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Rise of American Power. Emerging Global Involvement. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American expansion was in many ways a resumption of the expansionist drive that had been halted by the Civil War.
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Emerging Global Involvement • In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American expansion was in many ways a resumption of the expansionist drive that had been halted by the Civil War. • A number of factors led the United States into greater global involvement in the late 1800s.
Technology • Improvements in transportation and communication technology shortened distances around the world. • At the same time, other inventions accelerated industrial growth. • Railroads connected factories and farms to Atlantic and Pacific ports, from which steamships carried goods to Europe, Latin America, and Asia..
Technology • Communication was faster and easier thanks to the telegraph, telephone, and transatlantic cable. • Communications technology quickly provided information on international markets and on events in other nations that might affect the United States. • The world was becoming more interdependent.
Drive for Markets and Raw Materials • Economics linked the domestic and foreign policy goals of the United States. • Business leaders wanted raw materials from abroad. • Both business leaders and farmers also wanted overseas markets.
Drive for Markets and Raw Materials • Overseas markets could provide economic stability, especially when, as in the 1890s, domestic consumption could not absorb the nation's output. • At the same time, international competition increased as European nations, Japan, and the United States sought raw materials and markets. • Foreign trade increased dramatically. • High U.S. tariffs played a role in revolutions in Hawaii and in Cuba.
Naval Power • The U.S. Navy began to expand in the 1880s, building steel-hulled warships with steam engines and the latest in weapons. • Behind this growth was the urging of expansionists like Alfred T. Mahan, who argued that as foreign trade grew, a nation needed a strong navy to protect shipping routes. • The navy, in turn, needed bases at which to refuel and restock supplies.
Manifest Destiny • As you will recall, the idea of manifest destiny took hold in the United States in the mid-1800s. • Manifest destiny is the idea that the United States had a divine mission to expand in order to spread the ideals of freedom and democracy.
Manifest Destiny • This belief was fueled by historian Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. • In a famous 1893 essay, Turner argued that the existence of a frontier throughout our history had been vital in shaping the American character. • By 1893, Turner noted, that frontier no longer existed, an argument supported by the 1890 census. • Some people interpreted this development to mean that Americans needed new frontiers beyond the current borders.
Social Darwinism • Closely tied to manifest destiny was the idea that the American way of life was so superior that the United States was obliged to carry its benefits to other peoples. • Few wondered whether these peoples wanted American "benefits," or recognized that this notion implied that other peoples and their ways of life were inferior.
Social Darwinism • The belief in American superiority was a form of Social Darwinism. • According to Social Darwinists, the law of nature resulted in the survival of superior people. • Similarly, the same law led to the survival of superior nations, which are meant to dominate inferior nations. • Few questioned the fact that no scientific evidence supported this theory.
Missionary Spirit • Another motive for expansion was the missionary spirit. • It lay behind attempts to introduce Christianityand "civilization" to others, particularly in China, where the movement was strongest. • The missionary impulse did result in certain improvements, such as the building of schools and hospitals.
Missionary Spirit • However, it also fostered a paternalistic view —one that saw the United States as a parent supervising weaker, less "developed" peoples. • Underlying manifest destiny, social Darwinism, and the missionary movement were nationalism, racism, and a strong sense of cultural superiority.
U.S. World Power: Asia & The Pacific • The United States role in Asia expanded because of the establishment of trade with China and Japan and the acquisition of Hawaii, Pacific bases, and the Philippines.
China • American trade with China began in the 1780s through the port of Canton. • By the late 1800s, however, Americans were afraid that their economic opportunities in China might be limited. • Throughout the nineteenth century, China had been subjected to imperialistic demands by Japan, Germany, Russia, Britain, and France. • Each nation gained a sphere of influence —a region in which it had exclusive trade, mining, or other economic rights.
Open Door Policy • In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay tried to assure economic opportunity for the United States. • He asked the European powers to keep an "open door" to China. • He wanted to ensure through his Open Door Policy that the United States would have fair access to the Chinese market. • The European powers, however, met his request with a cool response.
Boxer Rebellion • In 1900, a secret patriotic Chinese society called the Boxers attacked missionaries, diplomats, and other foreigners in China in what is known as the Boxer Rebellion. • The Boxers were revolting against the Manchu Rule (under the Qing Dynasty) and against the intervention of Western powers in China.
Boxer Rebellion • The Western powers, including the United States, sent troops to restore order. • Fearing that rival nations would take even more Chinese land, Hay expanded the Open Door Policy to mean that the current boundaries of China should be preserved.
Japan • Japan had developed into a major economic power after 1854, the year Commodore Matthew Perry ended Japan's isolation by negotiating a treaty opening two Japanese ports to ships from the United States. • Unlike China, Japan carried out a far-reaching modernization program making it a major economic power by 1900.
Japan • From 1900 to 1941, a key aim of American foreign policy in Asia became providing the balance of power to restrict Japanese expansion. • Japan displayed its growing strength by defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. • In an effort to protect American interests in Asia, President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the peace treaty that ended the war.
Japan • It was understood that Japan could remain in Manchuria and annex Korea. • The agreement of the United States to the Japanese takeover of Korea was formalized in the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement. • In return, Japan would not threaten the Philippines.
Japan • Relations between Japan and the United States experienced a setback when San Francisco schools placed Japanese children in separate classes in the early 1900s. • The Japanese government condemned this segregation. President Theodore Roosevelt achieved a compromise with Japanese officials called the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. This agreement ended school segregation in San Francisco but also restricted Japanese immigration to the United States.
