America, Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States Book

This is a first rate readable single volume of the history of the United States, fully annotated with references, which takes account of recent revisionism without polemic. The author is English, although a specialist in American history.

The book may be a tad more useful for non-Americans seeking some sense of the broad sweep of the US story than it might be for Americans who know its stories from school.

His theme (because some theme is necessary to cover over 400 years of history in under 600 pages) is that the United States can be defined by the three-way tension of its religious faith in a secular political framework, its expansionism and its particular and fraught ideology of liberty.

Understanding this complex interplay of aspirations is required if non-Europeans are to get any understanding of why Americans appear so sure in their moral rectitude when the bulk of humanity sees nothing (at least in recent years) but inconsistent blundering and hypocrisy.

The truth is that the Americans and the rest of the world are talking different languages and this history helps to tell us why. Although Reynolds does not make it specific, US history, after the colonial age, seems to fall into three very broad phases.

Reynolds deals with the first and the third well but he somewhat skips over the second of which more in a moment. There is an argument that we are now just entering a fourth phase - of which more, also, in a moment.

The first phase is about the lengthy resolution of an accident. When the British withdrew, they left behind two very different and competing cultures that should perhaps have been allowed to go their separate ways if a clash within the new State was not to be averted.

There was, first, a slave-owning plantation culture in the South and, second, a more sophisticated proto-industrial liberal culture in the North, both competing for the fruits of expansion westwards.

The whole business was held together on a wing and a prayer by Northern acceptance of the domination of the Southern aristocracy in politics and the lack of interest of Southerners in extending rather than retaining their very peculiar institution of slavery.

Reynolds is very good on this era in which those who wanted a free aristocratic republic competed with more radical democrats from the North and then faced evangelical religious pressure (the same impetus that has gone sour in recent American politics) to contain and even abolish the basis for their wealth.

The tensions built up reaching a critical cultural point in the 1850s. A liberal intellectual renaissance on the East Coast fuelled constant challenges to the status quo.

It ended inevitably in the South seeking secession and the North engaging in what amounts to an imperial determination to keep the South bound to a piece of paper, the American Constitution. But the rise of the US as major global power was not inevitable.

The South was doomed only because the British Empire failed to come to its aid, thus giving the superior industrial strength of the North a chance to overwhelm it in campaigns of unparalleled ferocity (and atrocity).

Such campaigns must have brutalised the soldiery for its campaigns against the indigenous peoples in subsequent decades. The American mythos demands that the Civil War be cast as a 'good war', like the war against fascism, and the ending of slavery is the oft-quoted justification.

But nothing is so simple - Sherman's total war in Georgia destroyed an economy so that it could feed neither white nor black alike for a short while and the black population, after a period of liberation, were crushed, arguably in little better state, without federal help for another hundred years.

Southern resentment, although pragmatists might accept the inevitable, was turned against the blacks rather than the victors and it was forgotten that war exigencies had even begun to free the slaves so that they could defend a common homeland in the very last stages of the war.

Serious racism as opposed to labour exploitation grew after a victory that could not be followed through by the Northern liberals who seem, quite simply, to have lost interest.

More to the point, the smashing of the constraint on central government policy of the states' rights ideology of the South, though it has remained a force in American politics to this day, finally turned a loose confederation into the potential to become a centralised war machine.

This development was delayed but the rise of a superpower was almost inevitable once America has absorbed the full economic potential of its vast internal market and its never-ending supply of cheap labour.

Reynolds rather skates over the next phase, from reconstruction to the First World War. Yet this is the phase that enables empire and which created the ideology of liberty that would be market-tested by Woodrow Wilson and then imposed by FDR.

At one end of the story, the tale is simply one of expanding to natural limits and of adding a couple of colonies in the European manner with the usual lies and brutalities involved in such enterprises.

At the other end, which is where Reynolds is weakest in analysis, there is the struggle to create a polity that can have values at all. The core values were set by the Constitution and the victory sealed at Appomattox.

However, there were many issues left hanging, of whom those of the blacks, women, indigenous tribes and 'sexually different' (the last weakly handled by Reynolds) were simply inconvenient and required resolution in the Sixties in a way that soon created a conservative reaction.

The central issue was how to bind the useful cheap migrant labour required by the capitalist machine into an earlier society of small farmers and tradesman, especially when the migrant labour might not hold to Protestant small town values.

This was not a new problem but an intensification of early nineteenth century problems.

Equally important and growing in salience with time was the clash (and sometimes co-operation) between the owners of capital, some now of immense wealth with significant power in and over Washington, with the aspirations of the wider population.

People in general wanted improved social conditions and, as consumers, unadulterated and low priced food and consumables. These struggles created the ideology of progressivism and the practice of American capitalism.

Progressivism sought to use executive authority, whether State or Federal, to make major changes in the structure of power to benefit the general population.

Unfortunately, it had the unfortunate effect of binding an appreciation of strong central Government to the capture by progressives of that strong central Government for the extension of progressive values overseas.

This is a continuous story of a development that has no formal ending date (indeed, it continues today) but the key transitional point is when America becomes a net exporter of capital and uses that leverage to control in stages the global conduct of its old rival, the British Empire.

Even as late as 1942 in the North African campaign, the British had the whip hand, but, by 1944, the export of US resources effectively broke any remaining pretensions to global leadership of the British Empire, a position already weak but from which it never recovered.

The story of the Atlantic Alliance is really little more than the de facto acquisition of the old British Empire by Washington without a fight and on the cheap.

The third phase starts not with Woodrow Wilson's aspirations but with FDR, a remarkable politician, who faced a major economic meltdown, sustained the polity (without initially solving the underlying problems of economic weakness) and then discovered war as a means to economic growth.

