"Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall"
(The Bible, Book of Proverbs 16:18)
In this chapter I will first describe the historical development of the United States and how the nature of that development affected both the state/society complex, and the long-term determinants of the strategic culture of the policy-making elites. I will show that the history of the US (and the precursor British colonies) has been one of continual expansion; to begin with predominantly through military means (the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), and then through a mixture of economic, political, covert, and when deemed necessary, overt military means. I will then utilize these insights to assess current energy-related policies in the context of major power competition. In the final piece of this chapter I will summarize the current US configuration with respect to the possible paths open to the nation.
If the young United States had a mission, it was not to liberate but to expand. “Of course” declared Theodore Roosevelt in 1899, as if explaining the self-evident to the obtuse “our whole national history has been one of expansion.” TR spoke truthfully … How was this expansion achieved? On this point, the historical record leaves no room for debate: by any means necessary. (Bacevich 2009, pp. 19-20)
I will also show that the historical experiences of the British colonies prior to the mid-eighteenth century, together with the following genocide of the native peoples, have produced a creation myth that sanctifies the US as “The Shining City On A Hill” that is in a constant civilizing struggle with the Other; a conceptual structure and discourse that has been repeatedly used to support aggressive actions against other nations. Only when all of the world has been “civilized” and accepts the US as the “indispensable nation” and “global policeman” will America’s work be done.
The notion of American exceptionalism – that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary – is not new. It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Colony when Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later would be quoted by Ronald Reagan, Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city on a hill”. Reagan embellished a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill” … A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words, the people on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot Indians … Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history from the first settlements to the present day.
(Zinn 2005)
This multi-century expansionist drive has been supported by the combination of extensive domestic natural resource endowments and an ever-increasing population, together with the ability of the US to dominate its own hemisphere; separated by two oceans from military attack and bordered by two weak nations. Until 1970 the US was self-sufficient in fossil fuel energy, after which it suffered a 40-year period of escalating foreign oil dependency until the shale oil revolution that has now returned the nation to a position of self-sufficiency; a position strengthened by the oil production surpluses of the neighbouring Canada and Mexico. The US is home to the majority of global private fossil fuel TNCs, which have for over a century developed extensive global operations synergistically with US foreign policy. There are also many US based TNCs, such as Boeing and General Electric, which are directly dependent upon the continued use of fossil fuels.
I will show that the US has been politically dominated by big business and finance since the late nineteenth century, a situation that has direct impacts upon US foreign policy. Since World War 2 that policy has been dominated by the large internationalized corporate elites, with an emphasis on the integration of as much of the globe as possible within a US-dominated market regime. This has been heavily facilitated by US dominance in the immediate post-WW2 period, repeated four decades later by the collapse of the Soviet-bloc and the liberalization of China.
Domestically, the US is relatively unique among Western nations in never having developed a labor-based, socialist mass movement as a balance to business interests. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, business, the state, and the courts, worked together to constrain labor organizations – aided by extreme economic volatility. The rapid rise of big business at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of a still small business-oriented state, altered the balance of power even more against labor (and against smaller domestic-oriented businesses). The power of big business was only challenged in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the resulting New Deal social compact lasting into the 1970s. Since the progressive challenge of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the turmoil created by the Vietnam War, economic elites have returned themselves to a dominant position that is at least, if not greater than, that of the late nineteenth century. Such elite dominance puts the lie to the dominant US discoursal notions of its own democracy, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both” (Shoup 2015, preface).
Historical Positioning
The Terror Dream (1584 to 1776)
Much of US myth making is facilitated by “forgetting”, with large voids before the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and between then and American Independence in 1776. This misses much of the continuity between prior colony and the new nation, and leaves generally unseen the highly exploitative, class-ridden, and terror-inducing reality of this period.
Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all the subsequent generations took their cue from the nation’s founder. (Isenberg 2017, p. 5)
The Jamestown, Virginia colony was established in 1607 as a business venture by the Virginia Company of London after a series of failed colonies, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke that had been established in 1585. Jamestown was briefly abandoned in 1610 after three years of extremely high settler death rates due to starvation, disease and attacks from local tribes and the Spanish (this included the Starving Time from 1609-1610); it was quickly resettled with the arrival of new supply ships.
