Hartz oVers the American South, with its militant racism and its blood-
and-soil nationalism, its use of romantic (rather than rational) Wghting
rhetoric, as an illustrative contrast, a peculiar anomaly for an exceptionally
liberal nation. But where Hartz sees an outlier, others have seen the ‘‘essential
soul’’ of American identity. In the work of Michael Rogin (at one point a
Hartz student), we can locate the fusion between race and liberal individu-
alism that puts the war between the republic and its deWning enemies back at
the center of the story of American exceptionalism:
‘‘In the beginning,’’ John Locke wrote, ‘‘all the world was America.’’ Then men
relinquished the state of nature, freely contracted together, and entered civil society.
That was not the way it began, in America.... America clearly began not with primal
innocence and consent but with acts of force and fraud. Indians were hereWrst, and it
was their land upon which Americans contracted, squabbled, and reasoned with one
another. Stripping away history did not permit beginning without sin; it simply
exposed the sin at the beginning of it all. (Rogin 1975 , 3 )
In Rogin’s account, race becomes the tabula rasa on which American identity
is composed. Race serves as the singular contrast around which others are
deWned—whiteness is to color what industry and reason are to fancy and
covetousness. ‘‘Indians did not use the land for agriculture, explained Mas-
sachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop. Since the wandering tribes failed to
‘subdue and replenish’ the earth, white farmers could acquire their land’’
(Rogin 1988 , 46 – 7 ).
The event which separates the beginning time in which all the world was
America from the modern era is, according to Locke, the invention of money.
In America, that event is not just enacted through the creation of a particular
currency; indeed, as Rogin demonstrates, people of color serve as the cur-
rency dividing America from its pre-political paradise. ‘‘Whites consistently
converted what Van Buren called ‘the debt we owe to this unhappy race’ into
money.... Indians were turned into things—a small reserve remaining in
Ohio after removal was a ‘blank spot,’ a ‘mote in the eye of the state’—and
could be manipulated and rearranged at will. Money was the perfect repre-
sentation of dead, interchangeable matter’’ (Rogin 1975 , 243 ). Slaves, mean-
while, were objects of American commerce and raw material for the
expanding American economy.
Rogin directs our attention to the centrality of race in all these narratives of
exceptionalism. Race even becomes central to the declaration of American
identity, despite the removal of most of the references to slavery from
JeVerson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. In Rogin’s account, the
american exceptionalism in new contexts 289