Claims that the United States of America is becoming an empire and its president a Caesar have long been intertwined. During his period of office in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson in particular was accused of both pursuing territorial expansion and augmenting the power of the president. As Margaret Malamud has elaborated in Wyke 2006 (ch. 9), to Jackson’s opponents he was a Caesar, that is to say an arrogant general turned demagogue who was now leading the republic into domestic tyranny and a damaging imperialism.7 But it was in the twentieth century and, specifically, after World War II - when it was recognized that the United States was becoming the heir to Europe’s old colonial empires8 - that this dual Roman analogy (of empire and, therefore, of emperor) was first deployed at length and in depth in order to envisage an apocalyptic future for the western world.
In 1957, the French critic Amaury de Riencourt published a book which received considerable attention in the United States because in it he maintained that Europe now stood in the same relation to America as Greece had once stood to Rome. Just as Roman civilization had been fated to overcome Greek culture and master the world, so American civilization was now destined to take over European culture and dominate the world of tomorrow. For de Riencourt, this was clearly an organic, biocyclical process which could only degenerate into a universal state under the sway of a Caesarian ruler. Hence he entitled his grim political prophecy The Coming Caesars. Among the vast array of elaborate classical parallels and similarities amassed in the book (lent some credibility in part because many had already been put to use by American politicians and their critics right from the time when the Founding Fathers were debating the relative merits of federalism), two in particular were decisive for the author: the adoption by both Rome and America of the course of democratic growth and imperial expansion. For both the consequence was (or now would be) loss of liberty, centralization, and the arrival of Caesarism: ‘‘Our Western world, America and Europe, is threatened with Caesarism on a scale unknown since the dawn of the Roman empire.’’9
After depicting Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first real ‘‘pre-Caesarist’’ president, that is, as the one who, during the era of the New Deal and in the later crisis of world war, most nearly established dictatorial rule, de Riencourt concluded:
[T]he President of the United States is the most powerful single human being in the world today. Future crises will inevitably transform him into a full-fledged Caesar, if we do not beware. Today he wears ten hats - as Head of State, Chief Executive, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chief Legislator, Head of Party, Tribune of the People, Ultimate Arbitrator of Social Justice, Guardian of Economic Prosperity, and World Leader of Western Civilization. Slowly and unobtrusively these hats are becoming crowns and this pyramid of hats is slowly metamorphosing itself into a tiara, the tiara of one man’s world imperium. (330-1)
In this context, ancient Rome and Caesar are not trusty guides to follow but warning beacons that shed light on the bleak destiny of the world. Or, a little more optimistically, the step back into Roman history which de Riencourt takes is presented by him as an opportunity to wake up and see properly the road we have all been traveling along like somnambulists (6), and to adjust our path as best we can and before it is too late (356).
At the time, de Riencourt’s thesis became the subject of considerable debate. Political conservatives rejected his Roman analogies as robustly as they denied his bold predictions for America’s future place in the world. In the National Review, the libertarian conservative Frank Meyer objected firstly that the author’s argument constituted a sinister European imposition on the United States, designed to depict the latter speciously as the dull and soulless Roman master of a Europe painted as a once sparkling Greece. Secondly, Meyer noted, it depended on an outmoded philosophy of history as cyclical, borrowed from Oswald Spengler’s sensational, but long since discredited, two-volume study The Decline of the West (1926-8). Finally, it ignored an essential characteristic of American political life, namely, its Christian vision of the innate value of the person and of his freedom under God. Confident of Christian America’s difference from pagan Rome, Meyer boldly concluded that Americans would indeed determine the fate of the West, but on their own terms: any future American era of western culture will be ‘‘not Caesarist, but free.’’10 More recent (and more mundane) objections to The Coming Caesars have included de Riencourt’s inability to count hats, as well as the extraordinary historical contortions, contradictions, and contentions practiced by the author in order to turn America into the new Rome and Caesarism into its destiny.
