Contextual Essay

VUS.9a

Between 1890 and 1917, the United States took possession of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Samoa. It established protectorates over Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, and mounted armed interventions in many of these countries as well as in China, Mexico, Haiti, and Nicaragua. What accounts for this great spasm of American energy and acquisitiveness at the beginning of the twentieth century? Did the United States consciously seek to become an "imperial" power in the years between the Spanish-American War and its entry into the First World War? If so—and even if that decision was not conscious—what was the nature of American imperialism and how did it shape the course of U.S. diplomacy in the Caribbean and Far East? These questions continue to generate spirited debate among historians of American foreign relations.

Economic Transformation and Foreign Policy

The emergence of the United States as a major player in Asia and Latin America was closely related to the spectacular growth of the American economy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This explosive growth accompanied the centralization of the federal government's bureaucracy and the establishment of a truly national state. Between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the First World War, the "island communities" of rural America slowly disappeared as social and economic changes ushered in a modern, urban, industrial United States. During these years, the American economy was transformed from one based on small, family-owned businesses to one dominated by a highly integrated system of large corporations. A new professional and managerial class engineered this transformation and redefined middle class America by the dawn of the new century. As historians Robert Wiebe, Martin J. Sklar, and Olivier Zunz have suggested, the dynamism of American foreign policy in this period had its roots in the economic and bureaucratic restructuring of American life.

If the growth of the American economy was spectacular in the late 1800s, it was also extremely volatile and loosed potentially disruptive energies upon a nation grappling with the promise and costs of industrialization. Sharp economic downturns frequently followed the booms of the 1880s, and from 1893 to 1897, the nation sank into a depression that threatened its political stability. American workingmen and women became restive; many became politically radicalized. American leaders strove to keep the industrial economy humming while preserving domestic peace and damping political unrest at home. Their efforts had important ramifications for American foreign policy as the pivotal year of 1898 approached.

Watershed: 1898

The year of the Spanish American War is generally considered a watershed in the history of American diplomacy. 1898 marks the point at which the United States translated its growing industrial might into military and political power on the global stage. It marked the beginning of the American "imperial moment," a period that scholars have long struggled to explain. In many ways, U.S. diplomacy in Latin America and Asia after the war was driven by apostles of empire-Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, and Columbia University president John W. Burgess foremost among them-who urged Americans to pursue a "new manifest destiny" and spread the benefits of American Protestant culture overseas. But was this missionary spirit enough to explain the expansionist impulse in American foreign policy? During the 1940s, Samuel Flagg Bemis, one of the great historians of American diplomacy, wrote that such expansionism marked a "momentary fall from grace" by an otherwise peace-loving United States. Bemis argued that political and emotional strains of the Populist and Progressive movements contributed to the nature of U.S. diplomacy in the 1890s. The American rush to acquire colonies and dependencies resulted, in part, from the "psychic crisis" of these reform movements and a sense of middle-class insecurity engendered by the rapid economic and social transformations of the late nineteenth century.

The Drive for New Markets

Clearly, economic imperatives, political requirements and commercial ambitions all came together to shape the course of American expansion after 1898. In key respects, the roots of American expansion were located in the "Industrial Revolution" and its resulting crisis of overproduction by American manufacturers. American industry in the late nineteenth century was driven by technological advances in electricity and communications. Industrial leaders like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cyrus McCormick argued that the health of American industry depended on expansion. Failure to establish new foreign markets for the swelling output of U.S. goods, they claimed, would result in an industrial slowdown and economic stagnation at home. Rising unemployment would produce further social unrest and feed the growth of subversive radicalism that could undermine political and economic institutions. Consequently, American businessmen and government officials looked to Latin America, and especially to China, as new outlets for American-made products.

But an economic interpretation of American expansion does not fully explain the phenomenon. Respected historians like Ernest May have identified no overarching economic logic to U.S. foreign policy. Although politicians, businessmen, and farmers spoke regularly of the need to find foreign markets for American goods, their rhetoric seldom determined the course of U.S. diplomacy. The China market, for example, proved largely illusory. Some historians claimed that Washington's policy was driven by the desire to extend the values of American Progressivism abroad, while others asserted that American diplomacy's main objective was to keep the European powers out of Latin America and the Caribbean and to consolidate hemispheric security through a sort of "preclusive imperialism." Richard H. Collin, in Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism (1985), has contended that Americans' belief in the superiority of their politically stable and technologically advanced society contributed to aggressive U.S. policies toward the more agrarian, politically troubled countries of Latin America and East Asia.

