America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

product.

Introduction

THE LONG AMERICAN CENTURY

In the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War, Americans were unsure about their place in the world. For the previous half century, U.S. foreign policy had been defined by resistance to fascism and communism. But after these struggles, it was no longer clear what America’s world mission should be—or, indeed, if America should have a mission. In this climate, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, perhaps the world’s most recognized diplomat, worried that many Americans did not believe the United States needed a foreign policy at all. He thought it did and, alarmed by their apathy, wrote a call to action in early 2001.¹

Kissinger’s book could not have been better timed. Only months after publication, the terrorist group al-Qaeda launched the devastating 9/11 attacks against targets in New York and Washington, D.C. Nothing could have shown Americans more clearly that they needed a foreign policy. And yet Kissinger had missed a great deal, too. His book made no mention of al-Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden, and contained only a brief discussion of international terrorism. As Kissinger would be the first to admit, foreign policy priorities are apt to change, often suddenly and unpredictably.

When they do, as at the end of the Cold War and after 9/11, Americans usually find themselves locked in ferocious debate over how their country should act on the world stage. And in such debates, all sides refer to the past—successes and mistakes alike—in order to craft, justify, and legitimate plans for the present and future. Making claims about the past is common practice. Misperceptions about the history of American foreign relations are also common. Discussions of history often lack knowledge, context, or specificity. Distortions, half-truths, and catechisms of national faith made without regard to evidence, offered by all parts of the political spectrum, are even more prevalent during highly politicized debates about the terms of America’s proper role in the world.

By bringing together important and revealing original documents, we hope that America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror will contribute to a deeper understanding of America’s role in the world by promoting the study of the past on its own terms and for its own sake and by informing present and future debates. Above all, we hope that readers, both students and the broader public, will come to appreciate through the following pages the sheer complexity of America’s historical encounters with the outside world and the myriad factors—economic, political, cultural, ideological—that have driven U.S. behavior since the late nineteenth century.

Dating the rise of American international power is no easy task. When the Time-Life publishing baron Henry R. Luce proclaimed the advent of the American century in early 1941, he intended to suggest that the United States had suddenly arrived as a great power and was likely to dominate global affairs in the future.² By dating the emergence of the United States to the World War II era, however, Luce underestimated the historical extent of U.S. power and influence. In fact, the American century’s origins lie farther back, in the late nineteenth century, when the nation’s unprecedented industrial growth enabled its leaders to play a world role. World War II may have marked the culmination of America’s rise as a global superpower, but the process began much earlier.

Our book charts this process, one of world-historical importance, through an examination of the documentary record. Surveying what might be called the long American century, it examines the career of the United States as a world power from the 1890s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. By using original documents, we hope to capture the thoughts and perspectives of a wide variety of Americans who grappled with the complexities of their evolving world roles. Americans, in the past as now, rarely agreed on how to engage with the rest of the world or to use their power. Perhaps the best way to appreciate these arguments is by listening to the voices that originally made them. It is instructive as well to heed foreign voices, which commented with ever-increasing urgency and insight on the role of the United States in international affairs.

For ease of use—and because the first step for any student of history is to develop a timeline of events—documents are presented in chronological order within each chapter. But close reading reveals not a single line of narrative so much as the recurrence and intermingling of several themes that have cut across the history of U.S. relations with the outside world. We hope that this volume enables readers to trace the development of dilemmas and debates that have long sat at the heart of American foreign policy making.

One central theme is the expanding definition of national security, from a narrow concept of continental self-defense to an expansive, global vision that sometimes seemed to have no limit. Even outer space and the moon became battlegrounds for playing out American policies and influence during the Cold War. Another key theme is the concern Americans have often had with the influence of private capital and industry—what President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously called a military-industrial complex—on their nation’s foreign policy. Equally, we are interested in exposing the ideological currents that have driven American engagement in the world or, conversely, given Americans pause about ever-expanding international ambitions. We also examine the waging of wars and opposition to them, the importance of human rights and democracy in the exercise of U.S. power, and the intersections between race, religion, empire, and revolution in Americans’ views of the world.

In choosing these themes, we have been guided partly by interest in the old question that has preoccupied historians since they started writing rigorously about American foreign relations in the 1950s: In making policy toward the outside world, have U.S. leaders been guided principally by ideology, material ambitions, or geostrategic calculation? Many of the documents provide windows into the ways in which these three types of motives weighed in the minds of American decision makers. But we have also been guided by two newer concerns that have decisively reshaped the writing of U.S. foreign-relations history in the last couple of decades.