Japan • In 1908, the two nations also entered into the Root-Takahira Agreement, in which both countries agreed to uphold the Open Door Policy and support China's independence and integrity. • It also meant each nation would not attempt to seize the other's possessions.
Hawaii • Until the 1890s, Hawaii was an independent country ruled by a monarch. • The United States had important business interests there, namely, sugar plantations. • In 1890, the United States placed a protective tariff on imported sugar, including that from Hawaii, in order to protect sugar producers in the United States.
Hawaii • This meant that Americans would be more likely to buy domestic sugar rather than Hawaiian sugar, and American planters in Hawaii would lose money. • In addition to being hurt economically by this protective tariff, American planters in Hawaii also feared the growth of Hawaiian nationalism and resentment toward the power of American interests.
Hawaii • In 1893, American planters, aided by the chief U.S. diplomat to Hawaii and by marines, carried out a successful revolution against the Hawaiian ruler (Queen Liliuokalani). • Against the wishes of the Hawaiian people, the American sugar growers asked that the United States annex Hawaii, but President Grover Cleveland opposed expansion by force.
Hawaii • Hawaii remained in the hands of the American sugar interests as the independent Republic of Hawaii. • In 1898 under President McKinley, the U.S. annexed Hawaii under the Newlands Resolution . • Now American planters in Hawaii could get as much for their sugar as growers on the mainland.
Hawaii • Not until 1898 during the Spanish-American War did Hawaii become a United States possession. • Then it became important as a military and commercial link to the Philippines and the rest of East Asia. • Annexation was accomplished by a joint resolution of Congress rather than a treaty.
Samoa • In 1878, the United States gained the rights to a naval station at Pago Pagoin the Samoan Islands. • The port was also used by Germany and Great Britain. • Samoa was situated in the Pacific on the trade route to Australia. Conflicts arose among the three nations. • In 1899, Germany and the United States divided Samoa.
Spanish-American War • In 1898, the United States began to acquire new territories, making it an imperial power. • Most of these territorial gains resulted from the Spanish-American War.
Causes of the war • There were several underlying causes of the war between Spain and the United States. • In Spanish-controlled Cuba, economic chaos led to revolution and a demand for U.S. intervention. • In the 1890s, Spain had imposed increased taxes on Cuba.
Causes of the war • In addition, the United States placed a protective tariff on Cuban sugar, which had previously entered the nation duty-free. • The effect of these taxes was economic collapse. Resentment toward Spain fueled Cuban anger, and soon revolution erupted. • Cubans provoked U.S. involvement by destroying American sugar plantations and mills in Cuba.
Causes of the war • Many Americans sympathized with the Cuban revolution and were appalled by the tactics of the Spanish military commander, Valeriano Weyler. • He imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Cuban civilians in camps, where about 30 percent of them died from disease and starvation.
Causes of the war • American expansionists —including Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Secretary of State John Hay—recognized that war offered an opportunity to seize territory from Spain, a weak nation.
Immediate causes of the war • In addition to the underlying causes of the Spanish-American War, several immediate events aroused Americans' emotions. • These fed a growing jingoism —a super patriotism and demand for aggressive actions—that created a warlike mood.
Immediate causes of the war • In the late 1890s, two of the most famous American publishers, William Randolph Hearst of the New York Morning Journal and Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, were battling for readers in a circulation war. • Both newspapers printed the most sensational stories and pictures they could find about the horrors of the Cuban revolution. The stories often exaggerated and distorted events for emotional effect. This kind of sensationalism is called "yellow journalism."
Immediate causes of the war • A personal letter written by the Spanish minister to the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lome, was printed in the New York Journal in February 1898. • De Lome's unfavorable comments—he called McKinley "weak and catering to the rabble"—made it hard for the President and other political leaders to withstand demands for war.
Immediate causes of the war • Less than a week after publication of the de Lome letter, the United States battleship Maine exploded and sank in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, killing 266 Americans. • The public blamed Spain, although a later investigation was never able to determine the cause of the explosion nor assign responsibility.
Fighting The War • In April 1898, despite Spain's agreement to an armistice with Cuba, McKinley asked Congress to declare war. • Congress complied. • It also approved the Teller Amendment, which promised that the United States would not annex Cuba.
Fighting The War • The war lasted four months, with fighting in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. • Of the 2,446 Americans who lost their lives, fewer than 400 were killed in combat; the rest died from infection and disease.
The Results of the War • In December 1898, the Treaty of Paris, negotiated with Spain granted Cuba its independence, gave the United States the Philippines, in return for $20 million, and ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States.
The Results of the War • The Treaty of Paris of 1898 led to the acquisition of many former Spanish territories that formed the basis of an American Empire. • This set off a national debate among imperialists and anti-imperialists. • It also led to increased American involvement in Latin America and Asia as the nation sought to protect its new lands.
Imperialism: Great Debate • Ratification of the Treaty of Paris set off a great debate in the United States. • As with all treaties, it had to be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. • The fundamental question was whether the United States should pursue imperialism—the policy of expanding a nation's power by foreign acquisitions.
Imperialism: Great Debate • Americans in both political parties, in all regions, and from all social classes could be found on either side of the debate. • Progressives were also divided.
Imperialism: Great Debate • Imperialists included Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred T. Mahan. • Among the anti-imperialists were Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, and former Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. • The chart summarizes the arguments of the two groups.
