American Exceptionalism and the Great Game

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

The game of ball is glorious.

WALT WHITMAN

. . . His almost chosen people . . .

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

If you want to see a bunch of happy Americans, go to opening day at any baseball stadium in the land. Pretty much any day is a good day to go to the ballpark, but that first day of the season is special. It’s spring. The grass is green. Pessimism is impossible, at least until the other team scores. The promise of the season sits before us with all the pristine shine of a new car, the latest vehicle for the secret aspirations we all hold for ourselves. Life will be better, this time. We will be better: smarter, richer, funnier, and absolutely better-looking, all in magical correspondence with the home team’s pennant drive. Deep down we know what’s going to happen to our fine new car, all those dingers and scrapes that lie in wait, the hailstorms, the exploding batteries, and yet, and yet . . . Opening day is “the triumph of hope over experience,” as a wise man once said, though he was talking about second marriages, not baseball.

On this opening day at Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas—formerly “the Ballpark in Arlington,” then “Ameriquest Field in Arlington” until the subprime-mortgage bubble burst, then “Rangers Ballpark in Arlington” for a while before Globe Life plunked down a reported $50 million for name rights—the weather is, to state it plainly, perfect. Literally not a cloud in the sky, which is the brilliant turquoise of a well-chlorinated pool. The temperature is a summery 84 degrees, and while the pollen count is high—not unusual for North Texas, which is a Pandora’s box of seasonal allergens—the Air Quality Index is in the healthy-for-children-and-old-folks range. The outfield grass is a cow’s or pro golfer’s dream—lush, smooth, preternaturally green, with crisscross stripes laid down by artisanal mowings. Curated grass. Heavenly grass. It brings out the dog in me, I want to take off all my clothes and roll around on it.

Globe Life is an earnest, determinedly fan-friendly park, eager to please with its historically referenced quirks—home-run porch in right field, whimsically jiggered outfield wall—and cozy red-brick and forest-green color scheme. Cognoscenti describe it as “retro jewel-box,” in the highly specialized nomenclature of baseball stadia. (Thanks to generations of brainy, obsessive fans, everything about baseball is highly specialized.) Players and coaches assemble along the baselines for the pregame ritual, the Rangers in crisp white uniforms with blue and red trim, the Seattle Mariners somewhat baggier in their subdued blue-gray. Makes a body look fast, those Ranger whites. Dozens of scurrying workers unfurl the largest American flag I have ever seen, we’re talking flag acreage here, it practically covers the entire outfield, then country singer Neal McCoy stands near the pitcher’s mound and belts out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Now there’s a snappy tune,” Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, “blind Senator Gore,” used to say to his young grandson Gore Vidal whenever the national anthem was rendered, and Neal McCoy does a creditable job with the song, managing the devilish stadium acoustics like the pro he is. Everyone cheers as the final notes fade away, and a pair of F-16 fighter jets banks low overhead, creasing the air with a mighty roar.

America, America. The ceremony encourages us, if not to think about the country, at least to be aware of it for a couple of moments, to experience a fluttering uplift of national spirit. Land of the free, home of the brave, the “shining city on a hill” as Ronald Reagan loved to put it, a formulation that reaches back to the Puritan pioneers, with echoes from the Sermon on the Mount. Transiting from England to the New World on the Arbella in 1630, the Puritan leader John Winthrop preached it thus:

We shall find 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: “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.¹

To this day that Puritan sense of divine mission remains a defining characteristic of the American self-image. The Puritans were miliasts, die-hard believers in the millennial prophecies of the Bible: the coming of the Antichrist, the Second Advent, Armageddon, the works. It’s worth noting that Winthrop situates his city in a war context, God’s chosen ten resisting a thousand enemies, and the Puritans viewed their settlements in just such militant terms, absolute good purging the wilderness of absolute evil, clearing the way for God’s kingdom in the New World. And, eventually, beyond. Preaching in Boston some sixty years after Winthrop, Cotton Mather urged his congregation to consider the “great increase” of the colonies, “the blessings of land and sea” bestowed on them in the New World:

Indeed, if we cast up the account and lay all things together, God hath been doing the same thing here that he prophesied of Jacob’s remnant . . . And we may conclude that he intended some great thing when he planted these heavens, and laid the foundations of this earth. And what should that be if not a scripture-pattern that shall in due time be accomplished the whole world throughout?²

