Patterns of American Interest

• American interventions in Mexico, China, and the Middle East reflected the United States’ new eagerness to intervene in foreign governments to protect American economic interests abroad

  • The United States was not only ready to intervene in foreign affairs to preserve foreign markets, it was willing to take territory

    • The United States acquired its first Pacific territories with the Guano Islands Act of 1856, and the act also authorized and encouraged Americans to venture into the seas and claim islands with guano deposits for the United States

  • As many Americans looked for an empire across the Pacific, others looked to Latin America

    • American capitalists invested enormous sums of money in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the long reign of the corrupt yet stable regime of the modernization-hungry president Porfirio Diaz

      • But in 1910 the Mexican people revolted against Díaz, ending his authoritarian regime but also his friendliness toward the business interests of the United States

      • Eventually, America occupied parts of Mexico in the name of protecting American interests

    • The United States’ actions during the Mexican Revolution reflected long-standing American policy that justified interventionist actions in Latin American politics because of their potential bearing on the United States: on citizens, on shared territorial borders, and on economic investments

1898

• Although the United States had a long history of international economic, military, and cultural engagement that stretched back deep into the eighteenth century, the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1898–1902) marked a crucial turning point in American interventions abroad

  • In pursuing war with Spain, and then engaging in counterrevolutionary conflict in the Philippines, the United States expanded the scope and strength of its global reach

• These new conflicts and ensuing territorial problems forced Americans to confront the ideological elements of imperialism

  • Questions being asked:

    • Would American expansion be an empire?

    • Were foreign interventions and the taking of territory antithetical to its founding democratic ideals?

  • But the question of whether the United States should become an empire was sharply debated across the nation in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of Hawaii in July 1898

    • Many Americans coveted the economic and political advantages that increased territory would bring

    • Those opposed to expansion worried that imperial ambitions did not accord with the nation’s founding ideals

• The Philippine Insurrection, or the Philippine-American War, was a brutal conflict of occupation and insurgency

  • Like the Cubans, Filipinos had waged a long war against their Spanish colonizers

  • The US could have given them freedom, but instead (at the behest of President William McKinley) the United States occupied the islands and waged a bloody series of conflicts against Filipino insurrectionists that cost far more lives than the war with Spain

• Debates about American imperialism dominated headlines and tapped into core ideas about American identity and the proper role of the United States in the larger world

Theodore Roosevelt and American Imperialism

• Under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, the United States emerged from the nineteenth century with ambitious designs on global power through military might, territorial expansion, and economic influence

  • Roosevelt’s emphasis on developing the American navy, and on Latin America as a key strategic area of U.S. foreign policy, would have long-term consequences

• Under Roosevelt, the United States used military intervention in various circumstances to further its objectives, but it did not have the ability or the inclination to militarily impose its will on the entirety of South and Central America

  • The United States therefore more often used informal methods of empire, such as so-called dollar diplomacy, to assert dominance over the hemisphere

    • Dollar diplomacy had lenders take advantage of the region’s newly formed governments’ need for cash and exact punishing interest rates on massive loans, which were then sold off in pieces on the secondary bond market

• Roosevelt’s policy justified numerous and repeated police actions in “dysfunctional” Caribbean and Latin American countries by U.S. Marines and naval forces and enabled the founding of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

  • This approach is sometimes referred to as gunboat diplomacy, where naval forces and Marines land in a country’s capital to protect American and Western personnel, temporarily seize control of the government, and dictate policies friendly to American business

Women and Imperialism

• Debates over American imperialism revolved around more than just politics and economics and national self-interest, they also included notions of humanitarianism, morality, religion, and ideas of “civilization”

  • These debates had significant participation from women

• The rhetoric of civilization that underlay imperialism was itself a highly gendered concept

  • White women thus potentially had important roles to play in U.S. imperialism, both as symbols of the benefits of American civilization and as vehicles for the transmission of American values

  • Many white women felt that they had a duty to spread the benefits of Christian civilization to those less fortunate than themselves

Immigration

• For Americans at the turn of the century, imperialism and immigration were two sides of the same coin

  • The involvement of American women with imperialist and anti-imperialist activity demonstrates how foreign policy concerns were brought home and became, in a sense, domesticated

• Between 1870 and 1920, over twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States

  • Although the growing U.S. economy needed large numbers of immigrant workers for its factories and mills, many Americans reacted negatively to the arrival of so many immigrants

    • There were fears that the new arrivals were unfit for American democracy, would use violence or bribery to corrupt municipal governments, or would take peoples’ jobs

      • These fears multiplied after the Chicago Haymarket Affair in 1886, in which immigrants were accused of killing police officers in a bomb blast

• The first move for federal immigration control came from California, where racial hostility toward Chinese immigrants had mounted since the mid-nineteenth century

  • In addition to accusing Chinese immigrants of racial inferiority and unfitness for American citizenship, opponents claimed that they were also economically and morally corrupting American society with cheap labor and immoral practices, such as prostitution

  • In May 1882, Congress suspended the immigration of all Chinese laborers with the Chinese Exclusion Act, making the Chinese the first immigrant group subject to admission restrictions on the basis of race

• In August 1882, Congress passed the Immigration Act, denying admission to people who were not able to support themselves and those, such as paupers, people with mental illnesses, or convicted criminals, who might otherwise threaten the security of the nation