Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: âIn strict confidenceâŠI should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.â
The year of the massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890, it was officially declared by the Bureau of the Census that the internal frontier was closed. The profit system, with its natural tendency for expansion, had already begun to look overseas. The severe depression that began in 1893 strengthened an idea developing within the political and financial elite of the country: that overseas markets for American goods might relieve the problem of underconsumption at home and prevent the economic crises that in the 1890s brought class war.
And would not a foreign adventure deflect some of the rebellious energy that went into strikes and protest movements toward an external enemy? Would it not unite people with government, with the armed forces, instead of against them? This was probably not a conscious plan among most of the eliteâbut a natural development from the twin drives of capitalism and nationalism.
Expansion overseas was not a new idea. Even before the war against Mexico carried the United States to the Pacific, the Monroe Doctrine looked southward into and beyond the Caribbean. Issued in 1823 when the countries of Latin America were winning independence from Spanish control, it made plain to European nations that the United States considered Latin America its sphere of influence. Not long after, some Americans began thinking into the Pacific: of Hawaii, Japan, and the great markets of China.
There was more than thinking; the American armed forces had made forays overseas. A State Department list, âInstances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798â1945â (presented by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to a Senate committee in 1962 to cite precedents for the use of armed force against Cuba), shows 103 interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895. A sampling from the list, with the exact description given by the State Department:
1852â53âArgentina. Marines were landed and maintained in Buenos Aires to protect American interests during a revolution.
1853âNicaraguaâto protect American lives and interests during political disturbances.
1853â54âJapanâThe âOpening of Japanâ and the Perry Expedition. [The State Department does not give more details, but this involved the use of warships to force Japan to open its ports to the United States.]
1853â54âRyukyu and Bonin IslandsâCommodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration, landing marines twice, and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa. He also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands. All to secure facilities for commerce.
1854âNicaraguaâSan Juan del Norte [Greytown was destroyed to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.]
1855âUruguayâU.S. and European naval forces landed to protect American interests during an attempted revolution in Montevideo.
1859âChinaâFor the protection of American interests in Shanghai.
1860âAngola, Portuguese West AfricaâTo protect American lives and property at Kissembo when the natives became troublesome.
1893âHawaiiâOstensibly to protect American lives and property; actually to promote a provisional government under Sanford B. Dole. This action was disavowed by the United States.
1894âNicaraguaâTo protect American interests at Bluefields following a revolution.
Thus, by the 1890s, there had been much experience in overseas probes and interventions. The ideology of expansion was widespread in the upper circles of military men, politicians, businessmenâand even among some of the leaders of farmersâ movements who thought foreign markets would help them.
Captain A. T. Mahan of the U.S. navy, a popular propagandist for expansion, greatly influenced Theodore Roosevelt and other American leaders. The countries with the biggest navies would inherit the earth, he said. âAmericans must now begin to look outward.â Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts wrote in a magazine article:
A Washington Post editorial on the eve of the Spanish-American war:
Was that taste in the mouth of the people through some instinctive lust for aggression or some urgent self-interest? Or was it a taste (if indeed it existed) created, encouraged, advertised, and exaggerated by the millionaire press, the military, the government, the eager-to-please scholars of the time? Political scientist John Burgess of Columbia University said the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races were âparticularly endowed with the capacity for establishing national statesâŠthey are entrustedâŠwith the mission of conducting the political civilization of the modern world.â
Several years before his election to the presidency, William McKinley said: âWe want a foreign market for our surplus products.â Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana in early 1897 declared: âAmerican factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.â The Department of State explained in 1898:
These expansionist military men and politicians were in touch with one another. One of Theodore Rooseveltâs biographers tells us: âBy 1890, Lodge, Roosevelt, and Mahan had begun exchanging views,â and that they tried to get Mahan off sea duty âso that he could continue full-time his propaganda for expansion.â Roosevelt once sent Henry Cabot Lodge a copy of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, saying it was âpoor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint.â
When the United States did not annex Hawaii in 1893 after some Americans (the combined missionary and pineapple interests of the Dole family) set up their own government, Roosevelt called this hesitancy âa crime against white civilization.â And he told the Naval War College: âAll the great masterful races have been fighting racesâŠ. No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.â
Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was ârather a good thingâ and told her he had said as much at a dinner with âvarious dago diplomatsâŠall wrought up by the lynching.â
William James, the philosopher, who became one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote about Roosevelt that he âgushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher lifeâŠ.â
Rooseveltâs talk of expansionism was not just a matter of manliness and heroism; he was conscious of âour trade relations with China.â Lodge was aware of the textile interests in Massachusetts that looked to Asian markets. Historian Marilyn Young has written of the work of the American China Development Company to expand American influence in China for commercial reasons, and of State Department instructions to the American emissary in China to âemploy all proper methods for the extension of American interests in China.â She says (The Rhetoric of Empire) that the talk about markets in China was far greater than the actual amount of dollars involved at the time, but this talk was important in shaping American policy toward Hawaii, the Philippines, and all of Asia.
