The Academy’s Bench Warmer

Short version: I passed my exams. Long version to come after a two-week vacation abroad, but for now: thanks for the support, y’all.

In just over an hour, I’ll take my exams.  Three essays, four hours, just me and my computer.  I’m relieved that it’s finally time.  About a week ago, I came to the conclusion that there was very little else that I could do to be prepared, but I’ve kept on reading and writing and studying nevertheless.  Pretty sure none of it stuck.  I’d like to think that I can get something out of this, that I can turn this into a fruitful experience, a “useful exercise.”  We’ll see.

Thesis: Both (duh).  More specifically, the mechanics of American imperialism change in relation to domestic politics and the international situation, but the philosophy of American imperialism–expand American capitalism but don’t get caught doing it–has essentially remained the same.

I. Straw-man beat-down: William Appleman Williams and Walter Lafeber
A. Both Williams and Lafeber are too materialist: American capitalism must expand, and it has done so by means of imperialism since Spanish-American War of 1898.
B. Truth to this–American capitalism must and has expanded. But Americans have been more and less enthusiastic about that at different times in the last century, a reluctance that finds its earliest manifestation in George Washington’s call to avoid foreign entanglements. Not that the US avoided such entanglements during the 19th century–it was a matter of imperialism by geographic justification (The West is ours, so good-bye, Indians; the Western Hemisphere is ours, so stay away, Europe). So, from the get-go, tension between American capitalism figuring itself out and expanding, and American habit of denying it.
C. How to see it: look to federal foreign policy, the activities of American capital, and domestic policy re: immigration.

II. Spanish-American War -> WWI
A. Opportunity and need arises
i. Opportunity: Perceptions of Spanish brutality; Europeans opening the way in other areas (Asia); American government coming into its own as military and organizational force (especially with TR’s involvement).
ii. Need: Growing economy without sufficient markets
B. American wariness
i. American habits of small government and belief in non-intervention
ii. Anxiety re: contact with the Other
C. Result: Open Doors by force
i. Federal foreign policy: Smash the door open and keep it ajar
ii. American capital: Rush in to the new markets in Asia and Latin America (United Fruit Company, for instance)
iii. Domestic policy: accommodate increasingly defined-as-white immigrants

III. WWI -> New Deal: Once Bitten, Twice Shy
A. WWI proves the isolationists right (well, they think so, anyway)
i. Wilsonian internationalism crushed in spirit and in form by blowback against death, destruction, and disillusionment with Progressive confidence
ii. Bolshevism! Watch out for those Bolshevists!
B. American economy
i. American consumers filling need just fine, thank you very much, by virtue of slightly higher income and lots more credit at home
C. Result: Shut the Doors and keep the world away
i. Political isolation (from League of Nations to Good Neighbor Policy)
ii. American capital finds some investment abroad, but can’t look to US gov’t for help (Latin America, esp. Mexico)
iii. Shutting the immigration gates (National Origins Immigration Act of 1924)

IV. WWII -> Vietnam
A. Confidence tempered and justified by anti-communism
i. In American government
ii. In American capitalism
iii. In liberal America
B. Result: Gloved fist of government and capital
i. Federal government spreading American democracy by peace when possible (esp. JFK’s programs) and force when necessary or cheaper (Turkey, Greece, Latin America, Korea)
ii. American capitalists selling and investing the world over, from institutions like IMF and World Bank to investment in Green Revolution to making consumers (and producers) out of Europeans
iii. Domestic policy: pulling back from exclusion with Immigration Act of 1965

V. Vietnam -> 1989
A. Oh, crap: American capitalism not working so well.
1. Disaster of Vietnam
2. Recognition of failure to eradicate communism (Korea, Eastern Europe)
3. Economic woes at home: stagflation and susceptibility to international oil markets
B. Result: Secret Imperialism
1. American government: stay involved, but be quiet about it (Latin America, Afghanistan)
2. American capital: seize opportunities as they appear, at home (shale oil during late 1970s; crushing unions in 1980s) or through mult-nationalization
3. American domestic policy: increasingly anti-immigrant (1986 IRCA)

