America as a World Power

Several ideas pushed Americans outward at the same time.

• Markets. After the depression of the 1890s, business leaders and farmers worried that the country produced more than Americans could buy. Many looked to Asia and Latin America for customers.
• Sea power. In The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that great nations had strong navies, overseas coaling stations and a canal between the oceans. Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge agreed, and Congress began building modern steel battleships.
• Race and mission. Social Darwinism taught, falsely, that some races were “fitter” than others and destined to rule. Some Protestant leaders, such as Josiah Strong, believed Americans had a duty to spread Christianity and “civilization.” These ideas often blended together.
• The closing frontier. In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier, which the 1890 census had declared closed, had shaped American democracy. Some readers concluded that the nation needed new frontiers overseas.

American missionaries arrived in Hawaii in the 1820s, and their descendants and other Americans built large sugar plantations there. In 1887 planters forced King Kalākaua to accept the so-called Bayonet Constitution, which cut his power and took the vote from most Native Hawaiians and Asian workers.

When Queen Liliʻuokalani tried to restore royal power in January 1893, a group of mostly American businessmen overthrew her. The U.S. minister, John L. Stevens, had Marines from the USS Boston landed in Honolulu. President Grover Cleveland called the overthrow wrong and refused to annex the islands, but the new Republic of Hawaii, led by Sanford Dole, held on. During the war with Spain in 1898, Congress annexed Hawaii by joint resolution. Many Native Hawaiians had signed petitions against annexation. In 1993 Congress formally apologized for the overthrow.

Cubans rebelled against Spanish rule in 1895. To cut rebels off from support, Spanish General Valeriano Weyler forced rural Cubans into camps, where many thousands died of disease and hunger. Newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer competed with lurid stories, some true and some exaggerated, a style called yellow journalism.

On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing about 260 sailors. A U.S. Navy court of inquiry that year blamed a mine, and many Americans blamed Spain. A 1976 Navy study led by Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded that a fire in a coal bunker probably set off the ship’s own ammunition. Later studies have disagreed, and the cause is still disputed. “Remember the Maine!” became a rallying cry either way.

Congress declared war in April. The Teller Amendment promised that the United States would not annex Cuba. The war lasted less than four months. On May 1, Commodore George Dewey destroyed Spain’s Pacific fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines. In Cuba, on July 1, U.S. troops took Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill above Santiago. Roosevelt’s volunteer cavalry, the Rough Riders, won fame, but the Black regular soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry fought beside them and were essential to the victory; several later received the Medal of Honor. Far more U.S. soldiers died of disease than in battle.

In the Treaty of Paris (December 1898), Spain gave up Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, for which the United States paid $20 million. Secretary of State John Hay called it “a splendid little war.”

Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo had been fighting Spain and declared independence in June 1898. When the United States kept the islands instead, war broke out in February 1899. It lasted far longer than the war with Spain. The United States declared it over in July 1902, after Aguinaldo’s capture in 1901, but fighting continued in some regions for years. About 4,200 U.S. soldiers died. At least 20,000 Filipino fighters were killed, and estimates of civilian deaths from fighting, hunger and disease run from about 200,000 to much higher. Both sides committed atrocities; some U.S. troops tortured prisoners with the “water cure” and burned villages.

The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in Boston in 1898, opposed taking the Philippines. Its members included Mark Twain, Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers and former president Grover Cleveland. Some argued that ruling people without their consent betrayed the Declaration of Independence. Others, including some white Southerners, opposed annexation because they did not want nonwhite peoples inside the nation. The Senate approved the Treaty of Paris in February 1899 by just one vote more than the two-thirds needed.

• Cuba. The U.S. Army governed Cuba until 1902. Before leaving, Congress required the Platt Amendment (1901): Cuba could not sign treaties that weakened its independence, had to let the United States intervene, and had to lease naval bases, including Guantánamo Bay. U.S. troops returned several times before the amendment was repealed in 1934.
• Puerto Rico and the Insular Cases. In the Insular Cases, beginning in 1901, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not fully apply in “unincorporated” territories such as Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens under the Jones Act of 1917, but they still cannot vote for president while living on the island.
• China and the Open Door. European powers and Japan were carving China into spheres of influence. In 1899 and 1900 Secretary of State Hay sent the Open Door notes, asking for equal trading rights for all nations and, in 1900, for respect for China’s territory. In the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Chinese militants attacked foreigners and Chinese Christians and besieged the foreign legations in Beijing. U.S. troops joined an international force that ended the siege.

Theodore Roosevelt liked a West African saying: “speak softly and carry a big stick.” He built up the navy and sent its battleships, the “Great White Fleet,” around the world from 1907 to 1909. He also won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the Russo-Japanese War.