First, in keeping with a pronounced trend away from exclusive focus on decision-making elites in explaining U.S. foreign relations, we include documents that reflect how Americans outside the rarified world of Washington decision making thought about international affairs. To this end, we highlight the voices of academics, activists, clergymen, novelists, poets, and songwriters in addition to presidents, cabinet secretaries, and military officers. To be sure, the book contains plenty of classics, indisputably important landmark documents, often written by easily recognizable figures who are familiar to any student of American foreign relations. By emphasizing the perspectives of Americans who never served in government alongside those of policy makers, however, we hope to capture a fuller, richer, and more nuanced interpretation of U.S. diplomatic history than is sometimes conveyed in textbooks or documentary collections surveying the history of American diplomacy.

Second, consistent with efforts by scholars to view the United States as just one participant in a complex web of international relationships, we include numerous non-American sources. Above all, the book highlights materials from the Soviet bloc that became available following the end of the Cold War, transforming historians’ ability to write about the East-West conflict that dominated international affairs for half a century. But the book also contains non-American documents from earlier and later periods. Our hope is that such documents—comprising approximately one quarter of the entire collection—will generate deeper discussion of U.S. behavior by revealing what foreign observers, as well as Americans, thought about it. This material also reminds us that U.S. foreign policy generated a tremendous amount of comment abroad during the American century. As Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau once put it in a speech in Washington, D.C., Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.³ A similar cliché, commonly heard during the economic crisis that began in 2008, contends, When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.⁴

Like many clichés, these aphorisms have more than a ring of truth; at the very least, they reflect widespread perceptions of American power.⁵ In 2004, for example, during a presidential election that many believed would shape the fate of the entire world, the Guardian, one of Britain’s major daily newspapers, wrote that non-Americans felt increasingly helpless at not having a say over the outcome. [U]nless you happen to be a voter in a handful of swing states, there’s little you can do about the final result. If you’re not American, the situation is more acute because the actions of the US impact on our lives in overwhelming ways. Even British politics, the Guardian warned, may now be at least as heavily influenced by White House policy as by the choices of UK voters⁶

We hope that our inclusion of some non-American documents, from adversaries as well as allies, captures these international sentiments and illustrates for Americans just how deep and profound their effect on the rest of the world can be. However, we hasten to add that while our book examines foreign perceptions of U.S. behavior, it does not analyze policy decisions by other countries. Not only is such an analysis beyond the scope of this book, but its proper treatment is also beyond the book’s size.

In fact, one of the most difficult challenges in compiling this book was to select a mere 223 documents from the monumentally vast pool of material from which to draw. To help with this problem, we have organized each chapter around one or two broad interpretive questions and selected material that relates, in one way or another, to that central agenda. Such questions are spelled out in the introduction to each chapter and, we hope, lend coherence to a project that could clearly spill in an infinite number of directions. If we have been successful, each chapter will read not as a loose collection of material organized around historical topics but as sustained considerations of major interpretive questions that have preoccupied historians of American foreign relations. We hope, for example, that our consideration of the role played by economic, ideological, and cultural factors in driving U.S. behavior abroad will dovetail with the flourishing debate about which of these impulses has been most important in explaining American decision making. We also hope that our juxtaposition of documents reflecting geostrategic calculation with other materials illuminating the political and cultural landscape of the United States will promote consideration of the extent to which foreign policy grows from—and is restrained by—the nation’s internal character.

Even as we have been heavily influenced by the long-standing preoccupations of diplomatic historians, we have also been guided by a sense of which questions about the past will most likely resonate in future debates over American foreign relations. For this reason, we have included many documents that reflect in one way or another on the questions of how deeply the United States should be involved in international affairs, how the nation should balance self-interest and principle, and how closely Americans’ self-perceptions correspond to the opinions held by foreigners of the role played by the United States on the global stage. We readily acknowledge, however, our keen awareness of the impossibility of knowing what issues will stand out in the future. Many of our selections provide abundant evidence that prognosticators about the global order have a decidedly mixed track record.