VI. Post-1989
A. Whew! We won! Now what?
1. Communism seems to have lost
2. American government: free from world-wide threat
3. American capital: the world is open for business
4. “Washington consensus”: an economic philosophy connected with seat of government. That tells the story.
B. Result: Aggressive, naturalized American capitalism
1. American government: send advisers to former communist countries to help them set up shop (capitalist shop, of course) and pressure for capitalism (Bush’s involvement with German rejection of third way after Wall falls). Step up to military involvement when instability seems to threaten New World Order (Kosovo, Gulf War, Somalia). More than anything else: focus on trade (NAFTA in 1994).
2. American capital: exuberant investment and privatization
3. Domestic scene: Americans pleased with their government and their economic system, which increasingly became one and the same.
4. BUT: produces backlash against American hegemony, which produces response of the unified American government/business machine (see Iraq War)

VII. The future
A. Ferguson: Gee, I sure hope America becomes the next Great Britain. Me: probably not, because (a) different type of capitalism and (b) American habits of anti-eager imperialism.
B. Todd: America’s screwed. Me: Probably, but not because of European birth rates, you idiot.
C. No matter what: American imperialism = American capitalism’s needs/desires + Domestic politics and International situation

I’ve been brainstorming questions that I’d like to be asked for my exams (t-minus 45 days). Here are some ideas for twentieth century, in roughly chronological order:

• What blend of anxiety and idealism drove the Progressive Movement?
• The New Deal: Revolution, Reform, or Retrenchment?
• Was the Cold War inevitable?  Or was it an aberration, a detour from a multilateralist course set during the New Deal and World War II?
• During the Cold War, to what degree did American domestic politics affect American foreign policy and vice-versa?
• To what extent can the rise of the New Right be attributed to elite political actors versus grassroots movements?
• Is American imperialism between 1898 and 2008 best characterized by change or continuity?

I’ve got some rough outlines for these questions that I’ll share next week.  Your thoughts?  Which sounds like more fun to talk about?

From Aaron, this brilliant and fascinating question:

Don’t know if this is the sort of thing you’re working on, but I wonder how you would relate changes in the federal government’s relationship to “underdeveloped” parts of the country (whether geographic areas, like the South, or populations, like immigrants or African-Americans) to the American state’s changing relationship with the “primitive” world abroad in this period; Borgwardt seems like an appropriate point of departure, but I’m unsatisfied with her exceptionalist account (don’t know if you agree, but there it is) even while it seems like she does better at synthesizing that relationship than almost anyone else I know (since the foreign relations / domestic affairs schism always splits up people’s analysis).

Wow–thanks for starting me off easy, Aaron…   Seriously, this is a great question.  It actually is something I hope to be working on–the relationship between domestic affairs and foreign relations during the Cold War, to be a bit more specific.  But I haven’t got there yet, as my response below reveals.  It’s quite the piece of crap, this response of mine.  I read the question and wrote my response in an hour (that’s how my school’s exam process works: 4 hours to write 3 essays), so that’s part of the reason that it won’t make a lick of sense.  You’ve been warned.

—–

During the Great Depression and New Deal (1929-1941), the Roosevelt Administration pursued a policy of tentative interventionism in domestic affairs and isolationism in foreign affairs.  Political anxiety combined with a commitment to perserving American capitalism to create these policies; victory in war would eventually erase that political anxiety and reject isolationism in favor of interventionism on behalf of American capitalism.

The federal government directly involved itself in the affairs of  marginal people and places at home during the New Deal.  The country’s land- and river-scapes show this interventionism in stark relief.  The Tennessee Valley Administration; Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams on the Columbia River; the tree belts and relocation of farmers on the Great Plains–these and other massive state projects changed the landscape and intimately involved the federal government in the day-to-day lives of marginal people in marginal places.  Yet these projects were also limited by political circumstances and the administration’s commitment to capitalism.  As Sarah Phillips argues, A.E. Morgan was unable to realize his great dreams for the TVA–farming co-ops, etc.–because local involvement (particularly of landowners who were already unhappy with the federal government) was necessary in order to get the TVA going at all.  Thus was created the grassroots TVA–not one controlled by the federal government, but by local officials under the eye of local residents.  And on the Great Plains, as Donald Worster argues, the federal government refused to recognize the incompatibility of monoculture farming with such a marginal landscape, instead allowing farmers to continue their extractive practices.  To do otherwise would have signaled an inherent problem with capitalist agriculture–a step too far for FDR, even in his most “radical” experiments after his first re-election.

