Ronald D. Traylor

History 6393

Review One

January 26, 2000

Van Alstyne, Richard W. The Rising American Empire. New York: Blackwell and

Mott, Ltd., 1960.

Richard W. Van Alstyne, in The Rising American Empire, followed the growth of the United States from the Colonial Period through the beginning of the first Wilson administration of the Twentieth Century. He concentrated on such topics as the relationship between the United States and France during the Revolutionary and the Federalist Periods, as well as the early appearance by the United States as a world power. He also examined the attitude of the United States toward the North American possessions of other nations, the acquisition of a territorial empire in the Pacific, the Caribbean and Latin America, and United States attempts at hegemony in the Far East. Throughout his discussion of such critical topics ran a deeper current in which Van Alstyne insisted that the American empire, both economic and physical, possessed roots in the Colonial Period that clearly predated the Frederick Jackson Turner frontier thesis. It is this consistent obsession by the United States for growth, rather than the better known historical nuts and bolts that I hope to address here. Of additional interest, and worth mention here, is how Van Alstyne in his investigation of the century and a half under consideration, managed to invalidate a number of what he clearly considered dearly held American myths.

Van Alstyne claimed that a propensity toward empire among the English colonists of the Atlantic seaboard was entirely natural, given their familiarity with the British Empire already in place. The colonists supported westward expansion by the Crown, a support that lost no momentum with the advent of independence. In the face of Montesquieu’s opinion that a large nation did not lend itself to the republican form of government, American leaders such as Benjamin Franklin and James Madison did what American leaders often did when faced with public actions that flew in the face of political theory. Realizing early on that westward movement and the attendant gain of territory was impossible to stop, Franklin suggested that the Republic might survive in spite of its size through the creation of a strong central government to deal justly with the national interest and to guarantee equal rights for all citizens. Madison put a further positive spin on the predicament by maintaining that, although limits to growth surely existed, an expansive nation might serve to protect the minority from abuse by the majority. To be fair to Madison, such temporizing was not all pure damage control, for as Walter LaFeber observed, "Jefferson tended to visualize America as Americans hoped it would be. Madison analyzed and prescribed for Americans as they actually were and would be." Drew R. McCoy, in The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, explained how eighteenth century thinkers saw socioeconomic development as a succession of stages, beginning with hunting, the lowest level. Society then progressed to pasturage, then to agriculture, and then on to commerce. After commerce came corruption and decline. Critical to such development was time. Madison and others such as Jefferson saw the added space offered by a growing frontier as an impediment to the total time necessary for the completion of all the stages and the unavoidable descent into dissolution.

Van Alstyne said that the idea that the North American continent "belonged, as of right, to the people of the thirteen colonies of the Atlantic seaboard" saw its origins with the American colonies of the seventeenth century and their obsession with French possessions on the common frontier, especially Acadia and Canada. Van Alstyne said that the hunger for expansion and the perceived need for security by the colonies and the Crown led ultimately to the eighteenth century expulsion of the French from both Canada and the trans-Alleghenies. In an interesting aside, Van Alstyne questioned the American habit in later years of giving neutral names to wars which stressed the involvement of others (King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War, and the French and Indian War, which Van Alstyne insisted should more correctly be called the Great War for Empire) and minimized the colonial obsession with expansion and security that played such a large role in starting each war.

Van Alstyne also commented on what Walter LaFeber referred to as the "dilemma of a so-called ‘American isolationism’…a longing for landed and/or commercial expansion without having to make requisite political commitments." This hesitancy of the United States to make foreign commitments led to the myth of the United States as an isolationist nation, but nothing is further from the truth. Both Van Alstyne and La Feber noted the distinction that Americans (and more importantly, in this instance, the British) made between neutrality and isolation. The United States preferred to have its cake and eat it too in an environment of neutrality on its own terms. That America played an active role in its relationships with other nations is evidenced by the list of countries from which it received territory, either by treaty, purchase, deception, or war. The governments of England, France, Spain, Russia, Hawaii, and Mexico witnessed a very aggressive America, willing to treat when possible but resorting to other forms of suasion when necessary. It was a far cry from the isolationist nation of myth.

Throughout The Rising American Empire, Van Alstyne ascribed America’s drive for empire to nationalism. He acknowledged the importance of the economic factor to the growth of the nation, but gave it no more importance than any other determinant. This study, published in 1960, was contemporary to Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy, but I found no reference to Tragedy, and except for a single citation late in the book for American-Russian Relations, 1781-1917, found no mention of Williams. Van Alstyne mentioned the Open Door Policy several times early in the book, each time maintaining that policy was not uniquely American, but rather a recapitulation of British policy couched in American terms. Then, within the last few pages of the text, Van Alstyne, almost out of the blue, stressed the failure of the Open Door Policy in American diplomacy. I am perhaps completely off base, but it seems possible that Van Alstyne’s book was nearly ready for the publisher when he heard about or read Tragedy. The comments at book’s end served as an acknowledgement of Williams’ work, as well as Van Alstyne’s disapproval of it.

The Rising American Empire was not a groundbreaking book like Tragedy, but few are. It followed the pattern of most pre-revisionist work, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Van Alstyne did good, solid work in presenting the creation of the American empire, and if he did not present some grand, overarching new thesis (the historical equivalent of a Unified Field Theory), he nevertheless gave substance to a subject where my knowledge was sadly lacking. Of special interest to me was the delight he took in exposing the mythconceptions of accepted American history. It was a good read and an informative volume that educated me.