[Marxism] The Long Land Grab

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Washington Post Book Review, Sunday, August 5, 2007; BW04
The Long Land Grab
A Pulitzer-winning social historian recounts America's rapacious expansion.

Reviewed by John Ferling

SEIZING DESTINY

How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea
By Richard Kluger
Knopf. 649 pp. $35

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson called the U.S. 
government "the world's best hope." What chutzpah! Twenty percent of the 
population in 1801 was enslaved, and free African Americans faced 
grinding exploitation. The new president himself held more than 100 
people as chattel. What is more, for 200 years generations of settlers 
had remorselessly pushed Native Americans off their tribal lands. 
Indians who resisted were killed or sold into slavery. If a country with 
such a track record was the world's best hope, God help humanity.

What truly set America apart, Jefferson believed, was its virtually 
unlimited supply of land, for he was convinced that if most free 
Americans became landowners, the new nation's experiment in republican 
government could succeed. Land was foremost among the enticements luring 
Europeans to say goodbye to all they had known, make a perilous ocean 
crossing and settle in a forbidding wilderness.

Those who obtained land were on the fast track to a better life. Their 
housing and diet usually improved, they accumulated more possessions, 
and they were first-class citizens with suffrage rights. Americans 
pursued this dream with a mixture of idealism and brutish self-absorption.

Between Capt. John Smith's arrival in 1607 and Col. George Washington's 
first war in the 1750s, Virginians fought five wars with their Indian 
neighbors, virtually liquidating entire tribes as the settlers advanced 
from Jamestown to beyond the Shenandoah. No less inclined toward 
expansion, the Puritans who founded New England fought six wars with the 
Indians in the same period. This was just the beginning. Following the 
War of Independence, settlers pushed onto the fertile lands beyond the 
Appalachians. Over the next century, the United States repeatedly 
battled Indians, fought Great Britain in 1812 (this time partly in the 
hope of taking Canada), and in 1846 went to war with Mexico to gain yet 
more territory.

Along the way, the settlers hit upon cash crops that made their land 
more valuable. To maximize profits, farmers who raised tobacco along the 
Chesapeake, rice in the Low Country and cotton in the Deep South turned 
to slave labor, which had not existed in supposedly benighted western 
Europe. Furthermore, American farmers stopped lavishing the care they 
had been forced to use on timeworn fields in Europe. They became 
wastrels, ruinously exploiting the soil before hurrying on to another patch.

This is a story that has been told many times, not infrequently in the 
most labored fashion and usually from the sole point of view of the 
victors. Thankfully, Richard Kluger's Seizing Destiny does not fall into 
that category. It emphasizes the rapacity of Americans who, through 
daring, cunning, double-dealing and sometimes pitiless force, took 
possession of nearly 4 million square miles within three centuries. 
Their first concern, he emphasizes, was always for their private 
property, not the public welfare.

Kluger, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for A shes to Ashes, his 
critical history of the tobacco industry, focuses less on rank-and-file 
soldiers and settlers than on how leaders encouraged the steady 
expansion. Britain's imperial rulers and later the Founding Fathers saw 
possession of trans-Appalachia as essential for the elimination of 
European rivals and for tightening the loosely federated union. 
Jefferson saw the infinite western lands as the best chance for the 
survival of republicanism. Party and sectional leaders before the Civil 
War glimpsed political advantages from opening new tracts.

Seizing Destiny is a well-crafted and readable narrative of this often 
sordid, sometimes forgotten side of the American past. In places, it is 
overly long -- more than 15 pages on Napoleon's career and dozens to 
rehash the negotiation of the peace treaty ending the Revolutionary War, 
for example. More disconcerting is Kluger's apparent reluctance to 
explore the lasting political and psychological impact of the long land 
grab. It is unlikely that three centuries of self-assuredly taking the 
land of others did not leave their mark on American culture or the 
nation's moral character. Today, many around the globe view the United 
States as greedy and intrusive. They might well see Kluger's book as the 
story of a predatory people, insensitive to the pain caused by their 
covetous habits.

Seizing Destiny features a rich narrative that includes wonderful 
vignettes about Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Sam Houston and Andrew 
Jackson. But this good book would have been better had Kluger seriously 
analyzed the legacy of America's historic aggressiveness. ·

John Ferling is the author of "Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in 
the War of Independence."

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