St. Louis & Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest & Urban Crisis by Henry W. Berger (review)

With a book that either defies or transcends categorization, Henry W. Berger gives us a history of St. Louis from the perspective of its imperial aspirations as expressed through two hundred and fifty years of commercial initiatives. In "shifting and relocating the focus of foreign relations history from the traditional confines of nation-state formation," Berger does an admirable job of using St. Louis to demonstrate the domestic foundations of foreign policy while also evaluating the effect of international relations on a particular metropolitan area (1). He does so in service to two broad arguments: the first being that a succession of St. Louis's business and political elites possessed enduring confidence that their imperial endeavors would be of benefit not only to themselves but to the city and its environs; and the second being that those initiatives ultimately constituted a benign neglect of domestic affairs that resulted in great harm to the city and its people. In the final analysis, "Empire and community were profoundly discordant" (3).

Moving quickly through the early decades of St. Louis history as an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fur trade entrepôt and gateway to the West, Berger chooses Thomas Hart Benton as the first of several St. Louis elites whose careers he sketches from an imperial perspective. In the 1820s–1830s Benton rode a wave of populist support for efforts to carry the US flag into the trans-Mississippi West before crashing in the 1840s on the rocks of sectional differences involving the expansion of slavery in lands acquired following the Mexican-American War. Benton's dream of a transcontinental railroad moving west from St. Louis would never be realized and the east-west imperial ambitions of St. Louis's leadership would be reoriented to a north-south axis following the Civil War.

During the 1870s increased agricultural output and falling domestic prices drove a push by St. Louis business interests to open markets to the south—to Mexico and the Caribbean—as a chance to return to prosperity. Henry Clay Pierce became a key figure in trade between St. Louis and Mexico and eventually became a major investor in Mexican railroads. When Mexico entered a protracted Revolutionary period Pierce found himself, along with other American imperialists, in the middle of a complex situation that culminated in the nationalizing of many Mexican businesses—at great loss to US investors.

Berger moves into the twentieth century and traces the opportunities presented for St. Louis elites to hitch a ride on American imperial initiatives surrounding the opening of the Panama Canal and followed closely by World War I. Shoes (Brown Shoe Company) and beer (Anheuser-Busch) produced in the St. Louis metropolitan area were soon being sold around the world, but with particular success in the newly opened China market thanks to the leadership of entrepreneurs such as Leonidas Dyer and Arthur Bostwick. In World War I pharmaceutical companies such as the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works and the Monsanto Chemical Company make great inroads in markets stretching from Europe to Asia while St. Louis politician David R. Francis became the United States ambassador to Russia—just in time for the Russian Revolution.

St. Louis was particularly hard hit by the Great Depression but by the early 1940s St. Louis business and political elites such as Charles J. Hardy, Arthur Holly Compton, and Stuart Symington parlayed alliances and relationships with the Roosevelt administration into lucrative war supply contracts that made St. Louis a major player in the emerging military-industrial-academic complex. Berger explains, however, how the success of such industrial giants such as the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, "postponed and disguised the deterioration of the industrial central core of St. Louis" (199). The city's population peaked at about 850,000 in 1950 but by then was already a shrinking portion of the wider metropolitan area.

In the second half of the twentieth century corporate giants such as Anheuser...