Moral Superiority in American History: Roots and Hypocrisy
This essay examines the historical roots of American moral superiority, tracing the sentiment from the Revolutionary era through the nineteenth century. Drawing on primary texts by Thomas Paine, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, John L. O'Sullivan, Henry David Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, and Herman Melville, the paper argues that a belief in divine destiny and national exceptionalism ran alongside — and often contradicted — practices such as the displacement of Native Americans, slavery, and the subjugation of women. The essay connects these early ideological formations to broader international perceptions of American arrogance and self-righteousness that persist into the modern era.
- Introduction: A World-Wide Perception: Global resentment of American moral self-assurance introduced
- Revolutionary Origins: Thomas Paine and Divine Right: Paine frames colonial rebellion as divinely ordained superiority
- Manifest Destiny and the Displacement of Native Americans: O'Sullivan justifies westward expansion despite Native dispossession
- Slavery, Muslim Nations, and the Problem of Hypocrisy: American anti-slavery rhetoric clashes with domestic slave practice
- The Degradation of Women and the Abolitionist Connection: Women's subjugation linked to slavery and moral double standards
- A Nation of Pride and Contradiction: Melville's Moby Dick mirrors American exceptionalism's dark duality
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds an abstract cultural argument — American moral superiority — in specific primary source quotations, letting historical voices speak for themselves rather than relying on unsupported assertion.
- It maintains a consistent critical thread, showing how the same ideological assumptions reappeared across different eras and issues (revolution, westward expansion, slavery, gender), building a cumulative case.
- The opening joke and the closing literary parallel with Moby Dick give the essay a distinctive framing that makes its argument memorable and rhetorically coherent.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies the use of counterexample and internal contradiction as an analytical tool. Rather than simply cataloguing expressions of American pride, the author repeatedly juxtaposes a patriotic claim against a contemporaneous practice — O'Sullivan's rhetoric of freedom against the dispossession of Native Americans, condemnation of Algerian slavery against domestic slavery — to expose hypocrisy as a structural feature of American exceptionalism, not merely an occasional lapse.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a framing anecdote and moves chronologically, beginning with the Revolutionary era (Paine, 1776), advancing through early national writing (Crèvecoeur, O'Sullivan, 1839), then addressing antebellum moral contradictions (Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony). It closes with a literary synthesis via Melville's Moby Dick, using Ripley's 1851 review to reframe the entire argument as a question of foreign perception. The structure is roughly five to six thematic paragraphs without formal subheadings in the source, making it a tightly integrated analytical essay.
Introduction: A World-Wide Perception
"A survey was conducted in the world. Respondents were asked to 'please write down your opinion about food shortages in other countries.' The survey failed because Africa didn't know the meaning of 'food,' Western Europe didn't know the meaning of 'shortage,' Eastern Europe didn't know the meaning of 'opinion,' and the United States didn't know the meaning of 'other countries.'"
— joke circulating in Hungarian cyberspace
Americans, already reeling in shock from the tragedy of September 11, were appalled at television images of Muslim children laughing and celebrating at the injury done to the United States. It was a visceral reminder of the hatred that many nations feel for the US — hatred certainly engendered in part through envy for the comparative wealth and freedoms that Americans enjoy, but also in part by the virtually worldwide perception of Americans as blissfully certain of their moral superiority to all other nationalities, and abundantly willing to steamroller other cultures with their opinions and beliefs. Did this attitude emerge with the Founding Fathers?
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 5th ed.
Allison, Robert. "Muslims on America's Mind, A.D. 1790." The Globalist, September 28, 2001. Adapted from Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815.
De Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John. Letters From an American Farmer. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904.
O'Sullivan, John L. "Manifest Destiny." 1839.
Paine, Thomas. "Common Sense." 1776.
Paine, Thomas. "Epistle to Quakers."
Ripley, George. "A Pregnant Allegory: Review of Moby Dick." Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December 1851.
Thoreau, Henry David. "Civil Disobedience." Walden and Other Writings. Ed. Joseph Wood Krutch. New York: Bantam Books Inc., 1965.
Truth, Sojourner. "Ain't I a Woman?" 1851. www.pbs.org/amex/lincolns/wworld/esantebellum.html
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