Melville Among the Cannibals and American Empire

Melville Among the Cannibals and American Empire T. WALTER HERBERT Southwestern University F ollowing the atrocities of September 11, 2001, American opinionmakers debated whether the United States has a global empire. The world-wide reach of America’s political, economic, cultural and military power was canvassed, and earlier empires—British, French, Dutch, Spanish , Japanese, Russian—were invoked for uneasy comparison, uneasy because those other empires are dead. At first the debate took on an assertive, confident tone, adapted to counter the humiliation inflicted by Al Qaeda. Those like Gore Vidal, who deplore American imperialism, pointed to the damage it does and the resentment it provokes, but did not consider the prospect of imperial decline. Celebrants of American power warned against denial. We’ve got an empire—argued Michael Ignatieff and Max Boot—and we’d better run it right.1 The United States was born fighting the British Empire, so the term “empire” has a negative connotation for Americans, as when Ronald Reagan referred to the “evil Empire” of the Soviet Union. “The Empire Strikes Back,” in the Star Wars series, featured a technologically advanced tyrannical power trying to stamp out endearing rag-tag freedom fighters. So it was no surprise to find George W. Bush assuring cadets at West Point that “America has no empire to extend.”2 In a limited sense, President Bush was right: the United States does not establish and enforce laws for subject nations, nor do we tax them directly, nor do we draft their men to fill out the ranks of our armed forces. But direct rule C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 See Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: the Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden.” The New York Times Magazine. January 5, 2003; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Vidal, Gore. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (New York: Nation Books, 2002). 2 “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2002, http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 71 T . W A L T E R H E R B E R T is not the only way to exercise and maintain global power; and where global power is used to enlarge itself and to transfer wealth from subject nations to the master state, the core features of imperial dominion are present. Nationalist ebullience has drained out of these debates in recent years, as the so called “global war on terror,” has turned into a self-defeating fiasco that has increased the danger of further atrocities, and has been accompanied by hitherto unthinkable moral and legal transgressions. If Americans are unable to mend the twisted thinking that produced this catastrophe, it may become apparent that the American empire is passing into decline. The war in Iraq will not collapse the global power of the United States, but may serve as a dress rehearsal for that collapse, tracing out fateful patterns of self-delusion and selfdefeat . The names and dates are new in the current war of words over American imperialism, but the governing conceptions were already traditional a hundred and fifty years ago. They were explored in Typee, Herman Melville’s 1846 account of his sojourn with the Taipi tribe in the Marquesas Islands. The Marquesas were well known in Melville’s time because they provided a stage on which the drama of empire was played out, and the Taipis figured large in debates about America’s place in that drama. Prominent Americans wrote up their encounters with the Taipis, and in his novel, Melville criticized the imperialist perspectives that...