One point stands out above all others when the documents in this book are considered: the American century has given rise to an extraordinary array of commentary that defies generalization. The documents that follow reflect a spectrum of opinion from ecstatic faith in the United States as global leader to certainty of American malfeasance. Who was right is perhaps a less interesting question than how various authors made their arguments, why they wrote as they did, and what kinds of responses they generated. Reckoning seriously with these matters will, we hope, make for well-informed students, general readers, and—in the best case—citizens.

¹Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

²Luce’s phrase originally appeared in The American Century, Life, February 17, 1941. In 1999, the journal Diplomatic History reprinted Luce’s essay along with sixteen essays of commentary on the notion of an American century. See The American Century: A Roundtable (Part I), Diplomatic History 23 (Spring 1999), 157–370; and The American Century: A Roundtable (Part II), Diplomatic History 23 (Summer 1999), 391–537.

³Pierre Trudeau, quoted in John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 250.

⁴When America Sneezes, Clichés Spread, Morning Edition, National Public Radio, January 24, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18368571.

⁵The literature on such foreign perspectives of the United States is vast, even more so when comparative histories and studies of America’s relations with other countries and regions are taken into account. But for good general introductions from a variety of approaches, see Geir Lundestad, Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952, Journal of Peace Research 23 (September 1986): 263–77; Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May, eds., Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000); Alan McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Tony Judt and Denis Lacorne, eds., With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Giacomo Chiozza, Anti-Americanism and the American World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Steven Kull, Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011).

⁶Oliver Burkeman, My Fellow Non-Americans . . . , Guardian, October 13, 2004, 2.

1

Motives of Expansion

The United States was never the passive, isolationist nation that the mythology of American history has often suggested. As early as 1776, American diplomats were busily attempting to woo European governments to support U.S. objectives. Over the following decades, moreover, the survival of the young republic depended on managing complex economic and military threats from abroad. Growing confidence encouraged increasingly ambitious uses of power. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, U.S. presidents had sent forces into action in territories stretching from Cuba and Peru to the Marquesas Islands, Tripoli, and China.

Still, a decisive breaking point in the history of American interaction with the rest of the world occurred in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. A nation largely focused on economic relations with the outside world embraced an increasingly prominent role in international diplomacy, gradually joining the ranks of the European powers that had long vied for global influence. In addition, American leaders decided to equip the nation with naval forces suited not just to fighting small skirmishes but also to demonstrating America’s arrival as a great power. Most impressively of all, the United States broke with its anticolonial traditions by acquiring Alaska, the Midway Atoll, and Hawaii. All of these transformations culminated in 1898, when the United States fought a major war against Spain and took control over vast new overseas territories.

What accounts for this transformation in the global role of the United States between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898? There is no single answer. Rather, U.S. activism sprang from various causes. One of them was America’s rapidly expanding industrial economy, which seemed to many business moguls to require that the United States secure new markets overseas. Indeed, many powerful Americans believed that the United States could sustain its economic dynamism and avoid massive labor unrest only by acquiring new consumers for the nation’s industrial output.

Powerful ideological currents in the late nineteenth century also encouraged international activism. In an era of pervasive social Darwinism, many Americans believed that their nation would inevitably weaken and die if it failed to compete vigorously with the other world powers, which were eagerly expanding their colonial possessions. The mark of a robust, energetic society seemed increasingly to be bold activism beyond its borders. American ambitions also flowed from more altruistic sources. As the nation’s self-confidence grew and new technologies expanded opportunities for overseas travel, Americans increasingly concerned themselves with the moral condition of ostensibly primitive or backward foreign societies.

Yet another ideological source of overseas ambitions was a mounting anxiety about the closing of the frontier. For centuries, in this view, the defining characteristic of American life had been the availability of unclaimed land, which gave all individuals the opportunity to succeed through hard work and thereby sustained the American creed of individualism. Once the entire continent was settled, as seemed to be the case in the 1890s, Americans increasingly viewed foreign territories as the next frontier that might absorb Americans’ prodigious energies and preserve the nation’s basic character.

Some combination of economic and ideological rationales convinced many Americans that their nation’s future lay in global activism and even territorial expansion. Yet not everyone joined the chorus. Mounting determination to expand the nation’s reach generated potent resistance rooted in fears that a quest for global power would betray the nation’s ideals of self-determination and limited government. Hostility came as well from abroad, where critics viewed the United States as an arrogant upstart and peoples subjected to U.S. power often resented American heavy-handedness. In these tensions lay the seeds of disagreements that would swirl around the conduct of American foreign policy for many decades to come.

