The American Ascendancy

How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance

Michael H. Hunt

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780807883419
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A simple question lurks amid the considerable controversy created by recent U.S. policy: what road did Americans travel to reach their current global preeminence? Taking the long historical view, Michael Hunt demonstrates that wealth, confidence, and leadership were key elements to America's ascent. In an analytic narrative that illuminates the past rather than indulges in political triumphalism, he provides crucial insights into the country's problematic place in the world today. Hunt charts America's rise to global power from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a culminating multilayered dominance achieved in the mid-twentieth century that has led to unanticipated constraints and perplexities over the last several decades. Themes that figure prominently in his account include the rise of the American state and a nationalist ideology and the domestic effects and international spread of consumer society. He examines how the United States remade great power relations, fashioned limits for the third world, and shaped our current international economic and cultural order. Hunt concludes by addressing current issues, such as how durable American power really is and what options remain for America's future. His provocative exploration will engage anyone concerned about the fate of our republic.

Chapter 1: Nineteenth-Century Foundations

The New York–based artist John Gast completed American Progress in 1872, pushed by George Crofutt, the publisher of guides to the U.S. West (see fig. 1). Crofutt not only commissioned the work but also prescribed the themes Gast was to include and gave the oil painting its name.¹ This celebration of American destiny set center stage a fair-skinned woman, classic in profile, wearing a loose, flowing dress and serenely advancing with a schoolbook in hand. The star in her luxuriant hair announced her mission: to build an empire for liberty. Gast, drawing on an assemblage of images already made familiar by other U.S. artists, surrounded the woman with the players in the drama of continental transformation. From the east came farmers, prospectors, and Pony Express riders, their way lit by the rising sun. Behind them telegraph, railroad, and coach symbolized the binding together of newly won land. Before the forces of civilization, native peoples retreated in anger and disarray. Buffalo, bear, and wild horses joined the flight. They too were part of a wild but doomed world, bound to vanish into a dark and clouded west. Just as the natives would disappear in the face of civilization, so too would the gloom of barbarism be dispelled. Reproduced in inexpensive color, Gast’s rendition of an emerging national mythology circulated widely.

The painting was more than the depiction of an empty myth. Gast also captured a set of real developments that had already by then readied the United States to play a role as an international force. Americans had asserted control of a continent against the presence of other peoples and the claims of foreign powers. Within the newly secured national boundaries, they were developing a flourishing economy that was rapidly climbing to the first rank. Finally, they were forging a sturdy conception of their national identity that would carry over into the following century and beyond. A verse appearing in a Kansas newspaper in 1876, the centennial of national independence, captured the sense of American power that was both real and richly imagined:

The rudiments of Empire here,

Are plastic yet and warm:

The chaos of a mighty world

Is rounding into form.²

Although Gast and other Americans may have seen their nation as the special, providentially blessed progressive force, the work of global historians suggests a more complicated and interesting point about the origins of U.S. ascendancy. The emergence of the United States as an international power was inextricably tied to processes playing out around the world: the consolidation of settler societies, the rise of global capitalism, and the tightening grip of state-dominated nationalism. These foundational elements ultimately yielded a nation of exceptional power and certitude, but this process was both in its origins and in its outcome wholly unexceptional. At every critical point Americans operated in the nexus of forces operating across the North Atlantic world.

TERRITORIAL CONTROL

The peoples of European origin depicted advancing across Gast’s canvas were the spearheads of a settler colonialism increasingly commonplace from the sixteenth century onward. More and more Europeans—religious dissenters, prisoners, laborers, traders, displaced peasants, and colonial officials—left for strange lands. The United States along with other British settler enclaves—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—embodied one variation within the pattern of European settlement that was playing out across the world. While in the U.S. case the outcome was a dominant European population, in other cases the European presence either faded or became part of a cultural mix. Plantation societies of the sort that sprang up in the Caribbean and northeast Brazil had a few Europeans importing large numbers of laborers whose descendants would dominate demographically and create a plural society with coexisting cultures (for example, Malaysia and South Africa) or a creole society (as in Mexico). Instances of formal territorial control exercised by a handful of European administrators and soldiers (notably British India and the Dutch East Indies) or Europeans promoting trade from strategic overseas points such as Singapore or Goa left even less of a trace. The plantation society of the U.S. South with its enslaved labor represented a pattern of settlement with more in common with the Caribbean and Brazil than the rest of the United States to which it was linked politically—a useful reminder of marked variation possible even within one region.

