Customer Reviews

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't be put off by the negative and tepid reviews; this is an exceptionally informative and entertaining book. I usually don't care for histories written by novelists (the great Shelby Foote excepted); however, this is a beautifully written account of our country's expansion. The author has the ability to encapsulate events and personalities concisely, deftly and elegantly.

Best of all, his perspective is that of a disinterested party - not the chauvinistic pap that we all had to endure in public school text books. This is not to say that he has written a preachy screed from the Howard Zinn school of victim-history. His assessments are witty and yet balanced. There are no cartoonish heros or villains here, just complex people working for their own ends.

Do yourself a favor and expand the "All editorial reviews". You will find therein not only very favorable comments from Joseph Ellis, David Kennedy, Dan Carter and others, but also a brief snippet from the book.

If you are a jingoistic "super-patriot" of the Lynne Cheney/William Bennett school, beware! This book may let too much light in.

The swift spread of the United States across the continent - and beyond - seems almost inevitable from today's perspective. In an incredibly short period, even if measured only from the conclusion of the War for Independence, that nation's borders reached from the Atlantic shores to the Pacific Ocean. Was this continent so empty or the resistance so minimal that only one end would result? Richard Kluger explains how land hunger, glory-seeking Presidents and various international events led to the formation of a great empire. If nothing else is clear from this intense study of expansion, the mantra of "Manifest Destiny" drummed into school children in that nation is clearly misplaced. The massive stretches of US borders were as much due to fortuitous circumstances as to any other cause. But the widespread popular desire to expand was clearly the foundation to encourage taking advantage of those circumstances.

Kluger notes that from the earliest European expansion into North America, land hunger was a strong social and political force. The charters granted aristocrats, "companies" of colonists and others were vague, conflicting and often unrealistically ambitious. When charter provisions declared the western border was "the Southern Sea" [the Pacific Ocean], it set a pattern. Western expansion was considered inevitable by royal decree. Displacing the monarchy only set the authority for western settlement a notch higher. Kluger is selective, if unsubtle, in weaving racist attitudes underlying US continental imperialism. He ignores the indigenous peoples, making almost as little note of them as does the US Constitution - "cited only once in passing". He clearly acknowledges, however, the hypocrisy of whites in making settlements with the Indians, then breaking those when convenient. Slavery was tolerated not only because the "slavocrats" from the South were politically dominant, but also because it was believed blacks "benefitted" from this unsavoury institution. Unlike the Indians, slaves were part of the economy. That role buttressed the political power of the South and national expansion was to be riven by a North versus South dichotomy of far more importance than whether westward expansion needed justification. Reaching the Western Ocean seemed a given. Only how the continent was to be segmented remained to be settled.

Structured around the acquisition of each segment of North America the US had interest in, the chapters explain how the territory was viewed and what transpired to gain it. It's not often pleasant reading as Kluger highlights how devious politicians could be over land. Land was the issue and all other considerations followed. The aim might have been agriculture, transportation or even diplomatic confrontation, but the goal was always territory. So pervasive was that desire, that we must give Kluger an extra touch of credit for not repeating that oft-quoted gibe from a frontier farmer that "I don't want all the land. Just what joins mine!" which succinctly sums a sub-theme of the book. The main theme is that whoever sat in the White House, irrespective of ideology or party affiliation, gaining land was a constant. If any President is given rougher treatment by Kluger than John Tyler best assumes the hairshirt the author drapes. After a careful and complete depiction of the development of Texas as a province of Mexico, including vivid accounts of that nation's domestic politics, Kluger follows the devious manoeuvring Tyler engaged in. Like a later President, provoking a war to gain an end was not beyond Tyler's range of choices.

For all the image of a "land hungry" people Kluger tries to paint for the US, his attention to domestic affairs is granted little ink. He addresses the slave-holding "plantocracy" in scathing terms throughout the pre-Confederacy years, and notes how depressions cut back on land investment. He cannot, of course, discuss the expanding frontier without noting the work of Frederike Jackson Turner. However, he accepts Turner's "land hunger" thesis without reference to the debate over who constituted the frontier population. Expanding the topics covered would have generated a second volume in this study. Other works have addressed them well, and might be considered in conjunction with this one. Given his intention, to show how land hunger was implemented through government action, domestic diplomatic and military, the coverage is greatly satisfying. Add Kluger's vivid style in presenting the wealth of information he conveys, this is a highly readable and useful volume. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is a most Savory book... I qualify a "Savory" book as one I loved reading, couldn't wait to get back to each night. Also, a book that sent me in ten different directions having peeked my interest to learn more. The book is wonderfully written with clarity and care. I cannot imagine, having read the New York Times Book Review that in the words of the reviewer, I was reading the same book. It would have put me off if Mr. Kluger had not responded with such a gallant answer in the "Letters to the Editor." I loved this book, I have recommended it to others. It would have been wonderful to have read this American History in College through the clear eyes of Richard Kluger. Thank you, P.J.

