Bruce Cumings has drunk the Kool-Aid of the American frontier myth and spat it out. Or has he? Much of what he says in Dominion from Sea to Sea would gladden the heart of Frederick Jackson Turner or Henry Luce, except that Cumings clearly recognizes the violence, chicanery, greed, and lust for power that drove Americans westward. In this highly entertaining overview of American history, Cumings deploys sardonic wit and theoretical insights from Fernand Braudel, Alexander Gerschenkron, Karl Marx, Leo Marx, Karl Polanyi, and Joseph Schumpeter to stress the central role of Western expansion since the nineteenth century. He deliberately downplays the influence of Eastern elites and North–South divisions. The Civil War figures only as a brief interruption of the inexorable drive westward; President James K. Polk gets much more play than Abraham Lincoln, whose main contributions were to approve the transcontinental railroad and sign the Homestead Act. African Americans hardly figure at all, nor does white racism against blacks. (Racist attitudes toward Native Americans, on the other hand, are a central part of his story.) Texas and California dominate, followed by the imitation frontier societies of Washington, Alaska, Oregon, and Hawaii.
The narrative is based on English-language secondary accounts, not primary sources or any sources in foreign languages, but there are striking quotations, both erudite and popular. Cumings is always provocative, never dull, and enjoys pithy statements that shake up conventional wisdom.
Others who have told this story often complain that the American West only appears sporadically in textbooks, popping up in phrases such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Alamo, the Gold Rush, and the new West of the postwar period, while Eastern politicians and immigrants dominate the main narrative. Some advocate a view of the West as a regional history with its own particular dynamics. Cumings deserves credit for writing an integrated narrative of the United States that features Western expansion throughout the entire period.
The story begins with European settlement of California in the eighteenth century and culminates with the rise of California and Texas in national politics during the Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush eras. California until then was an isolated paradise, with its own peculiar culture of agriculture, sunshine, tourism, and Hollywood. Joining California to the national economy, especially through the military spending of the postwar period, brought the Republican Right to power, dragging with it the radical anticommunists of Orange County and Knott's Berry Farm. We all know the consequences.
Cumings has many memorable phrases encapsulating the character of a person or period, and he surprises us with new takes on old stories. To pick a few at random: “California's ‘opening’ was contemporaneous with China's and Japan's . . . but it was distant enough to be unknown or irrelevant to East Coast elites” (p. 52). In other words, after the 1850s, East Coast Americans generally learned more about China and Japan than they did about their own West Coast. “Cleanliness was not next to Godliness in the nineteenth century, with states like Kentucky having to pass laws requiring people to take a bath at least once a year[!],” so Commodore Matthew C. Perry was extremely impressed with the Japanese who “scrubbed themselves squeaky clean, albeit in communal baths with both sexes mingling together stark naked” (p. 86).
Cumings also does not whitewash the atrocities perpetrated by Americans during both domestic and foreign wars. In the Indian wars, “whites killed far more Indians than vice versa, just as it was more common for Indians to help pioneers than to harm them” (p. 30), but Indian cooperation did not spare these peoples from “unparalleled atrocity and horror.” The U.S. military repeated its atrocities with gusto in the suppression of Filipino insurrection, guided by the maxim “Kill and burn, kill and burn” (p. 135). Cumings also emphasizes the close ties of U.S. military power to Western economic development, not only in the postwar period but throughout the nineteenth century.
California's agricultural prosperity depended on large-scale engineering of water systems, adapting military models to business goals. Cumings is fascinated by the dictatorial engineers who diverted huge rivers to benefit themselves, their cronies, and incidentally the urban and agrarian settlers. The Irish seaman William Mulholland, “a remarkable example of that American hero, the self-taught and self-made man” (p. 247), taught himself engineering, took over the water system of Los Angeles, and built fourteen dams, causing a disastrous flood with his last one, but he made the Southern California desert bloom. Roman Polanski's film Chinatown (1974), with its themes of secret environmental manipulation and Oriental despotic power, is the leitmotif of Cumings's story. (Cumings loves films, but he is less attracted to literary figures: Jack London, John Steinbeck, or the quintessential Oregonian Ken Kesey get little or no mention here.)
But where are the Asians? Aguinaldo and Queen Liliuokalani play cameo roles; the Chinese and Japanese immigrants get a few pages, but this is basically a story of white middle-class Americans spreading out from the middle of the country to dominate the continent and the world. The contributions of working people get only passing mention; Cumings prefers to tell us curious details about rich white elites. Nor is there much about Hispanics; Cesar Chavez, for example, hardly appears. Despite his scathing critiques of power and greed, Cumings cannot help being seduced by the optimism, heedlessness, and forward-looking confidence of Californians and other Westerners who built a new society based on radical technologies that transformed nature, and heavily militarized economic development driven by mythical ideologies of individualism. Not for him the dismal ecology of fear.
I agree with many of Cumings's points, and most of his errors are fruitful. He has several good pages arguing for similarities between China and the United States, both viewed as self-absorbed large continental empires, and he rightly gives short shrift to predictions of a hegemonic China or a new clash of civilizations. He argues manfully for greater American knowledge of Asia, while well aware of the provincialism of nearly all Americans, including the Eastern media elite. Like all of us Asianists, he knows intimately the heavy weight of the European dinosaur on our academic institutions. Ultimately, he wants to combine the best of the Atlantic ideals of cultural preservation, collective security, and internationalism with the Californian ideal of material abundance, easy living, tolerance, and opportunity. But the story he tells features more arrogance, ignorance, and destruction than cooperation and equality.
His story certainly gives historic grounding to the Reagan-Bush era. But is that the only story we can tell of the American West? While American historians now call for a turn to transnational history that recognizes America's inextricable involvement with other countries in the world, Cumings's history reads like a throwback to American exceptionalism. There are almost no extended comparisons to any other country in this book. After all, the United States was not the only country to span two oceans (see Canada, Russia, or the Ottoman empire), nor was it the only place with a large fertile grassland frontier (see Argentina, for example).
Despite his engaging style, it is disappointing that one of the premier modern historians of Asia has told such a provincial story of the United States. The theorists invoked in the appendix, such as Braudel and Polanyi, wrote in reaction to narrow-minded nationalism, in favor of a broader view of political economy. Even if Republican provincialism has dominated national politics for several decades, alternative stories still lie in waiting. In the era of our first Hawaiian president, we might look forward to a genuinely global history of the United States that will give serious recognition to its comparability and engagement with the rest of the world.