That a small fraction of colonists survived this first twenty years of settlement came as no surprise back home – nor did London’s elite much care. The investment was not in people … The colonists were meant to find gold, and to line the pockets of the investor class back in England. The people sent to accomplish this task were by definition expendable. (Isenberg 2017, p. 11)
After starting to successfully harvest tobacco from 1614 the colony began to prosper, but this then led to expansion that drove conflict with the neighboring tribes. In 1622 these tribes attempted to eliminate the colony, killing 300 settlers (about a third of the English-speaking colonists) but failed in their elimination attempt. Despite these losses, the colony continued to prosper and grow, and decisively defeated the local tribes between 1644 and 1646. The workforce of the colony predominantly consisted of current or previous indentured servants with a few thousand African slaves; many of the former poor adults and fatherless boys with some children “spirited” (i.e. kidnapped) from London streets and sold to planters. With respect to the Chesapeake Bay colonies (Virginia and Maryland), “between 1630 and 1680, 50,000 of the 75,000 European immigrants … were indentured servants”, and approximately half of voluntary emigrants to the British American colonies as a whole prior to 1776 were indentured servants (Smith 2023, p. 97). They mostly laboured in horrendous conditions, “Overwork, inadequate nutrition, and disease killed many of them, and suicides were not uncommon” (Ibid.) and “it is doubtful [in Virginia] that English servants fared better than [Blacks]” (Breen 1973, p. 7), with “Half of all white servants in the … colonies of Virginia and Maryland [dying] within five years of their arrival (Mintz and McNeil quoted in Smith 2023, p. 97). Even after becoming freemen, only about 6% ever became independent planters with the vast majority not substantially improving their lot (Breen 1973). The balance switched more to slavery after Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, during which English indentured servants and Black slaves fought together against the colony’s administration; the enslaved portion of Virginia’s population grew from 9% in 1700 to 40% in 1775 (Holton 1999, page xix). The rebellion had begun due to the Governor’s perceived lack of support for the frontier settlers’ moves to annex more Amerindian territory, as he refused to retaliate against tribal attacks on frontier settlements. This need for expansion to provide space for a growing population, with much of the colonial lands taken by a gentry monopolizing the cultivatable land away from proximity to Amerindian populations, would bedevil the British colonies. The rebellion was then transformed into a general class war between the rich and the poor of the colony, with “many Virginians … [regarding] economic status, not race, as the essential social distinction” (Breen 1973, p. 11).
From Virginia, the British expanded into North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The large estate owners became the powerful plantation elite within the colony, utilizing mostly slave labor; a pattern repeated throughout the American South. With much greater access to Black slaves, and the kidnapping of individuals into indentured servitude legally restricted in England, the gentry tended to indenture more skilled individuals who were treated somewhat better. An ongoing improvement in the economy of the southern colonies also lifted many of the freemen out of grinding poverty, and the expansion of territory opened up lands for settlement. The life experience of the white servant and the Black slave were diverging greatly, especially as more slaves were imported directly from Africa in horrific conditions rather than via the West Indies where they had had time to learn English and to adjust to the alien culture. “By 1700, whites had achieved a sense of race solidarity at the expense of the blacks [who] were set apart of objects of contempt and ridicule. The whites, even the meanest among them, always knew there was a class of men permanently below them” (Breen 1973, p. 18). The nature of the Virginia colony, and that of the plantation South that grew from it, did not lend itself to the basis of a national myth based upon religious freedom and democracy. That role fell to Plymouth, and more generally New England, founded thirteen years after Jamestown.
The Plymouth colony was founded in 1620 by puritan separatists that came to be known as the Pilgrims (a word not popularized until 1874 [Isenberg 2017]); both as a business settlement and a place of escape from religious persecution. The Voyage of the Mayflower and the First Thanksgiving (in late 1621 after half the Pilgrims had died) provide foundational myths of White American history. The latter was not celebrated with a national holiday until the US Civil War, a time of need for Northern national myth making, two and a half centuries later. The larger Massachusetts Bay colony was established in 1628, the Province of New Hampshire in 1629, and Connecticut and Rhode Island & Providence Plantation colonies in 1636. The words of John Winthrop in 1630 to a group of Massachusetts colonists before they embarked on their journey, “as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people will be upon us … we shall be made a story and byword through the world”, were only published two centuries later and it was another century until US Presidents would utilize his words in the service of US exceptionalism:
I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella [sic] three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. "We must always consider", he said, "that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us” … For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella [sic] in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. (Kennedy 1961)
Ronald Reagan utilized Winthrop’s words many times, identifying the US as the shining city on a hill. Barack Obama and many other politicians have also utilized Winthrop’s words to underline the assumed exceptionalism of the US. In 2017 Reagan’s adaptation was used by James Comey, the former FBI Director, in his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in reference to Russia: “That’s what this is about. And they will be back, because we remain – as difficult as we can be with each other, we remain the shining city on the hill, and they don’t like it” (Comey 2017). The mythical view of the US as an exceptional New World nation, rising above the failures of the Old World was well captured by Schlesinger (1952):
The New World had been called into existence to redress the moral as well as the diplomatic balance of the Old; we could not defile the sacredness of our national mission by too careless intercourse with the world whose failure made our own necessary … Our nation had been commissioned--whether by God or by history--to work out on this remote hemisphere the best hopes and dreams of men.
