• After the Civil War, a mood of isolationism—a desire to stay out of conflicts elsewhere in the world—dominated American public opinion. In The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), historian Brooks Adams argued that for the United States to survive and prosper, it had to keep pushing beyond its borders. Manifest destiny also took on racial meaning; many Americans agreed with future president Theodore Roosevelt that the United States needed to expand “on behalf of the destiny of the [Anglo-Saxon] race.” Roosevelt and others believed that the Americans and British were at the top of the racial pyramid, superior to all others in intellect, ambition, and creativity.

Towards the New Imperialism

• The United States was a latecomer to imperialism. By the 1880s, the British, French, Belgians, Italians, Dutch, Spanish, and Germans had conquered most of Africa and Asia. Each imperial nation dispatched missionaries to convert conquered peoples to Christianity. A small yet influential group of public officials aggressively encouraged the idea of expansion beyond North America. In addition to Theodore Roosevelt, they included naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the U.S. Naval War College, and Senators Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Referring to European imperialism, Lodge said, “We must not be left behind.” In 1890, Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, in which he argued that national greatness flowed from naval power. Mahan insisted that industrial development required a powerful navy centered on huge battleships, a strong merchant marine, foreign commerce, colonies to provide raw materials and new markets for American products, and global naval bases. Mahan urged leaders to “look outward” beyond the continental United States. He championed America’s “destiny” to control the Caribbean Sea, build a canal across Central America to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, acquire Hawaii and the Philippine Islands, and spread American values and investments across the Pacific. His ideas were widely circulated, and by 1896 the United States had built eleven new battleships, making its navy the third most powerful in the world, behind Great Britain and Germany. Claims of racial superiority reinforced the new imperialist spirit. Many Americans and Europeans readily assumed that some races were dominant (Anglo-Saxons) and some inferior (Indians, Africans). Such racist notions were given “scientific” authority by researchers at universities throughout Europe and America. Prominent Americans used the arguments of social Darwinism to justify economic exploitation and territorial conquest abroad and racial segregation at home. Among nations as among individuals, they claimed, only the strongest survived. John Fiske, a Harvard historian, proclaimed the superior character of “Anglo-Saxon” institutions and peoples. The English-speaking “race,” he argued, was destined to dominate the globe and transform the institutions, traditions, language, and even the blood of the world’s “backward” races.

Expansions in the Pacific

• For John Fiske and other imperialists, Asia offered an especially attractive target. In 1866, Secretary of State William H. Seward had predicted that the United States must inevitably impose its economic domination “on the Pacific Ocean, and its islands and continents.” Eager for American manufacturers to take advantage of the huge Asian markets, Seward believed that the nation first had to remove all foreign powers from its northern Pacific coast and gain access to the region’s valuable ports. To that end, he tried to acquire the English colony of British Columbia, sandwiched between Russian-owned Alaska and the Washington Territory. Late in 1866, while encouraging business leaders and civil authorities in British Columbia to consider becoming a U.S. territory, Seward learned of Russia’s desire to sell Alaska. He leaped at the opportunity, thinking the purchase might influence British Columbia to join the union. In 1867, the United States bought Alaska for $7.2 million, thus removing the threat of Russian imperialism in North America. Critics scoffed at “Seward’s folly,” but the purchase of Alaska proved to be the biggest bargain since the Louisiana Purchase, in part because of its vast deposits of gold and oil. Seward’s successors at the State Department sustained his expansionist vision. Acquiring key ports in the Pacific Ocean was the major focus of overseas activity throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Two island groups occupied especially strategic positions: Samoa and Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands). Both had major harbors, Pago Pago and Pearl Harbor, respectively. In the years after the Civil War, American interest in those islands deepened.

Samoa

• In 1878, the Samoans signed a treaty with the United States that granted a naval base at Pago Pago and extraterritoriality for Americans (meaning that in Samoa, Americans remained subject only to U.S. law), exchanged trade concessions, and called for the United States to help resolve any disputes with other nations. The Senate ratified this accord, and in the following year the German and British governments worked out similar arrangements with other islands in the Samoan group. These matters rested until civil war broke out in Samoa in 1887. A peace conference in Berlin in 1889 established a protectorate over Samoa, with Germany, Great Britain, and the United States in an uneasy partnership.

Hawaii

• Seward and other Americans also wanted the Hawaiian Islands. The islands, a unified kingdom since 1795, had a sizable population of American missionaries and a profitable crop, sugarcane. In 1875, Hawaii had signed a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States through which Hawaiian sugar would enter the country duty-free in exchange for Hawaii’s promise that none of its territories would be leased or granted to a third power. This agreement led to a boom in sugar production based on cheap immigrant labor, mainly Chinese and Japanese, and white American sugar planters soon formed an economic elite. By the 1890s, the native Hawaiian population had been reduced to a minority by smallpox and other foreign diseases, and Asians became the largest ethnic group. Beginning in 1891, Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian ruler, tried to restrict the growing political power exercised by American planters in the islands. Two years later, however, Hawaii’s white population (called haoles) overthrew the monarchy with the help of U.S. Marines brought in by John L. Stevens, the U.S. ambassador. Within a month, a committee representing the haoles came to Washington, D.C., to ask the United States to annex the islands. President Benjamin Harrison sent an annexation treaty to the Senate just as he was leaving the presidency. To investigate the situation, the new president, Grover Cleveland, sent a special commissioner to Hawaii, who reported that the Americans there had acted improperly and that most native Hawaiians opposed annexation. Cleveland tried to restore the queen to power but met resistance from the haoles. On July 4, 1894, the government they controlled created the Republic of Hawaii, which included in its constitution a provision for American annexation. In 1897, when William McKinley became president, he was looking for an excuse to annex the islands. “We need Hawaii,” he claimed. “It is [America’s] manifest destiny.” The United States annexed Hawaii in the summer of 1898 over the protests of native Hawaiians.

