Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America

by Eric Rauchway

Overview

Nineteenth-century globalization made America exceptional. On the back of European money and immigration, America became an empire with considerable skill at conquest but little experience administering other people's, or its own, affairs, which it preferred to leave to the energies of private enterprise. The nation's resulting state institutions and traditions left America immune to the trends of national development and ever after unable to persuade other peoples to follow its example.

In this concise, argumentative book, Eric Rauchway traces how, from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, the world allowed the United States to become unique and the consequent dangers we face to this very day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809030477
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/26/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	725,723
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Eric Rauchway has written for the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times. He teaches at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (H&W, 2003).

Read an Excerpt

Blessed Among Nations

How the World Made America

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By Rauchway, Eric

Hill and Wang

Copyright © 2006 Rauchway, Eric
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0809055805

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Excerpted from Blessed Among Nations by Eric Rauchway. Copyright © 2006 by Eric Rauchway. Published in July 2006 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This book offers a look at American history through the lens of globalization. Like a regular optical lens you might find in a telescope or a microscope, it is meant to help you see something you wouldn't if you were simply looking with your unaided eyes. It directs your attention to the movements of money and people around the globe, and how they influenced American politics and culture.

Also like a regular optical lens, it is better at bringing some kinds of things into focus than others. Just as a telescope is terrific for marveling at the mountains on the moon but pretty poor for peering at paramecia, this book is designed to help you get an appreciation for the effects of powerful global forces, not local ones.

It's not that we don't care about the paramecia of the past. The microscopic view of history, when carefully trained on the right subject--a mad prophet, a frontier speculator, a presidential assassin--can tell us a great deal. But if we want to see largefeatures in faraway landscapes, we need to overlook these otherwise compelling close-ups.

There is another way in which I hope this book will work like a lens. Like a lot of people, I need corrective lenses to see properly, and also like a lot of people I don't like to go to the doctor very much. So people like me will wear a pair of glasses for years without seeing an optometrist. And during that time, those glasses, which were perfectly designed to help us see when they were made, get worse and worse at their job. The lenses aren't changing, but our eyes are. We just don't notice because it happens so slowly. Then, finally, we get tired of the headaches and the blurry vision and we go to the doctor and get a properly prescribed pair of spectacles. And we put them on, and suddenly we see the world as if it were new, and we realize we've been squinting through outdated lenses for far too long. I think that much of what we see nowadays when we look at American history is like this, a picture as seen through lenses that worked fine for us once, but don't work so well now that we've changed. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with our old glasses; they were just meant for a different set of eyes, and too much of the world now looks out of focus.

When you put on your new glasses after delaying a visit to the doctor for too long, you suddenly wonder how you could ever have stood to look through the old ones. I hope this book will help us see America's place in the world with the same freshness, so that we can see the same old story with a new clarity and begin to wonder how we could ever have stood to look at the world through those quaint old spectacles, missing so much of such importance.

Specifically, using globalization as a lens brings into focus the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world in the late nineteenth century, and how this relationship shaped American political development. Capital and labor from overseas pushed American political development in noticeably unusual directions during a particularly important growth spurt. This early formative influence bequeathed the United States some peculiar and lasting habits of government. The effects of globalization helped the country become a powerful nation without developing (in comparative terms) a powerful central government. In the United States, as in some other countries, we often argue over the appropriate size and authority of national government, and usually we argue from principle: a big government is better because it can provide security; a small government is better because it can allow freedom. These arguments from principle have what to a historian seems like an unfortunately timeless quality, as if government were some uniform product, of which you can have too much or too little, but which is always the same thing. If we look at how government grew in the first place, we might remember that it is a set of solutions to a set of problems--not theoretical problems, but practical problems--and that, in practice, not all peoples face the same problems. During its growth into a powerful nation, the United States faced a set of problems unlike those any other nation has encountered. Americans formed their habits of government by solving a set of problems specific to their circumstances. And we know that habits often outlast the circumstances that justified them, just as we often wear prescription eyeglasses long after our eyes have changed, and sometimes with bad consequences.

