow Wilson, speaking from Montana, branded the walkout "a crime against civilization" that left the city "at the mercy of an army of thugs."
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge saw in the strike the dangers of the national labor movement: "If the American Federation of Labor succeeds in getting hold of the police in Boston it will go all over the country, and we shall be in measurable distance of Soviet government by labor unions." The Ohio State Journal opposed any sympathetic treatment of the strikers: "When a policeman strikes, he should be debarred not only from resuming his office, but from citizenship as well. He has committed the unpardonable sin; he has forfeited all his rights." Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge who would go on to become 30-th president of the U.S., put the anti-union position simply: "There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime."

The workers did not let up with their protests against the system. Gradually the strikes expanded to core industrial sectors such as steel and coal in the same year of 1919. To crush the protesters the local and Federal governments declared an all-out war. Playing to the traditional nativism of the American people, the steel industry management spread the rumor that strikers were immigrants. This turned the American people against the strikers. After strikebreakers and police clashed with unionists in Gary, Indiana, the U.S. Army took over the city on October 6, 1919, and martial law was declared.

Amazingly on the one hand when the steel industry management were spreading the rumor that the strikers were immigrants at the same time they brought in thousands of Mexican and African immigrants to replace the white English-speaking workers who had gone on to strike.

Congress conducted its own investigation, focused on radical influence upon union activity. In that context, U.S. Senator Kenneth McKellar, a member of the Senate committee investigating the strike, proposed making one of the Philippine Islands a penal colony to which those convicted of an attempt to overthrow the government could be deported.

The American Exceptionalists not only used the threat of deporting the leaders of the striking workers as rhetoric in fact they implemented their threat. A ship named “Buford” which was also known as the “Soviet Arc” left New York Harbor in December, 1920. On board were 249 workers who were allegedly involved in the “Bolshevik plan to destroy the American way of life”. These workers were sentenced to be deported to the Soviet Union as “American Christmas day gift for Lenin and Trotsky”.

Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake." The New York Evening Mail said: "Just as the sailing of the Ark that Noah built was a pledge for the preservation of the human race, so the sailing of the Ark of the Soviet is a pledge for the preservation of America."

Even Hollywood came up with it’s own ideas to denounce communism. Movies made in this era all had a strong anti-communist element to it. Movies like “Bolshevism on trial”, “Dangerous Hours”, “The Volcano” all of which were made in this period had a strong anti-Communist storyline in it.
Some other Movies like “The New Moon” or “The World and it’s Woman” were focused on the particular fear of “Nationalization of Woman by the Bolsheviks” by the American exceptionalists.
President Woodrow Wilson decided to destroy Soviet Union by taking the fight to the Soviet territory, itself. 5,000 US army soldiers were sent in the campaign as the "American North Russia Expeditionary Force" in Archangelsk, north Russia. These troops were part of a coalition of entente powers whose main motive was to expand anti-Bolshevik force of whites and, in the process, stop the spread of communism and the Communist cause in Russia. Another 8,000 US soldiers, organized as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia, were shipped to Vladivostok from the Philippines and from Camp Fremont in California. However as the anti-communist White generals began to lose in the battles against the Soviet red army, gradually all these western mercenaries were withdrawn by their governments. However some remained to perform acts of sabotage and incitement against the Soviet Union.

I must mention that not all American intellectuals opposed Communism at the time. In fact some like John Reed would become biggest supporters of communism with their monumental works like “Ten days that shook the world”.

As time moved on, the exceptionalist mode in the U.S.A continued to be suspicious and hateful towards Communism or any idea which talked about revolutionary changes in traditional social norms.

One of the biggest events in American history between the two world wars was the great depression which started to affect the U.S.A from 1929. The whole western world were affected during the great depression which resulted in a massive rise in unemployment , bank and other industrial foreclosures , stock market and other financial market crashes , and a virtual halt in manufacturing and heavy industries.

In the U.S.A the Unemployment rate reached 25% at early 1933. In the agricultural heartland of the U.S.A particularly in regions like Tennessee and Georgia a drought persisted throughout the period and businesses and families defaulted on record numbers of loans. By this time 5000 banks had failed.

The newly elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) who during his election campaign promised to bring in new reforms for alleviating the plight of the impoverished masses, decided on an economic reform program called “new deal”.

The “new deal” wanted to re-distribute wealth by taxing the rich and massive government spending in key economic activities generating employment.

Some of the American exceptionalists were up in arms from the beginning against the new deal. There were different reasons for these exceptionalists to oppose the new deal. As I have mentioned previously the exceptionalists tend to be really afraid of any new idea which might change their way of life. The new deal talked about measures like redistributing of wealth as well as state funding for economic activities and creation of institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) whose job was to monitor the activities of the big business. In the mind of the American exceptionalists all these measures would hinder the freedom of the rich to do business as they pleased. In their minds the exceptionalists also found parallels and similarities with the new deal measures with the planned economic policies of their archenemy, the Soviet Union. The fear of government control in their lifestyles was the main paranoia behind the exceptionalist opposition towards the new deal. The Libertarians among the American exceptionalists, who were always suspicious about government intervention in their lives, grew more suspicious towards the federal government. From this time onwards any new government involvement either socio-economic or political realm will be considered as “socialist” or “communist” by these group of American exceptionalists. This particular tradition would continue till our time. When Barrack Obama wanted to pass his new healthcare reform measures providing benefit to the millions of uninsured patients in the American healthcare system in terms of government sponsored financial aid, the whole gamut of modern American exceptionalists blamed him for spreading “socialism” and endangering the American way of life.