America was the chosen land, specially blessed and purposed with a world-changing mission. Thanks to several centuries of refinement and accretion, the doctrine has come down to us with a name, American Exceptionalism, and a remarkably bellicose history. The millennial aspect has waxed and waned according to the temper of the times, but it’s coded in even the more secular varieties of Exceptionalism. America’s missionary zeal to remake the world always tends toward the quasi-religious tone: Woodrow Wilson, son of a Presbyterian minister, urged U.S. Naval Academy graduates to go forth “onto the seas like adventurers enlisted for the elevation of the spirit of the human race.”³ John F. Kennedy often hit similar notes, at times explicitly invoking the “city upon a hill.” “I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella,” Kennedy said in a 1961 speech. “‘We must always consider . . . that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.’ Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments . . . must be as a city upon a hill, constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.”⁴ George W. Bush famously termed the war on terror a “crusade,” a descriptor loaded with white-hot millennial connotations,⁵ and in his acceptance speech to the 2004 Republican National Convention he declared that Americans “have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” Reagan, of course, was a master of the quasi-religious tone. Christian fundamentalists were a crucial part of his base, and Reagan himself was raised in the millennial worldview of the Disciples of Christ. “I have quoted John Winthrop’s words more than once on the campaign trail this year—for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining ‘city on a hill’ as were those long ago settlers,” he said on the eve of the 1980 election.⁶ And he was striking deep millennial chords when he described the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and “the focus of all evil in the world.”⁷

Election season in the U.S. is pure carnival for this sort of stuff, candidates beating each other bloody with the American Exceptionalism stick. It’s the I-Love-America-More-Than-You smackdown: America is and always has been the greatest, ever, at everything, and anyone who disagrees just doesn’t love America enough. Which is political discourse as fairy tale, a made-up story for children. Instead of fantasy, how about this for a more adult, and more useful, formulation: America has done very many great and noble things. America has also done many shocking and terrible things, always—always—in the name of doing good. Am I about to be critical of my country? I am, and by the way the United States was founded on dissent, contrariness, critical thinking; if not for independent thought, we might still be carrying water for the Brits.

Even a cursory run through American history shows Exceptionalism has been used to justify monumental bloodshed, oppression, and profit. Cotton Mather saw “the evident hand of God” in the colonists’ wholesale slaughter of Native Americans in King Philip’s War, a genocide that would eventually roll all the way to the Pacific under the quasi-religious doctrine of Manifest Destiny.⁸ Over three hundred years of slavery were justified on biblical grounds, as, variously, a means of saving African souls, or adherence to a divinely ordained natural order. For invasion and conquest in the name of liberty and democracy, we have the land grabs in Mexico in 1846–48, the Philippines in 1899–1902, and Panama in 1903. For the softer sorts of grabs—i.e., imperialism—in the early twentieth century, the career of Major General Smedley Butler (1881–1940) provides a useful guide to U.S. adventures in Mexico (again), Central America, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and China.⁹ A partial list of U.S.-sponsored or actively supported interventions, regime changes, and coups d’état for the latter half of the twentieth century would include Iran (coup, 1953), Guatemala (coup, 1954), Vietnam (coup, 1963; the war, 1965[?]–1973[?]), the Dominican Republic (intervention, 1965), Chile (coup, 1973), Argentina (coup, 1976), Nicaragua (war, 1980s), El Salvador (war, 1980s), Panama (invasion, 1989), and Haiti (coup, 1991; invasion, 1994; coup, 2004). Underneath all the high-minded missionary rhetoric, you will usually find the throbbing heart of the profit motive. Reflecting on his military career, General Butler wrote, “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”¹⁰ For anyone who cares to look, a survey of just three U.S. industries—oil, finance, and bananas—will more than prove out Butler’s gangster claim.

All this by way of saying: America is complicated. American history is not clean. Blood and bullshit run through it every bit as robustly as high-minded Puritan principles, the invasion of Iraq being just the latest example. Americans are chronically vulnerable to appeals to our goodness and innocence, as generations of pols and con men have found to their benefit. Exceptionalism is an easy sell in the land of the free, and yet the country does contain much that can be called, well, exceptional. The founding of the American republic was truly something new under the sun, a remarkable achievement that can bear the weight of shining-city aspirations. So how about this for a working theory of American Exceptionalism: it is a real and volatile phenomenon in the world, with as much potential for doing good as wreaking havoc.

