The American Empire

Written in 1921 for the Rand School of Social Science, this book argues that the United States had become an empire in fact if not in name. Scott Nearing opens with the promise of 1776, its language of liberty and equality, then traces how the country grew instead through conquest: the dispossession of Native Americans, slavery, the winning of the West, and the war with Mexico. From there he turns to plutocracy, industrial capitalism, and the First World War, reading each as a stage in the same drive toward markets, raw materials, and profit. The closing chapters look outward to competition for world trade and Pan-American control. It is a blunt socialist critique, and it survives as both political history and a primary document of early American dissent.