Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 672 pp., $38.00.
Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power
TWO BOOKS for the price of one: that's what readers get with Dominion from Sea to Sea. Had he chosen to publish them separately, Bruce Cumings might properly have called the first Facing West: The Once and Future Orientation of American Statecraft; the second, Dreams Fulfilled: The Pacific Coast and the Making of the American Century.
Differing in focus, the two books also differ in tone. The first is skeptical, acerbic and biting, if also at times mordantly funny. The second is lush and lyrical. In the first, Cumings, a specialist in East Asia who teaches at the University of Chicago, maintains a critical distance from his subject. In the second, he abandons any pretense of doing so: he loves, cherishes and is rapturously devoted to the Pacific Coast, especially to California, and makes no effort to conceal the depth of his passion.
To say that of the two I like the first better is not to offer a qualitative judgment but simply to reveal my own predilections. Both books are eminently worth reading. They take on big questions. They render sweeping judgments. They provoke. Conceived with an eye toward "erasing the line between domestic and international perspectives," Dominion from Sea to Sea falls short of accomplishing that worthy objective. Even so, it qualifies as a notable achievement.
AS A contribution to diplomatic history, Dominion argues that from the moment the United States secured independence, the central theme of American statecraft was not that old bugaboo "isolationism"-it was expansionism. In search of opportunity, territorial as well as commercial, Americans turned away from Europe. As a consequence, throughout the period when it rose to the status of great power, "the fundamental orientation of this country was toward the West and the Pacific." To the West lay land and new markets. To the East was only trouble; tacking too closely to Europe promised to involve the United States, in the words of George Washington (quoted by Cumings), "in frequent controversies, the cause of which are essentially foreign to our concerns."
By almost any measure, this westward orientation served the nation exceedingly well. Midway through the nineteenth century, the voracious young republic already reached from sea to shining sea. By century's end, it had added a maritime empire extending thousands of miles across the Pacific. Not too shabby a record for an ostensibly inward-looking country said to be intent on turning its back on the world.
Shabby, however, accurately describes the machinations employed along the way. Here Cumings pulls no punches. Americans contrived various myths to endow their actions with a convenient moral gloss. The land they claimed was "empty." Its settlement by true-blue (that is, white Protestant) Americans necessarily advanced the overarching cause of liberty, thereby fulfilling God's purposes. Any unfortunates found to inhabit this empty land, thus interfering with those purposes, were deemed disposable. So too with regard to those recruited from abroad to exploit the riches of the land. Whites viewed immigrants, especially Asians and Hispanics, as inferior, unworthy and expendable.
These myths provided cover for expansion-minded Americans to do whatever they felt necessary to take whatever it was they happened to covet-always with a clear conscience. A favored technique was to infiltrate new territories under the guise of saving souls or making a few bucks and then to organize a putsch, declare a republic and immediately petition Washington for protection or, preferably, annexation. This approach worked brilliantly in raising the Stars and Stripes above Texas, California and Hawaii, and in carving out the canal zone in Panama.
Then there was Washington's distinctive way of going to war, still much in evidence in our own day: "behold, an unprovoked attack." Employed by James K. Polk to create a pretext for dismembering Mexico, by William McKinley to address problems in Cuba and the Philippines, and by any number of other presidents to deal with obstreperous Native Americans, this tactic could be counted on to rouse "a howling throng of outraged congressmen, newspaper pundits, and other demagogues" all demanding that innocent blood be avenged and justice brought to evildoers. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration resurrected this tradition to justify its misguided global war on terror.
