| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Paul T. McCartney. Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism. (Political Traditions in Foreign Policy Series.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 373. $49.95.
Depending on time, place, and ideology, the War of 1898 has been called many different things. Because Paul T. McCartney is chiefly interested in contemporary U.S. perspectives, the "cultural milieu," and the particular constructions it generated at the time, he chooses, after initial clarifications, to call the war by its traditional U.S. name: the Spanish-American War. McCartney wants to understand, almost phenomenologically, how Americans actually viewed the conflict, what it was supposedly about, and how such ideas involved conceptions of national identity. His central point is that the war was not simply a humanitarian exercise that developed into an imperialist one but that it always mixed humanitarianism with racism and assorted other ills. He also says that the mixture was largely coherent and sincere.	1
McCartney rejects extant studies of ideology and culture whose focus is on any one thing, the usual suspects being market expansion, resource control, race, Social Darwinism, power, naval geopolitics, manifest destiny, and excitable public opinion. All have a place in McCartney's story, but in the end he insists that the sources of U.S. conduct, amid the specific historical contingencies, lay in more overarching notions of nationalism, identity, and mission. The War of 1898 is in fact an especially clear case when foreign policy and national identity became mutually constitutive: there is no way of thinking about the one without thinking about the other. McCartney is right, although he is perhaps a trifle extravagant in claiming that his book is the first intensive account along these lines.	. . .

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