Mass migration to the New England colonies continued until the English Civil War (1641 to 1652) after which population growth was predominantly from natural increase. The New England colony utilized few indentured servants or slaves, but instead of being the mythical home of freedom and equality,
By the 1630s, New Englanders reinvented a hierarchical society of ‘stations’, from ruling elite to household servants. In their number were plenty of poor boys, meant for exploitation. Some were religious, but they were the minority among the waves of migrants that followed Winthrop’s Arbella. The elites owned slaves, but the population they most exploited were the child laborers. Even the church reflected class relations: designated seating affirmed class station. (Isenberg 2017, p. 10).
As Turner (2020, p. 180) notes “only a small percentage of adult settlers elected the colony’s leaders and gave consent to laws and taxes. In some respects, New Plymouth functioned as an oligarchy, as men like William Bradford, Edward Wilson, Mules Standish, and Thomas Pence filled key offices year after year.” After a peaceful start to relations with the local Amerindians, the expansion of the New England colonies produced the same result as in the southern colonies – conflict. This conflict included the Pequot War (1636-1638) and King Philip’s War (1675-1678). The latter led to large-scale destruction in the New England colonies and significant loss of life. Expansionism was supported by a notion of “providential and historical ‘destiny’” so strong that the settlers “saw the ‘clearing’ of Native American communities by disease as evidence that God ‘intended’ the colonists to possess Indian [sic] lands” (Kakel III 2011, p. 17). Such a view also supported the multi-century Amerindian genocide and land theft that started early in the New England colonies, historical realities that lie silent in US mythology:
In a chilling display of the coexistence of democracy and genocide on the American borderlands, the settlers first held a vote on what to do with the indigenous Moravian converts. Indiscriminate slaughter won out … Within American history … The ‘c’ and ‘g’ words – colonialism and genocide – are rarely invoked. (Hixson 2013, preface)
The British colonies in North America had been split by New Holland until it surrendered in 1664, resulting in the British takeover of the area that now includes New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The diverse colony of New Holland (over half the inhabitants were not Dutch) was established by the business concern the West India Company, and included the highly diverse and thriving port of New York, the large landed estates of the Patroons used for agriculture, fur trading and fishing (provided with jurisdictional rights in return for their development), merchants, smaller farmers and tradesmen. The economy was predominantly capitalist in nature, with paid labor and relatively well-off immigrants, governed with a secular pragmatism. This remained so after the British takeover, with no confiscation of land or expelling of its population and with even Dutch mayors ruling over what became New York, forming the cultural basis of the development of New York and the surrounding middle colonies. The British victory opened the door to large-scale immigration from the New England colonies into the area.
The French to the north and west, the Spanish to the south and the Amerindians to the west hemmed in the British colonies along the North American eastern seaboard. This led to the British colonies being drawn into European wars, as well as dealing with Amerindian resistance to their expansion. King William’s War (1688-1697: European War of Grand Alliance) involved conflict between the British colonies of New England and New York and the French colony of New France; each side using its respective Amerindian allies. Within five years the colonies were consumed into Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713: European War of Spanish Succession). This involved conflict with both New France and Spanish Florida and ended with significant British gains. The 1715-1717 Yamasee War (with the Yamasee tribe) nearly destroyed the South Carolina colony, with it only being saved by an alliance with the Cherokee tribe. In the north, conflict continued with Father Rale’s War (1722-1725), King George’s War (1744-1748: War of Austrian Succession) and Father Le Loutre’s War (1749-1755). The wars with the French, and their Amerindian allies, were finally stopped with the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which resulted in total defeat for the French and a huge expansion of the British colonies to the Mississippi River.
This ended the much-forgotten period of seemingly endless and brutal struggle; a period of painful attrition with the colonists continually growing in numbers and the Amerindians dwindling due to pandemics, war losses and outright slaughter. Added to this was an internal theocratic and disciplinary terror. This included in the northern colonies the persecution of Quakers and those accused of practicing witchcraft; exemplified by Salem and its infamous Witch Trials (1692-1693). The terror and moral ambiguity of this period, that required both a constant ideological reinforcement of the colonists’ spiritual uniqueness and a fostering of a hatred of the Other, is well captured by Faludi (2007, Ch. 8, para. 33):
Caught in these coils, early American settlers dwelled in a state of perpetual insecurity, in what they repeatedly described as an experience of ‘terror’. Time and again, military attempts to guard frontier towns failed. Long after King Philip [a native leader] himself had been shot, quartered, and beheaded, long after his head was impaled on a pole and displayed in Plymouth’s town square (where his father had dined with Pilgrim’s at the first Thanksgiving) for the delectation of white passers-by for the next quarter century … the different kind of war roiled on, in the borderlands of the continent and the bitter hearts of the antagonists.
