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Book Review
| Paul D. Carrington, Spreading America's Word: Stories of Its Lawyer-Missionaries, New York: Twelve Tables Press, 2005. Pp. 392 . $26.95 (ISBN 0-9747286-2-4).
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| This ambitious volume explores over two centuries of efforts by American lawyers and policy-makers to replicate their laws and government in foreign countries. These lawyers and policy-makers are, in Paul D. Carrington's words, "lawyer-missionaries." Some came to doubt the enterprise in which they were engaged. Even larger numbers doggedly promoted American-style legal institutions, attempted to influence foreign lawyers, and hoped that the world's peoples would take a belief in democracy and the rule of law to heart. For the most part, the efforts by "legal missionaries" achieved only modest success or failed completely. |
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The range of Carrington's study is both a strength and a weakness. He begins with a treatment of American lawyers' reactions to the French Revolution and, with literally dozens of stops along the way, ends with Americans' involvement in the contemporary international human rights movement. Carrington's most insightful treatments concern American policy in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the twentieth century, and his commentary on Woodrow Wilson is especially sobering. The author also has a fine eye for history's ironies, and the reader cannot help but pause when contemplating former American slaves acquiring their own slaves in Liberia or the heroic liberation of Puerto Rico in which only six Americans were wounded. But Carrington ranges so far and wide as to deny some of his subjects their deserved detail and complexity. Some of his treatments do not even concern Americans attempting to carry their legal institutions and law-related ideology to other parts of the globe. Spreading America's Word would actually have been more shaped and coherent without the author's treatments of the Trail of Tears, Reconstruction, or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. |
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It also appears that Carrington's editors did not alert him to the limitations of Whig history. Indeed, the editors have festooned the volume with roughly 100 head shots of important historical figures. These men and two women are for the most part the "lawyer-missionaries." The volume's subtitle suggests we will read their "stories," but there is no particular sensitivity to the imperatives and pitfalls of biographical narratives as building blocks for a historical study. The author is instead simply fascinated by individual major figures and their disastrous blind spots and facility for critical discernment. Overall, the volume seems less the work of a historian than that of a traditional law professor. The "stories" of great men are the equivalent of "cases" from which one may extract the rules and lessons of it all. |
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On the latter score, Carrington does have important points to make. The "chief lesson" he draws from his stories of lawyers carrying American legal and political culture to other parts of the world "is that, in matters involving the reform of other peoples' law and political institutions, diffidence is an indispensable virtue, and arrogance a cardinal sin" (291). The diffidence he champions amounts not to skepticism but rather a hearty degree of self-doubt. Other countries are likely to be divided by ethnicity and class and to lack the mutual trust on which stable self-government depends. Some group or sector is almost certain to insist that the professed American determination to spread democracy and law is really a disguise for expansion, domination, and imperialism. Belatedly realizing how badly they have underestimated the difficulty of their mission, American leaders might then compound their mistake by increasing military action in order to create the conditions in which democracy and the American variety of a rule of law might thrive. |
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Carrington hardly misses the way these lessons are relevant to American ventures in Iraq. In his opinion, contemporary policy-makers and theorists such as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowicz are woefully oblivious to America's misguided and failed ventures of the past. Carrington offers them a pointed warning: "There is enduring peril in the vain talk of those whose arms have prevailed, whose investments have soared in value, whose language is spoken everywhere, who walk the planet as its masters, disguising their greed and arrogance, even from themselves by a false and pretentious piety about democracy and human rights that is not so very different from that of the conquistadores who presumed to make the world safe for God" (300). Professional historians might find Spreading America's Word insufficiently subtle and nuanced. Local situations, when considered carefully, often resist grand explanatory frameworks. But Carrington is correct in thinking those at the nation's helm would benefit from reading and contemplating this book. |
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| David Ray Papke
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| Marquette University Law School |
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