“If we admit this Consolidated Government it will be because we like a great splendid one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy, and a number of things: When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, Sir, was then the primary object.” Read full transcript here Many have reiterated and taken up Henry’s position over the years, while others disagree strongly with his thoughts. As much as these debates might be dismissed as belonging to an age of outdated antiquity with no substantial relevance to the modern world, they ultimately remain related to the core of the nation’s purposes and convictions today. The controversial relationship America maintains between the value of liberty and the desire for domination and imperialism as an empire is of intense interest in the modern world, as it has been since the beginning of the American nation. Various historians have affirmed the United States as an empire. In her novel American Umpire, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s emphasizes that “the existence of the American Empire is an undeniable fact.” According to Richard Immerman as he asserts in his novel Empire for Liberty, “America is and always has been an empire.” Others affirm that, “the old view that the United States had not been an empire [is] smoldering rubble.” It is indisputable that American rule, as it has played out over time, has led to the dispossession of and domination over disparate peoples, a key attribute of the move from continental to hemispheric to global empire. This imperialism is most prevalent with respect to the populations of color on its constantly expanding continental and oceanic frontiers, including but not limited to Native Americans, Africans, and Mexicans. Interestingly however, while empire is about domination, liberalism is about the vehement resistance to this domination. In Americans, who are considered liberals and promoters of democracy, this resistance to unjust domination runs deep and there is a tradition of anti-imperialism in American political thought. As Walter Lippmann wrote, in 1944, “the American antipathy to imperialism . . . is organic in the American character, and is transmitted on America soil to all whose minds are molded by the American tradition.”
There has never been and most likely will never be a final word in respect to the American Empire debate. It is ultimately our job as citizens and intellectuals to explore and accept competing interpretations of not only the United States but of the entire world, cultivating a more broad and encompassing discussion instead of a narrow, self-centered one.
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