Inventing America,again

ABSTRACT

In US intellectual and academic life, the 1940s and 1950s stand out as a period abounding with attempts to assay the characteristic and distinctive forms of ‘American culture’ and ‘American society,’ from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the oft-noted ‘Tocqueville revival’ to works by Harold Laski, Max Lerner, David Riesman, C. L. R. James, the ‘consensus historians,’ and the early writers in the field of American Studies. Viewed as the culmination of a half-century span (roughly 1900–1950) of cultural nation-building, this rush of ‘American’ definitions at mid-century was shot through with politics – but in complex ways that are not adequately captured by the familiar recourse to Cold War anticommunism as the presumed ideological bedrock of the time. By treating this cultural nationalism as the outcome of an uneven and combined intellectual-historical process, we see how elusive (and illusory) the enterprise of designating ‘American’ traits actually was.