A Patriot's History of the Modern World (3 page)

But by and large what Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly said of non-Western militaries—that the British were in Zululand, but it was impossible to imagine the Zulu on the Thames—applies to American influence worldwide. Whether through its products, its democratic processes, or its self-confidence, America remains the world's sole “exceptional” nation, which is to say, it alone has a self-written narrative that explains why the United States should—not just “could”—influence others. That self-definition remained alive, but largely contained within the Western Hemisphere between 1898 and 1941, with the exception of the brief foray into European conflict and the subsequent disastrous diplomatic solution America
allowed to be imposed on a large part of the globe at Versailles. While the United States had the potential to become the world's superpower in 1919, it had neither the desire nor the focus, and indeed in the immediate postwar aftermath, the tension between prewar Progressivism and the newly revived Constitutionalism of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge took center stage. Their emphasis on limited government, business growth, and restrained foreign interventions lasted a mere eight years, and stood out in sharp relief from the Progressive-dominated period that lasted from William McKinley's death in 1901 through World War II.

Meanwhile, the Europeans, almost all possessed of democratic constitutions adopted long after the U.S. Constitution, but not modeled on it, had spread their version of democracy around the world through their colonies. Yet with no understanding of common law and its central role in expressing the will of the people, almost all of the European governments and their colonial clones drifted into constitutional autocracies, and in the Third World those governments quickly disintegrated further into dictatorships covered by fig-leaf constitutions.

The American ascent to superpower status that began innocuously with the rapid defeat of Spain in 1898 and culminated in the difficult and bloody victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945 had been accomplished largely because the Progressives stood aside at the right moments and permitted America to be America. Franklin Roosevelt's antipathy to business during the Great Depression yielded to a commonsense liberating of the titans of industry from 1941 to 1945. While his misguided views of Joseph Stalin led him to make repeated concessions to the communists, he stopped short of ceding world supremacy. Harry Truman quickly righted the scale after Roosevelt's death, and the nature of Soviet intentions was not seriously questioned by another American president until 1976 by Jimmy Carter. In short, having hamstrung aspects of American exceptionalism in the 1930s, Roosevelt restored them during the time of ultimate crisis.

What remained in 1945 was a stark contrast of free and unfree societies, one led by an exceptional American republic and culture, one dominated by communist tyranny. While it is likely that the war itself prolonged Soviet communism by decades (allowing Stalin to both appeal to Russian patriotism and simultaneously purge threats), by the end of the war there were few rosy-eyed visionaries outside of the hard-left Progressives and academicians who still advocated Soviet-style communism for the United States.
The “Harvest of Sorrow” and the mass executions of the 1930s had shattered many illusions among fellow travelers as the truth about Stalin's regime leaked out. Thus, across the American political spectrum in 1945 there was a sense that right had prevailed, that the path followed by the United States was the correct and moral one, and that American exceptionalism was indeed worth celebrating. America's story from 1898 to 1945 is therefore nothing less than the triumph of American exceptionalism over liberal Progressivism, despite a few temporary victories by the latter. Few Americans who heard of Robert Peary planting the flag on the North Pole, or who knew of Charles Lindbergh's astounding flight, or who watched Babe Ruth pound home run after home run ever thought another nation was capable of such greatness. No one who witnessed the atomic bombs could doubt the power of America's wrath if turned on an enemy. The American ascent to
world
influence was the fastest in human history. Whether it was the best remained a question of how true the United States could stay to its founding values, and whether it would decide to remain…exceptional.

Time Line

T
he Pacific moon hung like a fat lemon, an ironic symbol marking what would become the dawn of the American global era, at 11:30 on the night of April 20, 1898. Eight ships of Admiral George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron slipped into the Boca Grande Channel in Manila Bay, where the crew intended to lay waste to the Spanish vessels in the harbor. Although Dewey, the son of a Vermont doctor, had a reputation as a practical joker and low-level troublemaker at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, this evening he stood grimly, watching his column silently plow through the Pacific waters en route to its deadly rendezvous. Feeling all of his sixty-one years, with his droopy white mustache and wise eyes, Dewey could have passed for a manager of one of the new American baseball teams, or a doctor, which would have made his father proud. He could barely remember his mother, dead at a young age from tuberculosis, but he expected she too would have gushed over her brave son, now leading a flotilla into battle. Now it was his turn to be proud.
¹

Having survived the academy—one of only fifteen out of the sixty who had entered with him as “plebes”—Dewey had commanded the USS
Mississippi
during the short combat in 1862 that led to the surrender of New Orleans by Confederate forces. He then quite literally barely survived his next assignment, when a Rebel shell exploded on the quarterdeck of the
Monongahela
, where he was the executive officer. The explosion killed the captain and four other officers, but Dewey walked away unharmed. With the end of the Civil War, Dewey marched through a series of tedious assignments: lighthouse inspector, commander of a rickety steam sloop headed for Asia, Washington bureaucrat. His role in several innovations related to electric searchlights and signaling apparatus led to his appointment to the Board of Inspection and Survey, where he was responsible for inspecting all new warships. Though he remained desk-bound, it was here that he became familiar with the latest naval technology, including newfangled gadgets such as John Holland's submarine. A promotion to commodore seemed hollow,
until the post of commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Squadron opened up in May 1896.

