Rob Farley remarks that he was surprised that Mahan and the Influence of Sea Power on History is absent from Herring's book (and he does use bookplates; his lost copy turned up anonymously at his office) . Mahan's not quite absent: Herring does note that he influenced Teddy, and his presence at the Second Hague Convention (he even manages to suggest, but not state, Mahan's contribution to torpedoing it).

But these are single sentences. The main reference (a paragraph, on p 303) claims that Mahan only provided a rationale for a pre-existing movement. One wouldn't know why Herring says this from his own book; he first mentions the fleet expansion movement with a quote from Mahan himself (the only other reference to him), and next mentions it in connection with the Italian crisis of 1891, after the first Influence was published.

The solution, as often, is to look at Herring's sources. For this, he cites Doenecke's The Presidencies of James A. Garfield & Chester A. Arthur, which dates the movement back into the Hayes administration, when Navy captains, and a Philadelphia ship-builder called John Roach, began to call for a larger fleet. That's not an ideological movement; that's a lobbying campaign, of the sort we have seen all too frequently  since.  Nor was it much of a lobbying campaign; despite getting Arthur's support, the naval funds were only appropriated on March 4, 1885, the last hours of Arthur's presidency.

The new ships were, Doenecke says, two cruisers and two destroyers (cf. Herring, who says they were three cruisers) , and Roach got the contract for all four. (He was low bid, and Doenecke says it was honest.)  

Doenecke's treatment is itself based on Walter La Feber's New Empire, and reading them has shown me why Herring is so bland. He insists so much that all the nineteenth century Secretaries of State were expansionist that he omits what La Feber showed: that they were expansionist in different directions by different means.

For example, Blaine advocated a Pan American Conference when he was Secretary in 1881, because he thought the United States could employ the Conference for leverage in Latin America. When Garfield was shot, Arthur dismissed Blaine, who belonged to another wing of the GOP on domestic issues (like civil service) and replaced him with Freylinghuysen, who was Arthur's  ally. Freylinghuysen scuttled the conference, because he didn't want to run the risk of the United States being bound by it.

These are both expansionist positions; but they are contrary in practice;  Herring obscures this. Instead of any of the three sentences above, he says the Conference was dismissed "largely through [nameless] spite" and goes on at length about Blaine's greatness and others' lack of greatness. This is not helpful.

Despite being identified as  1901-1913,  the ninth chapter of Herring's From Colony to Superpower  doesn't actually say much about Taft, perhaps more about his stay as proconsul in the Phillipines than about his Presidency. The final act of the Nicaraguan soap opera was delayed until 1911, but beyond that, there are some mentions about "dollar diplomacy."

This was the American invention of the role later undertaken by the IMF, the offer to some small country of enough loans to resolve its debts,on the condition that the rescuer control the small country's public finance. Taft seems to have adopted it, like anti-trust as domestic policy, by generalizing what TR did when he was in that mood.

I'm sorry not to get back to From Colony to Superpower, although I don't have as interesting a reason as Rob Farley does; I don't suppose he uses bookplates.

But I think this leaves me a little more time to get my reading in gear; my initial reaction to Chapter VIII, in which Herring covers the Theodore Roosevelt Administration (and a few words on Taft) is that our author has thrown his notecards at the chapter with no particular concept of how they should come down. He begins by defending American exceptionalism; he considers American philanthropy real, and quotes no less an authority than the Empress Dowager to the effect that Americans may be barbarians, but they've always been very kind. (Why does a qualified historian believe her? This is patently a return of thanks for a charitable donation, and royalty has always been very good at saying nice things about people who are handing them money.) He ends by revealing the unsurprising truth that the Open Door and  the return of the Boxer Indemnity both served the narrow interest of the United States.

