HISTORY: RICHARD ALDOUSreviews America, Empire of LibertyBy David Reynolds Allen Lane/Penguin 672 pp, £30
INAUGURATION DAY, 1929. The rain was lashing down, but the mood in Washington was sunny. Herbert Hoover seemed the ideal president for progressive, modern America.
The Quaker farm boy had trained as an engineer and made his name organising food relief in Europe during the Great War. Here surely was a perfect blend of traditional values and managerial skills. Franklin D Roosevelt definitely thought so.
“He is certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him president of the United States,” Roosevelt had said in 1920. “There could not be a better one.”
As it turned out, there could hardly have been a worse one. The most powerful office in the world can often destroy even men of the very highest calibre.
When Barack Obama, holding Abraham Lincoln’s bible, is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, he comes into that office with a greater weight of expectation than any commander-in-chief since John F Kennedy.
Aside from the historic moment of a black man, who under the original 1787 constitution would have been classed as three-fifths of a person, taking residence in the White House, Obama has also come to represent for so many around the world a renewed faith in America itself.
In Europe, newspaper reaction to Obama’s election was so ecstatic that the Italian newspaper Il Giornale felt compelled to remind its readers, “He’s just a president. Not the messiah.”
Obama takes up the leadership of a country that has been deeply unpopular around the world. The influential Pew Global Attitudes Project shows that the image of America abroad declined sharply during the Bush presidency. In Muslim nations, the wars in Afghanistan and particularly Iraq have nearly driven negative ratings off the charts.
In economically developed countries, people blame America for the financial crisis. In Western Europe, opposition to key elements of American foreign policy is widespread, and positive views of the US have declined steeply among many of America’s long-time European allies. Even in Germany – perhaps the country above all others that owes its existence and prosperity to American financial and military largesse – a staggering 80 per cent of people believe it is “bad that American ideas and customs are spreading here.”
No wonder then that for the theme of his inauguration, Obama has chosen “A birth of new freedom”, a phrase taken from Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address. That choice, combining rebirth with liberty, will not have surprised Cambridge historian David Reynolds. For as he makes clear in this compelling new history of America, redemption has always been an essential element in the exercise of US power.
BBC Radio 4 listeners will know Reynolds as the presenter of an ambitious 90-episode series of the same name – America, Empire of Liberty – that has been running since the autumn. (Part one is available online.)
Reynolds’s great skill is to bring clarity, imagination and humour to complexity without in any way talking down to his audience. The result is a series that represents the very best in public service broadcasting. Yet radio programmes and books are two very different beasts.
It is to Reynolds’s credit that the book of the series stands alone on its own merits. More than that, America, Empire of Liberty supersedes Hugh Brogan’s Penguin History of the United States as the most outstanding popular history of America written by a non-American.
There are three themes running through the book: empire, liberty and faith. “They are, of course, central to current American debate,” Reynolds writes, “but they run right through the whole story. Each one has proved richly, sometimes fatally, ambiguous.”
It is these ambiguities that provide the narrative drive both for the book and the radio series. Right into the twentieth century, Americans saw themselves as anti-empire and in conscious tension with the imperial values of the old world. Yet in reality, America has been an empire for most of its history. The thirteen colonies that declared independence from Britain in 1776 extended only a few hundred miles inland.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States stretched 3,000 miles across from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Some of that territorial gain came through negotiation and hard cash. The rest was made in war against European empires, neighbouring independent states and, brutally, the Native Americans. The founding father, Thomas Jefferson, may well have spoken of an “Empire of Liberty”, but in truth it was one put together in a way that any historian of empires throughout the ages would recognise easily enough.
These themes of empire and liberty are shot through with paradoxes. One of the ways in which Americans have attempted to reconcile those contradictions is through faith. America may well have been founded as a secular state, but that was not the same thing as an irreligious nation. And as Reynolds makes clear, it is ‘faith, self-belief in America’s mission’ that has powered America’s engagement in the world since the first world war.
In 1917, Wilson wanted to make “the world safe for democracy”. In 1941, Roosevelt offered the world “four freedoms” based on American democracy. That moral commitment also came with its flip side.
“When faith is overwhelmed by self-doubt , the United States has pulled back in on itself,” writes Reynolds. “The empire of liberty has been both made and unmade by its faith.”
Reynolds tells the ups and downs of this great narrative with tremendous verve and imagination. The result is a reminder of what, despite its inevitable flaws, so many love about America and Americans – that relentless optimism in “a birth of new freedom”.
Hope – even hope we can believe in – must inevitably be tempered by experience. But in the end, it is always “Morning in America.”
- Richard Aldous teaches history at UCD and is the author of The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs
Disraeli