Louis Hartz’s triumphalist manifesto for an enduring American liberal tradition, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), certainly did not underestimate the role of ideology in American history, but it misinterpreted the origins of the nation’s prevailing ideologies. Hartz’s underlying argument that all American ideologies emerged from a liberal core contained a kernel of truth. But the terrain of American politics reveals that its political ideologies have been more complex than Hartz comprehended. Hartz’s fundamental misunderstanding of the ideology of the founders led him into problems in defining the liberalism that flourished in American life. Hartz’s insistence on explicating American liberalism ironically produced an original understanding of American conservatism, whether of southern slaveholders trying to fashion Tory conservatism or twentieth-century businessmen trying to insist that conservativism was consistent with the creative destruction that defines capitalism.

This chapter addresses the contributions of the Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most important American intellectuals of the twentieth century. His influence on historical scholarship through The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935) created a field in Black history. Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of the “two-ness” of the Black experience in the United States, and lent the DuBois prestige he used as a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Black Reconstruction challenged the existing literature emphasizing the democratic achievements of Black politicians during Reconstruction. DuBois’ work inspired impressive later work on slave resistance, slave communities, slave religion, the slave family, and slave political awareness, as well as a reinterpretation of the Reconstruction era as one of expanding democracy. DuBois’ work stood as the basis for an anti-triumphalist interpretive thrust to American history, a thrust which persists down to the present day.

Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.

Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

The Pacific not only inspired early investments in the New Navy but the region also offered a series of crises in which the United States could deploy naval assets. As of 1890, the New Navy could muster only five modern warships into its model “Squadron of Evolution.” As a collective, it was a force that mattered little to the North Atlantic balance of power. In the Pacific, by contrast, New Navy ships were sufficient to force Chile – a longtime antagonist – into diplomatic settlements during the Chase of the Itata (1891) and the Baltimore Incident (1891–1892). These successful acts of “cruiser diplomacy” delivered political results. Naval proponents cited operations in the Pacific as evidence of the New Navy’s efficacy and necessity. By 1893, as its sailors and marines intervened in the Hawaiian Coup, the New Navy already had a record of coercion in the Pacific. Such results undergirded celebrations and naval reviews from Astoria, Oregon to New York City, as officials displayed the New Navy and its achievements to the public and the world.

This chapter returns to the question: What can we learn from history? Drawing not only on C. Vann Woodward but also on insights of Reinhold Niebuhr, Garry Wills, and Abraham Lincoln, among others, suggests that the irony of history alerts us to the folly of ignoring inconvenient history. History, at its best, should give us a keen awareness of the irony embedded in the human experience, and, as it does, it should temper our pride even when showing mercy and our zeal even when seeking justice.

The themes of technical parity and cultural insecurity endured into the 1890s as Japan replaced Chile in the role of Pacific threat to the US New Navy. As the relative power of the Chilean Navy faded after 1892, Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) created a new challenge to US narratives about its civilizational superiority and technological prowess. Much as California’s security was a source of anxiety during the US–Chilean naval race in the 1880s, Hawaii now served as a new site of conflict between US and Japanese imperialisms – acutely in the crises of 1893 and 1897. US policymakers and naval officers used recent experiences with Chile (and China) as a lens through which to understand Japan. The upshot: the origins of the US–Japanese competition – culminating eventually in World War II – were intimately tied to navalist politics and US–Chilean tensions in the 1880s.

This chapter examines Daniel Boorstin’s contention that historically Americans’ special genius grew from taking a practical, nonideological approach to politics and government. For Boorstin, this approach allowed Americans, unfettered by ideology, to react to changing circumstances with deliberation and confidence. Boorstin argued that even the American Civil War was a nonideological conflict, emerging from a practical sectional disagreement over the need to manage the slavery question. Since Boorstin, scholarship has revealed that he failed to grasp the ideological nature of American politics in the Age of Civil War and the conflicting ideologies that drove North and South to war. Given the horrific conflict, the sweeping nature of emancipation, and the promise, later abandoned, of full citizenship to African Americans, how can the nation now have confidence that the political “genius” of American politics can survive the current era of polarization and disillusionment?

This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.

The Conclusion emphasizes the book’s primary argument, that its proposed system of means-based adjustments to the tax compliance rules would more effectively deter tax avoidance and evasion by the rich than would reforms focused solely on increasing the IRS’s funding or on rules targeting specific potentially abusive activities. It notes that the book has provided four practical applications of this approach – as adjustments to tax penalties, penalty defenses, the statute of limitations, and information reporting – but that these examples are just the beginning. The book concludes that its analysis and new approach to tax administration should be relevant to legislators and other tax policymakers, scholars of both tax law and progressivity, and federal and state tax administrators.