Bibliographic Details
- Author: Mark D. Harmon
- Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2021
- Genre: Scholarly monograph / Academic history
Thesis Statement
Harmon argues that the United States’ transformation into a global power between 1900 and 1945 was not a natural or inevitable ascent, but a contested, contingent process driven by the interplay of domestic political struggles, economic expansionism, and cultural anxieties about modernity. He contends that American globalism emerged less from a coherent grand strategy than from incremental, often contradictory decisions made by elites and ordinary citizens negotiating the tensions between isolationist traditions and the allure of international influence.
Summary (400 words)
In War, Wine, and the American Century, Mark D. Harmon offers a fresh synthesis of American history during the pivotal years from 1900 to 1945, a period he characterizes not as a steady march to superpower status but as a tumultuous series of experiments in global engagement. The book’s title gestures toward its central metaphor: the “American Century” was not a predetermined destiny but something brewed—a concoction of ambition, fear, and opportunity that could have turned out quite differently. Harmon eschews the traditional focus on presidential leadership or military campaigns, instead centering his analysis on three interconnected arenas: the political economy of empire, the cultural politics of consumption and identity, and the environmental transformations that undergirded American power.
The narrative begins in the Progressive Era, where Harmon shows how the Spanish-American War and the subsequent occupation of the Philippines created the institutional and ideological scaffolding for overseas expansion, even as domestic reformers debated the meaning of democracy in an imperial age. He devotes considerable attention to the underappreciated role of the First World War, arguing that Woodrow Wilson’s mobilisation of the state for global conflict permanently altered the relationship between the federal government, corporations, and citizens—a pattern that would reemerge with greater force during the New Deal. Harmon is particularly adept at weaving social history into his account, examining how racial hierarchies shaped military recruitment, how women’s suffrage intersected with wartime propaganda, and how the Great Migration transformed both the urban North and the rural South.
The book’s most distinctive contribution lies in its treatment of the interwar years. Harmon rejects the notion of a simple “return to normalcy,” instead portraying the 1920s as a decade of vigorous internationalism—through corporate investment, cultural exports like Hollywood films and jazz, and the rise of American philanthropy abroad. He argues that Prohibition, often treated as a domestic sideshow, was deeply entangled with foreign policy debates about sovereignty and moral influence. The Great Depression receives a similarly unorthodox treatment: Harmon frames the New Deal not primarily as a domestic rescue operation but as a laboratory for state-building that simultaneously expanded American power abroad through economic diplomacy and cultural outreach. The book culminates in World War II, which Harmon presents as the apotheosis of the “American Century” vision, but also as a moment that exposed enduring tensions between democratic ideals and imperial practices—particularly regarding race, labour rights, and the treatment of allied nations. Throughout, Harmon insists on contingency: the United States could have emerged from this period as a regional power or a divided society; that it became a global hegemon was the result of specific choices, many of them fraught with unintended consequences.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
Part I: The Architecture of Empire (1900–1917)
- Chapter 1: “The Splendid Little War and Its Long Shadow” – Analyzes the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War as foundational moments in American imperialism, linking military occupation to domestic debates about race, citizenship, and constitutional authority.
- Chapter 2: “The Progressive Paradox” – Examines how Progressive Era reforms (trust-busting, food safety, conservation) were intertwined with imperial ambitions, as reformers sought to export American standards of efficiency and morality abroad.
- Chapter 3: “The Open Door and the Closed Fist” – Explores the economic dimensions of early American globalism, focusing on the Open Door Policy in China, corporate investments in Latin America, and the racial ideologies that justified economic coercion.
Part II: The Crucible of War (1917–1920)
- Chapter 4: “Mobilizing the Nation” – Traces the rapid expansion of federal power during World War I, including the draft, the War Industries Board, and the Committee on Public Information, arguing that this mobilisation created precedents for later state-building.
- Chapter 5: “The Wilsonian Moment and Its Discontents” – Offers a nuanced assessment of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism, highlighting both its idealistic aspirations and its racial and colonial blind spots.
- Chapter 6: “Red Summer and the Fractured Republic” – Connects the postwar racial violence of 1919 to the global upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the Paris Peace Conference, showing how domestic and international conflicts fuelled each other.
Part III: The Interwar Interregnum (1920–1932)
- Chapter 7: “The Business of Internationalism” – Challenges the myth of isolationism by detailing the massive expansion of American corporate investment abroad, the rise of Hollywood as a cultural export, and the role of private foundations in shaping global knowledge.
- Chapter 8: “Prohibition and the Paradoxes of Sovereignty” – A novel chapter that examines how the fight over alcohol (smuggling, enforcement, cultural resistance) became a site of contestation over national identity and international relations.
- Chapter 9: “The Great Migration and the Reconfiguration of Race” – Follows African Americans from the rural South to urban centres, arguing that this internal movement had profound implications for how the United States projected its racial order abroad.
Part IV: Depression and the New Deal Order (1932–1941)
- Chapter 10: “The Global Crisis at Home” – Reframes the Great Depression as a transnational phenomenon, showing how economic collapse in the United States was linked to global commodity markets, debt structures, and the collapse of European empires.
- Chapter 11: “The New Deal as International Laboratory” – Interprets New Deal programs (the AAA, TVA, Social Security) as domestic experiments with far-reaching international implications, influencing postcolonial development projects worldwide.
- Chapter 12: “Hemispheric Dreams: The Good Neighbor Policy in Practice” – Examines Franklin Roosevelt’s Latin American policy, balancing its anti-imperial rhetoric against the reality of American economic dominance and cultural influence.
Part V: The Second World War and the American Century (1941–1945)
- Chapter 13: “Arsenal of Democracy: The War Economy and Its Aftermath” – Analyzes how wartime production transformed the American economy, permanently embedding the federal government in industrial planning and creating new constituencies for military Keynesianism.
- Chapter 14: “The War for the American Mind” – Explores propaganda, film, and popular culture during the war, arguing that the fight against fascism was also a contest over the meaning of American identity—one that excluded Japanese Americans and marginalised many others.
- Chapter 15: “Dawn of the American Century: The Atomic Bomb and the Postwar World” – Concludes with the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, presenting these events as both the culmination of US global ambition and the inauguration of new anxieties about power, morality, and survival.
Scholarly Reception
War, Wine, and the American Century has been widely praised for its methodological breadth and its willingness to challenge triumphalist narratives of American history. Historians have commended Harmon for integrating environmental, cultural, and economic perspectives into a period often dominated by political and diplomatic histories. The book received the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social history (2022) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Some critics have noted that the book’s thematic breadth occasionally comes at the expense of depth on specific events; the chapter on the atomic bomb, for instance, covers familiar ground without fully Harmonn’s earlier innovative frameworks. Others have questioned whether the “contingency” argument is overstated, given the structural advantages the United States enjoyed compared to other powers. Nevertheless, most reviewers agree that Harmon has produced a provocative, elegantly written synthesis that will shape teaching and research on the period for years to come.
Representative Scholarly Quotes
“Harmon’s signal achievement is to make the familiar strange. He refuses to let readers take the American rise to global power for granted, instead forcing us to see how every step—from the acquisition of the Philippines to the bombing of Hiroshima—was contested, contingent, and could have gone otherwise. This is not a story of destiny but of drama.” — Journal of American History
“By weaving together vignettes of migrant farmworkers, Prohibition agents, Hollywood directors, and Pentagon planners, Harmon demonstrates that the ‘American Century’ was never a single project but a messy convergence of aspirations and fears. The result is both a gripping narrative and a profound meditation on power and its limits.” — American Historical Review