Herring bends a few notecards in the process: He cites a quote late in the chapter as being from "Finley Peter Dunne's character Mr. Dooley". Oddly enough, at the beginning of the chapter, he cites the much better known crack that TR should have called his Cuban memoirs Alone in Cubia, Herring simply identifies the author as "a wit". I grew curious, and looked at the source in his footnote (neither footnote cites Dunne), and found it was this newspaper column. It took me a while, because Herring misspelled the author's name, and ascribed it to the wrong newspaper; but the weirdest thing is that it doesn't contain the joke.

I should return to Chapter VII, and Flint's Fleet next; it's too fascinating a story, and Herring tells too litlle of it, to omit.

Added: on reviewing the chapter, I find it is worse than this. Herring also cites Mark Twain only at second hand, and he does not mention Twain's take on the Phillipine War at all, even to refute it. He cites one Twain quote from Ken Burns; has he read Twain himself?

Is this what it takes to be a major historian?  No, there is one feature which will keep Herring from being James Ford Rhodes or Ron Chernow; he has a regrettable habit of writing intelligible, grammatical, and (occasionally) witty English. He will never be a best-seller.

I regret to say that I will not be able to post at length about the current chapter of From Colony to Superpower; in the meantime, Robert Farley and Erik Loomis have done so. In brief, Herring continues to argue that America was always expansionist, and uses three examples this time, the Spanish-American War, the Venezuela crisis, and one I've never heard of, the intervention in Brazilian affairs in 1894.

Herring, also, to his credit quotes McKinley, a week before his assassination, as saying that isolation is no longer possible or desirable, which implies it once was. He makes an excellent point about the Venezuela crisis: the United States saved for Venezuela, of all its vasty claims over Guyana, only the mouth of the Orinoco. This meant that the British could not close the Orinoco, and Americans were guaranteed passage there. This was, of the whole swamp, the only thing Americans were interested in. Coincidence, doubtless.

But for all the justified snark against the patriotic portrayal of America putting herself out to serve another American Republic, it would seem that if only one point could be saved, the free passage of the Orinoco was likely to be the most valuble to Venezuela too....

George Herring fashions his history of the period from 1877 to 1893 around the figure of James G. Blaine, twice Secretary of State, and a notorious, if unconvicted, corruptionist. (There is no sign that he was any more dishonest in foreign affairs than a Secretary of State ought to be.)

Herring makes the interesting argument that the reduction of the Native Americans to effectively colonial status in this period, no longer subject to treaties, anticipates the  colonialism abroad of the next chapter, about the Spanish American War. An interesting idea; we shall see whether he connects the Good Neighbor policy with John Collier's  contemporary reforms of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which removed the forced assimilation and dependency of this era. 

Herring's continuing campaign against American exceptionalism leads him to portray this period as a great  rising of American expansionism.  I hold no great case for American exceptionalism, but he doesn't make much of a case against it.  There is the usual spattering of projects for expansion, but, as under Grant, they are fragile things, none of which come to much. 

Herring mentions two efforts by Blaine to arbitrate: one between Guatemala and Mexico, over a boundary question; one between Chile and Peru, over the War of the Pacific. In both cases he sums up the effort as encouraging  the materially weaker party, without actually doing anything to support them; thus prolonging the dispute without actually changing the outcome at all.

I'm not sure why he doesn't mention Hayes' arbitration of the boundary dispute between Argentina and Paraguay. It actually reached a resolution, stable for at least fifty years (depending on whether you count a war by a third party as destabilizing), it supported the claims of the weaker party, and it didn't involve Blaine. But the key difference may be that this arbitration seems to have been at the initiative of the parties, not the US trying to put its imperial oar in. 

In 1891, there was a crisis between the US and Italy, when eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans; and a crisis when a brawl in Valparaiso killed two US Navy sailors and wounded seventeen. Herring's emphases suggest that he regards both of these as exercises in US strength; but in fact they came out much the same: the US gave an apology and money to Italy, and Chile gave an apology and money to the US. (Chile paid three times as much for fewer deaths, but that's what one would expect from the relative power of the nations concerned.)  A pro-Navy lobby did arise out of this; it would never do for the US not to able to face down the Italian fleet.

