How the West was won

HISTORY: DANIEL GEARYreviews Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Powerby Bruce Cumings, Yale University Press, 641pp, $38

LOOKING ACROSS a vast ocean, Europeans are well aware that the United States is an Atlantic power. Its population includes descendents of Europeans and Africans who once travelled across that ocean and, since the second World War, the US has been the major power operating in Western Europe as the force behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

While the Irish see the US as the destination of millions of immigrants past and present, the British often obsess about its geopolitical "special relationship" with the US (a phrase that has always sounded to me like a euphemism for a tabooed love affair). However, as Bruce Cumings argues in Dominion from Sea to Sea, the secret to the historic and continued economic and political hegemony of the US is that it wields power and influence not just across the Atlantic to its east but also across the Pacific to its west.

Dominion from Sea to Seaoffers a wide-ranging history of the domestic affairs and foreign policy of the United States as told from the perspective of its Pacific states: Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and especially California.

Cumings first recounts the story of the acquisition, conquest, and settling of what is now the western half of the United States, a process of expansion that began with Thomas Jefferson’s fortuitous purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803 and climaxed with the seizure of the west coast in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.

In the 19th century, the US gained the access to the Pacific Coast necessary for it to wield power in Asia in the 20th century. Cumings also suggests that westward expansion produced regional and national character traits that figured prominently in the extension of American economic and political power across the Pacific: an ethos of libertarian individualism, an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to bend the natural environment to human ends, and a predilection for dealing violently with any group that stood it its path (beginning with Native Americans).

According to Cumings, the ascendency of the US as a Pacific power followed naturally from westward expansion across the North American continent, as “the elaboration of a century-long practice of moving and facing West, with allies absent and little concern for what the people in the way of the advance had to say”.

Movie Westerns would have you believe the region’s distinct history came to a close by the end of the 19th century as railroads and modern industry displaced cowboys and Indians. But for Cumings the 20th century is an even more critical period for understanding the relationship between the history of the American West and US foreign policy in Asia. The second World War both established the US as the primary military power in the Pacific and built up the Pacific Coast as an industrial centre through the billions of military dollars showered on the region, the key staging ground for the war against Japan. After the second World War, Cold War defence spending continued to benefit the region disproportionately as the US continued to fight major wars in Asia (Korea and Vietnam). The strong presence of a military-industrial complex was the catalyst for much of the region’s economic dynamism as a world technological centre well before the dramatic rise of Silicon Valley in the 1990s. The internet, after all, emerged from the military’s ARAPNET program; its laboratories were based on the West Coast. Ironically, given the significance of state-funded development, the West also pioneered a new breed of Republican politicians such as Ronald Reagan who attacked big government even as they expanded defense spending.

Cumings argues that the pervasive influence of American popular culture also originated on the West Coast. We can credit (or blame) Los Angeles not only for its invention of Hollywood but also its key role developing suburbanisation and the use of automobiles (Fords were built in Michigan but consumed in their greatest quantities in southern California). In its ethno-racial diversity, the West Coast was also at the forefront of larger trends. Not all immigrants came across the Atlantic; as early as the 19th century, many Chinese and Japanese emigrants came to the Pacific states and immigration from Asia (as well as Latin America) to the US has increased dramatically since the mid-1960s.

Cumings is that rare historian willing to think beyond his area of training (in East Asian history) and advance big, bold ideas about the development of the modern world. He brilliantly blends regional, national, and international histories. Yet, though it has a clear thesis, this book is much less argument-driven than it might at first seem. Dominion from Sea to Seais as sprawling as the city of Los Angeles and sometimes is as overwhelming.

Cumings’s narrative style is meandering; he often stops to explore interesting historical byways or to voice an opinion on any conceivable subject. The delight he takes in fascinating titbits of historical knowledge is infectious. Some of my favourites from this book are: that the state of Kentucky once found it necessary to pass a law stipulating that residents bathe once a year; that in 1845 Oregonians turned back 18 covered wagons because a black man rode with them whose name was George W Bush; and that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak once prank-called the pope pretending to be Henry Kissinger. While readers with some background knowledge in American history will enjoy this book the most, all will be entertained and enlightened.

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Lecturer in US History at Trinity College. He is the author of Radical Ambition: C Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought(University of California Press, 2009)