Imperialism and Foreign Policy

Scholars now believe it is more useful to move beyond the older terms of this debate and explore new aspects U.S. foreign policy in the years after 1898. The word "imperialism," as applied to American diplomacy, is difficult to define and is often used inexactly. It is heavily freighted with ideological baggage, becoming too loaded with pejorative political meaning during the Cold War era to be a useful descriptive term. For example, was U.S. expansion in the years after 1898 intentionally imperial, or did Americans assume imperial responsibilities in the Caribbean and Asia "in a fit of absent mindedness," as some historians described Britain's imperial history? Actually, the concept of empire, stripped of its incendiary modern implications, can still be a useful way to examine American diplomacy in the years before World War I. Historians such as Robin Winks, Emily Rosenberg, and John Lewis Gaddis have pointed out that intentional or not, "imperial" was the most accurate description of the formal and informal patron-client relationships the United States established with the nations of the Far East and Latin America.

Did this mean that American imperialism after 1898 was really a departure from U.S. continental and overseas policies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? If the United States had indeed become an imperial state, what sort of imperialism did Americans practice? In many ways, the overseas policies of Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft were prefigured by the military buildup and more aggressive diplomacy of the Harrison and Cleveland administrations. Some historians, like Victor Kiernan in America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (1980), depicted the nation's post-1898 overseas ventures as the "logical sequel" to its pursuit of a continental empire during the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, economic determinists like William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber maintained that the commercial "Open Door" policy articulated by the McKinley administration for China in 1899 and 1900 was a continuation of American foreign policies pursued since the revolution and which still determines the course of U.S. diplomacy.

Overseas Expansion: A Betrayal of American Principles?

In addition to economic imperatives, a mixture of political institutions and cultural practices-both formal and informal-governed U.S. policy in Asia and the Caribbean in the years before the First World War. In the language of geopolitics and world-systems theory, the United States during this period moved from being a nation on the "semi-periphery" to a powerful country at the political and industrial "center" of world affairs. Yet many men and women were profoundly uncomfortable with the United States' newly acquired imperial role. As Robert Beisner argues in Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900 (1968), Americans from all classes and walks of life expressed apprehension that establishing formal control over foreign lands and peoples was a betrayal of American principles. Instead, in William Appleman Williams's words, they preferred an informal "anti-colonial imperialism" that allowed private and commercial interests to exercise American hegemony in Asia and Latin America.

Wider Implications of American Expansion

Any exploration of post-1898 U.S. foreign policy must grapple with the cultural motivations, tools, and impact of American expansionism. In many ways, these constituted America's most important legacies in the Caribbean and Far East. For example, American missionaries in China and Japan helped to spread American values and culture to Asia. At the same time, teachers and health workers struggled to transmit Western ideas, technology, and hygiene practices to the underdeveloped world. Women played particularly important roles in this endeavor through the auspices of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement, and other educational and missionary institutions. Women became actively involved in the anti-imperial and peace organizations that helped shape the political debate on American expansionism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Historians are now exploring the less tangible ways that gender defined U.S. political choices in the imperial era. Most notably, Kristin L. Hoganson, in Fighting for American Manhood (1998), claims that "gender angst" resulting from economic and social upheavals of the late nineteenth century drove the United States to reaffirm its "manly ideal of politics." By pursuing wars in Latin America and Asia, Americans could "return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons." Such interpretations demonstrate that the issues surrounding American foreign policy and imperialism in the years before World War I remain a fertile ground for historical research and a contentious subject of scholarly debate.

Works Cited

Beisner, Robert L. Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898-1900. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. The United States as a World Power: A Diplomatic History, 1900-1950. New York: Holt, 1950.

Collin, Richard H. Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion: A New View of American Imperialism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Kiernan, Victor G. America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony. London: Zed Press, 1978.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963.

May, Ernest. Imperial Democracy; the Emergence of America as a Great Power. New York, Harper & Row, 1973.

Rosenberg, Emily S. Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 : the Market, the Law, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, [1967] 1980.

Winks, Robin, ed. The Age of Imperialism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate, 1870-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.