America, Empire of Freedom?

In the shadow of the financial crisis, America is searching its soul. The country has done so since the first Europeans came ashore, but the relationship between empire, freedom and faith is still paradoxical. Can Obama untie the Gordian Knot?

Woodrow Wilson was the first president to travel abroad. Fully loaded with principles of democracy, freedom and cooperation, he came to Europe to set the terms of the peace negotiations with Germany at the end of World War I. In Europe he was greeted by Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd Georges of Great Britain, both a bit more cynical and realistic than the American president: “God gave us 10 Commandments, and we broke them. Wilson gives us 14 Points…we’ll see how it goes.”

And it went the way it was bound to when morals and principles met cold reality after a war that cost tens of millions of lives. The world was given the League of Nations. The League of Nations was created by Woodrow Wilson, but Congress stopped America from ever joining.

Anecdotes like this are common in a book newly published in Britain: “America, Empire of Liberty.” The book is written by David Reynolds, professor of American History at Cambridge University. Over 600-some pages Reynolds delivers a fascinating and beautifully written portrait of the huge continent, from the first-known newcomers some 12,000 years ago up until Barack Obama’s inauguration as president.

Despite the large span of time, there is never any doubt as to Reynold’s key aim (by page 10 he’s already on Columbus and European immigration). He is interested in the time after the revolution in 1776, and he uses three concepts to explain the country’s history: liberty, empire and faith.

The writer says that “in American history, empire has often been the silent dance partner of liberty.” And faith dances willingly when the Stars and Stripes are on the move. Like when George Bush, one year after the U.S. invaded Iraq, said the following: “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”

His father stopped after Kuwait. Though George W. Bush conducted something that looked dangerously like a crusade, the first Bush would not answer Iraqi aggression towards Kuwait by making the U.S. an occupant in a hostile country. The older Bush had solid predecessors like George Washington and John Quincy Adams, who said that it was not America’s mission to go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”

The title of the book was inspired by a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison: “We should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation.” Jefferson was an anti-imperialist and it was England’s imperialist burden that America got rid of through independence. With independence as a backdrop, America built its own empire using war and money; an empire of liberty based on slavery and the extermination of the indigenous people of its continent, the purchase of an enormous area of land from France when Napoleon needed funds to invade England, war on Mexico who lost New Mexico and California, war on Spain, Cuba, the Philippines, the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1868 for 7.2 million dollars – a trade many Americans thought was idiotic. Even as late as 1950, when there was talk of drilling for oil through the permafrost, the plan was rejected by many experts who claimed that the cost of drilling would amount to five dollars per barrel, and that the world would never see such a high price.

The Civil War, which cost more American lives than both world wars, has a central place in Reynolds’ book because of his emphasis on the concept of “liberty.” After this war, America went from being a plural noun (The United States are a republic) to a singular one (the United States is…). With it, the nation of the United States was created. Reynolds especially points to Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, where neither the term “union” nor “states” was used. “Nation,” however, was used 5 times in the 272 word speech. But paradoxes abound here as well. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, and Lincoln was only moderately interested in the fate of the slaves; it was first and foremost the Union he wanted to save.

And how free did the slaves really become? America did rid itself of slavery, but a new type of segregation was put in place: not between slave and freeman, but between black and white. Reynolds includes a horrible scene from the second World War, in Kansas, USA, where white American officers had dinner with German officer-prisoners while the black American soldiers had to eat in a separate building. It was not until the time of Lyndon B. Johnson, who is remembered more for Vietnam than for his work for racial equality, that the “all men are created equal” phrase from the Constitution became a part of American society, more or less. America still has a ways to go.

In this time of financial crisis it is interesting to note one name that echoes through Reynold’s book from Wilson’s attempt at making “the world safe for democracy” after World War I until the present day: John Maynard Keynes, the economist. Keynes left Lloyd Georges’ delegation in protest against the harsh terms Germany was given. “If I was in Germany’s place I would rather die than sign such an agreement,” he said. Keynes reappears under Roosevelt, who did not understand what Keynes was talking about at all, and again under Nixon, who said that “we are all Keynesian now” and finally, of course, in today’s crisis where Barack Obama does his best to fulfill Keynes idea of huge budget deficits to “cross the abyss before it is too late.” Perhaps Obama and the rest of the world has made it this time?

Limited space forbids me to dive deeper into the enormous space that Reynolds requires. His landscape is enormous, but he is able to keep focus enough to clarify the balancing act of the three terms he has chosen to concentrate on. The journalist does take over from the historian at the end of the book, however: Reynolds does not dare to draw the long historic line on into Barack Obama’s time. It is understandable, but it a shame, because many of the problems he faces are the same as previous presidents faced.

But Reynolds cannot be misunderstood in his choice between American realism and Wilsonian Messianism, or between Bush the elder and Bush the younger. Had George W. Bush spoken more to his father and less with “the Father,” the last few years of American history could have looked rather different. Barack Obama’s presidency would look different, too.