An Empire Is Built
Ambrose, Stephen E.
An Empire Is Built The Forging of the American Empire, by Sidney Lens. Thomas Y. Crowell. 462 pp. $10. Reviewed by Stephen E. Ambrose The publishers claim that The Forging of the American Empire...
...For those willing to make the effort to understand, Lens's book will be a splendid aid...
...Both live in what Hannah Arendt has called a defactualized world and serve no master save themselves, both are expansionist, and both are experts at manipulating not only other people but their own heads of government...
...and it stood in the way of what is euphemistically called 'international stability,' since it could become a bastion to which revolutionary nationalists in the underdeveloped countries looked to for aid to their revolutions...
...The capitalist structure of America demanded expansion, to be sure, and the bureaucracy was created as a necessary instrument of that expansion, but that the corporations are the villains is no longer so altogether clear as it once seemed...
...So did the imperial bureaucracy, both formal and informal, which Lens dissects in some detail in one of his best sections...
...Nevertheless, it is a superb piece of work, well written, intelligent, accurate, and engaging...
...In the process, he shows that only a favored few, rather than the whole of the citizenry, reaped the truly big benefits...
...All of us got something, one way or another, but corporations and their stockholders obviously did better than, say, the black people of Mississippi...
...a nation that has directly conquered, through aggressive war against Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, and others, an enormous sweep of territory, and later forged a world empire while maintaining its innocence of imperialistic designs...
...Not, please note, from the Cold War itself, for as Lens points out, "the quarrel with the Soviet Union—it cannot be affirmed too often—was not the cause of America's imperial policy, but an effect of it...
...Following the path marked out by historian William A. Williams over the past decade, Lens traces the main outlines of American expansion from the conquest of the continental empire to Vietnam...
...To return to what Lens has accomplished, rather than what he did not write about, The Forging of the American Empire is an excellent example of what professors sneeringly call popular history, which means it is written for the intelligent reader and not the pages of The Amercian Historical Review (where it almost certainly will not even be reviewed...
...Lens gives fascinating details on the way each of these groups profit from the creation and maintenance of the American empire...
...Certainly many of them would rather use the public's tax money to buy concrete to rebuild our cities than to buy dynamite to destroy Vietnam's villages...
...Further, his explanation of the war is weak, especially in light of his solid analysis of earlier imperial ventures...
...and second, the economic potential of the area for the future...
...He makes this structural imperative clearest in his discussion of Franklin D. Roosevelt's well-known promise in 1940 to keep American boys out of foreign wars: "But there was an economic and political logic to events that transcended the wishes of mortals—a logic rooted in industrialism, private profit, and competition, which literally drove the great nations against each other, and all of them against the weaker states...
...After World War II, it was a complex of military officials, plus civilian militarists in the legislature, the executive, business and industry, the labor hierarchy, and academia...
...The Soviet Union was obviously not a military threat to America, "but it stood in the way of America's thrust to fashion the world in its image, since it sealed off a substantial part of the globe to the open door...
...Reviewed by Stephen E. Ambrose The publishers claim that The Forging of the American Empire is "the first truly comprehensive history of American imperialism...
...This because "Washington was determined to organize the world to its ends...
...Mr...
...An extended discussion by Lens on these matters, especially as they relate to Vietnam, would be most welcome...
...Lens does not push ideology, but he does insist—quite rightly, in my view —that the structure of the United States has impelled it to expand...
...There is something in both explanations, but not enough to satisfy...
...it is not enough to point in horror to the Pentagon and the CIA) is supposed to implement policy, but it now contributes to national decision-making and in far too many cases dominates the policy-making process...
...The one disappointment in The Forging of the American Empire is the brevity of Lens's discussion of Vietnam, a surprising neglect for the co-chairman of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam...
...Looked at from another view, there is little difference between the American and the Russian imperial bureaucracies, except for the significant fact that America's is far richer than Russia's and thus more prone to act...
...Moscow simply refused to be molded and manipulated like Britain or France...
...One must quibble, since it is not quite all that— it is neither the first nor is it comprehensive...
...But then Sidney Lens was not writing a textbook or a scholarly monograph...
...Since 1945 the United States has built a gigantic machine, composed of separate but related institutions, whose continued growth and prosperity depend absolutely on a continuation of imperial methods...
...Lens should have used his own description of the imperial bureaucracy to analyze Vietnam...
...That bureaucracy is like Pavlov's dogs—whenever the bell rings, whether it be in the Dominican Republic or Vietnam or elsewhere, it begins to salivate and soon to bite...
...Vietnam may well be the bureaucrats' war at least as much as it is the liberals' war, for our imperial bureaucracy leads its own existence and is responsible to no one...
...It has shortcomings, for it is episodic, based on secondary sources and thus short on new information or insights, and at times terribly unbalanced...
...At one time in the past it had been the commercial elite that predominated within the ruling class," he writes, "later the industrialists, then the bankers...
...This bureaucracy (of which the academic elite is an integral part...
...The capitalist system subsists on markets and access to raw materials...
...It is, in my view, the most important kind of history, for Lens wants to help all of us understand our own past better so that we will know how we got where we are, and learn what to do about the mess we are in...
...Ambrose, a historian at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, has written six books on military history and was associate editor of "The Eisenhower Papers...
...and if those should be cut off abroad through political or economic manipulation, the home country is enervated by the social diseases of unemployment and economic stagnation...
...His most recent book is "Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938...
...Lens sees the explanation of the Vietnam war "in two directions: first, the fear that a successful revolt against Pax Americana in one place would give it wings elsewhere [i.e., those damn dominoes...
...Rather, he tells a story—the story of a nation that has engaged in almost ceaseless warfare since its inception, all the while proclaiming its love of peace...
Vol. 36 • March 1972 • No. 3
