United States had aseconddeclaration of independence, a cultural assertion
of autonomy, in the age of Jackson, and the American popular culture that
was celebrated from the 1830 s onwards was one which used blackface min-
strelsy to contrast a white American republic to both the fancy and covet-
ousness of European monarchies and the unstable and self-indulgent alterity
of people of color (Rogin 1995 , 14 – 44 ,passim).
Rogin is not completely rejecting Hartz’s point here, as Hartz had Turner’s.
American exceptionalism in his account was Lockean and individualist,
nationalist and white. And the instability of American identity that fueled
(or at least allowed for) universal democratic conformity in Hartz’s account
also inXuences the actions of the exceptional Americans in Rogin’s work. The
problem is mirrored in Jacksonian America’s favorite public hero, an excep-
tionally powerful individual dubbed, by Speaker of the House Henry Clay, the
‘‘self-made man:’’
If a puritan mission or a liberal tradition engendered the United States, as the classic
studies of Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Louis Hartz maintain, then the slave-
holding South is an exception outside the national consensus. Placing blackface,
slavery, and race at the center, by contrast, makes the South organic to American
national identity.... Blackface places a racial division at its center. It also enacted the
feature that, together with racialism, deWned the exceptionalist character of Ameri-
can nationality: the power of subjects to make themselves over. (Rogin 1995 , 49 )
The principle of racialized and manly self-making promised a radical degree
of autonomy. But if one is ‘‘self-made,’’ and if much of the performance of
reason and industry is a personal creation, can one be sure that there is any
‘‘essential soul’’ in the American? Again we are left with the obsessive question
of American exceptionalism: even if we posit that the USA is the protagonist
in a story of global and historical importance, we are still left with the
question of identity. Who is this protagonist?
Hannah Arendt sees the Declaration of Independence as a splendidly
political response, a written and performed answer, to this question. How
do we know who Americans are? We ‘‘declare’’ that ‘‘we’’ are those who hold
the following political assertions to be self-evident truths, and ‘‘we’’ are also
those who have chosen to thus identify ourselves in a moment of political
liberation before the eyes of a rational and enlightened mankind. Arendt also
sees a disappointing retreat from the political in this moment, however; the
insistence upon ‘‘self-evident truth’’ demonstrates a very unpolitical and
coercive desire toWnd an a priori foundation that will establish beyond any
doubt our identity and our mission (Arendt 1961 , 193 – 5 ). Not two weeks after
290 ronald j. schmidt, jr.