American Niceness: A Cultural History

Thomas Hartshorne once declared it “a commonplace that Americans are more concerned with their national identity and spend more time trying to explain themselves to themselves” than do most other people.¹ In American Niceness, Bramen joins company with Potter, Boorstin, Slotkin, and myriad others to explain us to us.² For Bramen, “niceness” serves as a significant framing lens for detecting American identity. She contends that in the 1770s, even as Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751–1772) was noting proverbial descriptions of nationalities—“carefree as a Frenchman, jealous as an Italian, serious as a Spaniard, wicked as an Englishman, proud as a Scotsman, drunk as a German, lazy as an Irishman, duplicitous as a Greek”—Americans adopted niceness as a defining characteristic.³ The Declaration of Independence provides a first and important example, one in which the Founding Fathers decided that conditions had deteriorated so badly that, almost regretfully, it...