A Patriot's History of the Modern World (2 page)

Much of Europe has had a Christian religious tradition, but only parts had a distinctly Protestant background (Holland, parts of Germany, England, Scandinavia), leaving the United States in a rather small community of Protestant nations. Even then, several of those nations had state churches, which never developed in America due to the First Amendment. But Protestantism brought with it a heavy dose of individuality. Calvinist teachings insisted that each man read and understand the Bible for himself; Puritans and Quakers in America practiced congregational church government, which was exceptionally democratic and local; and the entire tone of Protestantism was antiauthoritarian.

While much of Europe, England, and, after the Second World War, Asia and even Latin America have at one time or another had free-market economies (to one degree or another), few have been as unfettered as the capitalist system practiced in the United States. The American variant of capitalism, again with its Protestant overtones, relied heavily on individual entrepreneurship and eschewed state involvement. Failure was considered a learning tool, not a source of public embarrassment, and bankruptcy laws reflected that. Laws provided extreme ease with which to start, sell, or terminate businesses. And finally, American property rights, emerging from the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance, not only closely linked political rights to land ownership, but also established the principle that individual land ownership was a social goal to be advanced by government. Following Thomas Jefferson's model, the early United States made it easy and relatively inexpensive for anyone not only to acquire property but also to gain legal title deed to that property—a characteristic that was rare in Europe and is still unseen and not even understood in much of the rest of the world. Therefore, American exceptionalism was in fact unique, consisting of four “legs” not found anywhere else in the world by the mid-twentieth century.

What has often served as a source of confusion is that the Europeans claim some of the same heritage, but often use similar terms to mean entirely different things. Americans have often been guilty of failing to understand that Europeans do not see the world through American eyes—they
have their own perspective that firmly places Europe in the center of the universe even during periods of American military and economic dominance. Until World War I and even later, Europeans often looked upon the United States as a large country with great potential suffering from an excess of liberty leading to irresolution, naïveté, and international impotence. European concepts of a “free market” have been from the late 1800s on dramatically different from those of Americans, integrating heavy regulation, socialized labor unions, and far more interference from government.

A certain snobbishness by Europe remained well entrenched throughout the 1900s. Culture and refinement were often viewed on the Continent as strictly European attributes—recalling the French Abbé Raynal's comment in 1770 that “America has not produced a good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science”—and it was generally held that Americans understood little of politics and foreign affairs.
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American egalitarianism in politics and the lack of a large professional military caste led Europeans to think the United States was hopeless in prosecuting wars. Even as late as the 1960s, many Germans believed that the United States was controlled by women's clubs. These views were reinforced by the reports of European visitors who traveled past the East Coast cities, where they found a people who were simply good-hearted, but uncultured, and whom they looked upon as “childlike” in their trust of strangers, and easily misled or manipulated—even politically.
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Americans, on the other hand, hewed to the proposition that the United States was an exceptional nation, the shining city upon a hill, containing more virtue than all of Europe put together. Many of the Founders had disdained the European cities as cesspools and swamps, and therefore understood the longing by poorer immigrants to reach American shores. Americans generally welcomed waves of immigrants—with some backlash against the Catholic Irish—and absorbed them with relative ease and without conflict until the 1880s. Only then—when the majority of European immigrants began to come from southern Europe or the Balkans—did the influx of so many non-English-speakers who practiced religions other than Protestantism strain the American social fabric.

Exacerbating the difficulties of absorbing these immigrants was the problem that, contrary to the American mainstream, many arrived having internalized radical socialist and communist doctrines. Many failed to distinguish the difference between a tyrannical, autocratic European monarch and an American president. The reaction came in the form of nativism during
the influx of Irish Catholics 1840–1860, which morphed into isolationism, and the persecution of Jews, Mexicans, and Asians occurring alongside Jim Crow–sanctioned separatism late in the nineteenth century . Yet this, too, was another element of America that virtually no other nation faced: a polyglot mix of people, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. For the first time, American exceptionalism had to be explained and taught, not merely taken for granted by those who had come from an English or Germanic background, and to be cherished as a foundational principle. However, the Progressive movement in the United States began to erode these principles and the value of an exceptional America, steering her to become a member of the international community and following Europe's lead.

European countries, with their oligarchic governments and more homogenous populations, never developed the concept of freedom as Americans lived it. To a large degree, even in democratic European countries, the notion of freedom was limited to “freedom to serve the state.” This European failure to understand the American character—its definitions of liberty, its reliance on personal responsibility, and its emphasis on land ownership—constituted a difference in the definitions of freedom that proved profound.

America's ascent to power from 1898 to 1945 not only reflected the “exceptional” traits that made her distinct from the Europeans, it
embodied
those traits. From the failed attempt at Prohibition—and its repeal, admitting a major national mistake—to the G.I. “can-do” attitude in World War II, the United States dared greatly. Her projects such as the Panama Canal seemed daunting to the point of impossibility, yet they were built where others failed. Her heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Peary, Sergeant Alvin York, Charles Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth all seemed giants whose exploits were incomparable. (Ruth's single-season home run record stood until 1961.) Her artistic, business, and intellectual titans such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ford, A. P. Giannini, and Walt Disney, often augmented by immigrants such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, pushed America to world preeminence in architecture, industry, finance, film, and science. And by 1945, not only was it clear that the United States would be a superpower, but it seemed that her best years still lay well into the future.

A Patriot's History of the Modern World
follows the history of the last century to the end of World War II along three thematic lines: the struggle between Progressivism and Constitutionalism within America; the rise of American global power and its corollary in the decline of European constitutionalism
and international influence; and the rise of new, non-Western powers challenging the United States for world leadership (or, perhaps, dominance).