Indeed, the Roosevelt administration prefered in most cases to keep its hands off of marginal populations at home, allowing both for the replication of existing power relationships and the development of new centers of power.  FDR’s need to maintain friends among Democrats in the South led to a variety of legislation providing “affirmative action” for whites, as Ira Katznelson points out, from the clauses in Social Security that excluded domestic and farm labor (thus disproportionately excluding African-Americans) or allowing segregation in the CCC.  But the administration’s reluctance to get its hands dirty in local politics sometimes opened avenues for the development of what John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing” power, particularly in the development of union strength.  As Lizabeth Cohen shows using the case of Chicago, ethnic communities seized the opportunity to associate themselves with FDR’s administration while simultaneously building a new center of power in more radical union activity, particularly through the CIO.

During the New Deal, FDR’s administration also preferred a hands-off policy vis-a-vis the rest of the world.  The administration pulled inward during the Great Depression, walking out of international economic meetings, instead preferring to deal with its economic–and political–problems at home.  Even in its own sphere of influence, the United States decided to let things alone; Latin America got a brief respite from US interventionism with FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy.  And yet, in pulling out, the United States did not necessarily leave the stage empty for other countries to intervene.  Particularly as FDR’s attention turned to the global situation post-1939 (as David Kennedy argues), the United States sought not simply to leave the world be, but to encourage a world in which American capitalism might flourish in the absence of old colonial ties.  As early as the Atlantic Charter, FDR indicated a vision in which old European colonialism would die out, leaving open markets for the American economy.  And so, while the U.S. did not actively engage the peoples and places on the margins of the Western industrialized world, it did not ignore those people/places, instead seeing potential consumers and markets.

Emerging victorious from WWII, the United States would more actively pursue this vision of a world whose consumers could absorb American production.  With the Marshall Plan and American domination of the IMF and World Bank, the United States sought to impress its own brand of liberalism on the rest of the world.  In many ways, this liberalism had been born in the Tennessee Valley, the Great Plains, and the Columbia River, where the federal government had learned to exercise its muscle, but only insofar as to create producers and consumers, thus ensuring the salvation of American capitalism.

I’ve been blogging for about a year now, and I still haven’t figured out how to stay on top of comments.  Or rather: I haven’t figured how other people stay so up-to-the-second on comments.  Edge of the West comes to mind–posts there get comments crazy fast.  I was digging on this post and thought I might add something, when I noticed that it had 20 comments in under an hour.  Also this one.

I don’t get it.  How the hell do people stay on top of this?  Constantly clicking on “reload”?  Some application that’s not available to the rest of us?  A super robot equipped with some special laser?  Whatever the secret, it effectively shuts out of the conversation those who aren’t clued in (i.e. me.  There’s also the matter of being more or less utterly ignored at EoftW unless you’re bitchphd, kid blitzer, Charlieford, Vance, urbino, silbey, or PorJ, but that’s besides this particular point).

Sadly only got to three books yesterday.

Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. This is a fun read, tracking the comet-like rise and fall of Long and Coughlin during the 1930s, with the climax in 1935. Brinkley sees Long and Coughlin’s brief success in their ability to give voice to the anxieties of small farmers, conservative workers, and other members of the middle class who lamented the passing of small-town community interactions in the face of centralization and industrialization of American economy and society. The bad guys were financiers and bankers (for Coughlin) and the wealthy (for Long); the solution was government–but not big or centralized government. And there’s the rub, because Long and Coughlin were fighting against modernization, a force that could truly only be stopped with some sort of radical economic change–like a big, centralized government–which Long, Coughlin, and their followers were unwilling and unable to consider such an alternative. It’s a story of American political character (in the Hartzian liberal tradition), middle-class anxiety, and demagoguery. Fun stuff.

John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. Higham sees three traditions in American nativism: anti-Catholicism, anti-radical, and racial nationalism. These rear their ugly heads in different degrees throughout this period in American history, usually during times of economic crisis/tension. This works for the late 1880s and 1890s (Haymarket, Homestead, Pullman), but as he admits in the epilogue, material conditions didn’t connect to nativism during the 1920s, when the US passes its most stringent immigration laws (1921 Emergency Immigration Act, 1924 National Origins Act). That said, his identification of the different strands of nativism is helpful, as his explanation of the development of racial nationalism, which required some scientific slight-of-hand (courtesy of eugenicists) to overcome the positive implications of Darwin’s survival of the fittest. Way better than Daniels’s Guarding the Door.

