1 ene 1885 año - Our Country

Descripción:

american exceptionalism: The idea that the United States has a unique destiny to foster democracy and civilization on the world stage.

History books used to describe turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S. imperialism as something new and unprecedented. Now, with the importance of Native American history more widely recognized, historians point out continuities between overseas empire building and the nation’s earlier, relentless expansion across North America. Wars against Native peoples had occurred almost continuously since the country’s founding; in the 1840s, the United States had annexed a third of Mexico. The United States never administered a large colonial empire, as did European powers like Spain, England, and Germany, partly because it had a plentiful supply of natural resources in the American West. But policymakers undertook a determined quest for resources and markets. Events in the 1890s opened opportunities to pursue this goal in new ways.

American empire builders around 1900 fulfilled a vision laid out earlier by William Seward, secretary of state under presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, who saw access to global markets as key to international power (Chapter 15). Seward’s ideas had won limited support at the time, but the severe economic depression of the 1890s brought Republicans into power and Seward’s ideas back into vogue. Confronting high unemployment and mass protests, policymakers feared American workers would embrace socialism or Marxism. The alternative, they believed, was to create jobs and prosperity at home by selling U.S. products in overseas markets.

Intellectual and social trends also justified imperialism. As early as 1885, in his popular book Our Country, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong urged Protestants to evangelize to “heathen” peoples overseas. He predicted that the American “Anglo-Saxon race,” which represented “the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization,” would “spread itself over the earth.” Such arguments — and the powerful missionary efforts they helped inspire — were grounded in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States had a unique destiny to foster democracy and civilization.

As Strong’s exhortation suggested, imperialists also drew on the popular racial theory that people of “Anglo-Saxon” descent — English and often German — were superior to all others. “Anglo-Saxon” rule over foreign people of color suited an era when, at home, the United States denied most American Indians and Asian immigrants citizenship, southern states disfranchised blacks, and the Supreme Court had justified segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. Imperialists argued that “free land” on the western frontier was dwindling, and thus new outlets needed to be found for American energy and enterprise. Responding to critics of U.S. occupation of the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt scoffed: if Filipinos should govern themselves, he declared, then America was “morally bound to return Arizona to the Apaches.”

Imperialists justified their views through racialized Social Darwinism (see “Darwinism and Its Critics” in Chapter 17). Josiah Strong, for example, predicted that with the globe fully occupied, a “competition of races” would ensue and the law of “survival of the fittest” would determine the result. Fear of ruthless competition drove the United States, like European nations, to invest in the latest weaponry. Policymakers saw that European powers were amassing steel-plated battleships and carving up Africa and Asia among themselves. In his book The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), U.S. naval officer Alfred Mahan urged the United States to enter the fray, observing that naval power had been essential to past empires. As early as 1886, Congress ordered construction of two steel-hulled battleships, the USS Texas and USS Maine; in 1890, it appropriated funds for three more, a program that expanded over the next two decades as the United States built one of the world’s most modern and powerful navies.

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