In the course we will combine literature, history, and social-political studies to probe the underside of American political culture, those tendencies the guardians of official culture need to repress, deny, minimize, or marginalize in order to sustain the approved sense of America as the redeemer nation. In concentrating on the early twentieth century, we’ll look at two influential spokesmen for the official America, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, to catch the cross-currents among American idealism and American empire, imperialism, and militarism. Randolph Bourne develops a neglected and contrasting vision of America, as in his acerbic way does H. L. Mencken. In their critique of “Puritanism” and their celebration of Dreiser, Bourne and Mencken also open up the hidden—or not-so-hidden—tradition of suppression in America, a concern that relates to early twentieth-century evangelicalism, the Scopes trial, and Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry as well as the Palmer Raids of 1919 and the Sedition Act of 1916. A central interest in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a concern Bourne and Mencken were too close to see, is Dreiser’s pioneering insight into the emerging consumer capitalism of the early twentieth century, a powerful tendency William Appleman Williams connects with “empire as a way of life.” We’ll begin the course with a prologue, Mark Twain’s scathing indictment of American imperialism, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and his “War Prayer.” We’ll end with Dos Passos’s 1919 and Hemingway’s In Our Time, two works which render the impact of World War I and open up other dimensions of Bourne’s principled opposition to war and militarism. Under the pressure of reality I’ll probably scale down the reading but this gives you an idea of the range and point of view.