When did the idea of America being the "freest country in the world" gain popularity?

April 20, 2011 3:02 AM

When did the idea of America being the "freest country in the world" first gain popularity?

I'm not interested in whether it is or isn't (or how many Americans believe it to be the case etc), just when this idea arose and gained popularity (and if they were two separate occasions).

Does it date from the Cold War era, or was it present from early on? Was it there during, say, racial segregation or is it a more recent idea?

posted by Hartster to Society & Culture (14 answers total)

i would suggest that it started when the pilgrims got away from their evil european oppressors?
posted by freddymetz at 3:08 AM on April 20, 2011

Since at least 1776.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:11 AM on April 20, 2011

Popular where?
posted by pompomtom at 3:18 AM on April 20, 2011 [5 favorites]

i would suggest that it started when the pilgrims got away from their evil european oppressors?

Agreed. In the early 1600s small groups of Europeans started coming to America in order to exercise religious freedom. The Pilgrims (puritans) in 1620, Quakers in 1650, Anabaptists in 1680, etc. As each of these religious groups suffered persecution in Europe, the ability to worship freely in America certainly left some positive impression on them.

America's founders believed religious freedom to be the "first liberty."
posted by three blind mice at 3:24 AM on April 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

Sorry. Dud link.

America's founders believed religious freedom to be the "first liberty."

posted by three blind mice at 3:27 AM on April 20, 2011

The Star Spangled Banner, which includes the classic line "Land of the free, home of the brave," was written in 1814.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:29 AM on April 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

But the claim of "freest country in the world" as a challenging boast rather than a proud statement is definitely from the Cold War years, or even before. Check out the "Red Scare" of the 1920's, which predates the Cold War by decades.
posted by bardic at 3:56 AM on April 20, 2011

This is one of the earliest features of the national ideology. Tocqueville made these comments as early as 1835, and the concept of liberty as a fundamental part of the political makeup of the nation is embedded in the founding documents.
posted by valkyryn at 4:49 AM on April 20, 2011

You might want to study the deep history of the American continent. The association of America with freedom is no superficial thing that "started" with an election or ad campaign. It's deeply woven into the earliest European perceptions of the place, developed as part of the residents' self-image, and was codified in the earliest documents of the United States. On a cultural level, this free people saw itself as freer than its European forebearers, but also feared what they saw as the emotional and sexual freedom of their enslaved blacks, and the physical freedom of the Native Americans. Freedom (and its absence) have been inextricable from the concept of the American continent since Columbus first set foot here. Though himself an enslaver, Columbus's discovery reinvented freedom for the European mind, and opened a new continent of the spirit, as well as new tract on the globe.
posted by Faze at 4:54 AM on April 20, 2011 [4 favorites]

That idea is part of the concept of "a shining city upon a hill" which has been used by many politicians over the years (most often by Reagan, but he was not the first by far) who got it from a sermon by the puritan John Winthrop who in turn took the phrase from the Sermon on the Mount. The whole idea that the United States is a shining beacon of freedom to the rest of the world ties in with American exceptionalism, a phrase first used by de Toqueville but the concept of which has been around since colonial times.
posted by TedW at 5:40 AM on April 20, 2011 [1 favorite]

It predates American independence; it's the foundational notion of America. It didn't start as a slogan, it was just later sloganized.
posted by spaltavian at 6:02 AM on April 20, 2011

Sloganized: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
posted by Sys Rq at 6:37 AM on April 20, 2011

TedW makes a good point, but I'd make a minor quibble in that the "America as the Land of the Free" predates and is one of the reasons people give for this so-called American Exceptionalism.

(And yes, the use of the free mythology as a challenge is a newer thing. It probably started when the US started to get some global power as the industrial revolution started to take hold.)

Just to reiterate, the idea of the US as the freest nation comes chiefly from the idea that there wasn't some king trying to push us around. Or, at least, they were so far away as to be meaningless. Very similar to a lot of the Australian and Canadian mythology.

(Using mythology to mean "shared story/history", not "untrue fable".)
posted by gjc at 5:34 PM on April 20, 2011

The idea has always been there, but it has been expressed in different ways appropriate for the times. In the Colonial period, it was religious liberty, free of the established churches of Europe. In the early post-Independence period, it was Republicanism, as the US -- especially after France reverted to Napoleonism and the Second Empire -- was one of the few major Republics anywhere. This led, for instance, to our support for the short-lived Republic of Rome. In the latter half of the 19th century, it took the nature of economic freedom, and in the 20th, ideological and political freedom. It has had a militaristic bent at times, such as the "Arsenal of Democracy" era, and the anti-Communism of the Cold War.
posted by dhartung at 11:07 PM on April 20, 2011