The emergence of the United States as an imperial power sparked intense debate. Opponents formed the Anti-Imperialist League. It united writers and social reformers who believed American energies should be directed at home, businessmen fearful of the cost of maintaining overseas outposts, and racists who did not wish to bring non-white populations into the United States. Among its prominent members were E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, the novelist William Dean Howells, and the labor leader George E. McNeill. The League held meetings throughout the country and published pamphlets called Liberty Tracts, warning that empire was incompatible with democracy. America’s historic mission, the League declared, was to “help the world by an example of successful self-government,” not to conquer other peoples. A “republic of free men,” anti-imperialists proclaimed, should assist the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines in their own “struggles for liberty,” rather than subjecting them to colonial rule.
In 1900, Democrats again nominated William Jennings Bryan to run against McKinley. The Democratic platform opposed the Philippine War for placing the United States in the “un-American” position of “crushing with military force” another people’s desire for “liberty and self-government.” George S. Boutwell, president of the Anti-Imperialist League, declared that the most pressing question in the election was the nation’s future character— “republic or empire?”
But without any sense of contradiction, proponents of an imperial foreign policy also adopted the language of freedom. Anti-imperialists were the real “infidels to the gospel of liberty,” claimed Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, because America ventured abroad not for material gain or national power, but to bring “a new day of freedom” to the peoples of the world. America’s was a “benevolent” imperialism, rooted in a national mission to uplift backward cultures and spread liberty across the globe. Beveridge did not, however, neglect more practical considerations. American trade, he insisted, “henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean.... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer.” And the Philippines held the key to “the commercial situation of the entire East.” Riding the wave of patriotic sentiment inspired by the war, and with the economy having recovered from the depression of 1893-1897, McKinley in 1900 repeated his 1896 triumph.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to take its place among the world’s great powers. Writers at home and overseas confidently predicted that American influence would soon span the globe. In his 1902 book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, a grandson of John Quincy Adams, predicted that because of its economic power, the United States would soon “outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.” Years would pass before this prediction was fulfilled. But in 1900, many features that would mark American life for much of the twentieth century were already apparent. The United States had surpassed Britain, France, and Germany in industrial production. The merger movement of 1897-1904 (discussed in the previous chapter) left broad sections of the economy under the control of giant corporations. The political system had stabilized. The white North and South had achieved reconciliation, while rigid lines of racial exclusion—the segregation of blacks, Chinese exclusion, Indian reservations—limited the boundaries of freedom and citizenship.
A Republican campaign poster from the election of 1900 links prosperity at home and benevolent imperialism abroad as achievements of William McKinley’s first term in office.
Yet the questions central to nineteenth-century debates over freedom— the relationship between political and economic liberty, the role of government in creating the conditions of freedom, and the definition of those entitled to enjoy the rights of citizens—had not been permanently answered. Nor had the dilemma of how to reconcile America’s role as an empire with traditional ideas of freedom. These were the challenges bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the first generation of the twentieth.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What economic issues gave rise to the Populist Party, and what political and economic changes did the party advocate?
2. Plow did employers use state and federal forces to protect their own economic interests, and what were the results?
3. Why is the elect ion of 1896 called the first modern presidential election?
4. Who were the Redeemers, and how did they change society and politics in the New South?
5. Using political, economic, and social examples, explain how the freedoms of Southern blacks were reduced after 1877.
6. How does the politics of memory, focusing on the Civil War and Reconstruction, demonstrate how whites removed blacks from a significant role in US. history?
7. What ideas and interests motivated the United States to create an empire in the late nineteenth-century?
8. Compare the arguments for and against U.S. imperialism. Be sure to consider the views of President McKinley and Emilio Aguinaldo.
9. Explain the impact of American racial attitudes and practices on other nations during the age of empire.
FREEDOM QUESTIONS
1. Describe the debate sparked by the Spanish-American War over the relationships between political democracy, race, citizenship, and freedom.
2. Since the Age of Jackson, the meanings of freedom included economic independence and democratic self-government. Why did workers, farmers, and women feel excluded from these freedoms between 1877 and 1900?
3. Explain Eugene V. Debs’s argument that the government was being used to deprive workers of their birthright of freedom.
4. How did political leaders and the courts justify the erosion of black rights in the name of freedom?
5. What restrictions were placed on the freedoms of post-Civil War immigrants, and how were these limitations justified?