The Spanish American War (the War of 1898) - Free Cuba

• The annexation of Hawaii set in motion a series of efforts to create an American presence in Asia. Ironically, this imperialist push originated in Cuba, a Spanish colony ninety miles south of Florida. Even more, ironically, the chief motive for American intervention in Cuba was outrage at Spain’s brutal imperialism. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Cubans had repeatedly revolted against Spanish rule, only to be ruthlessly suppressed. As one of Spain’s oldest colonies, Cuba was a major market for Spanish goods. Yet powerful American sugar and mining companies had also invested heavily in Cuba. In fact, the United States traded more with Cuba than Spain did, and American owners of sugar plantations in Cuba had grown increasingly concerned about the security of their investments. On February 24, 1895, Cubans began another guerrilla war against Spanish troops. During what became the Cuban War for Independence (1895–1898), tens of thousands of Cuban peasants died of combat wounds as well as disease and starvation in Spanish detention camps. Americans followed the conflict through the newspapers. Two newspapers locked in a fierce competition for readers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Both worked to outdo the other with sensational headlines about Spanish atrocities in Cuba, real or invented. Hearst explained that the role of newspapers was to shape public opinion and legislation. Newspapers, he claimed, had the power to “declare wars.” Hearst’s efforts to manipulate public opinion came to be called yellow journalism. Editors sent their best reporters to Cuba and encouraged them to distort, exaggerate, or even make up stories to attract more readers.

The Political Path to War

• At the outset of the Cuban War for Independence, President Grover Cleveland tried to protect U.S. business interests while avoiding military involvement. Mounting public sympathy for the rebel cause prompted concern in Congress, however. By concurrent resolutions on April 6, 1896, the House and Senate endorsed granting official recognition to the Cuban rebels. After his inauguration in March 1897, President William McKinley continued the official policy of neutrality while taking a sympathetic stance toward the rebels. McKinley, a Civil War veteran, did not want war. “I have been through one war,” he said. “I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.” Later that year, Spain offered Cubans autonomy (self-government without formal independence) in return for ending the rebellion, but the Cubans rejected the offer. Early in 1898, events pushed Spain and the United States into a war that neither wanted. On January 25, the U.S. battleship Maine docked in Havana, the Cuban capital, supposedly on a courtesy call. On February 9, the New York Journal released the text of a letter from Dupuy de Lôme, Spanish ambassador to the United States, to a friend in Havana, summarizing McKinley’s annual message to Congress. In the de Lôme letter, the Spaniard called McKinley “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd, besides being a would-be politician who tries to leave a door open behind himself while keeping on good terms with the jingoes [warmongers] of his party.” Six days later, at 9:40 on the night of February 15, Maine mysteriously exploded. Within minutes, its ruptured hull filled with water. Sailors, most of whom were asleep, struggled frantically in the dark, only to drown as the ship sank. Of the 350 sailors on board, 260 died. Years later, the sinking was ruled an accident resulting from a coal explosion, but in 1898 those eager for war with Spain saw no need to delay judgment. Theodore Roosevelt, the thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the navy, called the sinking “an act of dirty treachery” and told a friend that he “would give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow.” Congress authorized $50 million to prepare for combat with Spain, but McKinley, who assumed that the sinking was an accident, did his best to resist demands for war while negotiating with the Spanish and gauging the public mood. He also avoided interacting with Roosevelt, whom he said was “too pugnacious.” As the days passed, Roosevelt told his war-hungry friends that the president had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” With Roosevelt’s encouragement, the public’s antagonism toward Spain grew behind the popular saying “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” In the weeks following the sinking, the Spanish government grudgingly agreed to virtually every American demand regarding Cuba, but the weight of public opinion, the cry of revenge from Democratic leaders, and the influence of Republican jingoists eroded McKinley’s neutrality. As a senator explained, “the current was too strong, the demagogues too numerous, the fall elections too near” for McKinley to hold out against the war. On April 11, McKinley asked Congress for authority to use the armed forces to end the fighting in Cuba. On April 20, Congress declared Cuba independent from Spain and demanded the withdrawal of Spanish forces. The Spanish government quickly broke diplomatic ties with the United States and, after U.S. ships began blockading Cuban ports, declared war on April 24. The next day, Congress passed its own declaration of war. The Teller Amendment to the war resolution denied any U.S. intention to annex Cuba. President McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers to supplement the 28,000 men already serving in the U.S. Army. Among the first to enlist was Theodore Roosevelt, who resigned from his government post and told his tailor to make him a dashing army uniform. Never has an American war generated such unexpected and far-reaching consequences. Although McKinley had gone to war reluctantly, he soon saw it as an opportunity to acquire overseas territories. “While we are conducting war and until its conclusion,” he wrote privately, “we must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want.” A war to free Cuba became a way to gain an empire. (What had long been called the Spanish-American War has been renamed the War of 1898 because it involved not just Spanish and American combatants, but Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans.)