Donald Trump named one president, just one out of the entire field of forty-four, who he felt he couldn’t match for excellence in presidential demeanor—Abraham Lincoln, who also happened to be the most dogged champion of American Exceptionalism ever to hold the office. And it’s Lincoln who may well be our best guide to what’s truly exceptional in the American project.

WALT WHITMAN, THE BROOKLYN EAGLE, JULY 23, 1846:

In our sundown perambulations of late through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing “base,” a certain game of ball. We wish such sights were more common among us. In the practice of athletic and manly sports, the young men of nearly all our American cities are very deficient . . . Clerks are shut up from early morning till nine or ten o’clock at night—apprentices, after their days’ work, either go to bed or lounge about in places where they benefit neither body nor mind—and all classes seem to act as though there were no commendable objects of pursuit in the world except making money . . .¹¹

Even then we were exceptional workaholics! It speaks to Whitman’s genius that he was quick to seize on both the American game and American drudgery, just as he predicted Lincoln long before the obscure, one-term former congressman was elected president; before he even knew the flesh-and-blood Lincoln existed. In his 1856 essay “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Whitman got a load of democratic angst off his chest by describing the current political class as “robbers, pimps . . . malignants, conspirators, murderers . . . infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers . . . monte-dealers, duelists, carriers of concealed weapons, blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains . . .” He believed our only hope against this mob was a rough-hewn “Redeemer President” from the West who, in Whitman’s conjury, bears a striking resemblance to Lincoln: “some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman . . . with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms.”¹²

Lincoln’s supporters at the 1860 Republican Convention presented him as “the rail-splitter,” a man of the people who’d done his share of sweat-hog work. But well before he rose to national prominence, Lincoln was proclaiming—preaching would be closer to the mark—the gospel of American Exceptionalism. He based his version of the gospel on the Declaration of Independence, specifically the clause stating the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal.” Later, at the Gettysburg battlefield, he would employ a consciously biblical idiom in stating his case—Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—but he’d been hammering the “proposition” for years, usually stirring the same biblical echoes as Winthrop and Mather. And the “proposition” wasn’t limited to the U.S., as he emphasized in a speech en route to Washington in 1861 to take the oath of office:

It [the Revolution] was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but [of] that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.¹³

Lincoln’s Exceptionalism gospel was as vehement as that of any blowhard politician in 2016, but several essential qualities in the Lincoln version are worth pointing out. Immigrants were included in the American proposition with just as much right as if they’d arrived in America by accident of birth. Speaking in 1857, Lincoln said:

. . . when they [immigrants] look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that the moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.¹⁴

Even more striking is the insistent humility of Lincoln’s Exceptionalism. His was very much a searching, self-doubting, self-examining Exceptionalism: he believed in the American mission with religious fervor but maintained a healthy skepticism toward its mortal agents. Throughout his presidency, Lincoln stressed human fallibility, both individual and collective, and even in the midst of a horrifically bloody civil war—in the midst of what we might call partisanship run amok—he refused to vilify or demonize the South. Slavery was a national, not exclusively Southern, sin, and he was insistent about reminding the North of its complicity and profit in the slave economy. Even the Gettysburg Address, delivered at the site of the North’s greatest victory, is about as far from triumphant as one can imagine.¹⁵ No “Mission Accomplished” banners for Lincoln. No military swagger, no thumping chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

In our age of relentlessly upbeat branding, Lincoln’s humility and chastened tone wouldn’t get much traction in the public sphere. “Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!” as Delmore Schwartz described him in a poem from the 1950s.¹⁶ One might venture to construct a metaphysical argument that Lincoln’s private suffering was crucial to making him a genuine hero—that this suffering was key to the self-doubt and self-examination that led him to distrust all claims of earthly exceptionalism. He understood pain, loss, guilt; in the Bible he found the language to express the dark side of human experience and bring it into the public realm. It was the language of reflection; the language of atonement. Lincoln’s gospel of American Exceptionalism depended to a large degree on acknowledging just how flawed and morally suspect are the human vessels charged with fulfilling the mission.¹⁷ The Declaration may have stated the “proposition” of equality, “the standard maxim for a free society,” as Lincoln put it, but “enforcement” of the maxim would be an endless, and endlessly messy, process, “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated . . .”¹⁸

How was this “maxim” of equality to be enforced, however imperfectly? Through the laws of the land: the Constitution, judicial decisions, statutory and common law. The goal, “constantly labored for,” was (and surely continues to be) just laws, justly and fairly applied. And as early in his career as 1838 Lincoln was preaching “reverence for the laws” as “the political religion of the nation.”¹⁹ Equality would be possible only if no individual, group, or entity was above the law. Even the state itself, the government, must be subordinate to the law.

