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Reviews of Books and Films
exchange, choosing titles, book designs, and marketing
strategies with one eye toward the literati and the
other on the far more amorphous body of potential
book buyers. Satterfield ably examines how the critics'
elevated tastes and Arnoldian expectations of uplifting
"culture" were addressed in the series. But for the sake
of the bottom line, satisfying the taste of readers had
to be a more immediate concern. What sold these
books? Topics? Appearance? Reputation? Who was
the typical Modern Library book buyer? What did the
publishers recognize (or guess) about the interests of
those potential buyers that created sales? Here, considering "culture" in its anthropological or semiotic
sense as a shared system of symbols could open whole
new aspects of the Modern Library's significance, and
a clear-minded scholar like Satterfield could teach us
yet more.
PAUL R. GORMAN
University of Alabama,
Tuscaloosa
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of
Culture. (Convergences: Inventories of the
Present.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002.
Pp. 260. $35.00.
AMY KAPLAN.
u.s.
The idea of the United States as an imperial nation has
gained much popular purchase over the last two years.
This understanding flies in the face of the Cold War
conviction that, in contrast to the "Evil Empire," the
United States has always stood for freedom; that
empire might be a sordid part of our Western European allies' histories but is not a concept that can be
applied to the United States. Although diplomatic
historians such as William Appleman Williams and
historians of the U.S. West and ethnic studies have
worked to counter the myth of U.S. imperial innocence, imperial denial has persisted, both within and
beyond the academy.
Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's co-edited anthology, Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993),
made a landmark contribution to the post-Cold War
struggle against U.S. imperial denial. In her introduction to that book, Kaplan admonished Americanists to
consider culture in their histories of imperialism,
recognize the significance of empire in their studies of
culture, and wake up to postcolonial scholarship. In
this book, Kaplan speaks more fully to the movement
that she helped precipitate. Indeed, this collection of
essays can be seen as Kaplan's reply to her own call. To
elucidate the imperial dimensions of U.S. culture,
Kaplan takes her readers through a range of authors
and genres. Some of her subjects-including Theodore
Roosevelt and W. E. B. Du Bois-come as no surprise
in a book on empire; others-including Catherine
Beecher and Sarah Josepha Hale-are more startling.
But even her treatment of the usual suspects is illuminating: her chapter on Du Bois, for example, focuses
on one of his lesser-known works, Darkwater (1920),
and it goes beyond Du Bois's condemnation of U.S.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
imperialism to argue that he used the framework of
empire to "recenter his own international authority"
(p. 21).
As a literary scholar, Kaplan excels in providing
close readings, but she is well attuned to larger historical and historiographical contexts. She starts in the
mid-nineteenth century and continues into the midtwentieth century in order to position 1898 as a middle
point rather than an exception. Her chronological and
textual reach enables her to elucidate some of the
different inflections empire has had. In some moments, it was understood as more territorial, in others,
as more abstract; some texts acknowledged it outright,
others disavowed it as something foreign to the United
States.
Each of the book's six chapters stands on its own,
but all are loosely linked by several themes. Foremost
among them is the anarchy of empire mentioned in the
title, a term borrowed from Du Bois, who used it to
refer to the violence and destruction of colonial domination. Kaplan takes the phrase further, to mean "the
breakdown or defiance of the monolithic system of
order that empire aspires to impose on the world, an
order reliant on clear divisions between metropolis
and colony, colonizer and colonized, national and
international spaces, the domestic and the foreign" (p.
12). Kaplan argues for the fragility of these divisions by
showing, for example, that the "discourse of domesticity was intimately intertwined with the discourse of
Manifest Destiny in antebellum U.S. culture" (p. 24)
and by discussing how African-American soldiers serving in Cuba in 1898 "troubled the clear racial divisions
between colonizer and colonized and the assumed
affiliations between race and nationhood" (p. 20). Like
other postcolonialists, Kaplan would have us understand empire more as a matter of contention than
hegemony and as something that transformed the
supposed metropole as well as the presumed colonies.
Kaplan's efforts to blur the boundaries between
"home" and "away" contribute to a second major
theme: the international constitution of national identity. Through a careful reading of Mark Twain's account of his 1866 trip to Hawaii, she argues that this
quintessential American writer came to his Americanness via the Pacific. Her chapter on the early U.S.
motion picture industry maintains that spectacles of
empire contributed to its ascendance; her chapter on
romance fiction in the 1890s finds that it divorced U.S.
power from territorial expansion and relocated it in
the bodies of white American men, thereby making
these men icons of empire as well as the nation.
As these examples suggest, a third and absolutely
essential theme that runs through the essays is race.
Kaplan emphasizes the roles of continental expansion
and overseas empire in shaping domestic racial politics. She pays close attention to ways in which representations of U.S. imperialism became entangled with
issues of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation.