A Splendid Little War

• The war with Spain lasted only 114 days, but it set the United States on a course toward overseas imperialism that would transform America’s role in the world. The conflict was barely underway before the U.S. Navy produced a spectacular victory 7,000 miles away from Cuba, in the Pacific, at Manila Bay in the Philippine Islands, a colony controlled by the Spanish for more than 300 years. Just before the war was declared, Roosevelt, who was still assistant secretary of the navy, had taken advantage of his boss being away from the office one afternoon to order Commodore George Dewey, commander of the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, to engage Spanish forces in the Philippines in case of war in Cuba. Dewey arrived in Manila Bay on April 30 with six modern warships, which quickly destroyed or captured the outdated Spanish vessels there. Almost 400 Spaniards were killed or wounded. One overweight American sailor died—of heatstroke. An English reporter called it “a military execution rather than a real contest.” News of the battle set off wild celebrations in America. Dewey was now in possession of Manila Bay but had no soldiers to go onshore. In the meantime, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the Filipino nationalist movement, declared the Philippines independent on June 12, 1898. With Aguinaldo’s help, Dewey’s forces entered Manila on August 13 and accepted the surrender of the Spanish troops, who had feared revenge if they surrendered to the Filipinos.

The Cuban Campaign

• At the start of the war, the Spanish army in Cuba was five times as large as the entire U.S. Army. But McKinley’s call for volunteers inspired nearly a million men to enlist. The new recruits, including some 10,000 African American soldiers (mostly northerners eager to “show our loyalty to our land”) had to be equipped and trained before they would be ready for battle. In the “Jim Crow” South, however, blacks were less eager to enlist because, as a Richmond newspaper editor observed, they suffered “a system of oppression as barbarous as that which is alleged to exist in Cuba.” In the meantime, the U.S. Navy blockaded the Spanish fleet inside Santiago Harbor while some 17,000 American troops hastily assembled at Tampa, Florida. One prominent unit was the First Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders, a special regiment made up of former Ivy League athletes; ex-convicts; western cowboys; Texas Rangers; and Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Pawnee, and Creek Indians. All were “young, good shots, and good riders.” The Rough Riders are best remembered because Theodore Roosevelt was second in command. One of the Rough Riders said that Roosevelt was “nervous, energetic, virile [manly]. He may wear out someday, but he will never rust out.” When the 578 Rough Riders, accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and photographers, landed on June 22, 1898, at the undefended southeastern tip of Cuba, chaos followed. Except for Roosevelt’s horse, Little Texas, almost all of the other horses and mules had been mistakenly sent elsewhere, leaving the Rough Riders to become the “Weary Walkers.” Nevertheless, land and sea battles on the southern coast around Santiago quickly broke Spanish resistance. On July 1, about 7,000 U.S. soldiers took the fortified village of El Caney. While a much larger force attacked San Juan Hill, a smaller unit, led by Roosevelt on horseback and including the Rough Riders on foot, seized nearby Kettle Hill. Thanks to widespread newspaper coverage, much of it exaggerated, Roosevelt became a home-front legend for his headlong gallop toward the Spanish defenders. The New York Times reported that he had led the charge with “bulldog ferociousness,” acting in a “grand drama for the world to watch and admire.”

Spanish Defeat and Concessions

• On July 3, the Spanish navy trapped at Santiago made a gallant run to evade the American fleet blockading the harbor. “The Spanish ships,” reported Captain John Philip, commander of the U.S. warship Texas, “came out as gaily as brides to the altar.” But they were quickly destroyed. The casualties were as one-sided as those at Manila: 474 Spaniards were killed or wounded, while only 1 American was killed and 1 wounded. Spanish officials in Santiago surrendered on July 17. On July 25, an American force moved into Spanish-held Puerto Rico (“wealthy port” in English), meeting only minor resistance. The next day, July 26, the Spanish government sued for peace. A ceasefire agreement was signed on August 12. In Cuba, the Spanish forces formally surrendered to the U.S. commander and then sailed for home; excluded from the ceremony were the Cubans, for whom the war had supposedly been fought. On December 10, 1898, the United States and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris. Under its terms, Cuba was to become independent, and the United States was to annex Puerto Rico and continue to occupy Manila, pending a transfer of power in the Philippines. Thus the Spanish Empire in the Americas, initiated by the voyages of Christopher Columbus some four centuries earlier, came to a humiliating end. Now the United States was ready to create its own empire. During the four-month War of 1898, more than 60,000 Spanish soldiers and sailors died of wounds or disease—mostly malaria, typhoid, dysentery, or yellow fever. Some 10,500 Cubans died. Among the Americans who served in the war, 5,462 died, but only 379 in battle; most died from the disease. At such a cost, the United States was launched onto the world scene as a great power, with all the benefits—and burdens—that came with being an imperial nation. Halfway through the conflict in Cuba, John Hay, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, who would soon become secretary of state, wrote a letter to Roosevelt, calling the conflict “a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave.” The Spaniards, in contrast, called the war “The Disaster,” as the humiliating defeat brought into question their country’s status as a major world power.

Consequences of Victory

• Victory in the War of 1898 boosted American self-confidence and reinforced the self-serving belief, influenced by racism and social Darwinism, that the United States had a “manifest destiny” to reshape the world in its own image. In 1885, the Reverend Josiah Strong wrote a best-selling book titled Our Country in which he used a Darwinian argument to strengthen the appeal of manifest destiny

Annexing the Philippines

• The United States had liberated most of Spain’s remaining colonies, yet it soon substituted its own imperialism for Spain’s. If war with Spain had saved many lives by ending the insurrection in Cuba, it had also led the United States to take many lives in suppressing another anti-colonial insurrection, in the Philippines. The acquisition of America’s first imperial colonies created a host of long-lasting moral and practical problems, from the difficulties of imposing U.S. rule on native peoples to the challenges of defending far-flung territories.