DOCUMENT 1.1

AN APPEAL TO ANNEX THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

After 1865, some Americans continued to eye the Caribbean covetously, though for reasons different from the ones that had driven advocates of expanded slavery before the Civil War. In 1870, American expansionists focused their attention on the Dominican Republic, known at the time as Santo Domingo. Although Congress rejected the idea, President Ulysses S. Grant spoke enthusiastically about annexation in his State of the Union address on December 5, 1870.

During the last session of Congress a treaty for the annexation of the Republic of San Domingo to the United States failed to receive the requisite two-thirds vote of the Senate. I was thoroughly convinced then that the best interests of this country, commercially and materially, demanded its ratification. Time has only confirmed me in this view…. The Government of San Domingo has voluntarily sought this annexation. It is a weak power, numbering probably less than 120,000 souls, and yet possessing one of the richest territories under the sun, capable of supporting a population of 10,000,000 people in luxury. The people of San Domingo are not capable of maintaining themselves in their present condition, and must look for outside support. They yearn for the protection of our free institutions and laws, our progress and civilization. Shall we refuse them?

The acquisition of San Domingo is desirable because of its geographical position. It commands the entrance to the Caribbean Sea and the Isthmus transit of commerce. It possesses the richest soil, best and most capacious harbors, most salubrious climate, and the most valuable products of the forests, mine, and soil of any of the West India Islands…. It will give to us those articles which we consume so largely and do not produce, thus equalizing our exports and imports. In case of foreign war it will give us command of all the islands referred to, and thus prevent an enemy from ever again possessing himself of rendezvous upon our very coast….

San Domingo, with a stable government, under which her immense resources can be developed, will give remunerative wages to tens of thousands of laborers not now upon the island. This labor will take advantage of every available means of transportation to abandon the adjacent islands and seek the blessings of freedom and its sequence—each inhabitant receiving the reward of his own labor. Porto Rico and Cuba will have to abolish slavery, as a measure of self-preservation, to retain their laborers.

San Domingo will become a large consumer of the products of Northern farms and manufactories. The cheap rate at which her citizens can be furnished with food, tools, and machinery will make it necessary that contiguous islands should have the same advantages in order to compete in the production of sugar, coffee, tobacco, tropical fruits, etc. This will open to us a still wider market for our products. The production of our own supply of these articles will cut off more than one hundred millions of our annual imports, besides largely increasing our exports. With such a picture it is easy to see how our large debt abroad is ultimately to be extinguished. With a balance of trade against us … equal to the entire yield of the precious metals in this country, it is not so easy to see how this result is to be otherwise accomplished.

The acquisition of San Domingo is an adherence to the Monroe doctrine; it is a measure of national protection; it is asserting our just claim to a controlling influence over the great commercial traffic soon to flow from west to east by way of the Isthmus of Darien; it is to build up our merchant marine; it is to furnish new markets for the products of our farms, shops, and manufactories; it is to make slavery insupportable in Cuba and Porto Rico at once, and ultimately so in Brazil; it is to settle the unhappy condition of Cuba and end an exterminating conflict; it is to provide honest means of paying our honest debts without overtaxing the people; it is to furnish our citizens with the necessaries of everyday life at cheaper rates than ever before; and it is, in fine, a rapid stride toward that greatness which the intelligence, industry, and enterprise of the citizens of the United States entitle this country to assume among nations.

DOCUMENT 1.2

THE HIERARCHY OF RACES

Growing European and American interest in Asia, Africa, and other distant parts of the globe in the late nineteenth century spawned growing fascination with the peoples encountered in those areas. How were whites of European origin related to Africans, Asians, and others? What physical, intellectual, and cultural differences separated the purportedly advanced parts of the globe from the others? Among the authors to take up these questions was the Swiss-born Arnold Henry Guyot, who settled in the United States in the late 1840s and became a leading natural scientist at Princeton University. In the following excerpt from his 1873 book Physical Geography, Guyot expounds on the relationships among the world’s major racial groups.

Under the influence of ever-varying external conditions, the human family,—while preserving in all climes, and under all circumstances, certain common features of body and mind, which mark them as one,—display an almost unlimited diversity of physical and mental qualities, and of social conditions.