Blaine did see one change. The Samoan situation had continued to complicate, and the consuls had called in their fleets; a cyclone wrecked the American and the German contingent (the lone British ship was observing, further offshore, and survived). The upshot was an international condominium; the US didn't actually annex its share of Samoa for another decade.

The American sugar industry fought the expansionist lobby and substantial interests in Hawaii  to a draw. Considering the small size of that industry, I think this speaks to the weakness of the  lobby, not its strength.  

The reciprocity treaty from the last chapter was renewed once, but then McKinley's Tariff Bill restored the sugar tariff.  The Hawaiian sugar interests wanted back inside the American barrier, of course, and they tried to pull this off by declaring a Republic and having it annexed to the United States. The first part worked; the American consul called in the Marines, who "restored order" just in time to prevent the Queen from restoring the authority of her Government. (I wonder if anyone at the time compared this to intervention in the Civil War?) The new Republic duly sent a treaty of annexation to Washington; but it was not ratified before Gover Cleveland regained office, and put his foot down. He was a very moral man (in politics), and, incidentally, had just received the Electoral votes of Louisiana.  

Addendum: Herring mentions the desire for foreign markets to make up for the Recession of 1873 as one of the engines of expansion; but it is not clear that this is a genuine cause. Is this a real or an ideological cause? That is, it is clear that some American manufacturers believed this, and it was one of the arguments for the expansionist lobby, culminating in the perpetual claims that there was an enormous market in China; but is there any reason to believe they were right?

Erik Loomis  brings out a part of Chapter VI I should have discussed: The  Emancipation Proclamation became necessary in 1862, because the negroes were voting with their feet, and something had to be done with them. It was also a last chance for the South to choose "the Union as it was"; if they returned before January 1863, their system would survive (and, incidentally, there would have been an anti-Administration majority in both Houses of Congress).

The conventional story is that  Lincoln was persuaded by the advice  that this would look like an act of desperation, calling for the slaves to revolt, unless he waited for a victory first; so he issued the Preliminary Proclamation after Antietam. The conventional story is that this worked.

Herring points out that some Europeans took it as desperation anyway; and this is what one would expect. Antietam wasn't all that much of a victory, and even it had been, continuity suggests that the effect of Lincoln's timing would have been exactly what he got: instead of everybody treating it as desperation, some did.

And as it was, the idea that the Union was displaying weakness had few if important supporters: the Prime Minister argued in Cabinet that it was time to intervene, and was talked out of it, and Gladstone (not yet PM) gave a speech which said the Confederates "had made a nation" He didn't mention the Proclamation, and Roger Ransom suggests he hadn't heard of Antietam.

Chapter VI of From Colony to Superpower deals with the Civil War and foreign policy under Johnson and Grant, or rather under Seward and Fish.

The most striking part of this, for me, is the sketch of the boorish incompetence of the Confederate diplomatic mission. Granted they had a difficult mission (it was an offense to the United States for responsible ministers even to talk to Confederate emissaries), but their greatest success was not even of their doing: Capt. Wilkes, USN, took two of them off the British steamer Trent without any of the appropriate formalities; the British dusted off the American objections to this sort of high-handedness from the War of 1812, and  the resulting quarrel might actually have led to British recognition of the Confederacy.

But when Mason was released, and got to Britain, his speeches in favor of slavery and his bad aim with tobacco juice got him nowhere; Slidell did not understand how the French Government operated, or what the ministers wanted; the Confederate emissary to Saint Petersburgh never got there; and the star of the show, John Pickett of Kentucky, sent to Juarez in Mexico, managed to get arrested for brawling on the streets of Mexico City, offended and insulted the Mexican ministers, and eventually had Juarez intercepting his messages home and passing them on to Washington.

Herring describes this as provincialism and extreme cultural insensitivity, since he is discussing Europe as well as Latin America; he has described the same sort of thing as racism when talking about Polk or the American ministers to Mexico, like Joel Poinsett of Tennessee and Anthony Butler of Mississippi. I think he's right this time; assuming that any situation can be handled by a crude bribe, like Poinsett, or being more anti-Catholic than the anticlerical Juarez, like Pickett, isn't racism.