McKinley’s Motives

• The Treaty of Paris had left the political status of the Philippines unresolved. American business leaders wanted the United States to keep the islands so that they could more easily penetrate the vast markets of nearby China. As Mark Hanna, McKinley’s top adviser, stressed, controlling the Philippines would enable the United States to “take a large slice of the commerce of Asia.” American missionary organizations, mostly Protestant, also favored annexation; they viewed the Philippines as a base from which to bring Christianity to “the little brown brother.” Not long after the United States took control, American authorities ended the Roman Catholic Church’s status as the Philippines’ official religion and made English the official language, thus opening the door for Protestant missionaries in the region. These factors helped convince President McKinley of the need to annex “those darned islands” making up the Philippines. McKinley had summarized the motivating ideas of American imperialism: (1) national glory, (2) commerce, (3) racial superiority, and (4) evangelism. American negotiators in Paris finally offered Spain $20 million for the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, a Spanish-controlled island between Hawaii and the Philippines that would serve as a coaling station for ships headed across the Pacific. Meanwhile, the nation took other expansive steps. In addition to annexing Hawaii in 1898, the United States also claimed Wake Island, between Guam and Hawaii, which would become a vital link in a future transpacific telegraph cable. Then, in 1899, Germany and the United States agreed to divide the Samoa Islands.

Debating the Treaty

• By early 1899, the Treaty of Paris had yet to be ratified in the Senate because of growing opposition to the idea of a global American empire. Anti-expansionists argued that taking control of former Spanish colonies would violate the longstanding American principle embodied in the Constitution that people should be self-governing. The opposition might have killed the treaty had not the most prominent Democratic leader, William Jennings Bryan, argued that ending the war would open the way for the future independence of the Philippines. His position convinced enough Senate Democrats to support the treaty on February 6, 1899, by the narrowest of margins: only one vote more than the necessary two-thirds. President McKinley, however, had no intention of granting independence to the Philippines. Although he privately told a friend that “if old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us,” he publicly insisted that the United States take control of the islands as an act of “benevolent assimilation” of the native population. A California newspaper gave a more candid explanation, however. “Let us be frank,” the editor exclaimed. “We Do Not Want the Filipinos. We want the Philippines.” Many Filipinos had a different vision. In January 1899, they declared their independence again and named twenty-nine-year-old Emilio Aguinaldo president. The following month, an American soldier outside Manila fired on soldiers in Aguinaldo’s nationalist forces, called insurrectos, killing two. The next day, the U.S. Army commander, without investigating the cause of the shooting, ordered his troops to assault the insurrectos, beginning a full-scale armed conflict that continued for weeks. General Elwell S. Otis rejected Aguinaldo’s proposals for a truce, saying that “fighting, having begun, must go on to the grim end.” He would accept only the unconditional surrender of the Filipino forces. On June 2, 1899, the Philippine Republic declared war against the United States. Since the insurrectos more or less controlled the Philippines outside Manila, what followed was largely an American war of conquest at odds with the founding principle of the United States: that people have the right to govern themselves. The war would rob the Filipinos of the chance to be their own masters.

The Philippine-American War (1898-1902)

• The effort to crush Filipino nationalism lasted three years and involved some 126,000 U.S. troops, four times as many as had been sent to liberate Cuba. It cost the American government $600 million and took the lives of 200,000 Filipinos (most of them civilians) and 4,234 American soldiers. It was an especially brutal conflict fought in tropical heat and humidity, with massacres committed by both sides and racism contributing to numerous atrocities by the Americans, many of whom referred to the Filipinos as “niggers.” U.S. troops burned villages, tortured and executed prisoners, and imprisoned civilians in overcrowded concentration camps, and both sides used torture to gain information. A favorite method employed by Americans was the “water cure,” a technique to simulate drowning developed in the Spanish Inquisition during the sixteenth century. (Today it is called waterboarding.) A captured insurgent would be placed on his back on the ground. While soldiers stood on his outstretched arms and feet, they pried his mouth open and held it in place with a bamboo stick. They then poured salt water into the captive’s mouth and nose until his stomach was bloated, whereupon the soldiers would stomp on his abdomen, forcing the water, now mixed with gastric juices, out of his mouth. This process would be repeated until the captive told the soldiers what they wanted to know—or died. Theodore Roosevelt was convinced that “nobody was seriously damaged” by the “water cure,” whereas “Filipinos had inflicted terrible tortures upon our own people.” Thus did the United States destroy a revolutionary movement modeled after America’s own struggle for independence. Organized Filipino resistance had collapsed by the end of 1899. On April 1, 1901, Aguinaldo swore an oath accepting the authority of the United States over the Philippines and pledging his allegiance to the U.S. government. Against the backdrop of this nasty guerrilla war, the great debate over imperialism continued in the United States. In 1899, several anti-imperialist groups combined to form the American Anti-Imperialist League. Andrew Carnegie footed the bills for the League and even offered $20 million to buy independence for the Filipinos. Other prominent anti-imperialists included union leader Samuel Gompers, who feared the competition of cheap Filipino labor, college presidents Charles Eliot of Harvard and David Starr Jordan of Stanford, and social reformer Jane Addams. Even former presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison urged President McKinley to withdraw U.S. forces from the Philippines. The drive for imperialism in Asia, said Harvard philosopher William James, had caused the United States to “puke up its ancient soul.” Of the Philippine-American War, James asked, “Could there be any more damning indictment of that whole bloated ideal termed ‘modern civilization’?” Senator George Frisbie Hoar led the opposition to the annexation of the Philippines. Under the Constitution, he pointed out, “no power is given the Federal government to acquire territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies” or “to conquer alien people and hold them in subjugation.”