The long life of American habits, which outlasted the circumstances to which they were suited, has affected not only the United States but also the rest of the world fairly dramatically. To take up a literally dramatic analogy: the fifty-year period from 1865 through 1914 is, in the history of the Western world, like the play Hamlet. The great actors on the international stage, set at odds by bad faith, misunderstanding, and the fateful entanglement of their interests, come ever closer to catastrophe until finally they clash, and after a gruesome bout of killing none of the major players is left standing. It's terribly moving, and we in the audience feel emotionally drained. Then, somewhat confusingly, a fellow named Fortinbras walks on and says, well, now I'm the king of Denmark. And...curtain. Even in Shakespeare's full script there's little indication of who Fortinbras is, or what he's been up to.1 His story, whatever it is, must have gone on mostly separate from that of Hamlet and his family, because we've been watching them, and there's been scarcely any mention of Fortinbras. Yet he must have been, in some important way that was taking place offstage or, if you prefer, outside the principal focus of the action, connected to the characters and events of the play, because here he is, king. There is something very wrong with the end of this play; the foreseeable future seems dramatically disconnected from the immediate past as we have learned it.

The world's people must have felt much this sense of puzzlement and anxiety in 1918, when at war's end the Americans suddenly emerged as the planet's great power. Where had these Americans been, what had they been up to, and what did they think were the normal relations among nations? Most of the world's people knew little more about the United States in 1918 than theatergoers know about Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet, and in significant ways we know little more now than they did then, because we have been telling this history as if we've been restaging Hamlet, without any attention to the important offstage back story. We need now, all of us, to know not only what the American Fortinbras was doing just before he emerged from the wings, but also how his strange tale connects to the main action, if we want to understand why he has gone on to behave as he did and what it means to the world.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Blessed Among Nations by Rauchway, Eric Copyright © 2006 by Rauchway, Eric. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction     3
Globalization and America     7
Capital     30
Labor     58
Welfare     85
Warfare     122
Americanness on Trial     147
Conclusion     165
Appendix     175
A Note on Motive, Method, and Metaphor     177
Notes     181
Notes and Sources for Figures and Tables     223
Index     229

Editorial Reviews

Rauchway's book is right on time and right on target.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Provocative . . . Blessed Among Nations combines the same fluid writing style, bold interpretive approach, and ambitious agenda that made the work of mid-twentieth-century historians like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward so important and so broadly relevant.” —American Heritage

From the Publisher

The furor created in the United States by recent demonstrations on behalf of illegal immigrants makes Rauchway's analysis of America's early experiences with a global community especially timely. Rauchway (history, Univ. of California, Davis; Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America) posits that the United States became quintessentially "American," i.e., an economic powerhouse, in the years between the Civil War and World War I. In a staunchly unbiased fashion, he draws upon events during those years that made the United States the favored recipient of foreign capital investment. Cheap immigrant labor played a central role in the building of America, while other countries spent far more on the social welfare of their citizens than did the United States. Yet the influx of labor and capital did not make America more like other nations but instead more distinctive; it came to see itself, in President Wilson's phrase, as "blessed among nations," a concept that fostered the smug isolationism it abandoned when the United States was forced to enter World War I and become a major player in world affairs. Rauchway believes that the United States, by virtue of its standing among nations, has the obligation to maintain a commitment to globalization rather than to regard it as a self-regulating mechanism. An excellent addition for all academic and large public libraries. Peter R. Latusek, Stanford Graduate Sch. of Business Lib., CA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Laying the groundwork for American empire was an international enterprise-so why doesn't the world want to be American?"The earth's people have more often envied than imitated America," writes Rauchway (History/UC Davis; Murdering McKinley, 2003), preferring parliamentarianism and welfare statism to republicanism and laissez-faire. To find out why, Rauchway examines America's rise to empire, which occupied the years between 1865 and 1917. During that time, he writes, America received both financial and human capital from abroad; the working class was predominantly immigrant, as was the army that tamed the western frontier, while huge flows of European cash into the post-Civil War economy made an industrial super-revolution possible, leading to a manifold increase in the nation's wealth. Yet Americans refused to do the things that newly wealthy countries do-namely, invest in public infrastructure and build social-welfare institutions and mechanisms. Rauchway observes that just before WWI, America's army was smaller than Ethiopia's, while "relative to the size of its economy it had a smaller government than the Netherlands"; he reckons that at least some of the refusal to build a welfare state had precisely to do with the fact that the working class "appeared visibly to consist of people from other countries," leading native-born Americans to look the other way when issues of, say, occupational safety and labor exploitation arose. Our laissez-faire ways seemed particularly problematic when it came time to raise an army to fight overseas, leading to the creation of particularly inept bureaucracies, for "routine competence simply did not lie within the experience of Americans who had reliedfor years on an incidentally benevolent world to take care of them." And when it came time to protect the world economy with American initiatives after the armistice, Americans failed to come through, yielding worldwide depression-good reason to avoid imitating the American way of life. Given the current reliance on foreign capital and immigrant labor, Rauchway's book is right on time and right on target.

Kirkus Reviews