As the ink dried on the Constitution in 1787, the Founding Fathers--having just ended Britain's colonial hegemony--would have likely been very surprised to know that a little more than a century later the United States would have colonies of its own. From this perspective, America's Gilded Age imperialism is quite a shock. It is therefore not surprising that many would later view the period as Samuel Flagg Bemis did: a "Great Aberration" (May 4). Was American imperialism really a Great Aberration? Or, is this view an anachronistic application of a modern, idealized image of America to events which are continuations of deeper trends? Upon closer inspection, the matter becomes quite murky. Two historians writing in the 1960s, Harvard's Ernest May and Cornell's Walter LaFeber, have approached this issue with the aid of hindsight and historical objectivity. Despite similarities of era and professional perspective, the two historians developed largely conflicting views.
But before discussing interpretations, a sketch of the events of 1898 is in order. Although the United States officially annexed Hawaii in 1898, the defining matter in foreign policy was the Spanish-American War. Acting as defender of the Western Hemisphere--and seeking its own colonial gain--the United States moved to intervene in reaction to anti-Spanish insurrections in Cuba. After the sinking of the USS Maine, the United States declared war on Spain in April of 1898. Within a month, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt's 1897 plan for this contingency came into effect, and Commodore George Dewey engaged and destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manilla, in the Philippines. The United States had nearly instantly become embroiled in a two-ocean war against colonial Spain. But it was a war the United States was prepared to win. Spain quickly surrendered, and by December of that year, the Treaty of Paris brought the war to a close. Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States and received war reparations of 20 million dollars.
May's American Imperialism explains these events in terms of a shifting opinion among a "Foreign Policy Elite" consisting largely of businessmen, intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats and newspapermen. May searches for the reason the opinions of this group of opinion-makers changed, citing four previous interpretations: (1) LaFeber's explanation in terms of economic motivation, especially the search for new markets (2) Frederick Merk's view that imperialism was a continuation of "Manifest Destiny" (3) Julius Pratt's justification in terms of "Social Darwinism" and the expansion of Protestantism and (4) Richard Hofstadter's "Psychic Crisis". To this, May adds a fifth molding influence on the Foreign Policy Elite--the example set by European imperialists, in particular Great Britain. May proposes that these five reasons combined to change the opinions of the Foreign Policy Elite.
Although May attempts quite admirably to incorporate all parties into a very wide explanation, the very question he chooses to answer forces him to take a side. May reveals this as he summarizes his question in the preface to American Imperialism:
Why did American public opinion swing around during the 1890s on the subject of whether or not the United States should possess a colonial empire? (May xxxiv)To wonder why opinion and policy "swung around" is to assume a reversal or a rejection of past trends. In this way, May falls into the "Great Aberration" camp.
Even though May borrows some aspects of LaFeber's interpretation of imperialism, there are some fundamental differences between the two. LaFeber's The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 describes just what its title suggests--that the conquests of 1898 represented a new and unique empire, separate from the European colonial tradition, distinctly American. For LaFeber, American imperialism was not a rejection of the anti-colonialism of the early republic, but a conscious choice based on economic motivations which held true before and after 1898. As LaFeber points out in his preface, "Americans neither acquired this empire during a temporary absence of mind nor had the empire forced on them." (LaFeber vii) Furthermore, Americans were not merely aping the trappings of the European colonial experience:
Americans attempted to build a New Empire, an empire which differed fundamentally from the colonial holdings of European powers. (LaFeber 408)To LaFeber, Americans did not seek empire for God, glory or gold--but as markets for industrial overproduction. Furthermore, access to foreign markets rather than political control of markets was the goal. In earlier mercantilist philosophies, nations sought colonies as outlets for their finished goods and as sources of raw materials for their extractive economies. American imperialists, though, wanted colonies that would serve to keep foreign markets accessible and open, not colonies that would be the markets themselves. It is true America had long been politically isolationist, but virtually no one opposed "increased commercial entanglements" (LaFeber 60-61). As long as America's colonization process sought to open and protect markets and trade routes, as it did in Asia and South America, it was not really a departure from classic foreign policy themes but rather an intensification of them.