Pearl Harbour was a tragedy but it was also a lucky break because it enabled an aspiration - the assertion of American Power globally on the back of the re-allocation of American resources into an expanded version of the same model that had won the American Civil War and had opened up the West.

This model was a strategic alliance between the private sector and the executive on terms of equality.

This is the essence of the objection to Sovietism - not only its tyranny (which was sincerely held as a concern across America) but also its threat as an economic model in which the State replaced what would later be called 'public/private partnership'.

The US Government did not expropriate. It developed a system that might rightly be called 'socialism for corporations' that maintained a massive war effort in the 1940s and enabled the basis for the later information revolution. The model was not foolish. It opened up the West after the Civil War.

But it also did two things fraught with danger. It created the famous 'military-industrial complex', an interest in high government spending directed at perpetual warfare (even if frequently 'cold'), and it encouraged politicians to sustain similar projects designed to build middle class support.

The expenditures were accordingly lopsided - from the GI Bill through to Eisenhower's major investment in the road system (allowing rail in effect to collapse) and onwards, the US Federal Government extended the undoubted triumphs of the New Deal.

However, it also shifted them to benefit middle class voters and allies rather than the community as a whole. The road investment created the national dependence on Saudi Arabia. Cheap housing was not built but encouraged through unsustainable securitised debt.

Government bought off sections of the community successively by fiddling the legislative and budgetary books which encouraged identity politics, pork barrel-ism amongst legislators and policies whose consequences were never thought through.

This third phase is essentially the surprisingly short period in which the US was a major superpower, first in competition with communism and then alone.

The status was established by 1944 and probably reached its apogee (despite the problems of the 1970s) with the Coalition of the Willing that mounted the rescue of Kuwait in 1991, the last major assertion of UN values before Bush II introduced the concept of pre-emption.

This is a phase that continues. The seeds of being a superpower lay in the ability of a successful economy to become a net exporter of capital and act as arbiter to an increasing degree during the Great European Civil War of 1914-1945.

The seeds of a fourth phase were set when the US became a net importer of capital as its deficits grew. 9/11 is a neat marker but probably the failures of neo-con fantasists in Iraq will prove more significant in the long run.

FDR planted the seeds of crisis by building an unwieldy and often irrational system of social provision that locked in so many voters that even Reagan could not unravel it but this was married to the cost of fruitless wars (as in Vietnam).

It also became linked to a global system of bases that was simply a massive containment operation that eventually proved unable to deal decisively with global insurgency when it emerged in force a decade ago. In fact, welfarism is probably more of an economic problem than imperialism.

The 'theory' would have America dealing with its debt through constant economic growth - debt and the dependence on foreign investors would not matter so long as America remained a super power and its economy remained the most innovative (as evidenced by the information revolution).

The Chinese support America because they are now embedded in the system but America is no longer master of its own destiny in quite the same way. Instead of getting side-tracked into 'opinion', we should return to Reynolds and ask what his themes suggest about the future of the US.

No one can predict the future and America has the capacity to surprise - both FDR and Reagan were transformative to the fortunes of their country and there is no reason why a similar figure could not perform similar miracles but there are disturbing fundamentals to consider.

First, the crash of 2008 has still not worked its way through the system. Obama may be symbolically significant in historical terms but his Administration shows no sign of being in control of events.

He does not appear to have any strategy beyond accepting the need to bolster the private part of the private/public partnership system with massive thefts from the general population to sustain it. Perhaps there is no alternative now ...

Second, culture wars tend to be less important in times of economic hardship but if there is no leadership then culture wars can become proxies for economic demands.

The assumption that internal violence can be entirely crushed by what amounts to a growing 'secret police' capability within the country is to be doubted.

Reynolds rather passes over the extent of Western violence from Reconstruction to the 1890s but it was a strain of growth and violence could be a strain of decline.

As the US ceases to be able to direct global politics through the use of capital and arms, then it has to start sharing power, cutting deals and avoiding further entanglements until it has recovered at home.

The massive military presence worldwide has done little to stabilise key centres of insurgency just as we are about (March 2011) to go into what is expected to be another surge in global food prices

And at home, the oft-forgotten criminal insurgency in Northern Mexico is in serious danger of spilling into South-Western states already highly sensitised about immigration.

The demands of Christian fundamentalism do not only require 'change' in the broadly liberal cultural infrastructure of the US but also expect Congressional and Presidential support for its massive surge in missions overseas. Neither of these two pressures are well reported.

Despite the determined rhetoric of the neo-conservatives under Bush II, there is no scheming Hitler out there worthy of a 'crusade' that would kick-start the American economy and create national cohesion with total mobilisation.

America as nation-state was created (War of Independence), centralised as a corporate-executive power (American Civil War) and created as a superpower (the Second World War and the Cold War that followed) out of war.

Small wars are just not cutting the mustard. Teddy Roosevelt's Spanish-American War might have helped create a culture ready to go overseas in 1917 but Vietnam smashed any taste for conscription.

Iraq has created a profound distrust between liberal America and the nationalist-patriotic and imperialist other half of it. To go to war in full patriotic mode today might even be a trigger for low key civil war, especially if the evidence is not clear and America has not been attacked.

So, this worthwhile history (the views above are mine, not Reynolds) provides a back-drop to these general thoughts.

It will help understand how America not merely moved from a colonial outpost to troubled empire but will help non-Europeans understand why Americans often believe in their moral destiny despite their own crimes, how they hold to their ideals and why they are very, very different from the rest of us.