Just as American ideas about liberty and self-government had circulated around the world in the Age of Revolution, American racial attitudes had a global impact in the age of empire. The turn of the twentieth century was a time of worldwide concern about immigration, race relations, and the “white man’s burden,” all of which inspired a global sense of fraternity among “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Chinese exclusion in the United States strongly influenced anti-Chinese laws adopted in Canada, and American segregation and disenfranchisement became models for Australia and South Africa as they formed new governments; they read in particular the proceedings of the Mississippi constitutional convention of 1890, which pioneered ways to eliminate black voting rights.
School Begins, an 1899 cartoon from Puck, suggests doubts about the project of “civilizing” non-whites in new American possessions. Uncle Sam lectures four unkempt black children, labeled “Philippines,” “Hawaii,” “Porto Rico,” and “Cuba,” while neatly dressed pupils representing various states study quietly. In the background, an American Indian holds a book upside down, while a black man washes the window. A Chinese student, apparently hoping for instruction, waits at the door.
One “lesson” these countries learned from the United States was that the “failure” of Reconstruction demonstrated the impossibility of multiracial democracy. The extremely hostile account of Reconstruction by the British writer James Bryce in his widely read book The American Commonwealth (published in London in 1888) circulated around the world. Bryce called African-Americans “children of nature” and insisted that giving them the right to vote had been a terrible mistake, which had produced all kinds of corruption and misgovernment. His book was frequently cited by the founders of the Australian Commonwealth (1901) to justify their “white Australia” policy, which barred the further immigration of Asians. The Union of South Africa, inaugurated in 1911, saw its own policy of racial separation—later known as apartheid—as following in the footsteps of segregation in the United States. South Africa, however, went much further, enacting laws that limited skilled jobs to whites and dividing the country into areas where black Africans could and could not live. Even American proposals that did not become law, such as the literacy test for immigrants vetoed by President Cleveland, influenced measures adopted overseas. The United States, too, learned from other countries. The Gentleman’s Agreement that limited Japanese immigration early in the twentieth century (see Chapter 19) followed a similar arrangement between Japan and Canada.