The Panama Canal. Panama was then part of Colombia. When Colombia’s senate rejected a canal treaty in 1903, Panamanian rebels, encouraged by canal promoters, declared independence in November. U.S. warships kept Colombian troops from stopping them, and within weeks the United States signed a treaty with the new country for a canal zone. Building the canal took ten years. Dr. William Gorgas’s campaign against mosquitoes cut deaths from yellow fever and malaria, but about 5,600 workers still died during U.S. construction, most of them from the West Indies. The canal opened in August 1914. In 1921 the United States paid Colombia $25 million, and in 1999 the canal passed to Panama.

The Roosevelt Corollary. In 1904 Roosevelt added to the Monroe Doctrine. If a Latin American country could not keep order or pay its debts, he said, the United States would act as an “international police power,” rather than let Europeans step in. He soon took over the Dominican Republic’s customs collection.

Dollar diplomacy. President William Howard Taft preferred “dollars for bullets”: U.S. banks would lend to Latin American governments and invest there. When that failed, troops followed; Marines landed in Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed, with one short break, until 1933.

Moral diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson said U.S. policy should support democracy, not just profits. During the Mexican Revolution he refused to recognize General Victoriano Huerta, who had seized power, and in April 1914 U.S. forces occupied the port of Veracruz. In March 1916 Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and General John J. Pershing led about 10,000 troops into Mexico. They never caught Villa and withdrew in early 1917. Wilson also sent Marines to occupy Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924).

Neutrality. War broke out in Europe in August 1914. Wilson asked Americans to be neutral, but trade and loans to Britain and France grew much faster than trade with Germany. British ships blockaded Germany, and German submarines, or U-boats, attacked ships around Britain. On May 7, 1915, a U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania; about 1,200 people died, 128 of them Americans. Germany later promised to stop sinking passenger ships without warning, and Wilson won reelection in 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

1917. On February 1, 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. British codebreakers had intercepted the Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered Mexico an alliance and the return of lost territory if the United States entered the war; it was published on March 1. After U-boats sank several American ships, Wilson asked Congress for war on April 2, and Congress declared war on Germany on April 6. About 2 million American soldiers reached France, and about 116,000 Americans died in the war, many of them from influenza. Black soldiers served in segregated units; the 369th Infantry, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” fought under French command. The armistice came on November 11, 1918.

The home front. The government drafted soldiers, ran a propaganda agency called the Committee on Public Information, and pressed Americans to buy Liberty Bonds. The Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) made it a crime to interfere with the draft or to criticize the government or the war in certain ways. Socialist Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years for an antiwar speech, and in Schenck v. United States (1919) the Supreme Court upheld the law, saying speech could be punished if it posed a “clear and present danger.” German Americans faced suspicion and violence. War jobs drew hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners to Northern cities in the Great Migration, escaping Jim Crow but often meeting discrimination and, in 1919, deadly riots.

The peace. In January 1918 Wilson announced his Fourteen Points: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, lower trade barriers, self-determination for many peoples, and a league of nations to keep the peace. At the Paris Peace Conference the Allies imposed harsh terms on Germany, but Wilson won the League of Nations. In the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge and other Republicans wanted changes, especially to Article X, which they feared could commit the United States to war without Congress. Wilson refused to compromise and suffered a serious stroke during a speaking tour. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 and again in March 1920, and the United States never joined the League.

By 1920 the United States was the world’s largest economy and a lender to Europe, with a navy second only to Britain’s. Its rule left lasting marks: Puerto Rico and Guam are still U.S. territories, the Philippines became independent only in 1946, Hawaii became a state in 1959, and the base at Guantánamo Bay remains. Latin Americans long remembered the interventions of these years. The debate between Wilson’s idea of leading through international cooperation and the Senate’s fear of foreign entanglements shaped American foreign policy for the rest of the century.

The six units of this course tell one connected story about how industry changed a nation.

1. Industrialization: railroads, steel, oil and electricity made the United States the world’s leading industrial power and made a few men enormously rich.
2. Immigration and Cities: millions of newcomers filled the factories and the fast-growing cities, which machines governed and reformers tried to fix.
3. Labor and Unions: workers organized and struck for shorter hours and better pay, and owners and governments often answered with force.
4. Populism: farmers caught between falling prices and railroad rates built a political movement that pushed new ideas into the mainstream.
5. The Progressive Era: reformers used journalism, experts and government to regulate business and expand democracy, while Jim Crow tightened.
6. America as a World Power: the same factories, farms and navy that grew at home carried the country outward, into empire and a world war.

Running through all six are the same questions: Who gains from economic growth? What should government do about it? Who counts as a full member of the nation? Americans answered them differently in 1870 and in 1920, and they are still debating them today.