But provincialism can work for you, if you're a good enough diplomat. The Union minister to Russia, Cassius Clay, was also from Kentucky, and, like Dr. Franklin, he was a great success as a Noble Savage: pigeonwing dancing, Bowie knives, dueling, and all. Herring's source on Russia, Distant Friends, is about the relationship between Russia and the United States before Seward, and argues that the two got along because they had no interests (except a few sea otters) in conflict and each liked the existence of another state which might stand up to England. The problems of the hyperpower are not new.

The essential stupidity of Confederate foreign policy in general is another post: the Confederacy went to war for terms which mere victory could not achieve: would an independent CSA get its slaves returned from Massachusetts or a slave code in Nebraska? Yeah, right. (If Columbia had been supine at the conqueror's feet </lush metaphor>;, perhaps, but that was not in the cards.) 

Herring does discuss how the Rebels solved the Union blockade on their foreign trade: to embargo cotton themselves (they burnt 2.5 million bales) before the Union could get its blockade in place. Again a fondness for the apocalyptic solution: if England doesn't rescue us, England and the Confederacy are going down together.  It failed, as it fully deserved to: cotton production soared in Egypt and Bombay Presidency, and survived the re-entry of American cotton into the world market; and the North sold all the cotton it could from reconstructed areas. (Herring notes that this embargo, unlike 1807, was obeyed; but the South obeyed the Embargo of 1807 too.)  

The end of the chapter deals with Seward and Hamilton Fish. Seward did make an amazing number of possible expansions of American power the  Dominican Republic, the Danish West Indies, the Panama isthmus, Tiger Island in Honduras, Korea, Taiwan... Herring would use this to prove the normalcy of American expansionism, but what's really impressive is how fragile these deals are. The Danish deal blew over when a hurricane came through; but isn't Congress capable of remembering that there are hurricanes in the Caribbean without that?

The deals which came off during this whole period had someone pulling strongly for them at the other end: Alexander II was happy to get money for an indefensible possession like Alaska, which was no longer paying for itself (and Seward still got rooked on the price). The Kingdom of Hawaii reached close agreement with the United States because the haoles running the Islands' foreign affairs wanted very much to be inside the United States sugar tariff; and in exchange, Hawaii agreed not to lease bases to any third power, which the Hawaiians also wanted.  (The Americans would have preferred an American base at Pearl Harbour, but were evaded.) The  American share of the protectorate in Samoa began as an unauthorized agreement between the British, German, and American consuls to make Apia a neutral zone in the tribal wars.
 
There is an imperial ideology that this is how states  get inveigled into adventure: the innocent imperial proconsul is just minding his own business when some foreigner decides to involve them in his private affairs; but that doesn't mean there is no truth to it.

This long-delayed survey of George Herring's From Colony to Superpower   starts with Chapter V, which begins with the term of Martin Van Buren. At this point, there are loads of fascinating detail, from the acquisition of "Parker" Island in the Pacific (his source says Barker; is Baker Island correct?), the first non-contiguous posession of the United States, to the reaction of Van Buren to real revolution in Canada in 1837.

The island was a use of the Guano Act, one of the less savory pieces of American legislation, which permitted the United States to annex uninhabited islands with -er- guano all over them.

Van Buren stayed pretty well out of the Canadian revolution, even though the United States had tried to recruit Canada twice before, in 1775 and 1813. Even when the British burnt an American ship in American waters, just because it had been hired by Canadian revolutionaries, Van Buren stayed calm and filed a protest. It may have helped that the Caroline was owned by the Van Rensselaers, New York Whigs for whom the New York Democrat in the White House had no reason to do special favors. Instead he sent Winfield Scott, poor man, to tramp the border, often on his own, and keep both sides under observation. 