LaFeber admits that the 1890s were the perfect incubator for imperialist expansion. The Depression of 1893-1897 (LaFeber 8) and the switch from a predominately agricultural export economy to one in which manufactured goods were the primary export combined to fuel the search for foreign markets. Paraphrasing economist Worthington C. Ford's 1895 article "The Turning of the Tide", LaFeber shows that 1895 was a landmark year in the process of industrialization:
The figures in the export tables of fiscal 1895 marked not only a turn in the depression but a pivotal point in American commercial history. These figures indicated that, although farm exports had slumped, industrial exports had reached all time highs. (LaFeber 182)As the export of traditional foodstuff commodities waned, American manufacturers became the dominant exporters and a driving force behind the imperialist impulse.
1898 was certainly a year ripe for imperialism, but where did this imperialist impulse come from? Counter to May's suggestion that American imperialism largely derived from the colonial examples set by Europeans, LaFeber explains that it was part of a long tradition of expansionist doctrine. Though he gives many examples of earlier expansionist thinking, the key to understanding American imperialism as an old idea is "the prince of players", Grant's Secretary of State William Henry Seward. He "prophesied that the battle for world power would occur in Asia...[and] the victor in this battle would be the nation operating from the strongest economic power base." (LaFeber 24-26) Seward's famously prudent purchase of Alaska in 1867 was intended as a move toward the Asian market, the importance of which he preached as early as 1853:
Multiply your ships, and send them forth to the East. The nation that draws most materials and provisions from the earth, and fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the greatest power of the earth. (LaFeber 27)The emphasis on foreign markets, especially Asia's supposedly vast markets, was not an invention of the 1890s, but a decades-old idea. The move to colonialism was simply a further addition to this doctrine of foreign markets. But colonialism itself wasn't born in 1898, for Seward was already developing imperial plans three and four decades earlier:
It is most difficult, however, to understand the purchase of "Seward's Icebox" [Alaska] without comprehending the Secretary of State's magnificent view of the future American commercial empire...in 1867, Alaska was the "drawbridge" between the North American continent and Asia. (LaFeber 408)Clearly, Seward had a vision of a new, commercially-based imperialism long before the Spanish-American War. Furthermore, Seward's appointment as Secretary of State shows that the imperialist impulse was not a marginal one, either.
Like Seward, another seminal figure was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the US Navy. Mahan was an extraordinarily influential figure, who counted Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt as a close friend and disciple. In 1893, Secretary of the Navy Hilary Herbert changed his mind on closing the Naval War College after reading Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (LaFeber 94). Mahan's emphasis in that book was military, but his philosophy was soundly based in commerce. He writes, "The necessity of a navy...springs, therefore, from the existence of a peaceful shipping." (Mahan 26) Repeatedly, Mahan emphasizes the importance of commerce in the success of nations, advocating island colonies as coaling stations and naval bases with which to extend the comfortable range of the US and US-affiliated merchant marine. Hawaii was the perfect example of Mahan's vision of imperialism. Mahan's philosophy of imperialism was uniquely his own, rooted in his technical naval expertise. But even in his distinctiveness, Mahan typified American imperialism by developing an imperialism independent of Europe's precedents, tailor-fitted to America's specific needs. LaFeber was perhaps correct to describe 1898's expansion as "The New Empire", for to call it an imitation would be a grave oversimplification.
It seems clear that American imperialism was not a haphazard abandonment of anti-colonial tradition, but a logical extension of commercial expansion. And if American imperialism is understandable in light of the decades before, where has it gone? It is interesting to note that in a year when Great Britain has relinquished its last colony, Hong Kong, America still possesses the protectorates of Guam and Puerto Rico, and still has naval bases in Cuba and the Philippines. Perhaps American imperialism did not end suddenly in 1898, but has continued in at least some respect to the present day. And even if the United States is not currently in the business of grabbing island colonies, it is still very much interested in one of the major objectives of Gilded Age imperialism, the opening of foreign markets. From this perspective, the events of 1898 do not appear to be a Great Aberration so much as the most vivid expression of an expansionist theme in American foreign policy born prior to the Civil War and still alive today.
Works Cited
May, Ernest R. American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1991.
LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca: Cornell, University Press, 1963.
Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1918.
© 1998 Garrett Moritz. All rights reserved.