Which explains why the “American Exemptionalism” championed by the Bush-Cheney administration, and continued in many respects by Obama, was so corrupting, so blatantly un-American. You could call Exemptionalism the doppelgänger of Exceptionalism:²⁰ it’s the belief that America is so unique, so righteous, so divinely inspired and guided that it’s exempt from the law whenever its government deems fit. If America—God’s chosen country! that shining city on a hill!—does it, then it must be right, and to hell with the law. It’s a tautology that verges on madness, and leads straight back to all those marauding kings and despots in the old country who cited “reason of state” as justification to act as they wished, in disregard of the law, in order to serve an alleged national interest. By virtue of which, the ruler becomes the law, in effect, which is no law at all, but raw personality acting under color of law.

“Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.” This arresting sentence, found in the 2003 edition of the National Security Strategy of the United States, could be said to sum up the attitude of our executive branch, and a good bit of the legislative as well, toward the law since 9/11. We are told that our national integrity is under threat from international fora (the UN and similar organizations, along with the conventions and treaties—as ratified in accordance with the Constitution—that establish their authority), judicial processes (the law and the courts, both domestic and international), and, finally, terrorism. An odd threesome to lump together, “judicial processes” characterized as threats commensurate with terrorism.²¹ These are strange, most peculiar days indeed. A quick survey of the past fifteen years shows just what Exemptionalism, our American version of “reason of state,” has wrought: undeclared wars that go on and on, torture, indefinite detention, wholesale surveillance and spying, and extrajudicial executions of American citizens, all in the name of national security, all of which tend to render the objects of their attentions rather less than equal. We have laws against these sorts of things, and it’s our laws that distinguish the U.S. from the old monarchies, not to mention dictatorships, drug cartels, and military juntas. That make the U.S. exceptional, in other words. The law does provide for making a person “less equal”—for depriving him or her of property, liberty, even life. It’s called due process of law, and it’s required by the Constitution.

For Lincoln, it wasn’t enough to save the Union—it had to be worth saving, true to the “Declaration principle” of equality. “If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot”—he was in Philadelphia, en route to his inauguration, when assassination was a very real and present threat—“than to surrender it.”²² Post-9/11 American leadership has proved all too ready to surrender the “Declaration principle” in the name of national security, and no 2016 presidential candidate has been louder or more emphatic than Donald Trump in stating their willingness to continue the trend. Trump, admirer of Lincoln. “He was very presidential, right?”

Delmore Schwartz on Lincoln, again:

Later they made him out a prairie Christ

To sate the need coarse in the national heart.

THIS OPENING DAY AT GLOBE LIFE PARK IN ARLINGTON IS A happy one for the home team. The weather stays fair, nobody gets hurt, and the Rangers squeak out a 3–2 win on the strength of Prince Fielder’s mighty bloop single. The Dallas Morning News will report tomorrow that history was made on this opening day. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Rangers are the only team since 1900 to win its season opener with fewer than two hits, a statistic that is perhaps less amazing for itself than for the fact that it exists, a nugget sieved from all the stats of all the opening-day games ever played.

“Well—it’s our game; that’s the chief fact in connection with it,” Walt Whitman observed of baseball. “America’s game: has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere . . .”²³ Whitman took great pleasure in the sight of Americans doing things together, especially outdoor things, muscular things. “America, her athletic Democracy,” he called it, and he urged us to aspire to “adhesiveness,” the generous affection between citizens that’s the crucial binding agent of democracy.

Whoever degrades another degrades me . . .

I speak the password primeval . . . I give the sign of democracy;

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.²⁴

In 2016, it seems fair to say that baseball in America is alive and well. As for adhesiveness, it remains to be seen whether affection will endure amid vast inequalities of income and opportunity, and a political culture so toxic with partisan flatulence that poor Flint still drinks its water from trucked-in bottles, the Supreme Court soldiers on with an empty seat, and trolls roam the internet in search of better angels to slay.