In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Introduction We cannot end the war by protest or begging. We must begin to take apart the institutions which carry it on. Our fight to stop the war and democratize the university are the same.”1 These emotive words, taken from a protest flyer titled “The War Is Coming Home,” were written by members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in November 1968. Distributed at the University of Wisconsin (UW), the year after violent clashes between the police and student antiwar protestors, they became a clarion call for the New Left to fight US imperialism by attacking authority in all its guises. The radicals’ immediate objective was to depose UW’s administrators, who allegedly collaborated with corporate America by allowing Dow Chemical (the company that manufactured napalm) to recruit on campus, but the ultimate goal was the destruction of the US government; only revolution would enable the impassioned dissidents to “nail the war-makers against the wall” and reform the capitalist structures they believed made imperialism inevitable.2 This fervent Marxist rhetoric was typical of the radical New Left during the 1960s. As the Vietnam War escalated, the radical students moved away from the Port Huron Statement (which had initially positioned the New Left as a break from the past) and embraced critiques of US imperialism that were influenced by the Old Left. In particular they venerated scholars like William Appleman Williams, whose conception of US expansion had much in common with the progressive interpretations of the 1930s; they found Williams’s critique particularly attractive because it contextualized the Cold War as part of a broader history of US imperialism. According to the New Left, protecting the ostensibly democratic South Vietnamese regime from communism was not US policymakers’ primary aim; rather, the Vietnam War was designed to protect the United States’ burgeoning empire from revolutionary nationalism in the developing world. The war was not a mistake, the student radicals cried, it was systemic: the culmination of Americans’ longstanding penchant for economic 4 E Introduction expansion and a by-product of the United States’ capitalist economy. As a result, the critical concept of US imperialism was disseminated for the very first time. This prompted a fierce intellectual debate that began in classrooms but soon spilled over onto the streets of America. The assertion that the United States was an imperial nation was as contentious an assertion as it was possible to make. To be imperialist was un-American; to call the United States imperialist was especially un-American. The New Left, however, relished their dissidence. Many radical students and intellectuals came to see themselves as revolutionaries fighting capitalism and imperialism alongside fellow Marxists across the world. In an essay titled “Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin,” Carl Oglesby, the former president of SDS, argued that there was no solution short of social revolution for the New Left, because there was “no totalizing philosophy of revolution” other than MarxismLeninism for student radicals to follow.3 Having embraced this radical ideology, the radical New Left committed itself to a Marxist-Leninist view of imperialism too. They adopted the same narrow interpretation of US foreign policy as international revolutionaries like the talismanic Che Guevara, who argued that imperialism was an inevitable consequence of capitalism. In doing so they subscribed to economic determinism: the conviction that a country’s economic structure determined its development. This was not a sophisticated perspective, nor was it original, but it possessed a powerful logic that complemented the radical New Left’s political aspirations. Because the radicals proposed a Marxist critique of US imperialism at the height of the Cold War, a time when orthodox scholars depicted the United States as a defensively minded nation fighting a malevolent Soviet imperialism, an association between radicalism and the concept of American imperialism became entrenched. Yet two decades after the fall of Saigon, it became increasingly common for orthodox historians to discuss the subject of American empire without prejudice. Whereas historians were once “frightened” of discussing US imperialism because the term was “so politicized and rife with pejorative connotations ,” there eventually appeared to be “appreciable common ground and at least some agreement on the existence of an American empire” among “historians trying to see the bigger picture.” Indeed, at the start of the new millennium , Edward Crapol argued that “coming to terms with American empire and the nation’s imperial history” was “the key to understanding the United States’ role in the world.” Claiming that US imperialism “appears to...

Share