After reading Seizing Destiny by Richard Kluger, I've revised my definition of Manifest Destiny and our nation's success in achieving it. Three cheers for Kluger for writing an interesting and educational story about the construction of our nation's borders.

Most schoolchildren can name the defining moments in establishing our national borders; the Revolutionary War, the Louisiana Purchase, the Seminole Wars, Texas Independence, the Mexican War, the Gadsden Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Kluger assessed these milestone events with his own overview of each, plus a few others that don't necessarily roll off the tongue: the Anglo-American Treaties of 1818 and 1846, and the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.

There were some really good stories about the 18th century United States that you don't hear often, particularly three about how the earliest states - aside from the original thirteen colonies - .were formed: 1) Vermont statehood, from the Wentworth Grants to the Green Mountain Boys, 2) Tennessee statehood, featuring the first governor John Sevier, and 3) the Yazoo Plungers, who opened up the Mississippi Territory.

There are also some good stories about the men who negotiated treaties for America. Over the years, I've walked into John Jay College on 10th Avenue (and 58th Street) and seen the big picture of the school's namesake in the lobby. Never had I realized his role in negotiating the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Revolutionary War. Robert Livingston, Nicholas Trist, and James Gadsden were three others who made significant contributions in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the Gadsden Purchase, respectively.

Some other reviewers have discussed the author's penchant for making modern Americans feel guilty and remorseful for the faults of past generations. I also have no desire to feel guilty about the past misdeeds of our forefathers. Yet, the warnings helped prepare me for the way the author told his story, and thus, mitigated the impact of these admonitions.

For example, our nation's treatment toward Native Americans (who weren't actually natives, but migrants from Asia) was more of a knee-jerk reaction than anything else. They are self-described warrior cultures, who use `mourning wars' to replenish their members, and torture as a way of life. Their history of picking allies rivals that of Cub fans: Indians sided with the French in the Seven Years War, and sided with the British in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. Their atrocities, and their wars, inspired our reaction.

Nor did I feel too badly about The Mexican War, which Lincoln and Grant both called unjust. Spain didn't have more than a foot in the door in California and New Mexico, with little inclination to use the land. Mexico chose to do little with these lands as well, and they lost Texas through their own negligence.

Overall, his opinions are a small part of the book, which is a wonderful account of the expansion of America. It really is a top notch educational piece that was as fun to read as its author's views were to curse.

There are two very notable and distinct parts of this book- 1) Very detailed and fascinating stories about American land acquisitions from the negotiations to the personal motives, and 2) A pushing theory that all such acquisitions were a result of racsim with an unbridled attempt to make modern Americans feel guilty and remorseful for past generations' faults.

To the first point, I will say that it makes the book well worth reading. Though many history buffs know about things like the Gadsden Purchase or the Treaty of San Lorenzo, Kluger has cleary done extensive research on the circumstances surrounding all of the territorial changes in US history. Included are sections of varying size on the most and the least obscure, such as Vermont's land sale controversy and wonderful recant of the Texas war for independence. It is good to note that for the most part, Kluger does not let his racism-drives-all-and-you-should-feel-guilty-for-it theory get in the way of any of the details about negotiations, personal and political thoughts/feelings, or other details.

To the second point, it gets overwhelming, and this is the first time that I actually physically gave a book an unkind gesture. Kluger really made me mad by proclaiming that the United States had little justification for any of its post-Revolutionary land grabs other than blatant racism towards blacks, Indians, Mexicans, etc. He somehow makes clear to the reader that the US and the world have in actuality benefitted greatly by our history of land-grabbing, and therefore it was good, but then tries to bash Americans for the reasons why they did so much of that grabbing. It's as if he tries to state that the ends justify the means while at the same time pushing guilt on us for others' faults in those means. Further, he makes quite bizarre connections to George W. Bush and Iraq several times, while totally ignoring comparisons to any other Twentieth Century President's controversial actions.