Some of the essays in this book have appeared in
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Canada and the United States
shorter form elsewhere, but the fuller versions included in this collection incorporate more recent
scholarship. They reveal some new directions in
Kaplan's thinking and some tinkering with her narrative strategies. All but the most obdurate deniers of
U.S. empire will find this book a powerful introduction
to the imperial dimensions of U.S. culture. And those
who are already committed to this line of analysis will
appreciate the trenchant and nuanced readings Kaplan
provides.
KRISTIN HOGANSON
University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
BENJAMIN L. ALPERS. Dictators, Democracy, & American
Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy,
1920s-1950s. (Cultural Studies of the United States.)
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003.
Pp. x, 405. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.
The theory of totalitarianism is usually associated with
Cold War scholarship and Hannah Arendt's attempts
to link together the analysis of Soviet and Nazi dictatorships. Benjamin L. Alpers reminds us that the
theory and the term have, in fact, a longer history.
Curiously enough, in the 1920s the term dictator was
not entirely derogatory. Americans were fascinated by
the machismo of Benito Mussolini; car manufacturer
Studebaker called its 1927 model the "Dictator;" Hollywood producer Harry Cohn sympathetically portrayed the Italian uomo forte in Mussolini Speaks
(1933). Throughout the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was often seen as a benevolent dictator, although
Roosevelt himself always resented the suggestion.
While the president's adversaries feared the possibility
of totalitarian New Dealism, some of FDR's supporters had no such qualms. Thus, liberal Hollywood
mogul Walter Wanger and the other "cultural producers" (Alpers's term) of Gabriel over the White House
(1933) imagined a FDR lookalike, president Judson C.
"Judd" Hammond, assuming almost dictatorial powers
and bringing peace to the country and the world.
As Adolf Hitler came to power and the tragedy of
the 1930s unfolded, admiration for dictatorship waned,
and some American intellectuals began to use the term
totalitarianism to describe the regimes in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Alpers makes a good
case that Duke University economist Calvin B. Hoover
was one of the first to apply the term to qualify both
regimes. More precise than dictatorship and far less
positive than collectivism, in the second half of the
1930s "totalitarianism" was often employed by members of the anti-Stalinist Left who appreciated the
term's ability to connect Nazi and Communist dictatorships. For the same reason, the term was not
fashionable among the intellectuals who belonged to
the ranks of the Popular Front and were, overall, more
sympathetic to the Soviet system. The term's popularity did not increase during World War II. The theory of
totalitarianism fit well the Nazi-Soviet pact of August
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1939, but the German invasion of Russia in June 1941
and American entry into the war on the side of the
Soviets made it unwelcome in American intellectual
and diplomatic circles. The theory of totalitarianism
came into its own in the years following the war when
the Soviet regime replaced the Nazi regime as the
ur-dictatorship. In his final chapter, Alpers lucidly
describes not only the work of the "usual suspects" in
the theorization and representation of totalitarianism
such as Arendt and George Orwell but also their
"pessimistic precursors" (p. 255) like James Burnham
and Joseph Schumpeter, who saw totalitarianism not
just as the defining characteristic of Soviet and Nazi
societies but also as an aspect of possible American
futures.
Alpers has made visible an important aspect of
American intellectual history in the twentieth century.
Perhaps he has also made his story both less and more
central to American intellectual history than it really
was. On the one hand, concern with dictatorship was
not invented in the twentieth century but had animated
debates about possible futures of the United States
since the American Revolution. On the other hand,
the detailed narrative of this book obscures the fact
that before 1947 the supporters of the theory of
totalitarianism were few and not particularly influential. Its intellectual acumen notwithstanding, Partisan
Review was a minority within the American leftist
intelligentsia in the late 1930s, and some of its constituency left the fold during World War II. Perhaps these
intellectuals did not care. As Alpers suggests in some
of his most penetrating pages, the theory of totalitarianism is often pervaded by a genuine distrust for the
masses and "a generalized suspicion of popular political activity" (p. 302).
This book has a commendable wingspan. Alpers
dedicates as many pages to Arendt's The Origin of
Totalitarianism (1951) as to Frank Capra's Meet John
Doe (1941). This makes sense, since they are both
cultural products and the latter was as influential as
the former-and perhaps more. Alpers is more at ease
with the printed word than with the moving image, and
his grasp of Hollywood history is not particularly
impressive (Capra's screenwriter, Sidney Buchman,
was hardly a "mainstream liberal" [po 114]. He was
attacked by House UnAmerican Activities Committee
and blacklisted). Indeed, Alpers's analysis of Hollywood films does not examine the cultural and political
negotiations accompanying their production, and it
rarely goes beyond the plot synopses. This, however,
should not distract us from his book's innovative
methodology, which convincingly delineates an exciting intellectual history that has Orson Welles and
Charlie Chaplin converse with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
and Joseph Schumpeter.
SAVERIO GIOVACCHINI
University of Maryland,
College Park
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2004