The form and features show every gradation, from the symmetry, grace, and dignity of the ideal man, portrayed by the sculptors of ancient Greece, to the ugliness and deformity of the Hottentot and the Fuegian. The color of the skin varies from white tinted with rose, through brownish or yellowish hues, to an almost jet black.

The temperament is here ardent and impulsive, the emotions responding with the vivacity of childhood to every impression, whether joyous or sad; there it is cold, passive, as in old age, almost insensible alike to pain or pleasure.

The social condition varies from the refinement and culture of the European nations, to the degradation of the savage who roams the tropical forests, or burrows in the earth in the Arctic islands….

The White race are distinguished by their tall stature, graceful proportions, and light, elastic step; their oval head and face, high broad forehead, symmetrical features, and ruddy cheeks; their abundant beard, and waving or slightly curling hair….

The typical man … is distinguished by perfect regularity of features, and harmony in all the proportions of the figure, securing agility and strength in the highest degree, with the utmost beauty and grace….

The law of perfection of type, in man, … forms an exception to that observed in the lower orders of creation…. The human family appears in its highest physical perfection, not within the Tropics, but in the Temperate Zone, in western Asia, the geographical center of the Old World.

The type degenerates gradually, with increasing distance, in all directions from this geographical centre; until, in the remotest regions of the globe, are found the ugliest, and the most deformed specimens of the human family….

The Mongolic Race is more numerous than any other, and, including the various Mongoloid types, more widely dispersed than all others together. This race very anciently attained a comparatively high degree of civilization, and founded a powerful monarchy in China. They have, however, contributed little to the progress of mankind in general, owing to their isolation, their jealousy of foreign nations, and the policy of non-intercourse so rigidly observed by them even to the present time….

The Negro Race have, by themselves, made only the first steps in civilization, and the great mass are still in the savage state. Where they have been brought under the influence of cultured nations, however, they have shown themselves capable of a high degree of progress….

The Secondary Races have contributed nothing to the present condition of mankind; and none of the existing branches have taken more than the first steps in civilization, except under the influence of the White or Mongolic races.

DOCUMENT 1.3

A VISION OF ANGLO-SAXON TRIUMPH

Growing awareness of conditions in faraway parts of the world and the increasing feasibility of long-distance travel spurred the growth of a powerful American missionary movement in the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, surging social Darwinism led many Americans to view their nation—or often the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon nations of the world—as waging a struggle for survival with other peoples. The Congregationalist clergyman Josiah Strong, who helped found the Social Gospel movement dedicated to applying Christian teachings to contemporary social problems, knit these two trends together in his 1885 book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. The book urged Americans to undertake missionary work among benighted populations at home and abroad.

It is not necessary to argue to those for whom I write that the two great needs of mankind, that all men may be lifted up into the light of the highest Christian civilization, are, first, a pure, spiritual Christianity, and, second, civil liberty. Without controversy, these are the forces which, in the past, have contributed most to the elevation of the human race, and they must continue to be, in the future, the most efficient ministers to its progress. It follows, then, that the Anglo-Saxon, as the great representative of these two ideas, the depository of these two great blessings, sustains peculiar relations to the world’s future, is divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper….

[A] marked characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon is what may be called an instinct or genius for colonizing. His unequaled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence, made him a pioneer. He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries. It was those in whom this tendency was strongest that came to America, and this inherited tendency has been further developed by the westward sweep of successive generations across the continent….

Again, nothing more manifestly distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon than his intense and persistent energy; and he is developing in the United States an energy which, in eager activity and effectiveness, is peculiarly American. This is due partly to the fact that Americans are much better fed than Europeans, and partly to the undeveloped resources of a new country, but more largely to our climate, which acts as a constant stimulus…. Moreover, our social institutions are stimulating. In Europe the various ranks of society are, like the strata of the earth, fixed and fossilized. There can be no great change without a terrible upheaval, a social earthquake. Here society is like the waters of the sea, mobile…. Every one is free to become whatever he can make of himself; free to transform himself from a rail-splitter or a tanner or a canal-boy, into the nation’s President. Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers. Wealth, position, influence, are prizes offered for energy; and every farmer’s boy, every apprentice and clerk, every friendless and penniless immigrant, is free to enter the lists. Thus many causes co-operate to produce here the most forceful and tremendous energy in the world.

