3. Review of R.W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire

3. Review of R.W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire

March 18, 1962

Mr. Kenneth S. Templeton

William Volker Fund

Burlingame, California

Dear Ken:

R.W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (Oxford University Press, 1960) is a lively work that forms an extreme example, perhaps, of recent “revisionism” in the historiography of American foreign policy—which maintains that the imperialism of 1898 did not constitute a new, unusual break in an isolationist American past. The stress on this theme is always used as an argument against the Beard thesis that imperialism and the later internationalism and foreign interventionism were breaking with American traditions. Van Alstyne, indeed, claims that America began its plunge into “empire” even before the American Revolution, and continued surging onward from then on, 1898 only constituting its climactic end. This “completed” the “structure of the American Empire,” and since then American empire building has been “more of a problem of consolidation and rendering secure what has been gained.”

Now this guiding thesis I believe to be nonsense; certainly British expansionism before the American Revolution can hardly be attributed to America, despite occasional American support. Nor can the sensible and hardly imperialist attempt of the Revolutionary country to solicit aid from France be called significant. While it is true that America and American agents did many aggressive and imperialistic things throughout the nineteenth century, they can hardly be comparable in extent with the brazen acquisitions of the Spanish-American War.

Further, Van Alstyne is able to make his case by the inadmissible method of lumping expansionist actions into virtually uninhabited territory—or even such purchases as Louisiana—with aggressive actions against lands populated by other peoples, and also by lumping economic expansion (such as increased trade in the Pacific) with governmental expansion—though, admittedly, the American Navy tended to follow—and sometimes precede—the trade. American expansion throughout the world since 1898 can also hardly be called mere consolidation of previously won empire; it is the real shift from republic to empire. Thus, Van Alstyne can only make his point through distortion of quantitative judgment and confusion of categories.

Keeping this in mind, however, there is a great deal of fascinating and useful material in Van Alstyne, especially of neglected and little-known instances of American governmental intervention overseas, in Mexico, etc. There is useful material on the machinations of President Polk, of agitation to invade and acquire Canada and Mexico, of the aggressive designs of Theodore Roosevelt, etc.

It is also good to see Van Alstyne not falling for the lure of recent “revisionism” whitewashing Polk, Madison in the War of 1812, etc., and also to see the Monroe Doctrine considered an anti-British, rather than pro-British, policy. There is no “Britain the naval bulwark and partner” myth making in Van Alstyne; indeed, there is a refreshing cynicism toward much cant, such as the Open Door, U.S. missionary activities in China and Hawaii, etc. There is a great deal of interesting material on imperialist drives toward the Caribbean, on New England connivance at the atrocity in Acadia, etc.

Van Alstyne’s guiding principle is hostility to moral principle or moral crusading in foreign policy; as a result, the material that he presents would ordinarily be taken as damaging to American imperialism. But Van Alstyne, divorcing himself from morality and concerned only and rather cynically with realpolitik, is evidently enamored of American imperialism, of Theodore Roosevelt, etc. Not isolationism, not the crusading of Wilson or FDR, but the blunt imperialism of T.R. (“[t]he American Bismarck, without the arrogance and the aloofness”) seems to be Van Alstyne’s foreign policy ideal.