Upon hearing that someone had just published a lengthy study of American niceness, undoubtedly the work of years, my first impulse was to pity her unfortunate timing. Of all the things this era may eventually connote, it seems fair to assume that niceness will not be one of them. But then, have Americans ever been nice? Already it is difficult to remember the not-so-distant past, but the most familiar epithets would seem to suggest otherwise: the Ugly American, the Loud American, the Vulgar American.
According to Carrie Tirado Bramen, an English professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the author of “American Niceness: A Cultural History,” these archetypes are merely one side of a single national coin. Bramen acknowledges that the very idea of a national affect may seem quaint, perhaps even regressive, recalling the catalogue of dusty national archetypes—the efficient German, the lazy Irishman—that began as xenophobic spectres and somehow persist even in an era of accelerated globalization. But she’s interested in how this temperament has been constructed as a sociopolitical device across the past two and a half centuries. If those back in the Old World aspired to civility, a rigid code that moderated social interactions between the classes, the so-called New World went for niceness, a cruder virtue. Rather than cultivating the discipline required to avoid stomping on toes in the first place, the nice American assumes a spirit of cheery sociability to compensate for a host of transgressions.
“American Niceness” was inspired, in part, by the aftermath of 9/11, when the question “Why do they hate us?” became such a popular refrain that George W. Bush included it in his speech to Congress weeks after the attack. For Bramen, the question was another way of asking “Why don’t they like us?” It obscured the history of American interventionist tactics in the Middle East by making the tragedy into “a failure of likability.” At the root of this query, Bramen locates a willful innocence, a national ethos that refuses to acknowledge its own capacity for violence. “Niceness implies that Americans are fundamentally well-meaning people defined by an essential goodness,” she writes. “Even acts of aggression are framed as passive, reluctant, and defensive acts to protect oneself against the potential aggression of another.” At this point, my pity for the book’s seemingly ill-timed publication vanished—its immediate relevance was obvious. “Well, I think I’m a nice person. I really do,” Donald Trump said, in 2015, on “Meet the Press.” He added, “When I made, you know, harsh statements about various people, that was always in response to their criticism of me.”
Bramen traces this impulse back to our nation’s origins, when the passive framing of the Declaration of Independence (“it becomes necessary”) presented the Revolution as a grudging act of war instigated by British tyranny. But niceness came into full fruition, she argues, in the nineteenth century, her area of scholarly expertise. This was the period when America became an imperial power, and Bramen demonstrates the ways in which niceness served as a cheery façade pasted over violence and injustice. The culture of “Southern hospitality” perpetuated the belief that American slavery was a kinder, more compassionate variety than that practiced in the Caribbean. Later in the century, the annexation of the Philippines was heralded as a mission of “benevolent assimilation,” a phrase that President William McKinley used in his 1898 speech to the occupied nation to suggest that, unlike the Spanish empire, Americans would be nice. “We come not as invaders or conquerors but as friends,” McKinley proclaimed. Bramen also examines feminine niceness in the novels of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe (“a major theorist of American niceness”), and in female-led city missions like Jane Addams’s Hull House. During an era of exploitive industrialism and urban alienation, women were often encouraged to take on acts of “neighborliness,” reflecting the assumption that “interpersonal amiability can placate class tensions.”
Any nation that lays claim to certain principles, just like any person who dares to do so, opens itself up to the charge of hypocrisy. Some of the best moments in Bramen’s history ask what might happen were we to actually live up to our ideals. Appeals to niceness, she notes, have fostered ethical practices and brought attention to human-rights abuses. Bramen cites John Augustus Stone’s 1829 play, “Metamora,” which dramatized Native American hospitality for white audiences in order to portray the genocide of indigenous peoples as a tragedy of niceness betrayed. Reviews of the play suggest that it helped at least a few Jackson-era Americans come to terms with national guilt.
Such narratives point to what Bramen calls a “counter-tradition” of niceness, “one that linked a shame-based model of moral outrage with a call for national humility.” Still, she remains skeptical that such gestures can have a lasting effect. If niceness allows us to reckon, on occasion, with legacies of violence, these gestures just as often become merely therapeutic, another avenue to catharsis and forgetting. A sunny spirit of inclusion can obscure structural inequities, and the rehearsal of clichés and truisms—even those meant to acknowledge past errors—can reinforce the illusion of our own blamelessness and ease the conscience into a kind of historical amnesia. The political scientist Michael Rogin has dubbed this process “motivated forgetting.”
I live in Wisconsin, a place where niceness is so ubiquitous that it seems practically constitutional, so it may be unsurprising that I found Bramen’s thesis convincing, and a little unsettling. Congeniality has always come easily to me, almost by default; my husband claims that he frequently wakes to me murmuring litanies of consolation—“No worries, no worries”—in my sleep. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve long suspected it to be a substitute for more demanding virtues. In this part of the country, niceness is less an expression of generosity than it is of reserve: assuming an inoffensive blandness is a way to avoid drawing attention to oneself, and the most reliable means of keeping others at bay. I recall reading, with a pang of recognition, Lorrie Moore’s observation, in her short story “Childcare,” that the phrase “sounds good” functions for Midwestern girls as a kind of exit strategy. “It was the Midwestern girl’s reply to everything,” the narrator reflects. “It appeared to clinch a deal … except that it was promiseless—mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door.”
This regional variety of niceness can also carry more hostile undertones. In 2015, Mike Pence, who was then the governor of Indiana, defended his state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act against charges that it would allow businesses to discriminate on the basis of a person’s sexual identity. On an episode of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Pence, with an air of exasperation, said, “Hoosiers don’t believe in discrimination. . . . Anybody that’s been in Indiana for five minutes knows that Hoosier hospitality is not a slogan, it’s a reality. People tell me, when I travel around the country, ‘Gosh, I went to your state and people are so nice.’ ”
I suspect that fewer Americans now regard niceness as aspirational than did in the past. Most of my fellow-millennials would likely prefer to be known as fierce, unapologetic. But the posture of innocence remains seductive. More than once while reading Bramen’s book I thought of the characters in a story by Greg Jackson called “Wagner in the Desert.” These are thirtysomethings of the creative class, acutely aware of their comfortable status in a nation known for its decadence and waste, who nevertheless need to assure themselves of their inherent goodness by driving Priuses and donating to charity and returning, via hallucinogens, to a state of childlike credulity. “We thought we were not bad people,” the narrator observes. “Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciantly decent.” An apparent article of faith among young Americans on the left, a group in which I include myself, is that while we may belong to an ugly nation, we ourselves constitute a more benign and welcoming elect, a distinction that seems to depend less on the civic duties we have undertaken or the sacrifices we have made than it does on the fact that we use the right pronouns and ritually acknowledge our privilege and buy fair trade.
Niceness, Bramen notes, is a virtue of “surfaces rather than depths.” Of all the qualities that might constitute a national character, it is surely the most passive, the closest to simple indifference. Kindness requires active engagement. Compassion involves some measure of vulnerability. But niceness demands so little. It allows you to turn your back and slip out the door, grabbing your coat and calling out, over your shoulder, the sweet and empty wishes that facilitate so many exits: Sounds good. Take care. Have a nice day.