What is the significance of such facts? These tendencies infold the future; they are the mighty alphabet with which God writes his prophecies. May we not, by careful laying together of the letters, spell out something of his meaning? It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future…. If I read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the survival of the fittest? … To this result no war of extermination is needful; the contest is not one of arms, but of vitality and civilization.

DOCUMENT 1.4

A CUBAN VIEW

Enthusiasts for the extension of U.S. power frequently focused their attention on Cuba, the Spanish-controlled island that some Americans had coveted for decades. U.S. ambitions were hardly lost on Cuban observers, many of whom feared that the end of Spanish rule might bring subjugation by a new foreign power. One sharp critic of U.S. imperial desires was José Martí, the Cuban journalist and poet who helped spark rebellion against Spain in the 1890s. Martí found much to admire in the United States, including a commitment to human freedom that he associated with Abraham Lincoln. But Martí resented U.S. dominance in Latin America, which he associated with Francis Cutting, leader of the American Annexationist League. In the following letter, published in the New York Evening Post on March 25, 1889, Martí juxtaposes these two aspects of the United States and criticizes the country for failing to help Cubans break free of Spain. He also denounces harsh attitudes among Americans about Cubans (especially Cubans living in the United States), focusing his criticism on an article that had been recently published by a Philadelphia newspaper called the Manufacturer.

This is not the occasion to discuss the question of the annexation of Cuba. It is probable that no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance. No honest Cuban will stoop to be received as a moral pest for the sake of the usefulness of his land in a community where his ability is denied, his morality insulted, and his character despised. There are some Cubans who, from honorable motives, from an ardent admiration for progress and liberty, from a prescience of their own powers under better political conditions, from an unhappy ignorance of the history and tendency of annexation, would like to see the island annexed to the United States. But those who have fought in war and learned in exile, who have built, by the work of hands and mind, a virtuous home in the heart of an unfriendly community; who by their successful efforts as scientists and merchants, as railroad builders and engineers, as teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists, orators, and poets, as men of alert intelligence and uncommon activity, are honored wherever their powers have been called into action and the people are just enough to understand them; … those, more numerous than the others, do not desire the annexation of Cuba to the United States. They do not need it. They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their work of destruction. They have made of the heroes of this country their own heroes, and look to the success of the American commonwealth as the crowning glory of mankind; but they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty, where no opinion is to be based in greed, and no triumph or acquisition reached against charity and justice. We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting.

We are not the people of destitute vagrants or immoral pigmies that the Manufacturer is pleased to picture; nor the country of petty talkers, incapable of action, hostile to hard work, that, in a mass with the other countries of Spanish America, we are by arrogant travelers and writers represented to be. We have suffered impatiently under tyranny; we have fought like men, sometimes like giants, to be freemen; we are passing that period of stormy repose, full of germs of revolt, that naturally follows a period of excessive and unsuccessful action … we deserve in our misfortune the respect of those who did not help us in our need.

DOCUMENT 1.5

A CALL FOR NAVAL POWER

Dramatically expanding overseas trade and the apparent danger of failing to keep up with the military prowess of the other great powers convinced some Americans of the need to build a big navy. Unquestionably, the most influential and eloquent advocate of expanding America’s seagoing power was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a prolific historian, president of the U.S. Naval War College from 1886 to 1889 and 1892 to 1893, and friend of Theodore Roosevelt and other leading politicians. Mahan’s writings on the necessity of sea power remain classics a century after his death in 1914. In 1890, Mahan laid out some of his key ideas in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled The United States Looking Outward.

Indications are not wanting of an approaching change in the thoughts and policy of Americans as to their relations with the world outside their own borders. For the past quarter of a century, the predominant idea, which has asserted itself successfully at the polls and shaped the course of the government, has been to preserve the home market for the home industries. The employer and the workman alike have been taught to look at the various economical measures proposed from this point of view, to regard with hostility any step favoring the intrusion of the foreign producer upon their own domain, and rather to demand increasingly rigorous measures of exclusion than to acquiesce in any loosening of the chain that binds the consumer to them. The inevitable consequence has followed, as in all cases when the mind or the eye is exclusively fixed in one direction, that the danger of loss or the prospect of advantage in another quarter has been overlooked; and although the abounding resources of the country have maintained the exports at a high figure, this flattering result has been due more to the superabundant bounty of Nature than to the demand of other nations for our protected manufactures.