The chapter begins with the observation that slavery and expansion marched hand in hand; but I'm not convinced. While it offers a wide spectrum of attempts to expand in the interests of slavery, only the acquisition of Texas, as a ready-made slave state, actually happened. The efforts of three American diplomats to walk off with Cuba, the brief tenure of William Walker of Tennessee as President of Nicaragua, and the attempts to intervene in Yucatan all fizzled. (Walker might have had a better chance if he hadn't tried to expropriate Vanderbilt's local subsidiary, mind you...)  The efforts to extend American protection to Hawaii  had nothing to do with slavery.

But the centerpiece is Polk. It is conventional to quote the jibes of his opponents against this dark horse, but I still like Schlesinger's take: Polk came into office with a four-point platform and got all of them done: a lower tariff, the creation of government Treasuries to keep the Federal Government's cash, California, and  the American claim to "Oregon", which meant everything between California and Alaska. Polk accomplished all four, and took politics out of the process by pledging not to run for re-election in 1848 and making his Cabinet pledge not to run either.

He would have done  well to exact the same pledge from his generals. Herring says, on the same page, that Polk viewed  Scott and Zachary Taylor as political rivals; rivals for what? Polk wasn't running; but both generals ran the war as the first step of their Presidential campaigns. Taylor marched all over northern Mexico inviting largely pointless battles to keep himself in the news; and in due course was elected in 1848.

Herring gives great weight to Polk's errors. He found himself out on a limb, where he nearly was trapped into going to war for British Columbia, to which the United States had no claim to speak of; fortunately both sides compromised at the last minute on the present frontier. But close observation of almost any diplomatic history will show similar blunders; what counts is whether you recover from them. 

More interesting is Polk's calculation that he wouldn't have to go to war with Mexico. He offered to pay for California, and the land eastward to Texas. under slightly more generous terms than the eventual treaty. The Mexican decision to refuse this certainly cost them a war, and gained them no material benefit whatsoever, after a predictable defeat; Polk counted on the Mexicans acting for the immediate material benefit of their State, and there were voices (the British minister; Lucas Alaman, the former foreign minister)  who urged them to do so. But the Mexicans didn't take Polk's offer;  resentment over Texas, fear of Protestantism, and national pride prevented them.

I've been talked into joining a reading project on the web; the book is George Herring: From Colony to Superpower, a diplomatic history of the United States. I'm joining in late; the other readers first posted here, and here.

Herring is a Vietnam historian by trade; the further he is from there, the weaker and shorter his chapters are. The first four chapters are mostly textbook history, up through Jackson; and Herring's sources are mostly the recent, fairly Federalist, take on the period. He does use Dumas Malone's six-volume Jefferson when he gets to Jefferson's Presidency, but Malone covers the period when Jefferson was Secretary of State in as much detail, and with  no more bias.

Herring does have a thesis: he doesn't believe that there was ever a real isolationist period in American history; his America has normally been willing to expand, and always to intervene; One of the commentators has come away with the impression that there is no real difference between Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, on one hand, and Reagan and Bush on the other; I think this over-simplifies Herring's position somewhat. 

Herring does omit much of the evidence of difference: Adam's speech that we go not abroad for dragons to destroy is omitted, and Jefferson's constitutional qualms about Louisiana get a very short sentence.

In the process, Herring does make some interesting points: that 1812 was the only instance of a modern state going to war without any staff officers. This may explain one of the oddities of the war: Jefferson called the conquest of Canada a "mere matter of marching"; supply officers might have realized how hard it is to march from Detroit to Halifax. After the Battle of the Thames, marching might in fact have conquered Canada, at least until British reinforcements arrived; but Harrison realized he couldn't march to Niagra, much less the Atlantic, and went back to his base in Detroit.

Herring also notes, which I did not know, that restrictions on trade with the British West Indies were renewed after 1815; even sometimes restrictions on trade with Canada. These didn't cause the trouble of Jefferson's embargo; after all, there was all Europe as an alternative market; but they didn't work either.