Review of book by Morris Berman, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 2006

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

by
William Krehm

This is far too important a work to fit within a single review. We shall therefore deal with the various aspects of contemporary America and its influences on the rest of the world, in shorter takes. The role of the "frontier" in American history is the first that we shall examine since that has essentially been the American way of approaching economic problems — by simply "going West" and eventually appropriating new lands into its domains, pushing aside the detail that those lands may already have been occupied. Or to quote Berman…

"The West Versus the Rest"

"One of the most insightful approaches to this topic is that of the eminent historian Charles Beard, whose work was subsequently enlarged by William Appleman Williams (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy). For Beard, foreign policy was really an afterthought; it grew out of domestic policy, which was essentially about money. The centerpiece of the foreign policy strategy of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren G. Harding, he argued, was economic expansion — exporting our economic surpluses.

"This, in turn, meant pushing open the doors of trade and investment everywhere, whether by polite coercion, or by military force. It was only by trade and investment, these presidents believed, that the United States could flourish, and the permanence of its domestic order could be assured.

"But how far back does this pattern go? According to Williams, Americans thought of themselves as an empire in terms of the American continent (that is, from Revolutionary days). Alexander Hamilton, for example, referred to the United States as such in The Federalist. James Madison wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1786, ‘Most of our political evils can be traced to our commercial ones,’ and he proposed as a guide to policy and action, the same kind of argument that historian Jackson Turner did a century later in his famous ‘frontier thesis,’ which explains our prosperity as a result of (westward) expansion. Beginning with the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-37). In particular, democracy was seen as intertwined individualism, private property, and a capitalist market economy, but the process of territorial expansion had already begun under Jefferson with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Indeed, during McKinley’s war on the Philippines, Senator Albert Beveridge, defended the president’s actions by saying that McKinley was merely walking the path marked out by Jefferson. (The Louisiana Purchase — roughly half a billion acres at less than 3 cents a pop — has rightly been called ‘the greatest land grab in all history’). Natural greatness, liberty, and territorial expansion early morphed into a unified whole, the ideology of which was labeled ‘Manifest Destiny.’ Thus Turner wrote that expansion had been the dominant fact of American life for three centuries, and that the frontier was absolutely crucial to American history. What it provided, he said, was a ‘gate of escape’ from existing responsibilities, and it sustained a pattern of relying on external factors for solutions to internal problems....

"To take one of the most egregious examples, issues of imperialism were clearly present during the Mexican War under President James Polk, who was trying to subject the predominantly foreign population of California, New Mexico, and possibly of all Mexico to American rule…. The immediate cause of the war was the annexation of Texas in December 1845, along with the American desire to acquire California. When Mexico rebuffed Polk’s attempt to ‘negotiate’ these issues, the United States had no inhibition about shifting from diplomacy to force. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 February 1848) Mexico was forced to cede 40% of its territory when the US troops entered Mexico City.

"According to Williams, when America ran out of frontier and there was no more contiguous land to buy, annex, or conquer — the root impulse got channeled into overseas expansion. It was during the 1890s, when the US was beset by a severe economic crisis, that the nation recognized that the continental frontier was gone, that the nation formulated the argument that expansion into an economic and even territorial empire was the best way to maintain its own prosperity.... The famous Open Door notes of 1899-1900, written by McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, advocated not colonialism but rather a policy of ‘an open door through which America’s preponderant economic strength could enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world.’ Nor did subsequent Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter excepted) attempt to deviate from that, says Williams. It can accurately be described as a program of informal empire. As early as 1902, Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson wrote that overseas expansion was the economic frontier that would replace the American continent as the territorial frontier.

"What then is the ‘tragedy of American diplomacy,’ in William Appleman William’s memorable phrase? Essentially, it’s that we uphold an ideal of self-determination for the peoples of the world, which we then subvert by defining our foreign policy as a process of helping other people solve their problems by three ideas. Essentially, we uphold an ideal of self-determination for the peoples of the world, which we then subvert by defining our foreign policy as a process of helping those peoples become...like us! We don’t grasp that this is an oxymoron. We don’t see that in expanding our own economic system, the well-being of which we have since McKinley tied to overseas expansion — we make it difficult for others to retain their economic independence.... The upshot was the liberal state extended the practice of colonialism: local peoples ruled, but within limits defined by their economic ties to the imperial power.

"President Harding continued that program, urging Americans to go on to the peaceful commercial conquest of the world. Rather than being a revolution, it was a way of preventing one: even in the depths of the Depression, overseas expansion of the American corporate state was regarded as a basic means of economic recovery.

"Nobody could have foreseen this, of course, but it was the Open Door policy that set us on the long road to the Age of Terror, in which we now find ourselves through foreign eyes, to see those who object to being steam-rolled by us as anything but knaves or ingrates has a very long history.

"William Appleman Williams was the first and perhaps the greatest of the so-called revisionist historians, and he left behind him a distinguished discipleship who expanded his insights in various ways. Many of Williams’ latter-day disciples would agree — the economic emphasis is too narrow. Williams never really demonstrated the concrete link between the economy and the concern of policy makers, and as early as 1966 conceded that the idea of the Open Door might have drifted away from its economic moorings. Historian J.A. Thompson, in a critical review of Williams’ work published in 1873, points out that for the most part, American exports have been usually lower than 5 percent of the GDP, and the bulk of our trade is with other advanced, not with the Third World. But Americans, says Thompson, have often discussed their foreign policy in terms of national security, prestige, racism, and religion as well, and these have sometimes been autonomous from economic issues. The argument would seem to function best when if it does not exclude other factors."

However, the absence of access to markets and even the control of those that exist, are still economic problems. Before Americans took to spilling across their frontiers into much of the rest of the continent, their trade with the regions beyond the existing frontiers had similarly been negligible, but what drew Americans to go west, were still economic goals in the broadest sense of the word.

"It turns out that ideological factors were also present. Thus Michael Hunt defines ideology as a structure of meaning that is part of the culture — so much so that we take it for granted and are not really aware of it, and regard other ideologies as aberrant. The ideology underlying American foreign policy, he goes on, is coherent, emotionally charged, and comprised of three interlocking ideas. all of which emerged by the early twentieth century, and which together constitute a ‘civic religion.’ The first sees the American future in terms of a quest for national greatness, coupled to the possession of liberty. The second defines attitudes toward others in terms of a racial hierarchy. The third holds that with the exception of the American Revolution, revolution in general is a potentially dangerous thing.

"By 1900, expansionists argued that we would remake others in our own image, for the benefit both of them and us. Is it purely coincidental that most of our imperial ventures or wars of... conquest from Mexico in 1846 to Iraq in 2003, involved an ‘enemy’ who was non-white? Our newspaper cartoons depicted blacks as brutes or children, Asians as inscrutable or somnolent. Motion pictures portrayed Latinos as greasers, Latinas as sultry, and Arabs as devious, fanatical, or evil. All of this has a long history. In effect, racial hierarchy permeates our culture and has been used to underwrite our claims to foreign lands and to justify the imposition of Anglo values and institutions. ‘Our relationship with the Middle East is the culmination of a foreign-policy that has been building for some time and will prove to be, I believe, the linchpin of the American downfall.’"

In our next issue we will present and discuss further sections of this remarkable book.