Empire of Liberty

• 1. Introduction

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  The Empire of Liberty is a phrase Thomas Jefferson first wrote down in 1780, while the American Revolution was still being fought. At that moment, the United States did not yet exist as a finished nation, yet Jefferson was already looking outward, imagining a republic so free and so expansive that it would reshape the world. What is it that Jefferson actually meant by an empire built on liberty? How did a vision rooted in the ideals of self-government come to justify wars, territorial seizures, and policies that stripped Native Americans of a hundred million acres? And how did successive presidents, from James Monroe to George W. Bush, borrow this language to explain actions that critics called straightforward imperialism?

  Those questions are what this documentary sets out to answer. The phrase itself is small. The history it unleashed is very large.

• 2. Jefferson's Original Vision

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  In 1780, Jefferson's first written use of the phrase pointed toward a practical goal: securing a "barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada" and converting what he called "dangerous Enemies into valuable friends." He was describing westward expansion as both a commercial and a strategic act, and he framed it in the language of mutual benefit.

  By 1803, that vision had its single most dramatic expression. Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France nearly doubled the area of the Republic and removed what he saw as the main obstacle to westward movement. He described it himself as a "great achievement to the mass of happiness which is to ensue," linking the acquisition of land directly to the expansion of human welfare. The logic was consistent: more territory meant more room for the free, economical government he believed the American constitution had been uniquely designed to sustain.

  Yet Jefferson's Empire was never conceived as a single, centrally governed state. He wrote that whether the nation remained one confederacy or split into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies was, in his view, "not very important to the happiness of either part." The point was not unified political control but the spread of republican institutions across as wide a geography as possible.

  In 1809, writing to his successor James Madison, Jefferson extended this ambition to include Canada, imagining an empire for liberty "as she has never surveyed since the creation." Even in his final years, he saw no ceiling on this process, predicting that "barbarism" would "in time, I trust, disappear from the earth."

• 3. The Contradictions at Home

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  Scholar Richard Drinnon examined the gap between Jefferson's imperial rhetoric and his actual policies toward Native Americans. At his second inaugural address, Jefferson spoke of teaching Native Americans "agriculture and the domestic arts," framing the relationship as a civilizing partnership. Drinnon's assessment of what followed was pointed: he argued that Jefferson had "initiated the Indian removal policy" through efforts to obtain the entire left bank of the Mississippi from its original inhabitants.

  The mechanism was not military conquest alone. Drinnon documented that Jefferson's acquisition of roughly a hundred million acres came through treaties that were "shot through with fraud, bribery, and intimidation." The idealistic language of an Empire of Liberty did not soften the material reality of that dispossession.

  When tribes in the Northwest resisted in 1812, Jefferson's tone shifted. Writing to John Adams, he predicted that those he called "backward" tribes would "relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want," and that the United States would be "obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains." The civilizing mission, in this instance, curdled quickly into a statement of expulsion.

  Alexander Hamilton occupied a different position in the same conversation. In 1795, Hamilton described America as the "embryo of a great empire." In The Farmer Refuted, written in 1775, he had predicted that within fifty or sixty years the country would possess enough men and materials to equip a formidable navy, no longer needing British protection. Hamilton's empire was more frankly competitive and commercial than Jefferson's. The two visions shared a destination even when the moral vocabulary differed.

• 4. Doctrines and Interventions

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  The Monroe Doctrine, introduced in 1823, was the first institutional translation of Jefferson's idea into standing foreign policy. It declared that European efforts to colonize or interfere with states in the Americas would be treated as acts of aggression requiring a U.S. response. In exchange, the United States pledged not to interfere with existing European colonies or their Caribbean holdings.

  The stated justification was making the "New World" safe for liberty and American-style republicanism. Many Latin Americans read the doctrine differently, seeing it as a mechanism that gave the United States a free hand to establish its own imperialistic relationships with the region without worrying about European competition. The doctrine was invoked during the Second French intervention in Mexico and again during the Zimmermann Telegram affair involving the German Empire in 1917. After 1960, it was called on to justify efforts to roll back Communist influence in Cuba. Ronald Reagan later applied the same logic to Nicaragua and Grenada.

  The pattern of attaching fresh doctrines to the same underlying idea continued through the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt issued the Roosevelt Corollary. Woodrow Wilson developed what became known as Wilsonianism. Harry Truman articulated the Truman Doctrine. Reagan named his own. George W. Bush produced the Bush Doctrine. Each framework presented American intervention as an extension of the original Jeffersonian promise: that U.S. power in the world was inherently linked to the spread of freedom.

  The conflicts this framework motivated span more than a century. The Spanish-American War of 1898, U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, the later phase of World War II from 1941 to 1945, the Cold War from 1947 to 1991, and the war on terror beginning in 2001 have all been explained, at least in part, by appeal to the Empire of Liberty.

• 5. Religion and Reform Abroad

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  American Protestant and Catholic missionaries began working in what they called "pagan" areas from the 1820s, and by the late nineteenth century those operations had spread worldwide. The scale and ambition of the American missionary enterprise set it apart from European equivalents. British, French, and German missions concentrated largely on populations within their own empires. Americans, by contrast, went anywhere it was possible to go.

  Organizations involved in this work included the Young Men's Christian Association, the Young Women's Christian Association, the student volunteer movement, and the King's Daughters. Among Catholic groups, the three Maryknoll organizations were especially active in China, Africa, and Latin America. The common thread was the conviction that spreading Christianity and spreading modernity were the same project.

  The World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a spinoff of the WCTU, combined strong religious conviction with a specific international campaign: shutting down the global liquor trade. The fight against ignorance, disease, drugs, and alcohol was understood as a form of liberation, a practical extension of the idea that American values, exported, would improve lives.

  By the 1930s the trajectory had split. More evangelical Protestant groups redoubled their missionary efforts. More liberal Protestants grew uncertain. The failure of alcohol prohibition at home had cast serious doubt on how readily the world could be remade, and some began to question whether the confidence behind the missionary impulse had been warranted.

• 6. Critics and Counterclaims

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  Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson became two of the most prominent public voices arguing that the Empire of Liberty was not what it claimed to be. Their shared position was that American behavior abroad constituted genuine imperialism, making the United States, in their framing, the very thing the original concept was designed to oppose. Both recommended what they called "dismantling the empire," a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy away from interventionism.

  The 1930s Neutrality Acts represented a legislative attempt to embed a different principle: the United States actively tried to avoid involvement in foreign conflicts. That effort collapsed when the country entered World War II, though it came two years after the war had already started.

  Puerto Rican poet and novelist Giannina Braschi offered a more specific indictment. In her 2011 work United States of Banana, Braschi presented the collapse of the World Trade Center as marking the end of the American Empire and its "colonial" hold on Puerto Rico. Her framing connected the domestic consequences of the Empire of Liberty to its foreign ones, arguing that the people living under American territorial authority had experienced the imperial dimensions of the concept most directly.

  The economic dimensions of the empire ran alongside the political and military ones. American management techniques, including Taylorization, Fordism, and the assembly line, spread alongside American technology and popular culture, including film. These exports carried their own implicit argument about how productive, rational, and desirable American methods were, offering a softer version of the same claim that Jefferson had made with his phrase in 1780.