Some might have balked at the prospect of leaving the nation's political power center for an isolated position in the Far East, but Dewey relished the autonomy. He sought the post after McKinley took office, then was given a boost by the new assistant secretary of the Navy, the bombastic Theodore Roosevelt, at whose urging McKinley appointed Dewey toward the end of the year. The new commander reported to his flagship, the
Olympia,
in anchorage at Nagasaki, Japan, and in February 1898 sailed for Hong Kong, where the squadron rendezvoused. It entered a period of hectic detailed preparation for battle, and the ships were repainted with new gray battle camouflage replacing admiralty white.
²
Sailing from the British colony on April 24, Dewey turned north for thirty miles, before resuming a southerly course to engage the Spanish.

The circumstances that led the United States and Spain to war could be described as romantic and high-minded by some, or manipulated and contrived by others. To a certain extent, both descriptions are true. Cuba had been chafing under the Spanish leash for years, and going as far back as the Ostend Manifesto in 1854, some Americans had wanted to either purchase or seize Cuba as an American territory. So real was the possibility of obtaining Cuba due to its proximity and Spain's weakness that all that was needed was a push from Southern politicians. Instead, they obsessed over acquiring Kansas as a slave state, leading historian David Potter to artfully describe the South as having “sacrificed the Cuban substance for a Kansan shadow.”
³
By the 1890s, as the United States turned its attention from Reconstruction to its western frontiers and burgeoning presence in the world, the tensions in Cuba seemed all the more relevant. Spain, after all, was a sagging European nation, hardly possessing power to tell Cubans what to do. American sugar and other business interests in Cuba felt directly threatened by insurrectionist activities, which would disappear if Spain was gone. Finally, the “Yellow Press,” sensing a new age of American influence on the globe, incessantly cranked out propaganda portraying brave Cuban freedom fighters battling the oppressive Spanish overlords. Perhaps none of this would have reached a boiling point without the De Lôme letter of February 9, 1898, wherein Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, the Spanish minister in Cuba, sent a personal letter that was (illegally) intercepted by Cuban revolutionaries and made public. In it, he referred to U.S. president William McKinley as “weak and catering to the rabble” and as standing well with
“the jingos of his party.”
⁴
When the battleship
Maine
was ordered to Havana as a show of America's interest in the island—and remained there peacefully for more than a week—the crisis seemed to dissipate. But on February 15, the
Maine
was rocked by an explosion, obliterating the forward third of the ship. A naval board of inquiry, which lacked technical expertise, conducted a four-week investigation that concluded a mine had destroyed the ship. Blame flew in all directions, but mostly it landed in the lap of the Spanish. Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt anticipated the moment when the United States would step onto the world stage.
⁵
While his superior, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, took four hours off on the afternoon of February 25 to visit an osteopath for a massage, Roosevelt ordered Commodore Dewey at Hong Kong to concentrate his squadron and prepare for war with Spain. The United States Navy owed Roosevelt a great deal, as well before hostilities with Spain, Long had acquiesced to Roosevelt's energetic rebuilding of the fleet. On April 11, McKinley asked Congress for a war declaration, but Congress delayed for two weeks until Spain made the matter moot by declaring war on the United States.

Based on the principles of Alfred Thayer Mahan, naval historian and president of the Naval War College, which called for a new blue-water navy capable of taking on the Europeans and the Japanese in a decisive battle of massed firepower, the doctrine Roosevelt and Dewey subscribed to emphasized long-range gunnery focused on capital ships. Dewey would soon reap the rewards not only of Mahan, but of Benjamin Harrison's Navy secretary, Benjamin F. Tracy. From a distance, Tracy could have been mistaken for Andrew Carnegie with his short-cropped beard and white hair. Like Roosevelt, he was a New Yorker, possessing great energy and vision. Working with Mahan, Tracy had supported construction of modern warships funded in the Navy Bill of 1890. The resulting battleships
Indiana
,
Massachusetts
, and
Oregon
were authorized and, two years later, joined by the
Iowa
.