Organizing the New Colonies

• In the end, the imperialists won the debate over the status of the territories acquired from Spain. Senator Albert J. Beveridge boasted in 1900: “The Philippines are ours forever. And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . The power that rules the Pacific is the power that rules the world.” He added that the U.S. economy was producing “more than we can consume, making more than we can use. Therefore we must find new markets for our produce.” American-controlled colonies would make the best new markets. Without acknowledging it, Beveridge and others were using many of the same arguments that England had used in founding the American colonies in the seventeenth century. On July 4, 1901, the U.S. military government in the Philippines came to an end, and William Howard Taft became the civil governor. In 1902, Congress passed the Philippine Government Act, which declared the islands an “unorganized territory.” In 1917, the Jones Act affirmed America’s intention to grant the Philippines independence, but that would not happen until 1946. Closer to home, Puerto Rico had been acquired in part to serve as a U.S. outpost guarding the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, 1900, the Foraker Act established a government on the island, and its residents were declared citizens of Puerto Rico; they were not made citizens of the United States until 1917. In Cuba, the United States finally fulfilled the promise of independence after restoring order, organizing schools, and improving sanitary conditions. The problem of widespread disease prompted the work of Dr. Walter Reed, who made an outstanding contribution to health in tropical regions around the world. Named head of the Army Yellow Fever Commission in 1900, he proved that mosquitoes carry yellow fever. The commission’s experiments led the way to effective control of the disease worldwide. In 1900, on McKinley’s order, Cubans drafted a constitution modeled on that of the United States. The Platt Amendment, added to an army appropriations bill in 1901, sharply restricted the Cuban government’s independence, however. The amendment required that Cuba never impair its independence by signing a treaty with a third power, that it keeps its debt within the government’s power to repay it out of ordinary revenues, and that it acknowledge the right of the United States to intervene whenever it saw fit. Finally, Cuba had to sell or lease to the United States lands to be used for coaling or naval stations, a stipulation that led to a U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay that still exists today.

Imperial Rivalries in East Asia

• While the United States was conquering the Philippines, other nations were threatening to carve up China. After Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), European nations set out to exploit the weakness of the huge, virtually defenseless nation. By the end of the century, Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain had each established spheres of influence in China—territories that they (rather than the Chinese government) controlled but did not formally annex. In 1898 and again in 1899, the British asked the American government to join them in preserving the territorial integrity of China against further imperialist actions. Both times, however, the Senate rejected the request because the United States as yet had no strategic investment in the region. The American outlook changed with the defeat of Spain and the acquisition of the Philippines. Instead of acting jointly with Great Britain, though, the U.S. government decided to act alone. What came to be known as the Open Door policy was outlined in Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Note, dispatched in 1899 to his European counterparts. Without consulting the Chinese, Hay announced that China should remain an “Open Door” to European and American trade and that other nations should not try to take control of Chinese ports or territory. None of the European powers except Britain accepted Hay’s principles, but none rejected them, either. So Hay announced that all major powers involved in China had accepted the policy. The Open Door policy was rooted in the desire of American businesses to exploit and ultimately dominate Chinese markets. However, it also appealed to those who opposed imperialism because it pledged to keep China from being carved up by powerful European nations. The policy had little legal standing, however. When the Japanese became concerned about growing Russian influence in the disputed region of Manchuria in northeast China and asked how the United States intended to enforce the policy, Hay replied that America was “not prepared . . . to enforce these views.” So the situation would remain for forty years until continued Japanese military expansion in China would bring about a diplomatic dispute with America that would lead to war.

The Boxers

• A new Asian crisis arose in 1900 when a group of Chinese nationalists known to the Western world as Boxers—they called themselves the “Fists of Righteous Harmony”—rebelled against foreign involvement in China, especially Christian missionary efforts, and laid siege to foreign embassies in Peking (now known as Beijing). An expedition of British, German, Russian, Japanese, and American soldiers was organized to rescue the international diplomats and their staff. Hay, fearful that the intervention might become an excuse for other nations to dismember China, took the opportunity to refine the Open Door policy. The United States, he said, sought a solution that would “preserve Chinese territorial and administrative integrity” as well as “equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.” Six weeks later, the foreign military expedition reached Peking and ended the Boxer Rebellion.

Roosevelt’s Big Stick Diplomacy

• On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shaking hands at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, when a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed laborer named Leon Czolgosz (pronounced chol-GOTS), an anarchist who did not believe in governments or rulers, approached him with a concealed gun and fired twice at point-blank range. One bullet was deflected by the president’s coat button and breastbone, but the other tore through his stomach and lodged in his back. For several days, the attending doctors issued optimistic reports about the president’s condition, but after a week, McKinley knew he was dying. “It is useless, gentlemen,” he told the doctors and nurses. “I think we ought to have a prayer.” Theodore Roosevelt, his vice president, became the new president and soon launched a new era in national development. More than any other American of his time, Roosevelt transformed the role of the United States in world affairs. The nation had emerged from the War of 1898 as a world power with major international responsibilities. To ensure that Americans accepted their new global role, Roosevelt stretched both the Constitution and executive power to the limit. In the process, he pushed a reluctant nation onto the center stage of world affairs.

