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SEIZING DESTINY: How America Grew From Sea to Shining Sea, by Richard Kluger. Knopf, 672 pp.
Remember "the American Century"? It was in early 1941 that Henry Luce - the founder of Time, Life
and Fortune magazines, and a man habitually prone to thinking large - laid claim to the entire era on behalf of the
United States. We had, wrote Luce, to face "our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation of the world,
and in consequence to assert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such
means as we see fit."
At the time, aggressive totalitarian regimes were on the march across Europe and beyond. The
impending involvement of the United States in World War II was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. But Luce still had bigger
fish to fry; he was anticipating, and demanding, the creation of a globe remade in the American image. He justified this grand
mission by solemn references to Justice and Truth, among other inspiringly capitalized abstract nouns. It was the only future
really worthy of our great past.
As slogans went, "the American Century" had a certain catchy grandeur - one it would
be difficult to improve upon. (No accident that neoconservative blueprints for U.S. foreign policy were drawn up in the 1990s
by a think tank called the Project for the New American Century.)
Richard Kluger's new book, Seizing Destiny:
How America Grew From Sea to Shining Sea, is, in some ways, a prolonged meditation on the origins of the American Century.
He is far more critical of the idea than Luce or his epigones ever were. But he concurs that the doctrine of a global American
mission has deep roots in the nation's past.
Kluger, a prolific novelist and popular historian, won the Pulitzer Prize
10 years ago for Ashes to Ashes, his account of the American cigarette industry. He is master of a kind of sweeping
but detailed historical synthesis that is held together through the force of a lively but unobtrusive prose style.
In
Seizing Destiny, he looks at the contemporary map of the United States with an eye to the question we ordinarily
tend not to ask: How did it come to pass that a country quite young by global standards came to span an entire continent?
With hindsight, that outcome seems inevitable. (The one catchy slogan more prophetic than Luce's being, after all,
"Manifest Destiny.") But its realization was a drawn-out process, taking most of five centuries to realize, and it left an
imprint on the nation it created - "as if," in Kluger's words, "the American soul and the American soil were inextricably
linked."
The idea that subduing the untamed landscape was the defining experience for our national identity is not
a new one. Frederick Jackson Turner first put forward his "Frontier Thesis" in 1893, explaining that American institutions
and culture had been formed by the lure of the vast undeveloped zone to the west. The tensions and conflicts of urban life
- the burdens of order and civilization - were conditioned by the possibility of escape. You could always, like Huck Finn,
"light out for the Territories."
Academic historians have had decades to debate and criticize this theory, and so
they have. But its intuitive appeal remains powerful - even, perhaps especially, now that the West has long been closed. Kluger
seems to be an unabashed Turnerite. "In that raw frontier society," he writes, "the fittest did far better than survive, the
grasping had a field day, and those of faint heart or will won scant sympathy."
Such attitudes outlasted the frontier
that bred them. "Crafting their own destiny with whatever tools were at hand," the pioneers "gained a continental expanse
by means of daring, cunning, bullying, bluff and bluster, treachery, robbery, quick talk, doubletalk, noble principles, stubborn
resolve, low-down expediency, cash on the barrelhead, and, when deemed necessary, spilled blood."
But if Kluger has
taken over the frontier thesis as his own, Seizing Destiny also reflects an important recent development in historical
research: the growing awareness that we can only really understand the American past in a global context.
Three European
powers - Spain, France and Britain - planted their flags on the unmapped and unimaginably vast continent. It was already occupied
by inhabitants who found the whole notion of treating land as property itself quite unimaginable. Given the different cultural
patterns and economic systems the settlers imposed on the New World, divergent systems emerged in New Spain (to the south),
New France (now Quebec) and New England.
It was the latter, of course, that developed the strongest sense of its own
peculiar place in the world - distinct from, and ever more resentful towards, the authorities back home. But the development
of an independent country out of the colonies along the East Coast did not take place in a vacuum. The American story was
also a European story, involving protracted and terribly complex rounds of warfare, diplomacy and real estate shenanigans.
All three were often happening at the same time. And it is the particular challenge facing Kluger's project to keep
track of the different levels of the process without letting the narrative turn into a mere chronicle of wheelings and dealings.
The simplest technique would be to focus on a handful of masterminds and make this, in effect, their story. Kluger
does single out particular individuals who played important parts - Benjamin Franklin, for example, who wrote an amazing pamphlet
in 1751 analyzing the economic dynamism of the American scene, then served as shrewd strategist in developing the Revolution's
foreign policy. Likewise, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and William McKinley get their due as players in the game of expansion.
(And extermination: Along the way, the Indians were removed from their land, and all too often from the face of the Earth.)
But Kluger avoids the temptation - all too contemporary and American, perhaps - to reduce everything to the level
of a personality profile. His canvas is huge (you need a while to take it all in) and even the grandest architects of the
nation's growth never quite loom over the whole scene.
The author also performs another remarkable trick of perspective.
Seizing Destiny covers 500 years of history, yet the 20th century gets only a single chapter - one of the shortest.
This is understandable: Most of the territory now within the boundaries of the United States already had been assimilated
by then. But it also underscores an implicit point about the formative significance of those earlier periods.
It took
two World Wars (and then some, counting the Cold conflict) to throw the country fully onto the global stage as a superpower.
But this was consummation, not transformation. The national identity had been formed by the expanding horizon of the earlier
centuries - and with it, certain patterns of belief and expectation.
Citizens "chose to sublimate their compulsively
acquisitive drive by redirecting it from the massive accumulation of land," writes Kluger, "to other forms of expansionism.
... Americans, accounting for not even 5 percent of the world's population, consumed nearly one-third of all the resources
used on Earth."
This can't go on forever. Other countries are bound to have their centuries, too. Wisdom often comes
from discovering the limits of your own experience - recognizing, for example, that your habits and expectations have left
you somewhat obtuse. Seizing Destiny is a reminder, from one American to his fellow citizens, that it might be time
for us to wise up.
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