From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (56 page)

The years 1900 to 1912 also witnessed the first stirring of the revolutions that would rock the twentieth century. The war with Japan helped spark an abortive revolution in Russia in 1905, a forerunner of the more radical upheaval to come. Republicans overthrew the decaying Manchu regime in China in 1911, setting off nearly four decades of internal strife and agitation against foreign domination. Revolutions also erupted in Mexico and Iran. In all these early twentieth-century upheavals, peasants, industrial workers, the petty bourgeoisie, and provincial elites challenged established governments while meeting the threats posed by foreign powers and each other. Their success was limited, but they hinted at the shakiness of the established order and the turmoil ahead.
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In terms of size and population, the United States was clearly a great power. Between 1900 and 1912, the last of the original forty-eight states were admitted to the union, completing the organization of the continental United States. The territory of the mainland exceeded three million square miles; the new overseas empire covered 125,000 square miles extending halfway across the world. A still rapidly expanding population surpassed seventy-seven million in 1901 and was becoming daily more diverse. Almost eight million immigrants entered the United States during the Roosevelt presidency alone. By 1910, America's twelve largest cities
had populations one-third foreign born. New York, it was said, "had more Italians than Naples, more Germans than Hamburg, twice as many Irish as Dublin, and more Jews than the whole of western Europe."
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The influx of these new immigrants inflamed nativist passions and significantly influenced U.S. foreign relations.

Economically, the United States was first among equals. Per capita income was the highest in the world, although the average concealed gross and growing disparities between rich and poor. Agricultural and industrial productivity soared; the national wealth doubled between 1900 and 1912. A favorable balance of trade permitted a dramatic rise in foreign investments—from $700 million in 1897 to $3.5 billion by 1914. A once yawning gap between what Americans owed abroad and were owed closed by that same year, eliciting predictions that New York would soon be the center of world finance. "London and Berlin are standing in perfectly abject terror," novelist Henry James observed in 1901, "watching Pierpont Morgan's nose flaming over the waves, and approaching horribly nearer their bank vaults."
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The consolidation of industry that began in the late nineteenth century continued apace in the early twentieth. More and more corporations fell under the control of the great New York banking houses.

