HIS 315L E1 Bullets

Intro

• 1865: continental nation rebuilding after the Civil War → 1920: overseas empire, helped win WWI

• Thesis: two things drove the rise to world power: the search for markets and Anglo-Saxon superiority. Those ideas justified ruling people of color without their consent.

• For Mexican Americans, it meant land loss and violence → Plan de San Diego → backlash

Body 1: Empire

"In the 1890s the U.S. became an imperial power."

• Frontier "closed" (1890) + factories overproducing → looked overseas (Ozanne's lecture)

• Hawaii's queen overthrown (1893) → Hawaii annexed (1898)

• Spanish-American War (1898) → Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines → Philippine-American War (1899–1902)

• Beveridge: God-given mission · need new markets · consent of the governed only for those "capable of self-government"

• Because Americans thought some races were unfit to rule themselves, the U.S. ran its colonies without making their people citizens.

Body 2: Border

"The same racial logic shaped life for Mexican Americans."

• Beveridge called the Mexican War (1846–48) an earlier step in the march of the flag

• After 1848, Tejanos lost land to legal tricks, debt and violence (Texas Rangers)

• Plan de San Diego (1915): retake the Southwest from "North American imperialism," free Black Americans, kill Anglo men

• Raids (1915–16) → Rangers and vigilantes killed many Tejanos

• Villa's raid (1916) → U.S. troops sent into Mexico

• As a result, a local fight over land and race became an international crisis that pushed the U.S. and Mexico toward war.

Body 3: War

"Border tensions helped pull the U.S. into WWI."

• Neutral (1914) → Lusitania sunk (1915) → Zimmermann Telegram offers Mexico TX/NM/AZ (1917) → the threat felt real after the Plan → U.S. enters the war (April 1917)

• Home front: new jobs for Mexican Americans, but the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) punished dissent, and Mexican Americans were treated as disloyal

• 14 Points promised self-determination, but only for some peoples · Senate rejected the League of Nations

• The U.S. became a world power that still decided who deserved democracy by race.

Conclusion

• Continental republic → world power, built on Beveridge's idea that some peoples are fit to govern and others aren't

• For Mexican Americans, it continued the conquest of 1848 → Plan de San Diego → violence

• The U.S. backed democracy abroad but denied it at home → this fueled LULAC (1929)