I. Dementyev's The USA: Imperialists and Anti-Imperialists is a book about the Great Debate — the argument that broke out in the United States after 1898 over whether a republic founded against empire could itself become one. Its spine says Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979, and David Skvirsky's English translation is of that year. But the book itself is older than the jacket. Its footnotes run out in 1972 — the latest works it cites are Philip Foner's The Spanish-Cuban-American War and Daniel Schirmer's Republic or Empire, both New York, 1972, and Herbert Aptheker's survey of the literature in Political Affairs of October 1972. The only later date anywhere in it is in the Foreword, which quotes Leonid Brezhnev's speech to the 1975 Helsinki conference. So what we are reading is a scholarly monograph of the early 1970s — a product of the Vietnam years and of the high tide of détente — carried into English at the end of the decade, with a foreword updated to the diplomacy of the moment. That gap between the manuscript and the imprint is the first thing to hold, and the last line of this introduction will explain why.
The author is worth knowing. Ilya Dementyev was a historian of American historiography at Moscow State University — a specialist not in slogans but in how American scholars had written the history of their own expansion. It shows. This is one of the genuinely researched volumes in the Progress catalogue, and a reader who has learned to expect a pamphlet with a Lenin epigraph will be surprised by it. Dementyev worked from the Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Ministry — the dispatches Tsarist envoys sent home from Washington in the 1890s — and from manuscript collections in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Wisconsin State Historical Society: the Gompers papers, the papers of the anti-imperialist Moorfield Storey, the records of the Social Democratic Party. He read an enormous run of the American labour and socialist press of 1897–1903 in the original. And he read the American historians — Walter LaFeber, William Appleman Williams, David Healy, Julius Pratt, E. Berkeley Tompkins — and argued with them by name and by page. Whatever else this book is, it is not characterisation from a distance. On the test this series applies hardest — does the author quote the people he judges, or only paraphrase them? — Dementyev passes cleanly. He convicts American imperialism largely out of American mouths.
And the imperialism is real. The book's opening chapters document, soberly and with the receipts, the turn of United States capitalism toward expansion at the close of the nineteenth century. The manufacturers' associations that wanted foreign markets and said so: the National Association of Manufacturers, founded in 1895, whose president told its 1897 convention that "many of our manufacturers have outgrown or are outgrowing their home markets and the expansion of our foreign trade is their only promise of relief." The politicians who put it more brutally — Senator William P. Frye of Maine, on the China trade: "We must have the market ... or we shall have a revolution." Theodore Roosevelt in 1896, contemplating domestic unrest and writing that the sentiment then "animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed, as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out" and shooting them dead. The "splendid little war" of 1898 — the phrase is Secretary of State John Hay's, and Dementyev is right to fasten on it — and the annexations that followed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines. The book traces, chapter by chapter, the intellectual machinery built to justify all this: the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon superiority, Josiah Strong's providential Manifest Destiny, Alfred Thayer Mahan's cult of sea power, and the "white man's burden" racism that dressed conquest as uplift — Truxtun Beale and John Proctor in The Forum, arguing that "the black and yellow races" were fated "to have their countries parcelled out and administered by efficient races." None of this is invented, and much of it is not even contested. A reader wanting a documented account of how the American ruling class talked itself into empire will find one here, sourced to materials most English-language readers will never see. The chapter on the press is particularly good: Dementyev shows in detail how the Hearst and Pulitzer "yellow" papers manufactured the war fever of 1898, and he is careful to add, on the authority of the American historian G. W. Auxier, that the sober provincial papers of the mid-West did their quieter share too, by the "unceasing stress on the USA's economic and strategic interests in the Caribbean." He traces the turn from the "classical" British and French colonialism of formal possession toward the American preference for "dollar expansion" — economic control without the flag — across Latin America and the Far East, and he is right that this was the shape United States power would take for the century to come. On the substance of the American record he is a reliable guide.
The other half of the book is its real distinction, and the reason it is worth reprinting. Dementyev takes the American anti-imperialists seriously — more seriously, in some ways, than the American academy of his day did. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1898 against the annexation of the Philippines, is not treated as a footnote of genteel hand-wringing but as "an impressive action against imperialist colonial seizures." He restores the writers: Mark Twain, whose Following the Equator stripped the word "civilisation" off colonial plunder and who counted, among the "many humorous things in the world," "the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages"; William Dean Howells; the realists and the poets who signed the protests. He gives a full chapter to the workers' organisations and another to the socialists, and his verdict there is unambiguous and, on the evidence, correct: "During the Spanish-American War no political group in the USA was more consistently and uncompromisingly against war and expansion than the Socialists." He credits the Black anti-imperialists, whose experience of racial oppression made the "civilising mission" ring false, and he notes the short-lived National Black Anti-Imperialist League of 1899. This is genuine recovery work. The heritage it recovers — the American tradition of opposition to war and conquest, running from the abolitionists through Twain to the muckrakers and, the book insists, "carried on by broad sections of American society today" — is a real one, and the volume is a serious contribution to knowing it.
