Although he might not have known it, George W. Bush was a Wilsonian. He entered the White House swearing off “nation building,” but choose advisors who adhered to Woodrow Wilson’s dream of exporting American ideals on the shoulders of troops sent overseas. Even before entering World War I, Wilson’s incursion into Mexico “inaugurated a tradition in U.S. foreign policy—a militarized approach to ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ regimes in the name of democracy promotion.”
So writes British historian David Milne in Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Farrar Straus & Giroux). An account of American foreign policy at once dense with information yet written with such elegant élan that the theory and practice of statecraft becomes compellingly readable. Milne brings to life nine leading figures in the development of American thinking about the nation’s role in the world, weaving formative moments in their biographies with the policies they advocated.
Among the most prescient of them was Alfred Thayer Mahan, who imagined America would become a great power not through empire building but by constructing a network of bases across the globe sustained by compliant allies and enabling the projection of force to protect U.S. economic interests. The world Mahan envisioned in 1890 has largely come to pass.
Barack Obama occupies Worldmaking’s final chapter. Milne approvingly defines him as a pragmatist, skeptical of Wilsonian utopia building, flexible in his methods and “decrying the consequences of following theories and ideologies unshackled from historical precedent.”
Damn Yankees! Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South (Louisiana State University Press), by George C. Rable
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War encourages demonization: opponents become a composite of all the worst human traits, assuming they are human at all. Fought with words as well as bullets, the Civil War inflamed the already dry tinder of distrust between North and South. In Damn Yankees! University of Alabama history professor George C. Rable examines the South’s demonization of Northerners, less from the words of Confederate leaders than from the letters, diaries and editorials of its citizens. He finds vituperation widespread across genders and classes. Even the Confederacy’s Native American allies agreed with a Richmond journalist who called Yankees a “vast assemblage of pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, infidels, and sharpers.”
Henry Clay: America’s Greatest Statesman (Da Capo), by Harlow Giles Unger
Henry Clay was the kind of politician many of today’s politicians claim to despise—a compromiser. But in Harlow Giles Unger’s carefully considered biography of the 19th century leader, compromise not only is the heart of statecraft but was the one thing that saved the U.S. from splintering in its early years. Idealists during Clay’s lifetime and after have denounced the longtime Congressman from Kentucky for compromising on slavery—they charge him with selling America’s ideals short, and managing only to delay but not prevent the Civil War. Correct as they may be, Unger points to Clay’s other accomplishments, which include the investment in infrastructure that set the foundation for America’s emergence as an economic power.
Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (Hill and Wang), by Michael A. McDonnell
Victors write history, but Michael A. McDonnell lets the defeated Native Americans have their say in his account of the Indians of the Upper Midwest. Masters of Empire strives to reconstruct the world of the region’s first nations (including the Menomonee and Potawatomi) as they encountered French and British traders and, soon enough, the Americans who eventually expelled them from their lands and confined them to reservations. Perhaps with the benefit of distance, the Australian historian has traced a new map for a critical period of American history, one that locates Green Bay and the Straits of Mackinac at the center of events.
Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931-1950 (University of Texas Press), by Jeffrey L. Meikle
They still turn up at antique malls, those strangely hyper-real postcards of America from the 1920s through 1950s—the best ones printed on linen like tiny painted canvases. University of Texas American studies professor Jeffrey L. Meikle investigates the artifacts in a book as beautifully produced as the best of those cards. Postcard America focuses on one particular producer, Curt Teich, a Chicago printing and design firm that left behind a copious archive. Whether or not Teich’s artisans had a conscious agenda beyond profitability, they mass-produced depictions of the U.S. as a land of utopian promise with blemishes omitted. The central images, rendered in color-saturated simulations made possible by new technology, often depicted modernity against the wonders of the landscape.
