America, War and Power: Defining the State, 1775–2005 (review)

In 2005 a group of distinguished historians and political scientists gathered in Indianapolis for a symposium inspired by the recent publication of Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton’s book The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000. In that study, Anderson and Cayton challenged what they saw as a dominant “grand narrative” of an “exceptional” American history in which the War for Independence, Civil War, and World War II “punctuate an otherwise fundamentally peaceful pattern of settlement and economic growth” (p. x). Instead, Anderson and Cayton argued for incorporating these wars into a narrative that emphasizes the United States’s irrepressible pursuit of empire, and contended that other conflicts in the past three hundred years deserve at least equal attention from historians as the “big three”.

Students of the American military and its history will find much of interest and value in this compilation of essays from the Indianapolis symposium. Following a foreword by Anderson and Cayton, co-editor A. James Fuller’s introductory essay surveys literature on the theme of American exceptionalism and offers synopses of the essays that follow. The first of these, by Jeremy Black, looks at the early history of the United States in the context of arguments for American exceptionalism (a notion he, as do other contributors, argues must be reconsidered if not discarded altogether) and reminds readers of the military’s centrality in defining early American culture and politics. This is followed by Robert E. May’s fascinating examination of how American filibusters fostered an image of the United States before the Civil War as a “rogue” actor in world affairs (in which May points out ironic parallels to how American leaders today speak of governments they find objectionable), and Carol Reardon’s equally compelling study of how Northern and Southern veterans of the Civil War responded to the dramatic expansion of the United States’s role on the world stage during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Edward O. Frantz then looks at Dwight Eisenhower and how his military experiences colored his response to the civil rights movement during the 1950s. How American political leaders made distinctions between the Soviet Union and international communism in their approach to the Cold War is the subject of R. William Ayres’s essay, while Chester Pach looks at the relationship of the American media and the war in Vietnam. Next, William R. Thompson presents a fascinating case that the United States’s rise to become the world’s leading superpower was not exceptional, but simply followed a pattern in world history in which profound economic and technological changes and the reshuffling of world power have been interconnected. In his essay, Steven W. Hook provides a political scientist’s perspective on the matter of American exceptionalism and the institutions that shape and guide America’s current relations with the world. Co-editor Lawrence Sondhaus then closes the book by challenging recent arguments regarding the merits of emphasizing “soft power” in the United States’s dealings with the world.

It is an impressive compilation of essays, all of which are distinguished by thorough research, are clearly written, and contain a wealth of information and provocative arguments. Hopefully, the book’s absurdly high price will not prove too much of an impediment to its reaching the sort of audience it merits.