While it was true that in 1898, 90 percent of American products were sold at home, the 10 percent sold abroad amounted to a billion dollars. Walter Lafeber writes (The New Empire): âBy 1893, American trade exceeded that of every country in the world except England. Farm products, of course, especially in the key tobacco, cotton, and wheat areas, had long depended heavily on international markets for their prosperity.â And in the twenty years up to 1895, new investments by American capitalists overseas reached a billion dollars. In 1885, the steel industryâs publication Age of Steel wrote that the internal markets were insufficient and the overproduction of industrial products âshould be relieved and prevented in the future by increased foreign trade.â
Oil became a big export in the 1880s and 1890s: by 1891, the Rockefeller familyâs Standard Oil Company accounted for 90 percent of American exports of kerosene and controlled 70 percent of the world market. Oil was now second to cotton as the leading product sent overseas.
There were demands for expansion by large commercial farmers, including some of the Populist leaders, as William Appleman Williams has shown in The Roots of the Modern American Empire. Populist Congressman Jerry Simpson of Kansas told Congress in 1892 that with a huge agricultural surplus, farmers âmust of necessity seek a foreign market.â True, he was not calling for aggression or conquestâbut once foreign markets were seen as important to prosperity, expansionist policies, even war, might have wide appeal.
Such an appeal would be especially strong if the expansion looked like an act of generosityâhelping a rebellious group overthrow foreign ruleâas in Cuba. By 1898, Cuban rebels had been fighting their Spanish conquerors for three years in an attempt to win independence. By that time, it was possible to create a national mood for intervention.
It seems that the business interests of the nation did not at first want military intervention in Cuba. American merchants did not need colonies or wars of conquest if they could just have free access to markets. This idea of an âopen doorâ became the dominant theme of American foreign policy in the twentieth century. It was a more sophisticated approach to imperialism than the traditional empire-building of Europe. William Appleman Williams, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, says:
However, this preference on the part of some business groups and politicians for what Williams calls the idea of âinformal empire,â without war, was always subject to change. If peaceful imperialism turned out to be impossible, military action might be needed.
For instance, in late 1897 and early 1898, with China weakened by a recent war with Japan, German military forces occupied the Chinese port of Tsingtao at the mouth of Kiaochow Bay and demanded a naval station there, with rights to railways and coal mines on the nearby peninsula of Shantung. Within the next few months, other European powers moved in on China, and the partition of China by the major imperialist powers was under way, with the United States left behind.
At this point, the New York Journal of Commerce, which had advocated peaceful development of free trade, now urged old-fashioned military colonialism. Julius Pratt, a historian of U.S. expansionism, describes the turnabout:
There was a similar turnabout in U.S. business attitudes on Cuba in 1898. Businessmen had been interested, from the start of the Cuban revolt against Spain, in the effect on commercial possibilities there. There already was a substantial economic interest in the island, which President Grover Cleveland summarized in 1896:
Popular support of the Cuban revolution was based on the thought that they, like the Americans of 1776, were fighting a war for their own liberation. The United States government, however, the conservative product of another revolutionary war, had power and profit in mind as it observed the events in Cuba. Neither Cleveland, President during the first years of the Cuban revolt, nor McKinley, who followed, recognized the insurgents officially as belligerents; such legal recognition would have enabled the United States to give aid to the rebels without sending an army. But there may have been fear that the rebels would win on their own and keep the United States out.
There seems also to have been another kind of fear. The Cleveland administration said a Cuban victory might lead to âthe establishment of a white and a black republic,â since Cuba had a mixture of the two races. And the black republic might be dominant. This idea was expressed in 1896 in an article in The Saturday Review by a young and eloquent imperialist, whose mother was American and whose father was EnglishâWinston Churchill. He wrote that while Spanish rule was bad and the rebels had the support of the people, it would be better for Spain to keep control:
The reference to âanotherâ black republic meant Haiti, whose revolution against France in 1803 had led to the first nation run by blacks in the New World. The Spanish minister to the United States wrote to the U.S. Secretary of State:
As Philip Foner says in his two-volume study The Spanish-Cuban-American War, âThe McKinley Administration had plans for dealing with the Cuban situation, but these did not include independence for the island.â He points to the administrationâs instructions to its minister to Spain, Stewart Woodford, asking him to try to settle th...