British settlement in North America rolled forward territorially with such relentless success that it gives color to the later nationalist claim of predestination. The first settlements hugged the coast of New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas and struggled to maintain their numbers against disease, hunger, and the hostility of Native Americans. In 1700 native peoples constituted three-quarters of the population within the boundaries of what would become the United States. By 1820 Europeans were nearly 8 million out of a total of almost 10 million inhabitants, overshadowing both natives and a much expanded slave population. Demographic dominance in turn gave rise to rapid territorial growth, with the United States quadrupling in size during its first half century. The terms of the 1783 peace established control to the Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added a vast expanse west of the Mississippi. The succession of acquisitions between 1845 and 1867 rounded out the continental base. The total cost of expansion was three wars and the payment through various treaties of $55 million. Even recalculated into 2002 constant dollars, the total is just a bit over $1 billion—still a bargain!³

But to stop with this clinical description would be to fundamentally misconstrue a process that was also prolonged, complicated, and often violent. The push that put people of British birth or descent in control had two main but chronologically overlapping facets. It involved overwhelming indigenous peoples with a mix of epidemics, arms, and sheer weight of numbers and often at the same time beating back competing territorial claims laid down by European powers through diplomacy and warfare. This transcontinental drive played out in a series of contested borderlands marked in varying degrees by cultural mixing, economic exchange, open conflict, and the politics of accommodation. One such borderland was the Great Lakes region, the target of British and French imperial pretensions. The lower Missouri Valley was another; there Spain eclipsed France. The southern Great Plains was a zone of Spanish and then Mexican influence. In these regions, indigenous peoples such as the Iroquois, Osage, and Comanche played a central role.

In one borderland after another Anglo-Americans mastered both native peoples and European rivals to gain unquestioned control. The broad reasons for this success bear noting. To begin with, British settlers benefited, as did all Europeans, from the imported microbes and better weapons that devastated the native population, first at a distance and then in face-to-face conflict. In relation to other Europeans the growing power of the British state proved a distinct plus in organizing and defending settlements. Perhaps most important of all were demographic advantages. The dispossession of roughly half of the English rural population between 1530 and 1630 together with rapid population growth (a tripling between 1500 and 1800) created a large pool of potential migrants to North America. The French and Spanish peasant majority clung to their land, and the Dutch had too small a population to make a mark abroad, so Britain won the North American demographic race. Once peopled, the areas of British settlement prospered thanks not just to the rich resources at hand but also to their connection to a thriving British commercial empire and their exploitation of slave labor. Colonial output rose at an impressive rate—from 4 percent of England’s in 1700 to 40 percent seventy years later. By then colonial per capita income had surpassed that of the home island, and low taxes in North America further accentuated the difference in standard of living. Prosperity in turn ensured the resources needed to secure more North American land and support a rapidly growing and healthy population on it.⁴

Subordination of Native Americans

Gast invoked the nationalist myth of an empty continent, its original inhabitants having dwindled to a small band on its way to oblivion. Rather than a peaceful occupation, the encounter between settler and native calls to mind such brutal ethnic conflicts that have in our own time beset Israeli-occupied Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Russia’s Chechnya region, or Sudan. Claims to land are so closely tied to community identity, security, and livelihood that they seem to give rise to the most stubborn assertions of right and the cruel treatment of antagonists, including brutal enslavement and indiscriminate massacre. They also create a vicious climate of bigotry toward rivals for land.⁵

The subjugation of the Native Americans was a long-running drama of conquest. It began with their being entrenched in pockets from the Atlantic to the Pacific—at least 2 and perhaps as many as 10 million people living north of the Rio Grande before the first European settlements. On their first contact with Europeans, Indians were ravaged by diseases borne by these newcomers. Smallpox was perhaps the worst killer, racing through villages and along trade routes. Lacking immunity to maladies long endemic in Europe, Indians were especially vulnerable in time of hunger; entire groups could suffer losses as high as 90 percent over brief spans of time during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Direct contact brought additional death and suffering as Native Americans were outmatched by European military technology, overwhelmed by the burgeoning settler population, hemmed in territorially, and thrown into competition with other similarly beleaguered peoples for the shrinking resources of the continent.

Euro-American settlers, mainly of British origin, bore down relentlessly on indigenous peoples thus weakened and thrown on the defensive. Successive generations of frontier whites had viewed Indians not just as an impediment to acquiring new land cheaply but also as dangerous barbarians, to be segregated for better supervision or altogether removed beyond range of contact. A mailed fist and a readiness to use forceful if not brutal methods were essential to keeping them in check. Colonial New Englanders and residents of Virginia and the Carolinas had set the pattern. Colonial forces and their Indian allies had surrounded a Pequot village of some four hundred in 1637 and set it aflame. One of the expedition’s leaders explained that the “fiery Oven,” resulting in the death of nearly all the villagers, was God’s will. Two centuries later the governor of Georgia, a state synonymous among Cherokees with land grabbing, was equally ruthless in insisting that that the natives were an “ignorant, intractable, and savage people” and what they owned “civilized peoples had a right to possess.” Savages would have to go, treaties or no treaties. Though their resort to fraudulent and violent methods collided with humanitarian principles and legal agreements (including formal treaties), the political authorities and most Americans endorsed or acquiesced in the practice of Indian extermination and removal.⁶

By the early nineteenth century, the transplanted Europeans were able to assert their dominance confidently and at will. The federal government failed to enforce the very treaties that it had signed guaranteeing Indians even their diminished holdings, while states asserted their right to deal with natives as they wished. Those Indians who did make substantial progress toward assimilation, such as Cherokees, found whites insatiable in their appetite for land and unstoppable in their drive to acquire it. When local conflicts over land developed between settler and Indians, state authorities predictably favored their own. Attempts by native peoples to save themselves through alliances with Britain or France against their common enemy repeatedly ended in betrayal by their putative European allies and in brutal frontier warfare that invariably brought Indian defeat and white retribution. The victors then pushed the vanquished aside. Those who regretted the violence wished the process of dispossession to proceed as painlessly as possible. Jefferson captured this humanitarian impulse in comments to a gathering of Native Americans at the end of his presidency: “We wish you to live in peace, to increase in numbers. … In time you will be as we are: you will become one people with us: your blood will mix with ours.”⁷ This pious wish collided so violently with the facts on the ground that it is hard not to see it as hypocrisy or self-deception.