For nearly the lifetime of a generation, therefore, American industries have been thus protected, until the practice has assumed the force of a tradition, and is clothed in the mail of conservatism. In their mutual relations, these industries resemble the activities of a modern ironclad that has heavy armor, but inferior engines and guns; mighty for defence, weak for offence. Within, the home market is secured; but outside, beyond the broad seas, there are the markets of the world, that can be entered and controlled only by a vigorous contest, to which the habit of trusting to protection by statute does not conduce.

At bottom, however, the temperament of the American people is essentially alien to such a sluggish attitude…. The interesting and significant feature of this changing attitude is the turning of the eyes outward, instead of inward only, to seek the welfare of the country. To affirm the importance of distant markets, and the relation to them of our own immense powers of production, implies logically the recognition of the link that joins the products and the markets,—that is, the carrying trade; the three together constituting that chain of maritime power to which Great Britain owes her wealth and greatness. Further, is it too much to say that, as two of these links, the shipping and the markets, are exterior to our own borders, the acknowledgment of them carries with it a view of the relations of the United States to the world radically distinct from the simple idea of self-sufficingness? We shall not follow far this line of thought before there will dawn the realization of America’s unique position, facing the older worlds of the East and West, her shores washed by the oceans which touch the one or the other, but which are common to her alone.

Coincident with these signs of change in our own policy there is a restlessness in the world at large which is deeply significant, if not ominous. It is beside our purpose to dwell upon the internal state of Europe, whence, if disturbances arise, the effect upon us may be but partial and indirect. But the great seaboard powers there do not stand on guard against their continental rivals only; they cherish also aspirations for commercial extension, for colonies, and for influence in distant regions, which may bring, and, even under our present contracted policy, already have brought them into collision with ourselves….

There is no sound reason for believing that the world has passed into a period of assured peace outside the limits of Europe. Unsettled political conditions, such as exist in Haiti, Central America, and many of the Pacific islands, especially the Hawaiian group, when combined with great military or commercial importance as is the case with most of these positions, involve, now as always, dangerous germs of quarrel, against which it is prudent at least to be prepared. Undoubtedly, the general temper of nations is more averse from war than it was of old. If no less selfish and grasping than our predecessors, we feel more dislike to the discomforts and sufferings attendant upon a breach of peace; but to retain that highly valued repose and the undisturbed enjoyment of the returns of commerce, it is necessary to argue upon somewhat equal terms of strength with an adversary. It is the preparedness of the enemy, and not acquiescence in the existing state of things, that now holds back the armies of Europe….

Despite a certain great original superiority conferred by our geographical nearness and immense resources,—due, in other words, to our natural advantages, and not to our intelligent preparations,—the United States is woefully unready, not only in fact but in purpose, to assert in the Caribbean and Central America a weight of influence proportioned to the extent of her interests. We have not the navy, and, what is worse, we are not willing to have the navy, that will weigh seriously in any disputes with those nations whose interests will conflict there with our own. We have not, and we are not anxious to provide, the defence of the seaboard which will leave the navy free for its work at sea. We have not, but many other powers have, positions, either within or on the borders of the Caribbean, which not only possess great natural advantages for the control of that sea, but have received and are receiving that artificial strength of fortification and armament which will make them practically inexpugnable. On the contrary, we have not on the Gulf of Mexico even the beginning of a navy yard which could serve as the base of our operations….

It is perfectly reasonable and legitimate, in estimating our needs of military preparation, to take into account the remoteness of the chief naval and military nations from our shores, and the consequent difficulty of maintaining operations at such a distance. It is equally proper, in framing our policy, to consider the jealousies of the European family of states, and their consequent unwillingness to incur the enmity of a people so strong as ourselves; their dread of our revenge in the future, as well as their inability to detach more than a certain part of their forces to our shores without losing much of their own weight in the councils of Europe…. [But] it is folly to look upon [these considerations] as sufficient alone for our security…. Though distant, our shores can be reached; being defenceless, they can detain but a short time a force sent against them….

Yet, were our sea frontier as strong as it now is weak, passive self-defence, whether in trade or war, would be but a poor policy, so long as this world continues to be one of struggle and vicissitude. All around us now is strife; the struggle of life, the race of life, are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation; our own no less than others…. Are our people … so unaggressive that they are likely not to want their own way in matters where their interests turn on points of disputed right, or so little sensitive as to submit quietly to encroachment by others, in quarters where they long have considered their own influence should prevail?