The nation's political life centered around adaptations to these changes. The Progressive movement comprised an almost bewildering mélange of sometimes conflicting groups. What they shared was a faith in progress and a conviction that problems could be solved by professional expertise. The progressives set out to deal with the disorders of the 1890s by applying modern problem-solving techniques. They put great stock in bureaucracy and saw government as the essential instrument of order and progress.
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The American mood at the turn of the century was one of unbounded optimism and unalloyed exuberance. The return of prosperity salved the wounds opened in the 1890s. Americans again marveled at their productivity and gloried in their material well-being. The defeat of Spain filled the nation with pride. "There is not a man here who does not feel four hundred percent bigger in 1900 . . . ," New York senator Chauncey Depew observed, "[now] that he is a citizen of a country that has become a world power."
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Americans, and indeed some Europeans, more than ever
believed that their way of doing things would prevail across the world. Woodrow Wilson told a 1906 audience that the great vitality of the United States would thrust it into new frontiers beyond Alaska and the Philippines: "Soon . . . the shores of Asia and then Autocratic Europe shall hear us knocking at their back door, demanding admittance for American ideas, customs and arts."
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The first generation of historians of U.S. foreign policy shared this excitement for the nation's new role in the world. Archibald Cary Coolidge hailed the emergence of his country as one of those nations "directly interested in all parts of the world and whose voices must be heard."
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The internationalization of America and the Americanization of the world was under way by 1900. Another spurt in tourism manifested the nation's emerging internationalism. The growing ease and luxury and declining cost of travel increased the number of Americans going to Europe from 100,000 in 1885 to nearly 250,000 by 1914. Americans proudly referred to themselves as the "world's wanderers" and boasted that in the "century of travel, Americans are the nation of travelers." Some tourists approached Europe much like their ancestors, their experiences abroad confirming their Americanness. Others viewed travel as a way to broaden their horizons and spread American values and influence. Some hoped to liberalize and Americanize the Old World—even to improve French hygiene by flaunting the newest brand of American-made soap. Some saw travel as a way to promote peace, reasoning that the better people got to know each other the more difficult it would be to go to war. Most saw increased travel as a manifestation of their nation's power and influence. "To be a world power was to travel," it was said, "and to travel was to be a world power." Whatever the rationalization, travel influenced Americans' views of other nations and of their own place in the world. It shaped the culture from which twentieth-century policymakers and an elite keenly interested in foreign policy public would emerge. In the spirit of the age, it led to calls for a more professional foreign service, even for improved foreign language skills.
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Once scorned by Europeans for its cultural backwardness, the United States by the turn of the century had assumed an important role in the international cultural establishment. American artists and writers took advantage of French encouragement of the arts; wealthy Americans sponsored such artists as Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne. Henry James and James McNeill Whistler were among England's cultural elite. Americans bought and collected foreign art. J. P. Morgan acquired so many treasures that Europeans began to impose limits on art exports. Charles Freer's gift of Asian art spurred the creation of the first national gallery.
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In terms of its technological and manufacturing feats, the United States was widely recognized as
the
world power by 1900. At the Paris Universal Exposition that year, a huge dome topped by an oversized eagle towering above everything else marked the U.S. pavilion. It contained six thousand exhibits, second only to France, displaying everything from steam engines to meats. "It seems almost incredible," reveled a
Munsey's Magazine
writer, "that we should be sending cutlery to Sheffield, pig iron to Birmingham, silks to France, watch cases to Switzerland . . . or building sixty locomotives for British railways."
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Europeans expressed fascination with U.S. methods of mass production and especially Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific business management. Some urged their emulation. Others warned that to copy U.S. techniques would lead to shoddy products. Europeans also feared the mass consumption and democracy that were presumably the inevitable by-products of mass production and would, they fretted, undermine their high culture and threaten their elites. British journalist William Stead's 1901 best seller
The Americanization of the World
sounded an alarm bell that would echo repeatedly throughout the century.
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United States citizens, sometimes working with the government, eagerly took up the cause of humanitarian relief for peoples stricken by natural disaster. The wealth generated by the industrial revolution created a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Many citizens also agreed that their nation's status as a world power entailed global responsibilities. Modern communications brought to their attention disasters in far-flung areas; modern transportation made it possible to provide timely assistance. San Franciscans in the wake of their own horrendous earthquake in 1906
contributed $10,000 to victims of a similar disaster in Chile. Dr. Louis Klopsch of the
Christian Herald
, called the "twentieth-century captain of philanthropy," used his paper to collect contributions for famine relief in China and Scandinavia. In 1902, Roosevelt set aside $500,000 for victims of an earthquake on the islands of Martinique and St. Vincent. In 1907 and 1909, sailors from U.S. Navy ships helped with earthquake relief in Jamaica and Messina, Italy. Reorganized in 1905 under a congressional charter giving it status as a semiofficial government agency, the American Red Cross took the lead in many emergency operations. America's "habit of giving" saved countless lives and provided hope across the world. United States aid provoked some criticism, even from recipients, but also earned praise. According to the empress dowager of China, America was "known as the one foreign nation that is really a friend and whose people though barbarians, are really kind."
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The United States' rise to world power led to increased citizen activism on foreign policy issues. Americans agitated for reform of and even revolution against the oppressive tsarist government of Russia, in 1911 pressuring Congress into abrogating the commercial treaty of 1832. They took up the cause of world peace. In 1910, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie established the first foundation with an "explicit international orientation." Funded with $10 million of U.S. Steel stock, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sought to promote peace through law, international exchanges, and research.
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Increased citizen activism led to growing interest in and involvement with foreign policy issues on the part of American women. The realm of diplomacy, like that of politics, remained an exclusive male preserve, but women moved easily from agitation for suffrage and temperance at home into causes abroad. Philanthropy was more open to female participation than the political system. Reformer Alice Stone Blackwell took a leading role in efforts to promote revolution in Russia, even advocating a form of terrorism.
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Women had early taken up the cause of world peace, urging arbitration of the controversy with Britain in 1895 lest men "deluge the world in blood for a strip of land in Venezuela." After the turn of the century, they campaigned for disarmament and international arbitration of disputes and to publicize their cause designated May 15 as "Peace Day."
In promoting peace, they took a position at odds with their male counterparts, singling out what they saw as misguided and dangerous notions of manliness. Deploring modern industrialism, which they viewed as the triumph of male values, they fought against military appropriations, the sale of real and toy guns, and even the sport of boxing.
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In an age of internationalization, even African Americans, the most oppressed of American minorities, looked abroad. Leading educational institutions like Hampton Institute in Virginia and Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, each committed to uplifting African Americans by teaching self-help, industrial arts, and Christian morality, sought to project their values abroad. Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton, envisioned a "Girdle Around the World" and encouraged Hawaiians, Africans, Cubans, even Japanese minority groups to come to Hampton, learn its ways, and return home to uplift their peoples by introducing a "little Hampton" there. Booker T. Washington sought to spread his Tuskegee model to Africa by bringing students to the Alabama school and dispatching Tuskegee students to Togo, Sudan, Liberia, and South Africa. Like elites at home, the colonial authorities in Africa found Washington's ideas and programs congenial as ways to help manage the "natives" and make them more productive workers.
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As on domestic issues, the more radical W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, took issue with the Tuskegee-Hampton approach. Linking discrimination against African Americans at home with the exploitation of black people, especially Africans, abroad, he vigorously advocated an end to racial oppression at home and imperialism abroad.
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Although thrust into office by an assassin's bullet, Theodore Roosevelt perfectly fitted early twentieth-century America. He had traveled through Europe and the Middle East as a young man, broadening his horizons and expanding his views of other peoples and nations. An avid reader and prolific writer, he was abreast of the major intellectual currents of his day
and had close ties to the international literary and political elite. From his early years, he had taken a keen interest in world affairs. He was a driving force behind, as well as an active participant in, the "large policy" of the 1890s. In his first address to Congress, in December 1901, he preached the gospel of international noblesse oblige: "Whether we desire it or not, we must henceforth recognize that we have international duties no less than international rights."
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The youngest president to this time, Roosevelt brought to the office a flamboyant style that neatly reflected the America of his time. A "steam engine in trousers," he was called, "an avalanche that the sound of your voice might loosen," and his youthful exuberance and frenetic energy mirrored the pent-up vitality of his emerging nation. Henry James labeled him "Theodore Rex" and described him as "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and monstrous noise."
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A supreme egoist—his memoir of the war with Spain should have been titled "Alone in Cuba," one wit observed—he loved to be the center of attention. At the beginning of the age of mass media, he and his attractive family made excellent copy, fascinating and captivating the public and making TR, as he was called, the first politician to attain celebrity status. Building on precedents set by McKinley, he mastered the art of press relations and especially the press release to monopolize the news.
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