It is also honest about that tradition's limits, in a way that reads as scholarship rather than dismissal. Dementyev sees the "petty-bourgeois narrowness" of the League: its leaders wanted to save the republic from the odium of colonies, not to change the system that produced them, and so "the entire question of imperialist policy was often narrowed down to criticism solely of direct colonial expansion." He sees that the socialists' own sectarianism — their contempt for the mass anti-monopoly movements, their belief that the trusts were simply building socialism for them — "doomed the Socialists to isolation" and kept their anti-war stand from becoming an organising force. These are the judgments of a historian who has read the sources and weighed them, not of a functionary filling a template. Where this book does research, believe it.
The clearest measure of the book's seriousness is its final chapter, a full survey of how American historians had written the Great Debate — and it is here, incidentally, that the volume gives away the constraint it works under. Dementyev moves through the schools with real command: the neo-liberal "psychological" historians (Hofstadter, Schlesinger) who explained the war of 1898 as a fit of mass emotion and treated colonial expansion as a "long since rectified mistake" of national youth; the Filipino historian Maria Lanzar, who first reconstructed the Anti-Imperialist League from the archives in the 1930s; Robert Beisner's Twelve Against Empire; E. Berkeley Tompkins; Schirmer's Republic or Empire, which he rates the most thorough of all. He engages the New Left carefully and critically — LaFeber's The New Empire, he says, "convincingly continued the destruction" of the dogma that big business had no hand in the war, while William Appleman Williams over-reached by casting the farmers as empire's leading force — and he is candid that these radical American scholars, "although many of them were familiar with the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin," worked from a method "essentially far from being Marxist." This is a historian arguing inside a living, contested literature. And that is precisely the thing that has no counterpart on his own side. Dementyev could survey a whole shelf of American books re-opening the question of American empire, because in the United States that argument was permitted, published and fought out. No comparable open historiography of Soviet expansion — into the Baltic, into Eastern Europe, into the borderlands — existed for him to survey or to write. The freedom of the American academy to prosecute its own state is the raw material of his thirteenth chapter, and the absence of that freedom at home is the reason the same chapter could never have been written about Moscow.
So the difficulty is not that the book lies about the United States. Mostly it does not. The difficulty is the shape of the searchlight. The category that organises the whole volume — imperialism as great-power expansion, as the export of capital in search of markets and cheap labour, as intervention, annexation and the installation of pliant regimes — is wired to point in exactly one direction. It illuminates Manila and Havana and the dollar diplomacy of the Caribbean, and it cannot be turned to illuminate the state that is holding it. This is not an accusation Dementyev would have understood as fair, because for most of his book it genuinely is not applicable: a monograph on the American press of 1898 has no natural occasion to discuss the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, and to fault it for that silence would be to invent a finding out of chronology. The reflexive test bites only where the book itself reaches for the present — and it does reach.
It reaches first through its interpretive lineage. The socialists of 1900 are read, throughout, through William Z. Foster's History of the Communist Party of the United States (New York, 1952), which supplies the book's framework for judging where the old Socialist Labor Party and Social-Democratic Party went right and wrong. The living historians Dementyev leans on and praises — Aptheker, Philip Foner, William Pomeroy — are the scholars of the American Communist Party and its orbit. There is nothing dishonest in this; they did real work, and Foner's labour history is indispensable. But it means the American anti-imperialist heritage the book credits is filtered through the one American tradition aligned with Moscow, and the filtering is invisible on the page. The anti-imperialists who counted, in the end, are the forerunners of the party that would carry the line. The point is easier to see by its shadow. This series' companion volume on The US Two-Party System was found doing the same thing at close range — applying to every American party the analysis of class management that it exempted, alone, from its own tradition's American party. Here the operation runs backward into history: a whole national tradition of dissent is honoured, and quietly organised so that its true heir is the Communist Party of the United States.
It reaches, second and decisively, through the Foreword and the Conclusion, which are where the book speaks in the present tense. The Foreword frames the entire historical study as ammunition for a contemporary argument: the Vietnam-era peace movement has revived interest in "American democratic traditions," and the scholarship that follows is offered to that movement. And it grounds itself, as such books did, on the authority of Soviet foreign policy. Brezhnev is quoted from Helsinki, in 1975, calling it "very important to proclaim correct and just principles of relations among nations," and no less important "to see that these principles are firmly rooted in present-day international relations, are put to practical use and made the law of international life not to be breached by anyone." The sentence is offered without irony, as the standard against which American conduct is to be judged.
