Into New Territory: American Historians and the Concept of U.S. Imperialism by James G. Morgan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Into New Territory: American Historians and the Concept of U.S. Imperialism by James G. Morgan Jeremi Suri James G. Morgan, Into New Territory: American Historians and the Concept of U.S. Imperialism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 282 pp. $34.95. Until the 1950s the Northeast dominated the study of foreign policy in the United States. Prominent attorneys, business leaders, and Ivy League scholars emphasized the democratic and nationalist impulses behind American activities abroad. The Council on Foreign Relations, founded in New York in the years after the First World War, promoted former President Woodrow Wilson’s promise to make the world “safe for democracy.” During the 1930s and 1940s it became a center for defining the American “national interest” in defeating fascism and rebuilding Western Europe and Japan after the next war. James Morgan’s deeply researched book examines how the northeastern dominance of American foreign policy discourse shifted, at least partially, to the Midwest in the late 1950s. This was a change in assumptions that occurred before the Vietnam War and the domestic debates of the 1960s. Morgan shows how a small and somewhat marginal group of scholars, located around the University of Wisconsin in Madison, developed a critique of what they came to call “American Empire.” According to their analysis, the United States pursued a series of overseas expansionist activities that served the purposes of various business and political interests, but undermined the democratic principles and economic wellbeing of many citizens. In the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Western Europe, and Japan these scholars diagnosed needless American military and economic commitments that detracted from needs at home. The northeastern “experts” who advocated these actions benefited [End Page 154] from expansion, while citizens in other regions contended with higher prices and depleted investments in local institutions. American empire was a challenge to democratic control of the nation’s resources. Morgan is cogent in his argument that the midwestern critics were neither isolationist nor Marxist. They recognized that the United States needed an international presence, and they did not assume that capitalist processes made foreign wars inevitable. Quite the contrary, these critics emphasized the wide range of choices available to American leaders, and they criticized the unwillingness of men like William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt to avoid the temptations of empire. For each of these presidents, and others, they counseled for less military activity abroad and more collaboration with diverse foreign regimes. Instead of spreading “democracy,” they wanted the United States to encourage cohabitation with difference. The critique of American empire developed around the University of Wisconsin, Morgan shows, because of a deep progressive tradition in Madison. The distance from New York and Washington, D.C., meant that residents of this small and vibrant community could resist the pressures to comport with powerful urban economic and political interests. Instead, Madison attracted scholars, politicians, and small business figures who wanted to preserve local control, increase equality, and improve the general welfare of citizens. The culture of the University of Wisconsin encouraged experimentation with reforms, often influenced by foreign models, that focused on the domestic needs of farmers, small town residents, and children. This was the famous “Wisconsin Idea”—fusing scholarship, social justice, and public policy. The historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard were the key inspirations for scholars in the 1950s. Their ideas about the frontier and the northeastern perversions of the national interest inspired the figures at the center of Morgan’s book: Fred Harvey Harrington and William Apple-man Williams. These two men, and their many students (some of whom Morgan interviewed), articulated the progressive Wisconsin critique of American foreign policy that gained traction in the decades after 1959—the year Williams published his famous book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In contrast to leftist writers before and after, Williams clung to an alternative path for the United States that renounced foreign military intervention and rapacious economic activities for international cooperation and [End Page 155] mutually beneficial economic development. Williams described the Cold War as a continued departure from democracy and international cooperation, driven by exaggerated fears of communism and organized profit-driven interests, still largely based...