Get your knife and fork out for another generous helping of US history. America’s appetite for books about itself is insatiable, and Magoc and Bernstein have certainly done their best to satisfy it. Their book is nothing if not ambitious. It covers a good deal of America’s foreign relations and all of its military ventures in one gulp – a heroic undertaking. The coverage is both home and foreign: it starts with the English colonists’ early dealings with the Algonquins and the Iroquois; then Polk’s disputes with the Mexicans and the British in the 1840s; then the Indian wars, the Spanish-American war, the world wars, Korea and Vietnam; then, to end with, a section entitled The Lone Superpower – Somalia, drone strikes and relations with Iran.
“Imperialism” is almost a dirty word in the US, but, for 70 years, it was the Soviet Union’s main charge against it. America, although a supposedly peaceable republic pre-occupied with cultivating its own back yard, has become a country of global interests and frequent interventions. Because our two editors use the term “imperialism” in their title, let us do a simple comparison. We begin with the age of “high” imperialism, circa 1900: in those days, the European powers favoured colonies and protectorates. Old maps showed pink for the British empire and green for the French and so on. The European states were unapologetic. Colonial wars were just “the froth which the wave of civilization creates as it advances” (Lord Salisbury). London and Paris ruled: no nonsense. Even Denmark had colonies.
The American case offers a marked contrast. For a hundred years, the USA expanded internally, so to speak – a process dealt with in the first six sections of the book. That process was brutal and direct. But abroad, America does it differently. It favours a balanced mix of arms-length manipulation and troops on the ground – but no annexations. As regards the first of these techniques, it builds alliance systems with itself at the centres such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); it subsidises third-world regimes, so long as they behave in conformity with America’s interests (Egypt); it bankrolls and equips regimes which agree to act as an extension arm of American policy (Israel); it intrigues through the Corporate Finance Agency (CIA), so as to produce “acceptable” election returns (Italy after the war); it engineers violent coups to preserve US economic interests (Chile under Allende) and it imposes treaties which give it carte blanche to intervene (Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1901). But on the second point, it often “puts its money where its mouth is” and sends troops. The result of these measures has been to construct a network of client states and quasi-colonies such as the Philippines and Panama.
Now to the book itself. Magoc and Bernstein (history professors at Mercyhurst University, Pennsylvania and Denison University, Ohio) have organized the material in the following way. There are 14 topical sections. Each one has its own time frame and covers a specific area of policy that may also correspond with a geographical area, e.g. American Expansion into Latin America and Asia, 1899-1945. Taking the book overall, the terminal dates are 1754-2014. There are four chronologies located at various points throughout the book. Each section begins with a few pages of historical overview and ends with a collection of primary documents (note the phrase Document Collection in the title). Placed end to end, the documents would comprise 375 pages – around a quarter of the whole. Let us dispose of these quickly. These include a diverse mixture of passages, both official and private. There are even some song lyrics. They are useful as far as they go but unlikely to meet a student’s requirements on their own.
Deciding what to cover under the terms “Imperialism” and “Expansionism” is not easy. Some entries fall solidly into the category expansion: e.g. the Trail of Tears (the forcible expulsion of the Cherokee Indians, 1830s), the Gold Rushes and the Purchase of Alaska in 1867. Other entries have a weaker relevance to the main theme: e.g. McCarthyism and the Russo-Japanese War (the peace mediated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905).
The articles themselves provide the usual mixture of items: treaties, social groups and native tribes, wars, rebellions and battles, disputes and crises and lastly – proclamations and addresses. Other entries are biographical. Out of 830 articles in total, around a fifth are biographies. A few of the presidents are included, but the choice is sometimes odd. Kennedy gets an entry but not LBJ, although Vietnam was very much “Johnson’s war”. There is no entry on Reagan either, although his eight years contained a lot of foreign policy: the Iran-Nicaragua business, Grenada in 1983 and the murder of marines in Beirut. Both of these men can be accessed through the index, but the omissions are surprising given that foreign policy is the one area which presidents can treat almost as a personal fiefdom and where they may act without the say-so of Congress. You do not need congressional approval to conduct foreign and defence policy – unless troops are committed or a treaty is involved.
At this point, I would like to discuss another aspect of the book. The title includes the word “cultural” – a factor that is easily overlooked in foreign relations. Joseph Nye introduced the notion of culture as a form of influence in his book Bound to Lead, 1990. As an organising concept, Nye introduced the idea of “soft power” (also an entry in this book). If an alien influence, be it economic or cultural, is implanted in one’s home country by a foreign power, it may become part of one’s mental furniture, a thing to be identified with. This could include a Chevrolet sold in South Africa or Big Macs in Thailand. We all know about the power of United Fruit Co. in Central America and Anaconda Copper in Chile. Elvis Presley may have done more for American world power than any aircraft carrier. It also applies to Hollywood: everything from Dr Strangelove and the Green Berets, to Top Gun and Full Metal Jacket (all covered in the book). The entries are not as numerous as the political side, nor should they be, but they are still significant: Coca Cola, Tarzan films, Jazz, Country and Western music, Anti-war Protest Songs, even an entry on children’s toys! There is also an article on Western artists: the work of figures such as John Gast in painting and William Henry Jackson in photography made the American West look beautiful (which it often was) and romantic (which it was not). But like dime novels, they whetted New Yorkers’ appetite for the West. The editors and their small army of contributors (about 150) have tried hard to be comprehensive. Each article is signed and ends with further reading; there is also a short bibliography at very end and a 15-page index. The book is decorated with black and white pictures every few pages, but they do not add much to the overall value. This encyclopaedia is available in print in four volumes, but I have based this review on the e-book. It is easily navigated and pleasant to use. This work is a good contribution to its field because it is big and detailed enough to get to grips with the subject. As for the documents, students who wish to embellish their work with quotations from primary material might value the extracts, but, that apart, such a brief selection seems pointless to me. Better a shorter book at a lower price.
