The funny thing about books that cover the Founding Fathers is that they generally only come alive when the authors quote their subjects. This is perhaps inevitable given that any writer will be at a disadvantage laying his own prose and conclusions beside theirs.
It is a particular pitfall for academics, especially when they add their own interpretations alongside those of the luminaries. Richard H. Immerman of Temple is the latest brave soul to make such an effort in Empire For Liberty: A History of American Imperialism From Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz.
“Franklin identified six ‘Things’ in particular to ‘diminish a Nation’: ‘being conquered,’ ‘Loss of Territory,’ ‘Loss of Trade,’ ‘Loss of Food,’ ‘Bad Government and insecure Property,’ and the ‘Introduction of Slaves,’” Immerman records. Yet and still, when Franklin went to London, he brought his own slaves along, Immerman claims, although he called them servants.
Still and all, even given Franklin’s cosmopolitan nature, Immerman takes the liberty of bracketing in definitions which might be a bit of a stretch. Immerman notes that Franklin asserted the need to allow America’s “diverse, geographically immense political community [i. e., empire] [to] be held together without creating a sovereign power that would threaten the liberties and rights the Revolutionary War had been fought to preserve.”
To his credit, though, Immerman shares quotes that might undercut his thesis from not only Franklin but also George Washington: “Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances.” Also, his second subject, a direct heir to one of the founders, John Quincy Adams “harbored little ambition to move American territorial claims beyond the North American continent.”
“Whenever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams said on July 4, 1821. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
“She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.”
Immerman goes on to accuse Adams of racial biases on somewhat dubious grounds in correspondence with Spanish minister Juan de Onis on July 23, 1818 when JQA was U. S. Secretary of State. “Adams reminded Onis that Americans living on the ‘frontier’ of Georgia and Alabama ‘had been exposed to the depredations, murders, and massacres of a tribe of savages, a small part of which lived within the limits of the United States, far the greater number of them dwelling within the borders of Florida.’”
The racism onus is notable given Immerman’s quotes of U. S. Representative John Quincy Adams’ criticism of President Andrew Jackson’s “extermination of the Indians whom we have been driving like swine into a pen west of the Mississippi.” Offhand, it looks like what Adams was opposed to was killing.
Nonetheless, in the first century of the republic, Immerman averred at the Cato Institute on September 1, 2010, “expansion was benevolent, never hegemonic” and “through the civil war, empire was a benign term.” Immerman makes a harder case of the dark side of imperialism when he comes to the present age, particularly when he looks at Paul Wolfowitz who he insists he tries to cover sympathetically.
One warning sign that something was amiss with the last Bush Administration’s national security advisor was his tutelage at the University of Chicago under Leo Strauss.
“Strauss is best known for arguing that responsibility for the horrors of the twentieth century can be traced to modernity’s rejection of classical values,” Immerman states. “This argument led him to endow the United States, because of the premium its political culture and ideology places on natural rights, with the potential to instruct the remainder of the world’s nations about how to ‘escape from history’ and proffer the ‘chance for modernity to be something more than merely modern.’”
“Strauss also stressed ‘the importance of a leader who was especially strong in his actions, firm in his beliefs, and willing to go against the grain to combat ‘tyranny.’” That’s not all Strauss stressed. He was big on “meaningful silences” and “reading between the lines.” (I’ve met a few Straussians who attempt the latter function without reading the actual lines first.)
“By a Straussian reading of intelligence, U. S. officials imagined an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that in reality hardly existed; they dreamed Iraqi complicity in 9/11 even as they minimized the role of Saudi; they saw a reincarnated Hitler poised to attack and not a toothless tiger kept in check by a decade of isolation; they glimpsed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that apparently were so well hidden that even the Iraqis couldn’t find them when the globe’s lone superpower invaded; and they imagined a country ripe to be a mini-America in the Middle East rather than America’s West Bank,” Daniel J. Flynn wrote in Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas. “We may never know if they gleaned this information from meaningful silences, numerology, or some equally absurd method.”
“We know only that they drew conclusions not warranted by the facts.” Dan Flynn was my predecessor at Accuracy in Academia.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