What, then, constitutes the “modern” world in this context? We define it as the period after the United States stepped onto the world stage up to the present day. The year 1898, when the United States went to war with Spain over Cuba, marks the beginning of this era, as it was the first time America proved it could be an international power. Before then, the United States had confined itself to punitive expeditions against the Barbary Pirates and actions in the Western Hemisphere, mostly dealing with its neighbors Mexico and Canada. All European nations expected Spain to make short work of the impudent Americans and wreak utter havoc on the U.S. fleet. Only Great Britain was at all reserved in her judgment of the probable outcome, having been wrong three times (the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War) in her assessment of her Atlantic cousins. But when Spain was utterly defeated in a series of astounding victories in Manila Bay and the waters off Cuba, respect for American diplomats, soldiers, and sailors took a giant leap forward.

With the defeat of Spain, the United States broke the bonds that shackled her to the rest of the Western Hemisphere and limited America to a provincial, internal outlook. The limited national government soon found itself replaced by a federal colossus, requiring an income tax to provide the necessary revenues, a massive bureaucracy to manage its affairs, and a European-style central bank to control the economy. Like its European counterparts, the Federal Reserve, created under President Woodrow Wilson, was a private corporation, unaccountable to and uncontrolled by elected officials yet all too often seemingly in cahoots with the administration currently in office.

Yet even as the United States stepped onto the world stage as a world leader, she refrained from active involvement. The war with Spain was confined to Cuba, only ninety miles from American territory, and a single naval battle in the Philippines. The Islands of Hawaii were annexed in 1898, and America's participation in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Philippine Insurrection quickly followed, but these were seen as little more than police actions. Even after World War I, the U.S. Army was reduced to 150,000 men (only 50 percent larger than the size of the army permitted Germany by the Versailles Treaty).
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The Navy, however, while not gutted, remained in line with the Washington Naval Conference agreements
of 1921–22. While Spain fought a civil war, which attracted participants from Italy, Germany, and Russia, the United States carefully stayed out. Italians conquered Africans and the Japanese brutalized the Chinese, but except for sanctions, America stood down. Only the immediate threat of Britain's collapse against Hitler sparked enough concern to start Lend-Lease, and only a direct attack by Japan brought the United States into World War II. Yet by 1945, when no fewer than eight empires had been destroyed—the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, French, Dutch, British, and Japanese—America steadfastly refused to secure any of those territories as colonies, even to the point of denying aid to allies seeking to hold their lands. Instead, the United States, perhaps overconfident that the institutions so central to its exceptional character would be readily accepted throughout the world, insisted on open, Western democracies as the most just and efficient means to resist the new threat of Soviet communism. Often the conversion problems proved insurmountable in countries that lacked all of America's pillars of democracy—common law, Protestant Christianity, a free-market capitalistic economy, and the sanctity of private property—but the United States cannot be faulted for not trying to spread the American Way.

But the American Way was not just democratic government. There is nothing magical about democracy. After all, a democratic nation produced Adolf Hitler, and phony democracies in the twentieth century have repeatedly given murderous thugs such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il “majorities” in faux elections. In contrast, some Middle Eastern kingdoms, whether through intimidation, fear, or resignation, function with a minimum of violence and some level of economic progress. International aid agencies have learned that merely imposing democratic systems in utterly undeveloped parts of Africa or Asia did not automatically yield peace, stability, or progress. Rather, America's ascent to world power demonstrated that so long as the essence of American exceptionalism remained at the core of all efforts foreign and domestic, the likelihood of success was nearly guaranteed. Because that exceptionalism, as has been noted, consisted of more than merely democratic government; nations wishing to emulate America's progress could not simply pick and choose one or two parts of the package. Rather, the elements reinforced one another in a mutually supporting relationship—a fact that would be made clear in the Second World War when America and her allies defeated two powers that had adopted some, or most, of the “Western way of war” but which still resisted the
critical elements of liberty and free speech that completed the circle. Thus, for a writer such as Niall Ferguson to assert, for example, that the United States at the end of the Second World War “was still much less powerful than the European empires had been forty-five years before” is misguided, reflecting a certain nineteenth-century understanding of “empires.”
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That view also rested on a European-style understanding of colonialism, which, as historian Paul Johnson said, “was a highly visual phenomenon [abounding] in flags, exotic uniforms, splendid ceremonies, Durbars, sunset-guns, trade exhibitions at Olympia and Grand Palais, postage stamps and, above all, coloured maps.”
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The fact that American overseas expansion in the early twentieth century lacked precisely these “highly visual” trappings, but by World War II would export a much different type of symbol—Coca-Cola or Ford trademark images, for example—testified to the real influence the United States wielded.

America's astounding success in World War II, and her preeminent position among all free nations in the decades afterward, meant that U.S. products, goods, services, and ideas would increasingly expand into Europe and Asia. Over the ensuing half century, Americanism would become global: Marriott would have hotels virtually everywhere; McDonald's hamburgers and Disney movies would reach even remote areas of the world, and nations would define themselves largely in relation to their amity toward, or hostility to, the United States. Yes, Belgian chocolates, French cheeses, Japanese anime, Mexican cuisine, Canadian hockey, European soccer, and Korean cars would all carve out spots in American markets and culture. Yes, by 2012 one could find an (east) Indian actor or actress prominently featured on network television, or a Hong Kong Chinese turning out popular action movies, or an occasional foreign film that connected with the U.S. moviegoing audience.