| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mary E. Stuckey. Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2004. Pp. x, 413. $35.00.
The central premise of this book is that presidential rhetoric is at once a reflection of contemporary standards about who qualifies as a member of the American polity and an important force for reinforcing those standards. Mary E. Stuckey's intent is to place the presidency at the center of an enduring paradox of American political culture: the conflicting pressures for the nation to be at once essentially inclusive and exclusive. This book is thus an ambitious work of broad scope, dealing with some of the most important questions ever processed through the American political system.	1
The book includes seven substantive chapters, one each devoted to Andrew Jackson, the three presidents of the 1850s (considered as a group), Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush. Stuckey holds that each president's rhetoric defines an archetypical citizen, who then becomes the standard for judging who does and who does not belong. For example, "It was the independence offered by land ownership that imbued citizens with what Jackson considered a truly democratic character" (p. 53). The quintessential Jacksonian American was thus the independent frontiersman. Conversely, the touchstones of Americanism to Bush were decency and prudence, both of which he judged essential for a nation trying to manage epochal change in a rapidly transforming world. Folded into each chapter is a discussion of how these varying sets of definitions worked to exclude certain liminal groups, most prominently African Americans, American Indians, and women.	. . .

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