Father Charles Coughlin, the famous catholic preacher who was a megastar in radio talk shows at the time was a virulent critic of President FDR and his new deal measures.

By 1936, Coughlin compared the New Deal to, “…the red mud of Soviet Communism and…the stinking cesspool of pagan autocracy.” Coughlin believed in an international conspiracy led by Jewish bankers and other power brokers. It was these men, according to Coughlin, that had financed the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia.

When Congress considered increasing the amount of silver in order to create more currency – at 25% above world prices, Coughlin maneuvered to get the bill passed although FDR opposed it. Eventually, it was disclosed that Coughlin’s Radio League owned one half million ounces of silver.
(Courtesy: modern-us-history.suite101.com)

Father Coughlin will not be the last exceptionalist to manipulate mass media for personal benefit. He was the predecessor of Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of our time.

When the exceptionalists and their other conservative counterparts were busy denouncing new deal and communism, ominous clouds were gathering on the skies over Europe. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had created a deep paranoia and reaction among the traditional European societies. Now these attitudes will burst into movements that will ultimately change the face of Europe for years to come.

In Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal reactionary and ultra-nationalists had come to power. Now let us see how the American exceptionalists reacted towards this phenomenon.

Some American exceptionalists were astonished by the success of the Nazi Germany in terms of economics and industrialization. They admired the fact that a people who were so devastated after the First World War could make such great improvement, overcoming all the difficulties in a very short span of time. Another reason for American exceptionalists to have a favorable view of the Third Reich was the view that the Third Reich would work as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. This particular view about Hitler’s Germany was shared by almost all the major Western nations including Britain and France at the time. Another reason for the admiration of the American exceptionalists for Third Reich could be considered as a kind of ideological similarity. Alike the American exceptionalists the Nazis also considered that Germanic race and their Germanic culture is superior over all other Western nations and they have a God-given right to play a special role in shaping the future of the western civilization. This could be one of the ideological considerations that helped establish the attitude of admiration among some of the prominent American exceptionalists of the period like the the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and the industrialist Henry Ford.

Both Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were awarded the “Order of the German Eagle” by Third Reich for their contributions in building relationship between the U.S.A and Third Reich. Charles Lindbergh was a great admirer of German military strength and wanted German to use it’s military might against what he termed “Asiatic communism” of the Soviet Union. In a controversial 1939 Reader's Digest article, Lindbergh said, "Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations... and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection."
Lindbergh deplored the rivalry between Germany and Britain but favored a war between Germany and Russia.

When the Second World War finally commenced from 1939, Lindbergh became one of the prominent members of the anti-war America First Committee whose main job was to campaign against the United States participating in the War in Europe. Lindbergh also said at the time that the “the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization.”

During his January 23, 1941, testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Lindbergh recommended the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany.

At a speech at Des Moines on 11-th September, 1941 said that three groups “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” were pushing America into war which will not serve American interests. He also said “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation.”

Lindbergh considered Russia to be a "semi-Asiatic" country compared to Germany, and he found Communism to be an ideology that would destroy the West's "racial strength" and replace everyone of European descent with "a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown." He openly stated, if he had to choose, he would rather see America allied with Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia.

Famous industrialist Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler admired each other's achievements. Adolph Hitler kept a life-size portrait of Ford next to his desk. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the Chancellor of Germany in 1933. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal awarded by Third Reich to foreigners.

The U.S.A finally decided to join the war in favor of the allies in 1941 following the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor.

The USA finally avenged the Pearl Harbor with atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the fag end of the Second World War. The reasons behind the decision to use atomic bomb for the first time in history were:

1. To force a quick surrender of the Japanese so as to prevent losing a huge number of American soldiers in the upcoming invasion of the Japanese Islands. One of the senior American military officers in the pacific actually made a remark that “I will sacrifice a million Japs to spare one American life.”
2. To create enormous amount of psychological pressure among the Japanese government and it’s people so that they ultimately surrender. The US Secretary of War Henry L Stimson said in 1947 that “The atomic bomb was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon.”
3. To show the rest of the world particularly to the Soviet Union that the United States of America has and will use such weapons of mass destruction to destroy it’s enemies.


The U.S.A along with the allies Britain and Soviet Union went to war against the axis of Third Reich, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. In the end despite being on the winning side, the suspicion among the US and Britain against the Soviet Union were not coming to an end. The new fear was that the Soviet Union which did the bulk of fighting in the European theater would become more powerful and the influence of Soviet Union will gradually increase throughout the world. The Americans thought that they were helpless to prevent the Soviet Union looming large in Eastern Europe. FDR personally mentioned this to the disappointed Polish ambassador in Washington “Do you expect us and Great Britain to declare war on Joe Stalin if they cross your previous frontier? Even if we wanted to, Russia can still field an army twice our combined strength and we would have no say in the matter after all.”

Although the USA and it’s allies had defeated the Third Reich but they still considered the Soviet Union as their mortal threat. The American exceptionalists will continue to fight Soviet Union in what would be called the “Cold War”.

I will discuss the role of American exceptionalism throughout the cold war and the aftermath of that war in the next chapter.