Overall, I recommend this so that one may learn that our acquisitions were not always easy. Further, the reader will come to know some of the less familiar American characters and some of the great feats that they have done. But I warn you to beware of Kluger's bends, because as any true historian knows, one really cannot judge the (wo)men of the past by the moral standards of the present.

Kugler has produced an epic that explains not only the how but the also the why of America's geographical growth. Beginning with colonial times, Kugler describes how the thirteen colonies came to be and how the royal crown apportioned additional lands to them, and how even these apportionments were not without controversy and disputation. This was probably the roughest terrain to cover while reading, but if you make it through, you emerge upon a lush land of dramatic exposition of America's development from a country of 895,000 square miles, located on the Atlantic seaboard to one of over 3.5 million square miles covering territory in the Caribbean, near the arctic, and in the Pacific Occean. Kugler covers in dramatic detail all the various forces - economic, religious, political - that pushed our country's frontiers to its current boundaries. There are fascinating details, like Franklin's initial demand for all of Canada to settle the revolutionary treaty with Britain, fro example.

Kugler's skillful use of dramatic metaphor brings to life what in other hands could be a dry recitation of events. Key players abound, from the well-known like Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, to lesser lights like Robert Livingston, and especially many of the players from France, Britain and other countries. Each chapter on expansion is like a mini-drama with its own cast of characters, and its peculiar forces shaping their motives and actions. Read this book to take a quantum leap in your understanding of how and why this country came to be geographically how it is today.

In Seizing Destiny, he recounts the great multi-century sweep of American history. Kluger tells an epic story of people "ruthlessly transforming a spectacular wilderness into a mighty state." He adds that "no other sovereign entity ever grew so large so fast to become so rich and so strong.". The means, he hastens to point out, were a decidedly mixed bag of motives and techniques that embraced "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."

Success, in other words, came at a price, first and foremost for the native peoples who occupied the American land and the slaves brought over to work it, but also for the present-day descendants of the colonists, who have inherited a tainted legacy. The peopling of the American continent by European settlers, rather than a grand pageant, is presented as a series of land deals, parsed and analyzed in great detail. Boundary lines, maps and greed lie behind the lofty rhetoric of manifest destiny and divine providence, which, in so many cases, boiled down to the minutiae of meandering rivers, surveying errors, obscure historical claims and disputed fishing rights.

Kluger begins with Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century and French fur traders in the seventeenth century as precursors to the American Revolution against British rule a century later. The new nation aggressively expanded by purchasing Louisiana from the French in 1803, but it failed in a bid to conquer Canada during the War of 1812. In 1818-1819, the Monroe administration pressured the Spanish into surrendering Florida and persuaded the British to share the Pacific Northwest. Between 1820 and 1850, the United States pressed westward to the Pacific. American settlers migrated into Texas, where they revolted against Mexican rule, winning their independence in 1835-1836. Annexation by the United States in 1845 led to a one-sided war with Mexico a year later. Sweeping American victories secured the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which cost Mexico her northern two-fifths, including California on the Pacific. At the same time, the British and the Americans agreed to divide the Pacific Northwest along the forty-ninth parallel.

During the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States pushed into the Caribbean and the Pacific to project its power and seek markets in Latin America and Asia. In 1867, the Americans seized the Pacific Island of Midway and purchased the vast Alaskan Territory from Russia. During the 1890s, a military coup toppled the Hawaiian monarchy and added those islands to the United States. In a brief war in 1898 the United States crushed the Spanish, securing American protectorates in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The next century provided a few more tropical islands: the Danish (now U.S.) Virgin Islands in the Caribbean and Wake Island in the Pacific. Despite this dramatic and important story, Kluger's book often bogs down in long and repetitive accounts of the back-and-forth of diplomatic exchanges, recapitulating dead ends as well as actual consequences.

To break the tedium, Kluger recurrently jolts readers with flamboyant metaphors. He likens one small colony to "a flea spitting into a hurricane" and Americans to "a porridge of diverse peoples ... not free of lumpiness." Kluger likes his metaphors well mixed. Of the American Revolution, he observes that "here was a substantiation that theirs was a truly indissoluble union and no mere display of pyrotechnics sent skyward to scare away their overseas masters. " Of the French Revolution, he observes that "French grievances were vented in alternating waves of liberation and repression that swept the overwrought masses toward the cauldron of anarchy. France became an inflamed society with a large and easily dislodged chip on its shoulder."