A Rocket Rise to Prominence

• Born in 1858, “Teddie'' Roosevelt had grown up in New York City in an upper-class family. He visited Europe as a child, studied with a personal tutor, spoke German fluently, and graduated from Harvard with honors in 1880. A frail and sickly boy, nearly blind in one eye, he followed his father’s advice to “make your own body.” He compulsively lifted weights, wrestled, hiked, rowed, swam, boxed, and climbed mountains, all in an effort to build himself into a physical and intellectual athlete. The results were startling. Roosevelt transformed himself into a man of almost superhuman energy who fiercely championed the “strenuous life.” He told his children that he would rather see them dead than have them grow up to be “weaklings” and “sissies.” Roosevelt was a fearless “he-man” who also displayed extraordinary intellectual curiosity. He became a voracious reader and talented writer, a natural scientist, a dedicated bird-watcher, a renowned historian and essayist, and a zealous moralist who divided the world into two camps: good and evil. Roosevelt’s zest for life and his combative spirit was contagious, and he was ever eager to express an opinion on any subject. Within two years after graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt, a reform-minded Republican, won election as the youngest member of the New York legislature. Fearlessly independent, he could not be bought. Nor did he tolerate the excesses of the spoils system. “Though I am a strong party man,” he warned, “if I find a corrupt public official, I would take off his head.” With the world seemingly at Roosevelt’s feet, however, disaster struck. In 1884, his mother, Mittie, only forty-eight years old, died of typhoid fever. Eleven hours later, his “bewitchingly pretty,” twenty-two-year-old wife, Alice, died in his arms of kidney failure, having given birth to their only child just two days earlier. The “light has gone out of my life,” Roosevelt noted in his diary. To recover from this “strange and terrible fate,” Roosevelt turned his newborn daughter over to his sister, quit his political career, sold the family house, and moved to a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territory, where he threw himself into roping and branding steers, shooting buffalo and bears, capturing outlaws, fighting Indians (whom he called a “lesser race”), and reading novels by the campfire. He was, by his own admission, a poor shot, a bad roper, and an average horseman, but he loved every minute of his western life. Although his time in the West lasted only two years, he never got over being a cowboy. “I owe more than I can express to the West,” he wrote in his memoirs. Back in New York City, Roosevelt remarried and ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1886. He later served six years as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner and two years as the city’s police commissioner. In 1896, he campaigned energetically for William McKinley, and the new president was asked to reward him with the position of assistant secretary of the navy. McKinley resisted at first, saying that Roosevelt was too “hotheaded,” but eventually gave in. Roosevelt took full advantage of the celebrity he had gained with the Rough Riders in Cuba to win the governorship of New York in 1898. By then, he had become the most visible young Republican in the nation. “I have played it in bull luck this summer,” he wrote a friend about his recent streak of successes. “First, to get into the war; then to get out of it; then to get elected.” Two years later, Republican leaders were urging him to become the vice-presidential running mate for McKinley, who was hoping for a second term.

From Vice President to President

• In the 1900 presidential contest, the Democrats turned again to William Jennings Bryan, who wanted to make American imperialism the “paramount issue” of the campaign. The Democratic platform condemned the Philippine conflict as “an unnecessary war” that had placed the United States “in the false and un-American position of crushing with military force the efforts of our former allies to achieve liberty and self-government.” The Republicans renominated McKinley and named Roosevelt, now known as “Mr. Imperialism,” their candidate for vice president. Roosevelt, who despised Bryan, crisscrossed the nation condemning Bryan’s “communistic and socialistic doctrines” promoting higher taxes and the unlimited coinage of silver. In the end, McKinley and Roosevelt won by 7.2 million to 6.4 million popular votes and 292 to 155 electoral votes. Bryan even lost Nebraska, his home state. On September 14, 1901, McKinley died, and Theodore Roosevelt was elevated to the White House. Six weeks short of his forty-third birthday, Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to become president. But he had more experience in public affairs than most new presidents, and perhaps more vitality than any. One observer compared his boundless personality and energy to Niagara Falls—“both great wonders of nature.” Roosevelt’s glittering spectacles, glistening teeth, and overflowing enthusiasm were like divine gifts to political cartoonists, as was his famous motto, an old African proverb: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt’s unshakable self-righteousness led him to cast nearly every issue in moral and patriotic terms. He was the first truly activist president. The presidency was, as he put it, a “bully pulpit”—a wonderful platform for delivering fist-pumping speeches on the virtues of honesty, courage, and civic duty. Nowhere was Roosevelt’s forceful will more evident than in his handling of foreign affairs. Like many of his political friends and associates, he was convinced that the “civilized” and “barbarian” people of the world faced inevitable conflict, not unlike the fate of the Native Americans pushed off their ancestral lands by Americans. In 1899, Roosevelt argued that the United States, as a “great civilized power,” needed to take control of other regions of the world to bring “law, order, and righteousness” to “backward peoples.” He believed that American imperialists would be missionaries of civic virtue rather than colonial masters, spreading the merits of their superior “race.”