Andrew Jackson, an ambitious Tennessean and inveterate land speculator, shared none of Jefferson’s compassion. He embodied instead the settler drive to dominance that reached its climax in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indulging a violent streak, Jackson as general used the state militia to shatter the Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, and other Indians of the Southeast. Through a series of military campaigns and imposed treaties in the 1810s, he forced open to speculation and settlement Indian land accounting for three-fourths of the territory of Florida and Alabama, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and smaller fractions of Kentucky and North Carolina. Later, in the 1830s, Jackson as president set in motion the policy—described by him as “not only liberal, but generous”—of removing some sixty thousand Indians from their land. He articulated what had become the standard rationale for the looming extinction of the Indian. “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”⁸ By the 1840s the Indian question east of the Mississippi had been “solved” to settler satisfaction even if the eviction of native peoples and the possession of their land had involved fraud and force on a massive scale.

The process of subjugation was repeated west of the Mississippi in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to new technology in settler hands, especially rapid-fire guns, railroads, and telegraphs, the next round in the destruction of the American Indian proceeded just as inexorably and even more swiftly. Tribes long resident in the West and some ninety thousand Indians driven there from the East signed treaties with the federal government guaranteeing their land “as long as the waters run and the grass shall grow.” These treaties were then universally and systematically violated. The U.S. Army protected settlers and put down resistance. It dealt with Indians according to the principles of group responsibility, expected treachery and bad faith from them as a matter of course, and anticipated their ultimate extermination.

No strategy could blunt the settler demand for land backed by military might. Some tribes offered no resistance. Such was the case with the California Indians, who numbered one hundred thousand in 1848. In eleven years barbarous treatment reduced them to thirty thousand; by 1900 only fifteen thousand were left. Other tribes prudently retreated, seeking in renegotiated treaties to preserve some part of their ever-dwindling patrimony. Some, such as the Sioux, fought back, but even their small and temporary victories were purchased at the price of severe reprisals. The Nez Percé, successful livestock breeders living in the area of modern-day Idaho, tried a bit of all these coping mechanisms—to no avail. Chief Joseph explained to a congressional committee in 1879 how his people had cooperated with the U.S. government and sought to accommodate the growing press of settlers until the 1870s. But settlers with their insatiable greed stole land, horses, and cattle, and finally government officials announced the tribe was to be moved to a reservation in Oklahoma. When Chief Joseph attempted to lead the Nez Percé to refuge in Canada, U.S. forces followed in hot pursuit. In 1877 he struck a deal, surrendering on the condition that his people could return to Idaho. Betrayed, they were instead forced to go to Oklahoma, where many encountered disease and starvation. “When I think of our condition my heart is heavy,” he told the Congressmen. “I see men of my race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.”⁹

By the 1870s an American policy of continental expansion had run full course so far as the Indian was concerned. In 1871 (just as Gast was rendering his own version of this doleful drama) Congress stopped making new treaties, and old treaties, the Supreme Court had ruled the year before, were no longer binding. Whatever formal concessions Native Americans had negotiated would now depend on the pleasure of the U.S. government. Even cultural autonomy was denied to the Indian as the federal government extended its control over reservation life. The Dawes Act of 1887 completed the process of distributing tribal lands and undermining tribal power. In the 1890s the last spark of native resistance flickered out among a defeated, dispirited remnant. The massacre at Wounded Knee on 29 December 1890 conventionally and appropriately marks the end. A band of Lakota Sioux led by Big Foot were rounded up by a cavalry force with simple orders: “If he fights, destroy him.” Fearful Indians surrounded by impatient troopers on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation proved a volatile mix. What was to have been a peaceful surrender of weapons suddenly erupted in gunshots and then turned into a prolonged massacre. Nearly three hundred Sioux died, two-thirds of them women and children.¹⁰

Warfare, starvation, and exposure reduced the number of Indians living in the continental United States to about 6...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The American Ascendancy
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Framing the Question
• Chapter 1: Nineteenth-Century Foundations
• Chapter 2: Grand Projects, 1898–1920
• Chapter 3: The American Way in a Fragmenting World, 1921–1940
• Chapter 4: Reaching for Geopolitical Dominance, 1941–1968
• Chapter 5: In the American Image, 1941–1968
• Chapter 6: The Third-World Challenge, 1941–1968
• Chapter 7: Disoriented Giant, 1968–1991
• Chapter 8: The Neoliberal Triumph, 1991–
• Conclusion: Hegemony in Question
• Notes
• A Guide to the Literature
• Acknowledgments
• Index