Hold that sentence against the date on the spine. This English edition appeared in 1979. In December 1979 — the very year of its publication — the Soviet Union sent the 40th Army across the Amu Darya into Afghanistan, stormed the palace of a head of government it had itself installed, killed him, and replaced him with a client flown in for the purpose. It did in Kabul, in the month this book was reaching English shelves, the thing the book spends three hundred pages condemning in Manila: the armed imposition of a great power's will on a smaller nation, the manufacture of a compliant regime, the substitution of an occupying army for a people's own politics. The category of imperialism that Dementyev built so carefully out of the American record — intervention, client government, the metropole's soldiers in another country's capital — described, within months, the conduct of the state that printed his book and quoted its General Secretary on principles "not to be breached by anyone." The searchlight could reach 1898 and 1975. It could not be turned four hundred miles south of the Soviet border, in the year of its own publication. That is not a flaw in Dementyev's archival work, which stands. It is the boundary the whole enterprise was built not to cross, and no volume in this catalogue sits closer to it in time.
The reply this series points to is not a hostile one, and it does not require pretending the American crimes were smaller than Dementyev says. The Fourth International drew its own analysis of United States imperialism from the same root Dementyev drew his — Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which the book quotes throughout — and it spent those same years, 1979 and 1980, prosecuting American power without pause. The issues of Intercontinental Press that carried the news from Afghanistan carried, in the same weeks, the defence of the Nicaraguan revolution, the exposure of Washington's threats against revolutionary Iran, and the tracking of imperialism's hand in Zimbabwe. On the crimes of the United States the two traditions largely agree, and an introduction that pretended otherwise would be doing tribalism rather than criticism.
What separates them is the second half of the sentence — the half Dementyev's frame cannot write. The Fourth International turned the category of great-power domination on Moscow as readily as on Washington, and the clearest proof is what it did with Afghanistan while Dementyev's book was still new. The response was not simple, and it should not be flattened. The majority of the movement's United Secretariat, in its declaration of early 1980, refused the Kremlin any political cover: the Trotskyists, it wrote, "do not give the slightest political support to this intervention, which flows from the overall policy of the bureaucratic caste," even while noting that the intervention happened to deal blows to the reactionary mujahideen. A minority went further and called, without hesitation, "for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops," on the ground that a foreign army "far from aiding the struggle against pro-imperialist forces in Afghanistan" could "only hinder it." The two wings disagreed sharply on what to demand — the majority declined to raise the call for withdrawal, reasoning that the invasion, whatever its bureaucratic motives, was for the moment striking the landlords and the clerical reaction; the minority answered that no lasting gain could be built on foreign bayonets. The disagreement is worth stating in full rather than smoothing away, because the argument itself is the point: here was a movement thinking aloud, in print, about whether to back or oppose the very state it descended from, holding that state to a standard it refused to suspend for kinship. What neither wing could do — what the whole tradition was constituted to refuse — was to exempt the workers' state from the analysis. The word "imperialism," in that tradition, is not a searchlight bolted to point only at the class enemy; it is a description of a relation, and the relation can obtain wherever a great power imposes itself on a small one, Moscow's tanks included. That is the exact capacity Dementyev's book lacks, and it is lacking by construction, not by oversight.
The companion volumes in this series make the same point from the same decade. The Progress account of US Neocolonialism in Africa was found doing precisely what Dementyev does: putting to every American dollar the question — what does the giver purchase with it? — and never once putting it to a Soviet rouble, though the aid, the leverage and the client-making were structurally identical. The searchlight there illuminated Washington's hand in the fall of Nkrumah and could not see the bureaucratic rot the Fourth International's own press had described in the same events six years earlier. The pattern is not particular to a subject; it is the signature of the whole imprint. Aid is solidarity when Moscow extends it and imperialism when Washington does; intervention is internationalism on one side of the border and aggression on the other. Dementyev's book is a more distinguished specimen than most — better sourced, more honest about its heroes' failings, written by a real scholar — but it is the same specimen, and the timing makes it the sharpest example the catalogue holds.
Read The USA: Imperialists and Anti-Imperialists for what it is at its best, which is considerable. It is a densely documented study of how the United States argued itself into empire at the turn of the twentieth century, and of the movement of writers, workers and socialists who fought that turn — a movement this book takes more seriously, and reconstructs more fully, than much of the scholarship of its day. On the machinery of American expansion, on the racism that clothed it, on the courage and the limits of the Anti-Imperialist League, on the socialists as the war's most consistent opponents, Dementyev is a source, and a good one; his footnotes to the American archives will outlast the argument they were made to serve. The heritage he recovers is a real inheritance, and the American radical tradition and the Fourth International both claim it.
But read it aware of the year printed on it, and of what that year did. Its indictment of imperialism is accurate and its scholarship is honest, and both were assembled by a state that, in the twelve months the book took to reach its English readers, was carrying out the same act it had taught them to condemn — and quoting its own leader, at the front of the book, on principles "not to be breached by anyone." The crime the book names is a real crime. What it could not name, and was built not to name, was the one its own government was committing while the ink dried.