Carville Earle's The American Way is a book of many virtues. It ambitiously covers the interaction of American geography and political economy for more than three centuries. It contains a wealth of statistical and geographical information, usefully presented high-quality charts, tables, and maps (I have flagged several of these for inclusion into my undergraduate lectures). It not only analyzes the intersection of economics, geography, and history, but also incorporates political ideology and party politics into its basic framework. It has an extensive bibliography that reflects Earle's wide-ranging and interdisciplinary interests. This book, in essence, has all of the makings of a major historical synthesis.

The American Way, for all of its promise, ultimately disappoints as a work of synthesis. Burdened with an unpersuasive conceptual framework, the book manages to be both frustratingly complex and overly simplistic. Its wealth of data is shoved and pushed into categories that become unwieldy and sometimes contradictory. Perhaps that is the inevitable fate of a book that attempts to find “The American Way” of dealing with more than 350 years of economic, geographic, and political change. In trying to develop a model that explains almost everything, Earle ends up explaining very little.

Earle divides American history into cycles of policy regimes with their own geographic and economic imperatives. The colonial period is divided into three regimes— “Republican” then “Liberal” then back to “Republican” again. It is a bit confusing, to say the least, but the picture gets even more complicated after the American Revolution. Earle labels the early national period (1788–1830) as the “First Republic” that entailed a producer revolution, protectionism, geographic expansionism, and demographic concentration. After a period of crisis, the next regime was the “First Democracy” (1830–1877) that included a consumer revolution, free trade, geographic consolidation, and demographic dispersion. Alternating cycles of “Republics” and “Democracies” characterize the rest of American history. (We are now, according to Earle, in the era of the “Third Republic”). Earle sees long-run economic crises accounting for the transition to different policy regimes, each of which had its ideological roots in seventeenth-century political theory. Classifying more than 300 years of history in terms of nine policy regimes is bound to involve some reductionism, which Earle embraces wholeheartedly. Consider the first sentence of chapter one: “The roots of American geography—everything from NAFTA to flexible specialization, from edge cities to globalization—run deep into the subsoil of early modern England, to the seventeenth-century origins of liberalism, republicanism, and the half-century crises by then endemic in the capitalist societies of maritime Europe” (p. 15).

To use J. H. Hexter's famous distinction between the “lumper” and the “splitter,” Earle is the ultimate “lumper.” I am a “splitter” by nature, but even the most devoted lumper would find it difficult to make use of Earle's complicated model. At times, The American Way stretches the meaning of key concepts until they are almost meaningless. Take Earle's treatment of “liberalism” as an example. Most historians identify liberalism as a political doctrine associated with the extension of individual rights. Earle, however, associates liberalism with a rather vaguely defined economic elitism, so exactly who is a liberal and who is not is always in question. He surprisingly lumps Thomas Jefferson together with Alexander Hamilton as part of a liberal, nationalist elite that opposed the extension of democracy and equal opportunity (p. 345). This seems self-evidently flawed, especially as Earle himself notes a few pages later that Jefferson “came as close as anyone to recreating the classical republican ideology of nationalism and equal opportunity” (p. 348). Even more puzzling, Earle suggests that Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic policies were not really “liberal,” but rather harkened back to classical republican ideology (p. 46).

On more straightforward economic matters, Earle's framework is also problematic. He insists, for example, on drawing tight distinctions between “producer revolutions” (associated with republican policy regimes) and “consumer revolutions” (associated with democratic policy regimes). One would suppose the periods of greater production would be correlated with periods of higher consumption, but in Earle's framework they are “inseparable alterations” (p. 110). He thus labels the period from 1880–1932 as a “producer revolution.” Dramatic changes in production did indeed occur, but the era also saw the emergence of a national market, the rise of the department store, the growing popularity of branded goods, and the introduction of new consumer durables such as the automobile. His failure to seriously analyze these developments suggests that Earle does not in fact have convincing criteria for distinguishing a “consumer revolution” from a “producer revolution.”

Earle's framework might have been more persuasive if he had developed a clearer narrative. Unfortunately, he tends to shift topics with little attention to chronology. Because he often uses terminology in rather unconventional ways, the book's organization adds to its frustrations. The result is beautifully produced book brimming with big ideas, but one that ultimately fails in its quest to achieve a grand synthesis.