Despite Fanny Trollope’s dismissal of Americans as tobacco chewing, patriotic boors, travelers have a long history of commenting on American friendliness. Alexis De Tocqueville observed that their sociability made Americans more akin to the French than the “unfriendly disposition of the English.” And Rudyard Kipling remarked, “it is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people, whatever they may do. They are much too nice.”
Although it often goes unnamed as a pattern of behavior, niceness pervades the assumptions, discourses, and the everyday conduct of and about Americans. But how and when did Americans become associated with being nice? Carrie Tirado Bramen explores how niceness became an indispensable part of a democratic personality that was friendly and accessible, free from the Old World snobbery. Beginning with Samoset greeting the Pilgrims in 1621 by saying “Welcome, Englishman” and concluding with the Forgiveness Ceremony at Standing Rock in 2016, this talk will explore the many roles niceness has played in the social and political landscape of the United States.
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About the Speaker
Carrie Tirado Bramen is the author of American Niceness: A Cultural History (Harvard UP 2017), a study of the role niceness has played in configuring a democratic personality that is apparently free from Old World snobbery. Bramen explores the conflicting ways that niceness has figured in the nineteenth century from Native American hospitality, feminine niceness, and the rise of the nice Jesus to the significance of the slave’s smile in antebellum rhetoric. The book concludes with the emergence of the “democratic empire”—where the US occupation of the Philippines was claimed by some to be a kinder, gentler form of imperial dominance, epitomized in Civil-Governor William Howard Taft’s hearty laughter, firm handshake, and affable manner. This cultural history of the United States demonstrates the centrality of sociality for thinking about national and political cultures. Her essay, “Niceness in a Neoliberal Age,” appeared in Public Culture (May 2018).
Her first book, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Harvard UP 2000), was co-winner of the Thomas J. Wilson prize for best first book published by Harvard University Press. It explores how the language of ‘variety—a Victorian precursor to diversity—became synonymous with Americanism in the late nineteenth century from literary regionalism and biracial fictions to intra-urban walking tours and the emergence of the urban picturesque to religious pluralism and the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. William James’s philosophy of pluralism frames this study of how to imagine “manyness-in-oneness,” where oneness offers little in the way of stability and security.
Banner image: Calvin Coolidge and Walter Johnson, courtesy National Photo Company collection at the Library of Congress.