The Panama Canal

• After the War of 1898, as the United States became more deeply involved in the Caribbean, one issue overshadowed every other: the proposed Panama Canal. By enabling ships to travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, such a canal would cut the travel distance between San Francisco and New York City by almost 8,000 miles. Two treaties loomed as obstacles to the construction of a canal, however. The Bidlack Treaty (1846) with Colombia (then called New Granada) guaranteed Colombia’s control over Panama. In the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850), the British had agreed to acquire no more Central American territory, and the United States joined them in agreeing to build or fortify a canal only by mutual consent. Secretary of State John Hay asked the British ambassador for consent to build a canal, and the outcome was the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901. Other obstacles remained, however. From 1881 to 1887, a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had engineered the Suez Canal in Egypt, had already spent nearly $300 million and some 20,000 lives to dig a canal a third of the way across Panama, which was still under Colombian control. The company asked that the United States purchase the partially completed canal, which it did. Meanwhile, Hay had opened negotiations with Ambassador Tomás Herrán of Colombia. In return for acquiring a canal zone six miles wide, the United States agreed to pay $10 million. The U.S. Senate ratified the Hay-Herrán Treaty in 1903, but the Colombian Senate held out for $25 million. As President Roosevelt raged against the “foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogotá,” the Panamanians revolted against Colombian rule. Philippe BunauVarilla, an employee of the French canal company, assisted them and reported, after visiting Roosevelt and Hay in Washington, D.C., that U.S. warships would arrive at Colón, Panama, on November 2. Colombian troops, who could not penetrate the overland jungle separating them from the Canal Zone, found the U.S. ships blocking the sea-lanes to the area. On November 13, the Roosevelt administration received its first ambassador from the newly independent Panama: Bunau-Varilla, who eagerly signed a treaty that extended the Canal Zone from six to ten miles wide. For a $10 million down payment and $250,000 a year, the United States received “in perpetuity the use, occupation and control” of the fifty-mile-long Canal Zone. The U.S. attorney general asked to supply a legal opinion upholding Roosevelt’s actions, responded wryly, “No, Mr. President, if I were you I would not have any taint of legality about it.” Roosevelt later explained, “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the [construction of the] Canal does also.” Building the Panama Canal was one of the greatest engineering feats in history. Over ten years, some 60,000 mostly unskilled workers from Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean used dynamite and steam shovels to gouge out the canal from the dense jungle. Almost a third of the workers died. “People get killed and injured almost every day,” a worker reported in his journal. “And all the bosses want is to get the canal built.” With great fanfare, the canal opened on August 15, 1914, two weeks after the outbreak of the Great War in Europe.

Roosevelt and Latin America

• Theodore Roosevelt’s “theft” of the Panama Canal Zone created ill will throughout Latin America that would last for generations. Latin Americans were also upset by constant interference from both the United States and European countries in their internal affairs. A frequent excuse for intervention was to promote a safe and stable environment for American businesses, including the collection of debts owed by Latin American governments. The Latin Americans responded with the Drago Doctrine (1902), named after Argentinian foreign minister Luis María Drago, which prohibited armed intervention by other countries to collect debts. In December 1902, however, German and British warships blockaded Venezuela to force repayment of debts in defiance not only of the Drago Doctrine but also of the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. policy dating to 1823 that prohibited European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt decided that if the United States were to keep European nations from intervening militarily in Latin America, “then sooner or later we must keep order [there] ourselves.” In 1904, a crisis over the debts of the Dominican Republic prompted Roosevelt to send two warships to the island nation and issue what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: the principle, in short, that in certain circumstances, the United States was justified in intervening in Latin American nations to prevent Europeans from doing so. Thereafter, U.S. presidents would repeatedly use military force to ensure that Latin American nations paid their debts to U.S. and European banks.

Relations with Japan

• While wielding a “big stick” in Latin America, Roosevelt was playing the role of peacemaker in East Asia. The principle of equal trading rights represented by the Open Door policy was tested in 1904 when the long-standing rivalry between Russia and Japan flared into the Russo-Japanese war over Japan’s attempts to expand its influence in China and Korea. On February 8, Japanese warships devastated the Russian fleet. The Japanese then occupied the Korean peninsula and drove the Russians back into Manchuria. When the Japanese signaled that they would welcome a negotiated settlement, Roosevelt sponsored a peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the Treaty of Portsmouth, signed on September 5, 1905, Russia acknowledged Japan’s “predominant political, military, and economic interests in Korea.” (Japan would annex the kingdom in 1910.) Both powers agreed to leave Manchuria. Japan’s show of strength against Russia raised concerns among U.S. leaders about the security of the Philippines. During the Portsmouth talks, Roosevelt sent William Howard Taft to meet with the Japanese foreign minister in Tokyo. They negotiated the Taft-Katsura Agreement of July 29, 1905, in which the United States accepted Japanese control of Korea in exchange for Japan acknowledging U.S. control of the Philippines. Three years later, the RootTakahira Agreement, negotiated by Secretary of State Elihu Root and the Japanese ambassador to the United States, reinforced the Open Door policy by supporting “the independence and integrity of China” and “the principle of equal opportunity for commerce and industry in China.” Behind the outward appearances of goodwill, however, lay mutual distrust. For many Americans, the Russian threat in East Asia now gave way to concerns about the “yellow peril” (a term apparently coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany). Racial conflict on the West Coast, especially in California, helped sour relations with Japan. In 1906, San Francisco’s school board ordered students of Asian descent to attend a separate public school. When the Japanese government protested, President Roosevelt persuaded the school board to change its policy, but only after making sure that Japanese authorities would stop encouraging unemployed Japanese “laborers” to go to America. This “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907, the precise terms of which have never been revealed, halted the influx of Japanese immigrants to California and relieved some of the racial tension.

