August 13, 2007

Land Grab
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
The executive summary of Richard Kluger's "Seizing Destiny" is a one-page chart at the end of the book, "Principal Acquisitions of Territory by the United States." The Treaty of Paris (1783) defined a new nation of almost 900,000 square miles. The Louisiana Purchase 20 years later more than doubled its size. In the 1840s, Texas, Oregon and the northern half of Mexico accounted for 1.2 million additional square miles. Buying Alaska in 1867 added over half a million more. Other parcels brought the United States to its present size of 3,540,305 square miles. In the modern era only Russia and Canada occupy more of the earth's surface. Kluger, the author of many books, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the cigarette industry, begins his story in colonial times, when the dynamics of the American character were set. British North America had fewer natural resources than the New World possessions of France and Spain; instead, the 13 colonies were encouraged to attract settlers who would provide Britain an overseas market. The bait that lured them to the wilderness, besides a measure of freedom and self-rule, was the possibility of owning land. Everyone wanted a piece: speculators looked to rent or resell; squatters grabbed homesteads for free. The combination of high (white) population and high energy continued to mark the United States once it became independent. It also encouraged a high degree of contempt for those who stood in America's way Indians and, as America moved west, Spain, and its successor state, Mexico. Kluger's story involves many interesting people and facts. John Jay, the shrewd New Yorker who helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, told his fellow negotiator Benjamin Franklin that if Congress's instructions to them compromised America's honor and dignity, "I would break them like this" (and then, according to legend, flung his clay pipe into the fireplace). We are better off without some of the names Thomas Jefferson proposed to give the new states of the Old Northwest Polypotamia, Cherronesus, Pelispia. Before Sam Houston became the liberator of Texas, his life was in such shambles that the Osage Indians called him "Big Drunk." He shines by comparison with his enemy, Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna, 11 times president of Mexico, who stated the tyrant's credo for all time: In "a hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is. ... Despotism is the proper government for them." America's expansion was full of contingency. We think of the Mexican War, when we think of it, as a simple mugging. Morally, perhaps; yet the odds were often in Mexico's favor, especially on Winfield Scott's bloody march from Veracruz to Mexico City. The incompetence of Mexico's generals (its soldiers fought well) was a crucial factor; Santa Anna was better at despotism than leadership. The Alaska Purchase was the work of Secretary of State William Seward, seemingly the only man in Washington who wanted it; one senator said he would vote to buy Alaska if Seward agreed to live there. At many points there were Americans who were skeptical of the whole expansionist enterprise. Representative

Fisher Ames greeted the Louisiana Purchase thus: "We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much." I cannot recommend this book, however. Kluger's writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read. Let facts be submitted to a candid world. Kluger on the French Revolution: "French grievances were vented in alternating waves of liberation and repression that swept the overwrought masses toward the cauldron of anarchy." [SECTION DELETED] If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After 600, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum banged on by a clown. There is a connection, I think, between Kluger's prose and his point of view. The bards of American growth, including even otherwise great writers such as Walt Whitman, wrote rather like Kluger. Expansion made its votaries expansive, in a bad way. Kluger has the same subject, though he thinks the process was much darker, accomplished by "daring, cunning, bullying, bluff and bluster, treachery, robbery, quick talk, double-talk, noble principles, stubborn resolve, low-down expediency, cash on the barrelhead and, when deemed necessary, spilled blood." But he can't change the rhetoric. He is a booster standing on his head.

Published in the Book Review on August 12, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20070813monday.html