Founding myths are fundamental to the way in which nations see themselves. I have already referenced the usage of the notion of “The City Upon A Hill” above: a city that had the right to spread the civilizing mission of its God fearing people, even if that “Manifest Destiny” entailed the eradication or subjugation of “heathen” Others. “Indians [sic] destabilized the colonizer’s identity and his presumed providential destiny to inherit the land. This persistent rupturing of the colonialist fantasy combined with ‘savage’ anticolonial resistance had a traumatic impact on the colonizer. Euro-Americans thus engaged in often-indiscriminate violence aimed at fulfilling the self-serving vision of Indians as a ‘dying race’” (Hixson, p.4). The City Upon A Hill struggling to rid the world of the savage Other has been a redolent trope throughout US history, within such discourses as “Godless communists”, uncivilized “Muslim terrorist states”, “humanitarian intervention” and “the indispensable nation”. Only within such an exceptionalist discourse would the labeling of individuals and ideas as “un-American” make sense.
“So, welcome to America as it was” (Isenberg 2017, p. 14): a small elite standing above a class-ridden and autocratic white society, taking land for its own through conquest and genocide after more than two centuries of a brutal “total” war with the Other (Amerindians), and profiting from the enslavement of hundreds of thousands kidnapped from their home continent or born into slavery. A societal reality that would continue into the twentieth century.
The defeat of the French and their Amerindian allies removed the major threat to the British colonies that had “thwarted Great Britain’s plans to institute new colonial policies” (Ferling 2013, p. 56) to better control the somewhat unruly North American colonies, while at the same time suddenly removing much of the colonists need for the defensive services of the home country. At the same time the British started to raise new taxes on the colonists to pay for the large costs of the Seven Years War of 1756 to 1763 (which included the French and Indian War); taxes that the colonists were unwilling to pay. A third factor which drove colonial unrest was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which created an Indian [sic] reserve west of the British colonies that was not open to settlement by the British colonists. This was a vast amount of territory coveted by both settlers and land speculators (including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and many more of the elite members of colonial society). The lack of colonist voting rights, and the sometimes-capricious decisions of colonial governors (including one directly affecting a land grant to George Washington [Ferling 2010, p. 72-73]), also supported ideas of gaining greater decision-making powers for the colonists. The Intolerable Acts of 1774, mostly passed in response to the Boston Tea Party, removed the self-governance of the Massachusetts colony and triggered the First Continental Congress in that year.
Another significant factor in the elites drive for independence may have been their fear of slave emancipation by the British, reflecting the shifting of the legal tides within the mother country (including the freeing of a slave bound for the Americas by a British judge in 1772) and the increasing usage of Africans within the British armed forces in the Americas. Many of the slaveholders had moved from the Caribbean, to escape the many slave revolts that were aided by the large imbalances between the “white” population and slave population in the Caribbean islands. The threat by Lord Dunmore of Virginia to utilize armed Africans to quell the brewing revolt can only have intensified the fears of the colonial elites (Horne 2014). In the northern colonies, which benefitted very significantly from the slave trade and industries that served the southern slave estates:
the sight of armed Africans was quite unsettling … It was in 1768 that Bostonians were treated to the sight of Afro-Caribbean drummers … actually punishing their fellow “white” soldiers. In the heart of Boston Commons, these Negroes whipped about ten alleged miscreants for various misdeeds … It was also in Boston in 1768 that John Hancock and other eminent petitioners accused the redcoats of encouraging slaves to “cut their masters’ throats and to beat, insult and otherwise ill treat said masters”; it was felt that with the arrival of more redcoats, the Africans surmised they wold soon “be free [and] the Liberty Boys slaves” (Horne 2014, p. 10).
Hostilities began with the Siege of Boston in 1775, with the colonists finally prevailing with extensive and decisive support from France and Spain.
I am just thankful that a nation with such insane, blood-soaked foundations doesn't have any nuclear weapons.
Aahhhhhhh ...shit.
One aspect of the "war of Independence' that is rarely noted is the alliance between the Whig landowners and merchants in England and the Colonists.
The Colonies were supported throughout the long crisis and ensuing war by the great landowners who dominated the political scene. Their clash with George III and his 'friends' in Parliament led, in the end to the Rockingham Whigs taking power under Fox and, intellectually, Burke.
This alliance between the wealthiest Whigs, who regarded the country as theirs, as established, in their opinion, by the Revolution of 1688 and the 'whig' rebels in America has survived to this day in the alliance between the City and Wall St, the Washington elite and The Establishment.
Those who regard the Empire as having been continuous from the moment when London displaced Amsterdam to the present day recognise that the War in America was always a class war and that the winners then were closely allied to the evolving ruling class in the UK.
Incidentally there are a couple of typos in your exccellent introduction.