No turning back

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew From Sea to Shining Sea
By Richard Kluger
Knopf, 649 pp., $35

Old view: The American march from sea to sea, which built a continental nation out of forest, plain, and desert, represented one of history's great achievements, the triumph of a people of indomitable will who, in their conquest of nature and territory, extended freedom and Enlightenment values throughout an untamed land.

New view: The American capture of territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, accomplished through genocide, trickery, and unprovoked incursions, represents one of history's great crimes, the triumph of a people with insatiable appetites and racist outlooks who, in subduing the land and innocent native peoples, imposed their notions of intolerance, militarism, and greed on an entire continent.

Richard Kluger's new view of how America was built - how the new nation established its boundaries and then expanded them until they reached the Pacific - is not exactly what Americans used to learn in school. His "Seizing Destiny" is a study of how Americans acquired America, and the outlook is set out in Kluger's preface, in which he argues that early Americans were guilty of "confusing opportunity with entitlement and mistaking the abundance of liberty doled to them by history and geography for a license to have their way." Then he adds: "Those Americans given to blind chauvinism would do well to consider the darker side of the tale as well."

Kluger, whose history of the cigarette industry earned the Pulitzer Prize, does not skimp on the darker side. The prevailing tone of his massive volume is set by the fifth paragraph, which doesn't even involve the British or the Americans: "The Spaniards came first tracking the southerly latitudes and, after finding little to loot in the Caribbean isles, their first landfall, they reached the midsector of the hemispheric mainland."

The result is a work of history that is not the whispery Williamsburg wallpaper of American myth. His Colonial society is a kleptocracy where the rich stole land and privilege, and so did everyone else who could grab anything that wasn't tied down. "In that raw frontier society," he writes, "the fittest did far better than survive, the grasping had a field day, and those of faint heart or will won scant sympathy." No brave and true Pilgrims marching around Plymouth with their muskets in this portrayal.

And yet Kluger is not relentlessly negative in his depiction of America, its founders, and their successors. He presents Americans as perhaps all too human, all too intoxicated by the promise and the riches of the land they thought they discovered. "The land," he says, "transformed them into a people awash in optimism based on their hard-won achievements, a people unapologetic for the transparency of their abuse of the red and black races."

Through it all, Kluger paints a detailed and compelling portrait of how the Colonies became a country, settled their differences over various borders, and positioned themselves in a world hostile to their ideas and skeptical of their survival. He lingers on the disputes among the Colonies and states on their borders, many of which conflicted, none of which were acknowledged by the great powers of Europe, and explains how Great Britain, in defeat in America, came to try to win the affection of the onetime Colonists with whom they shared language and outlook. You don't find that in ordinary accounts of the Colonial and Revolutionary periods.

Again it was the land that made the difference, and in this case it was the land that made the country. It is in his passages about the land that Kluger is at his most eloquent, and least angry. "The land was their colossal collective treasure, an expansive resource that made them wealthy even when they had little money and no credit," he writes. "The land, nearly a million square miles of it, was their money, their credit, and their future, and with the vibrancy and resilience of youth, they set out to envelop it in a hurry."

The stain on the new nation was the way it treated the people who were already here when the Colonists arrived - and the stain only deepened as the years passed. "The new American government, for all its exalted rhetoric about liberty and natural rights, dealt disingenuously with the native peoples from the first," he argues. But Americans also lusted after Canada, and after Florida, and after Texas and New Mexico and Oregon and California. (They managed to buy Louisiana - a tale in itself, told with great verve in this volume.)

Perhaps the most fascinating character in Kluger's book is the unlikely figure of James K. Polk, who set his eyes upon Oregon and California and who snapped up Mexico in a war that underlined the nation's character flaws. "The Mexicans, of preponderantly swarthy cast, were a sitting target for virulent American racism," he writes. "Their mixed blood made them a degraded people and explained, satisfactorily for many in the United States, the low Mexican character: they were portrayed as dumb, lazy, untrustworthy, and doomed to wither away, like the American Indians."

The process of building a country wasn't effortless, but still it came remarkably easy to Americans, who possessed so many advantages of geography and economy. Listen to Kluger's assessment of the achievement: "The scope, suddenness, and daring of the nation's territorial expansion between 1845 and 1850, creating a transcontinental empire scarcely three-quarters of a century after breaking away from Great Britain, were all the more stunning because the initiative was met with so little sustained resistance from other countries and the native peoples."

It wasn't exactly a transcontinental empire acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness, as the British empire was said to have been assembled, but it wasn't done with much thought either, except for the vague and appealing notion that Americans had a manifest destiny to conquer and then fill up the continent. Kluger's interpretation may not appeal to you - it's an ugly story, however elegant the telling - but it has this virtue: It will force you to think about how America was made, and why.

David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe's Washington bureau chief, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.