A Country of Vast Designs
James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent
by Robert W. Merry
Simon & Schuster, 592 pp., $30

Historians still fiercely debate whether James K. Polk is our most underappreciated president, but I'll say this: He sure seems to be our most politically incorrect one. Polk's brilliant success in vastly expanding the size and power of the United States during his fleeting four years in office (1845-49), conquering Mexico along the way, has earned him the eternal enmity of much of academia. And his drab and crabby nature has kept him from holding a place in the hearts of his countrymen commensurate with his achievements.

In many ways, Polk's Mexican War has come to be treated as a defining American sin, the work of a leader who exploited the theme of national honor to justify a power grab, battering a weaker country into submission. The sainted Henry David Thoreau, I was taught from an early age, bravely went to jail for declining to pay his poll tax in protest of America's schemes against Mexico (though he had also failed to pay it well before then). America got its comeuppance, we are told, when its territorial expansion fanned the flames over slavery, bringing on the blood-soaked calamity of the Civil War.

Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in both conflicts, called the Mexican War "the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." Gore Vidal noted that the Polk era "is where we turned brutally

But it may be a little more complicated than that, Robert W. Merry suggests in this expansive new book. Polk did not act in a vacuum. He represented an extraordinarily dynamic young country, whose innovative people, raised in freedom, were willing to take bold risks to get ahead in life. No matter how much Polk's political enemies in the Whig party thundered against expansion, it seems clear that most Americans shared and cheered the president's sense of manifest destiny, and planned to make better use of the continent than did their predecessors.

Corrupt, enervated Mexico, feebly administering its sparsely populated territory, simply lacked the enterprise, resolution, and rule of law to keep its far-flung borders intact. Whatever academics might think of the matter, such weakness inevitably creates a power vacuum, and it seems clear that European powers (notably Great Britain) would have been tempted to fill the void if Americans had not.

History moves forward with a crushing force, Merry argues, "and does not stop for niceties of moral suasion or concepts of political virtue."

Instead of dodging the most compelling national issue of his time, Polk worked hard to increase the size of the United States by more than a third, adding to it what is now Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado. Through his agency, America became a Pacific power, and ultimately the strongest nation on earth.