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PART ONE
The State and the World
Until very recently, the great preponderance of US historians and scholars of American political development (APD) reflexively cordoned off âthe worldâ from âAmerica,â thereby reaffirming the nationalist (and exceptionalist) frames that have dominated professional history and much of social science since their inception in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, âthe worldâ and âAmericaâ have been posited as opposites since John Winthropâs âCity on a Hillâ sermon of 1630. But in recent years, the extrinsic dynamics of American state development have come to the fore as globalization has exerted its influence on the scholarly imagination. This vantage on state development was articulated by many of the essays in the important volume Shaped by War and Trade, though no systematic literature has developed out of it as of yet.1 Histories of the emergence of human rights and neoliberal globalization; postcolonial studies of empire; the transnational forays of immigration and world history; inventive methodologies deployed by the ânewâ international, diplomatic, and military historiesâall of these innovative fields have pushed students of US history to break out of national boundaries. Yet only recently has this rich body of scholarship begun to push scholars to attempt more comprehensive statements about American state building in the world.2
The broad historiographical move to provincialize the nation is an especially propitious one for the study of the American state, since it was in many fundamental respects a child of world politics.3 Yet this aspect of American state building has been one of the most overlooked in APD and American political history.
From beginning to end, American political development and state formation unfolded within an interplay between âdomesticâ dynamics, such as commercial expansion and settlement; âforeignâ pressures and considerations, including trade and tariff policy designed to fund and feed the nascent economy; and immigrations flows feeding labor supplies into a growing nation. Far from being the native product of the American genius for free institutions, the American state has been formed by influences from beyond its shores from the very beginning. Incubated in the swelling hinterlands of a mercantile empire, born and fostered in revolution against the same, establishing independence and self-government through a declaration whose first objective was to obtain recognition under international law, the American state has been an emerging experiment in the organization of political power capable of sustaining independence in a dangerous world.4 The search for a state capable of sustaining some constellation of liberty at home while preserving independence abroad informed the Continental race to form an âempire of libertyâ that pushed back three rival European empires while asserting a primacy of American interests within the Western Hemisphere by the antebellum period. The intense competitive and existential pressures of the Civil War, the Gilded Age scramble for colonies, the effective Thirty Yearsâ War spanning World War I and World War II, and the Cold War, all only further intensified the interplay of international and domestic, global and local pressures shaping the American state.5
To break from the exceptionalism that has turned the history of Amer-ican state building inward on itself, the essays in this section seek to reconceptualize the construct of America in or versus the world, recognizing instead that the national boundary (whether literal or virtual) was a historical site constructed to garner legal, economic, and political advantage for a congeries of actors pursuing concrete projects under public auspices. National power was an improvised shield against empire in the revolution through the early republic. Well into the twentieth century, empire remained a power-conjuring foil for American politics at home and abroad. By the twentieth century, national power became naturalized via the ultimate romantic mythical construct, âthe national interest,â as national boundaries thickened and assumed solidity over time. Immigration policy and border control not only provided the ultimate legal and embodied foundation for national identity but also served as a powerful geopolitical tool shaping relations among nations and allowing for polity-strengthening circulations of labor, ideas, and goods. Drawing the boundary between the nation and the world literally conjured national power, even as the incoherence of the construction constantly threatened destabilization and internal subversion.
Notes
1. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Note that some of the studies mentioned in note 5 below have come out of this project, or from the students of its principals.
2. Some exceptions that suggest the moment is ripe for this kind of history include Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Bartholomew Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Paul Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: Americaâs Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
3. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Bender, A Nation among Nations: Americaâs Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
4. Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675â1775 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); David Armitage, âThe Declaration of Independence and International Law,â William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2002): 39â64; Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
5. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859â1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul Kramer, âEmpires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and the United States Empires, 1880â1910,â Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315â53; Kramer, Blood of Government; Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (New York: St. Martinâs Press, 1979); Bartholomew Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2013); Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americaâs Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
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ONE
The Early American State âIn Actionâ: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789â18601
GAUTHAM RAO
The grand return of the state in American historiography is now visible even in the study of the colonial era and early American republic. This is due to the sharp demise of the âmythâ of the United Statesâ âstateless past,â which diminished the importance of governmental institutions as subjects, agents, objects, and contexts, and which once loomed large over main narratives of early America.2
The United Statesâ federal government has been a particularly fecund venue for nineteenth-century American historians to identify the state at work. This research agenda is not without its own normative agenda. Since theorists of the state have long fetishized central governmental action as a metric for state activity, historians of the United Statesâ long nineteenth century have quite rightly argued that the very presence of an active federal government between the creation of the American republic and World War I reveals a comparatively strong early American state. The depth of these scholarsâ discoveries can only be summarized here: the early federal government produced a âcommunication revolutionâ through the agency of the United States Postal Service; federal improvement programs prodded a complementary âtransportation revolution.â Some years ago, Paul Wallace Gates and his students made the federal governmentâs General Land Office an indispensable part of the story of American westward expansion. More recently, several scholars have reshaped this narrative by focusing on the federal governmentâs coercive civil and military Indian policies. The federal government is also seen to have played an important role in the economy through patent administration and tariff policy. Federal pensions to veterans of the Revolutionary War and then, on a far more massive scale, to Civil War veterans, established a foundation of what would later become the welfare state.3 The federal governmentâs activities in these arenas must, of course, be considered alongside national political parties and federal jurisprudenceâtwo institutions that were considered important institutional actors even when scholars saw precious little of an early American state at all.
This chapter turns to the story of the Marine Hospitals, the federal governmentâs first public health care program, to uncover another robust realm of federal activity in the earliest years of the United States. Beginning in 1798, the federal government used a small tax on merchant marinersâ wages to fund a national network of medical institutions, ranging from federally operated hospitals in a few cities, to leased hospital wards in other cities, and contract arrangements with individual physicians in smaller ports. The secretary of the Treasury, in tandem with federal customs officials on the waterfront, operated the network under congressional supervision. Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of United Statesâ merchant mariners received some manner of care in these Marine Hospitals. Historians have established that the Marine Hospitals were an important institutional precursor of federal health care policy as well as the private hospital movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Institutional historians have also argued that the Marine Hospitals were the centerpiece of the federal Public Health Service until the late twentieth century.4
Yet the story of the federal Marine Hospitals of the early republic is more than a mere case study that adds depth to an emerging scholarly paradigm of the early American state. I argue that the political economic origins and design of the Marine Hospitals provides a new vantage point on how the federal government operated in the early American republic.5 During the Federalist era, Congress created the Marine Hospitals to emulate a basic feature of the early British imperial state and political economy: fostering a ânursery of seamenâ to man commercial vessels and naval vessels alike. In short, the Federalists committed the federal government to protecting a maritime labor force to achieve similar commercial and military feats as had Great Britain in centuries past. With this mimetic, imperial vision came a decidedly British, imperial brand of central administration. The federal Treasury, like its British predecessor, would closely count tax revenue, while ceding to federal officials on the ground the discretion to adapt âhospitalâ arrangements to local needs. The federal Marine Hospitals thus signal an early, erstwhile orientation of federal policy and political economy toward the commercial means and ends of empire that had sustained the British Empire since early modernity.6
The commercial orientation and local governance of the Marine Hospitals and the early federal government was not exclusive to the Federalists, though. The Marine Hospitals came into existence in 1798. The presidential administration of Thomas...