In order to sustain a close and complex match over some 350 pages of text between the histories of Europe and ancient Greece, and between those of the United States and ancient Rome, de Riencourt is clearly constrained to twist and distort all four.12 And the achieved match is reinforced by the constant traffic of historical terminology across the centuries and the sea: the New Deal starts with the Gracchi in Rome, Roosevelt is the first real tribune of the people, Julius Caesar establishes a permanent bureaucracy after the downfall of Roman Big Business and relies on Clodius against Milo’s Tammany Hall. The whole argument is embedded in a contradictory philosophy of history which is simultaneously cyclical (civilizations overwhelm cultures and then ossify and degenerate into lethal tyrannies until the cycle begins again) and apocalyptic (expanding democracy leads to imperialism which in turn destroys republican institutions and concentrates absolute power in a single man, leading to nuclear holocaust and the end of history). Few critics since have been prepared to argue for such thoroughgoing historical coincidence, or to return to a biocyclical understanding of history (as rise and fall, ebb and flow, growth and decay). But at moments of political extremity or crisis, there has again been a turn to de Riencourt’s highly original and flamboyantly dramatic use of ancient Rome and Julius Caesar - namely, to paint a monitory vision of the future of the presidency, of America, and of the world.13
Less than ten years later, for example, the front page of the issue of National Review for May 3, 1966 carried the legend: ‘‘Imperial America: A look into the future.’’ Inside the journal, the philosopher Thomas Molnar, while acknowledging national resistance to the idea, accepted with little hesitation or need for sustained analysis that by now the United States had become an imperial power like Rome. Clearly, American diplomacy and its armed forces have become at least in part reluctant heirs to European conquests, garrisoning GIs from Saigon to Leopoldville in order not to colonize but to ‘‘protect’’ and provision with a Pax Americana, currently guarding oceans and sea-routes, air-routes, and space orbits from ‘‘a great Asian power.’’ Molnar exploits the dual Roman analogy not to ponder America’s growth to empire but to pick apart what he perceives to be the tremendous and troubling domestic consequences of such growth. Empire needs a single power center, imperial responsibility brings with it increased centralization. If the United States has grown like Rome from small agrarian republic to empire, then will the parallel hold and its Chief Executive also become an Imperial Caesar?14
Here Molnar catalogues what he perceives to be the extraordinary degree of community already perceptible between modern American presidents and Caesar (or, variously, the Caesars). They empty traditional institutions of their power (the Roman Senate, the American Congress). They are charismatic figures who promise but only partly deliver to the demands of the newly important masses. For their double role as chief administrator and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, they are compensated by considerable privileges (a crown for Julius, four mandates for Roosevelt). They curb the legislative arm of government, contain popular discontent (free grain distributions, anti-poverty funds), and acquire a large staff who duplicate all forms of government and whose political existence is tied to their leader alone. Molnar’s conclusion demonstrates the predictive and apocalyptic functions the Roman equivalence is once again made to serve: ‘‘The end of the story? Caesar reaches for absolute power, and absolute power corrupts Caesar first, the public and its morality next. Priests or television screens divinize his Image. Eager, famished enemies appear at the gates.’’15
The author completes his analysis by reassuring his presumably somewhat alarmed readers that these thoughts on a Caesarian presidency are merely an intellectual exercise and that none of his predictions might come true. However, although he makes no direct reference to the current president of the United States (Lyndon B. Johnson), the date his article was published is not without significance. Only a year earlier Johnson had authorized open-ended military intervention in Vietnam at the same time as he undertook sweeping policy innovations at home.16 Criticism of the secrecy with which the president came to his decisions was portrayed in a political cartoon linked to an editorial that appeared in the Washington Post on June 10, 1966, only a month after the publication of Molnar’s Roman speculations. On the left, a bespectacled, short senator dressed in Roman tunic and boots holds a cigar in one hand and raises up a scroll in the other on which is written: ‘‘Dirksen accuses administration of lack of candor on Vietnam.’’ On the right, a tall President Johnson dressed in toga and Roman sandals, and wearing a laurel wreath, finds himself backed against a pillar. The caption over the president’s head reads: ‘‘EV [sic] TU?,’’ identifying the confrontation as one between an American Brutus and his bemused Caesar.17
Throughout the 1960s and on into the mid-1970s and beyond, the Vietnamese conflict brought to prominence on the political left a critique of American imperialism and its association with an imperial presidency.18 But as discussion moved from speculation and prediction to confirmation and description, the original need for the critique to be dressed in dramatic Roman tropes appears to fade, the necessity of examining the distinctiveness and the specifics of the United States’ commitments overseas and the massive growth in presidential powers at home becomes more apparent. Even de Riencourt in his next book, The American Empire (1968), fails to sustain his previous use of ancient Rome and Caesar as historical analogy beyond some small mention in his introductory pages, at the same time as he asserts that his earlier predictions have all come true. While The Imperial Presidency (1973), Arthur Schlesinger’s study of the gradual appropriation by the presidency of powers originally reserved by the Constitution to Congress, in particular the vital decision to go to war, manages without mention of ancient empire and the Roman dictator.19 Widespread acknowledgment of military interventionism abroad and executive predominance at home now required much less in the way of historical analogy or even historical metaphor for their exploration. Until the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic anxieties about American expansion were assuaged for some by the assumption that US military growth and the creation of a colossal bureaucratic machinery at home were necessary, but merely temporary, departures from the nation’s republican origins, part of a Cold War strategy of containment rather than conquest, and held in check by the opposition of the eastern empire of the USSR.20 In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, Roman historical analogies have re-emerged and in the most unexpected quarters.
World History
