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We’ve been discussing frontiers lately, a concept that extends to the cultural realm as well. The American concern with the cultural frontier reached its pinnacle during the early Cold War. Beginning in the late 1940s, as fears of Soviet expansion and then communist military incursions took center stage in the foreign policies of the Western allies, officials in Washington grew increasingly concerned to project an image of U.S. leadership not only as benign, but as reliable and trustworthy. They were aware of traditional stereotypes about American superficiality, impertinence, and unreliability and sought to counter negative stereotypes of America with positive portrayals that would shore up Western morale. We call this effort “public diplomacy,” and the outreach involved multiple U.S. agencies, from the Economic Cooperation Administration, which ran the Marshall Plan and, along with it, what is likely the largest peacetime propaganda effort in human history, to the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Eisenhower administration. The State Department ran the Fulbright and Foreign Leader exchange programs, the Department of Defense took pains to maintain solid public relations among allied nations, and the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcast to both sides of the Iron Curtain. Of course the CIA got involved as well, with a hand in everything from election manipulation to promoting the work of anti-communist intellectuals.
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If you’ve never visited, you may be inclined to think of China’s Great Wall as a singular installation, as a very great wall, as perhaps the greatest of walls. In fact, the so-called “Great Wall of China” is a series of walls and fortifications built over centuries as the Chinese empire expanded northward. Walls were built for protection from marauding nomads outside of the empire, but new structures were extended northward and westward as the empire expanded. Grand as they were (and are), the walls did not demarcate the limit of the empire; instead, they ratcheted the empire ever further outward. “Build and move on was the principle,” historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper observe about these walls, “not setting up a fixed border for all time.” Protection was one function of the wall to be sure, but “the wall” was never intended strictly to demarcate the empire from non-empire. Rather, in their successive geographical march, the walls offered the ongoing contact with the outsider, non-imperial subjects–-“barbarians,” if you will--that is the hallmark of imperial frontiers.  In 1893, at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a young historian from the University of Wisconsin offered what might still be the most influential history lecture ever given in America. Titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner laid out a compelling political and cultural anthropology of the frontier in American life and a lament for its apparent passing. Basing his analysis in the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier was now, for all intents and purposes, filled up. Sparse population in some regions there may be, but the tide of settlement had nevertheless run the continent, and all was being brought under the control of barbed wire and the telegraph. No more wilderness was left to be claimed and tamed. For Turner, this fact carried enormous implications for American society. An era had passed, and the capacity of the frontier to generate what was unique about the Americans had passed with it. What became known as Turner’s “frontier thesis” enthralled a generation of leading American opinion makers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who feared for the sake of the country’s future, and, in particular, for the fate of American manhood.  |
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Why empire?This blog presents new scholarship on American empire, places the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, explores imperial habits throughout American society and culture, uncovers the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and develops “empire” as a critical perspective.
At least two features in the American experience are clarified through the lens of American empire: First, we better understand persistent social inequities in a nation professing a fundamental commitment to equality. Second, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of US foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war--including often with itself--with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof. |
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