American Writing on Machiavelli has never been systematically assessed -- even though Americans have for centuries used his ideas to argue over realpolitik and conventional virtue. Embraced by the original British colonizers of Virginia and New England in the 17th century, Machiavelli's reputation was low at the time of the American Revolution, despite the significance of his ideas mediated through other thinkers. A slow revival of Machiavelli's reputation began in the 19th century and continued through the 20th. By the mid-70s, the rediscovery of an earlier American republicanism challenged the consensus school view that the American revolution was based purely on Lockean values. This second "Machiavellian moment" introduced a more positive view of Machiavelli as an advocate of a communitarian republican tradition, in opposition to the neoliberal narrative of Ronald Reagan. After the 1990s, Machiavelli was claimed in a sense by both left and right. Popular and elite political culture increasingly lionized him, and often appealed to his authority in more serious debates over virtue, manliness, and morality in war, politics, and commerce.

One of the most fascinating periods for studying Machiavelli's revival in America is the Progressive Era. Woodrow Wilson canonized Machiavelli in his traveling lectures in the 1890s. Theodore roosevelt lauded Machiavelli for showing the need for popular participation in politics. However, negative views of The Prince continued to invoke a critique of corporations, imperialism, and of TR himself, through works such as Ida Tarbell's article "Commercial Machiavellianism." But TR's more positive view found company in some surprising places. Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her novel Benigna Machiavelli (1914) provides one of the finest examples of the feminist Machiavellianism that emerged in the twentieth century. Gilman's Italo-Scottish-Quaker-American heroine studies human behavior with the object of manipulating other people into good works, and taking control of her own life as well as that of others. Gilman's Machiavellianism is also imbricated with globalization, emphasizing the virtue produced by Benigna's eclectic religious and ethnic background.