Kluger casts the British as pompous exploiters of the poor American colonists. Kluger insists that the colonists blamed the British crown for the massive land speculation in frontier lands. In fact, leading colonists, including George Washington, were the speculators, and they bristled when the crown tried to regulate or restrict their aggressive intrusion into Indian lands. Kluger contradicts his colonial picture by later (and correctly) noting that the post-revolutionary land speculation "smacked of the same cronyism and inside dealing that marked the rampant abuse of public office in the colonial era." That similarity was hardly coincidental, given that the same sort of Americans speculated in land after, as well as before, the revolution. Similarly, Kluger repeats the hoary myth that a tyrannical king provoked the American Revolution: "the crown's demand for obedience and tribute money" was "a clear case -- no matter how dressed up -- of child abuse." But until 1776 the colonists hoped that the king would help them by intervening against the real culprit, which was Parliament, and its offensive taxation.

This triumphal march from sea to shining sea, traditionally a source of pride for Americans, gets a feeble two cheers from Mr. Kluger. The means, he hastens to point out, were a decidedly mixed bag of motives and techniques that embraced "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."

Success, in other words, came at a price, first and foremost for the native peoples who occupied the American land and the slaves brought over to work it, but also for the present-day descendants of the colonists, who have inherited a tainted legacy.

Well, the books subject is one that I hoped and thought I would love reading on. There are not too many texts that try and cover simply the fast and rapid expansion of the US. The problem became immediate by just reading the books preface as it was essentially a mini essay on how the United States had no other reason for going to war with Mexico than to just pick on it's southern neighbor. I kept reading hoping to find that past the authors opinions there, that historical facts and the good and bad from America's drive west would be laid out for the reader. Sadly, the book is just a one side tale, in which the author refuses to let the reader make up his/her own mind or simply read the events but constantly throws in paragraph after paragraph of his own views on why something happened. I don't mind the author having a opinion, but he goes to far in writing that opinion as facts, and limited or excluding any arguments or facts that don't line up with his conclusions. I wasn't looking for or didn't expect a flag waiving propaganda piece, but this is almost the reverse of that and it's just as bad at some points. I just wanted a book that would cover the subject line, but got a book covering how awful the English descended and in turn American citizens ruined the continent. Sadly, look elsewhere.

Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage)
It is hard to fathom the meaning of the reviewer who said of Richard Kruger that "his perspective is that of a disinterested party." Richard Kruger makes a very lucrative living as an intellectual, churning out long works of history on topics of his own choosing. He, more than the average American, is enjoying the lifestyle available to those who live in an affluent, successful society. If he is "disinterested" in how the United States reached the level that affords him his opulent existence, then he has learned very little from his research. Sadly, his real attitude is even worse. He finds distasteful how his country climbed to the top of world civilization, apparently unaware that his own life would be far less happy had things gone a different way. This makes him something of a fool.
One can read the same story, but from a different perspective, in Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation (Knopf, 2006). Kagan also recounts America's "aggressive expansionism, acquisitive materialism, and an overarching ideology of civilization that encouraged and justified both." But he embraces this success story. He sets out to debunk "the pervasive myth of America as isolationist and passive until provoked . . . . This book is an attempt to tell a different story that is more about expansion and ambition, idealistic as well as materialistic, than about isolationist exemplars and cities upon hills." This is a very useful exercise, and I would suggest that Kagan and Kruger be read together. Then the reader should look around the world with a clear eye and understand that the bare-knuckle methods used to build America are still needed to keep it on top. It's a much needed corrective to the notions (held by segments of both right and left) that decadent idealism and altruism form the path to glory.
The problems facing Americans today are not the results of our past victories, but of our present failures. John Ferling, another self-weakening liberal, in his Washington Post review claimed Kruger should have spent more time preaching disapprovingly about "the legacy of America's historic aggressiveness." We can only hope that the legacy holds in the face of rising powers such as China and Iran who exhibit the "lean and hungry" look that has challenged the world in the past. America won its challenges to those rival societies it encountered, and we should all consider ourselves members of a very "interested party" in making sure we continue to win when challenged now and in the future. Few people ever get to enjoy the benefits of living in the lead civilization of their day. Most of humankind always lives in conditions far worse. We should thank the hard work, cunning and ruthless ambition of our forefathers for "seizing destiny" and passing the good times on to us.

Unlike the prior one star reviewer, who prefers patriotic happy talk (and defends tobacco companies), this is real American history by a fine popular historian.