DOCUMENT 1.6

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West had put an end to the Western frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner, an eminent historian at the University of Wisconsin, picked up on the theme in a paper entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which he delivered as a speech at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago and then published as an essay that has been reprinted innumerable times ever since. Turner worried that the closing of the frontier would destroy the ethic of individualism that was the nation’s defining characteristic. It was a small step for many of Turner’s contemporaries to argue that the nation must find new frontiers on which to concentrate its energies.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life….

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit….

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that, to the frontier, the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves….

What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

DOCUMENT 1.7

OPPOSITION TO FOREIGN ADVENTURES

The failure to acquire Santo Domingo or Cuba in the 1860s and 1870s did not end speculation about adding new territories to the United States. Indeed, growing commercial and military power made the prospect appear more feasible than ever before. Some Americans viewed that possibility with great enthusiasm. Others worried that expanding the nation would carry numerous problems and could even eat away at core American ideals. One such skeptic was Carl Schurz, a German-born politician and essayist whose career included a term in the U.S. Senate, an ambassadorship to Spain, and a stint as editorial writer for Harper’s. In the following essay published in Harper’s in October 1893, Schurz spelled out various reasons for anxiety about American ambitions in the Western Hemisphere.

The patriotic ardor of those who would urge this Republic into the course of indiscriminate territorial aggrandizement to make it the greatest of the great Powers of the world deserves more serious consideration. To see his country powerful and respected among the nations of the earth, and to secure to it all those advantages to which its character and position entitle it, is the natural desire of every American. In this sentiment we are all agreed. There may, however, be grave differences of opinion as to how this end can be most surely, most completely and most worthily attained….

Let us admit, for argument’s sake, that there is something dazzling in the conception of a great republic embracing the whole continent and the adjacent islands, and that the tropical part of it would open many tempting fields for American enterprise; let us suppose—a violent supposition, to be sure—that we could get all these countries without any trouble or cost. But will it not be well to look beyond? If we receive those countries as States of this Union, as we eventually shall have to do in case we annex them, we shall also have to admit the people inhabiting them as our fellow-citizens on a footing of equality. As our fellow-citizens they will not only govern themselves in their own States as best they can—the United States undertaking to guarantee them a republican form of government, and to protect them against invasion and domestic violence—but they will, through their Senators and Representatives in Congress, and through their votes in Presidential elections, and through their influence upon our political parties, help in governing the whole Republic, in governing us. And what kind of people are those we take in as equal members of our National household, our family circle?

It is a matter of universal experience that democratic institutions have never on a large scale prospered in tropical latitudes. The so-called republics existing under the tropical sun constantly vibrate between anarchy and despotism. When we observe there a protracted period of order and quiet, we find almost always something like martial law at the bottom of it…. It cannot be said that the people of the American tropics have lacked opportunity for the progressive development of democratic institutions. Ever since they threw off the Spanish yoke they have been their own masters. They have long been as free and unhampered as the people of the United States to rule their home affairs and to shape their own destinies. Why have they not succeeded, as we have, in developing the rich resources of their own countries and in building up stable democratic governments? The cause is obvious to every unprejudiced observer….

I do not say that in the tropics there are not some persons who perform comparatively hard and steady work. But it is a well-known fact that the great mass of the people in those regions, in a state of freedom, labor just enough to satisfy their immediate wants; and these are very limited in a climate of perpetual summer, where most of the time food is easily obtainable, and where extremely little is needed in point of clothing and shelter. As in addition to this the high temperature discourages every strenuous and steady exertion, it is but natural that wherever in such climate labor is left to itself it should run into shiftlessness, and that efforts to stimulate or organize labor for production on a large scale should have a tendency to develop into some sort of coercion.

Neither do I say that in tropical countries there are not persons who understand the true theory of democratic government, or who are in favor of it. But democratic government cannot long be sustained by mere sentiment or political philosophy. It must live in the ways of thinking and the habits of the people who have to carry it on. And experience shows that the tropics will indeed breed individual men who know how to govern others, but not great masses of men who know how to govern themselves….

In our present condition we have over all the great nations of the world