Katherine Blee’s Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Holy shit this was weird. The second Klan got crazy powerful during the 1920s in Indiana, and it infiltrated every aspect of life: parades, weddings, funerals, junior auxiliaries, and, of course, women’s Klan chapters. The WKKK, though, rejected the female-submission aspects of the KKK, instead providing women with an organization through which they could form social bonds as well as act in highly political ways, such as helping each other get to the polls (remember: 19th amendment in 1920), boycotting Catholic and Jewish establishments, and spreading rumors about community members. Blee wants to argue that this demonstrates that not all right-wing women activists are submissive conservative types; I say “meh.” But she does a great job showing how pervasive the Klan was during the 1920s. Scary shit.

Over the next two days, I’ve got about ten books to read in order to catch up. I’ll be reading some under the influence of beer and with fireworks as my reading light. Stay tuned.

I need help.  In many ways, of course, but specifically: I need help selecting a seminar to take this term.  Here are the choices:

1) Political theory/sociology/philosophy on the public sphere.  The alleged reading list: Aristotle, Arendt, Dewey, Foucault, Habermas, D. Harvey, A. Negri, more.  Yeah, I’m sure we’ll get to all that.

2) A poli-sci course on Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Additional readings from Arendt, Rawls, etc.

3) An econ course on world economic history since 1800.  Readings by Pomeranz, Alan M. Taylor, M. Edelstein, D. Rodrik, M. Obstfeld, and lots, lots, lots more.

Thoughts?

I’m a few days late coming to it, but this posting over at The Edge of the American West is most excellent. My favorite bit:

The Postrelian idea that we can choose between small gummint and big gummint is fanciful. That train has sailed. If you want to blame someone for having “extinguished classical liberalism as the general philosophy of American government” you should blame the Republican Party of the Civil War era. Or maybe Thomas Jefferson. Or maybe you should acknowledge that if you think classical liberalism was ever alight as the general philosophy of the American government, you’re a bit of a fantasist. You probably also think the free market owes you a pony.

Simultaneously insightful, historically-minded, and hilarious (I want my pony, dammit!). And the comments give me hope that intelligent and historically-informed discussion is not actually dead, but is relevant even now (dig how BitchPhd brings Elizabeth Edwards in). If only we weren’t all so busy blogging…

Insecurity, I have learned over the past few years, is part of graduate student life. No matter how hard we resist, we can’t help but measure ourselves up against one another: have I read enough as her, does he have a more interesting project than me, etc. For instance, I learned the other day that a dear friend of mine recently got done with her minor field, and while my mouth said, “That’s great!” my mind was saying “Bitch. We should kick her in the shins. C’mon, legs, do it!” Fortunately, my legs didn’t get the message and my friend’s shins went unharmed. My ego, however, was not so lucky, and I once again felt inadequate to the task of graduate studies.

But over the winter break, I developed another, broader, and more terrifying insecurity: that I’m not just a sub-par graduate student–I’m also not a smart enough person. Reading about some of the great minds of the past 20, 30, 40 years, from Foucault to Eric Alterman (oh, I’m sure he’d love that comparison), I can’t help but think that I am not now nor could ever be–and that’s the killer–all that intelligent. By “intelligent” I mean creative, a wide breadth and depth of knowledge, a quick wit, etc.. Original. I’m pretty sure I don’t have that going for me.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been struck by my own limitations. It’s somewhat like the moment I had watching the NCAA men’s basketball playoffs when I was a senior in college: it occurred to me that I could never, ever be as good at basketball as those guys. As a kid, I could watch sports and think, “If I just worked hard enough at it, I could be as good as that guy,” “that guy” being Michael Jordon, Joe Montana, or Will Clark. But when you realize that the athletes you are watching are younger than you are, that hope sort of slips away. A few years later, I realized that becoming a rock star was also no longer in the cards; Noel Gallagher had already written Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, toured the world, and had dozens of classic rock star moments by the time he was 28, whilst I only had two coffee shop performances and a hack-job of a self-produced CD, and no rock star moments. So, no superstar athlete and no rock star. But that was okay. I hadn’t really worked all that hard on those things, I told myself; if I had, things might have been different.

But I had worked damned hard on my brain. And yet intellectual superstardom, or even the sort of intelligence that friends remark on and strangers notice, doesn’t seem to be in my future. I am, in a word, mediocre, and I’m not sure that any amount of work and effort–the only things I think I do reasonably well–will change that.

Ugh.