Excerpt from Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America by Eric Rauchway
Page 12 (© 2006, Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In terms of an international ranking, we can describe Americanness as follows. The United States is today the world's largest economy and the world's greatest producer and consumer of energy resources, yet it depends on the investment of capital and labor from the rest of the world to carry on its routine affairs; and its government spends a smaller proportion of its people's wealth than other rich countries' governments do. These characteristics make the United States recognizably American around the world today. Yet they have not always described the United States. If these attributes define Americannness now, then the United States became American during a particular and well-defined phase in its development. Specifically, during the half century following the Civil War, stretching up to the start of World War I in Europe in 1914, the United States became the America we recognize. During this time its economy quintupled in size, with its growth accounting for a quarter of the world's economic growth. On the eve of World War I, American productivity amounted to almost a fifth of the world's economic output, whereas five decades earlier, after the Civil War, it was measured under a tenth. The unmatched expansion made the United States into the power it now is: the richest country in the world, with an economy more than twice the size of the next largest. This transformation also left the United States, on the eve of its intervention in World War I, a country aloof from the rest of the world, the only major nation neither convulsed by revolution (as with China or Russia) nor already sunk into a war.