The Great White Fleet

• After Roosevelt’s election to a full term as president in 1904, he celebrated America’s rise as a world power. Since his youth, he had retained a boyish enthusiasm for ships and sea power. In 1907, he sent the entire U.S. Navy, by then second in strength only to Britain’s Royal Navy, on a grand fourteen-month tour around the world as a demonstration of America’s power. At every port of call—down the Atlantic coast of South America, then up the Pacific coast, out to Hawaii, and down to New Zealand and Australia— the “Great White Fleet '' of sixteen gleaming battleships received a rousing welcome. The triumphal procession continued to Japan, China, the Philippines, then Egypt through the Suez Canal, and across the Mediterranean Sea before steaming back to Virginia in early 1909, just in time to close Roosevelt’s presidency on a note of triumph. Roosevelt’s success in expanding U.S. power abroad would have mixed consequences, however, because underlying his imperialism was a militantly racist view of the world. Roosevelt and others believed that the world was made up of “civilized” societies, such as the United States, Japan, and the nations of Europe, and those they described as “barbarous,” “backward,” or “impotent.” It was the responsibility of the “civilized” nations to exercise control of the “barbarous” peoples, by force if necessary. Roosevelt called warfare the best way to promote “the clear instinct for race selfishness” and insisted that “the most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages.” Such belligerent, self-righteous bigotry defied American ideals of equality and would come back to haunt the United States.

Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy

• Republican William Howard Taft, who succeeded Roosevelt as president in 1909, continued to promote America’s economic interests abroad, practicing what Roosevelt called “dollar diplomacy.” Taft used the State Department to help American companies and banks invest in foreign countries, especially East Asia and the less developed nations of Latin America and the Caribbean. To ensure the stability of those investments, Taft did not hesitate to intervene in nations experiencing political and economic turmoil. In 1909, he dispatched U.S. Marines to support a revolution in Nicaragua. Once the new government was formed, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox helped U.S. banks negotiate loans to prop it up. Two years later, Taft again sent American troops to restore political stability. This time they stayed for more than a decade.

Wilson’s Interventionism

• In 1913, the new Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, attacked dollar diplomacy as a form of economic imperialism. He promised to treat Latin American nations “on terms of equality and honor.” Yet Wilson, along with William Jennings Bryan, his secretary of state, dispatched American military forces to Latin America more often than Taft and Roosevelt combined. Wilson argued that the United States must intervene to stabilize weak governments in the Western Hemisphere to keep European nations from doing so. During his two presidential terms, Wilson sent U.S. troops into Cuba once, Panama twice, and Honduras five times. In 1915, when the Dominican Republic refused to sign a treaty that would have given the United States a “special” role in governing the island nation, Wilson sent U.S. Marines, who established a military government and fought a nasty guerrilla war against anti-American rebels. That same year, Wilson intervened in Haiti, next door to the Dominican Republic. He admitted that his actions were “high-handed” but argued that they were justified because the “necessity for exercising control there is immediate, urgent, imperative.” Others disagreed. As the New York Times charged, Wilson’s frequent interventions made Taft’s dollar diplomacy look like “ten-cent diplomacy.”

The United States in Mexico

• Mexico was a much thornier problem. In 1910, long-suffering Mexicans had revolted against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, who had given foreign corporations free rein in developing the nation’s economy. After revolutionary armies occupied Mexico City in 1911, the victorious rebels began squabbling among themselves. The leader of the rebellion, Francisco Madero, was overthrown by his chief of staff, General Victoriano Huerta, who assumed power in early 1913 and then had Madero and thirty other political opponents murdered. A shocked President Wilson refused to recognize “a government of butchers.” Huerta ignored Wilson’s criticism and established a dictatorship. Wilson decided that Huerta must be removed and ordered U.S. warships to halt shipments of foreign weapons to the new government. Meanwhile, several rival revolutionary Mexican armies, the largest of which was led by Francisco Pancho Villa, began trying to unseat Huerta. On April 9, 1914, nine American sailors were arrested in Tampico, Mexico, while trying to buy supplies. Mexican officials quickly released them and apologized to the U.S. naval commander. There the incident might have ended, but the imperious U.S. admiral demanded that the Mexicans fire a twenty-one-gun salute to the American flag. After they refused, Wilson sent U.S. troops ashore at Veracruz on April 21, 1914. They occupied the city at a cost of 19 American lives; at least 300 Mexicans were killed or wounded. The use of military force in Mexico played out like many previous American interventions in the Caribbean and Central America. Congress readily supported the decision because American honor was supposedly at stake, and Wilson was sure that most Mexicans would welcome U.S. intervention since his intentions were so “unselfish.” But his strategy backfired. Instead of welcoming the Americans as liberators, Mexicans viewed them as invaders. For seven months, the Americans governed Veracruz. They left in late 1914 after Huerta was overthrown by Venustiano Carranza. Still, the troubles south of the border continued. In 1916, rebel leader Pancho Villa launched raids into Texas and New Mexico in a deliberate attempt to trigger U.S. intervention. On March 9, he and his men attacked Columbus, New Mexico, just three miles across the border. Villa shouted “Kill all the Gringos!” as his army of 500 peasant revolutionaries burned the town and killed seventeen Americans. A furious Wilson sent General John J. Pershing to Mexico with 6,000 U.S. soldiers. For nearly a year, Pershing’s troops chased Villa’s army through the rugged mountains of northern Mexico. As Pershing muttered, “It’s like trying to chase a rat in a cornfield.” In 1917, the American troops were ordered home. The elusive Villa, meanwhile, named his mule “President Wilson.” By then, however, Wilson paid little notice, for he was distracted by a much greater threat: massive war in Europe.