Donnelly
APUSH
Chapter 17: Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad, 1890–1900
Part 1:
The 1890s witnessed multiple conflicts over American freedom. Many workers and
their allies came to believe that employers were denying them economic
independence and democratic self-government. Millions of farmers joined the
Populist movement to try to reverse their economic decline and take back the
government from what they viewed as powerful corporate interests. A new racial
system in the South confined African-Americans to second-class citizenship status,
denying them freedoms assumed by many Americans. Increasing immigration
sparked debates about whether the nation should continue to offer freedom to
foreigners. By the end of the decade, the nation, through the Spanish-American War,
began to rule overseas possessions in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Many
debated whether these new peoples would be subjects or citizens and whether the
United States was still a republic or had become an empire.
Like workers, farmers in the South and West faced growing economic insecurity as
agricultural prices fell and economic dependency on merchants and banks
increased. Sharecropping kept millions of black and white southern farmers in
poverty and an oversupply of world cotton led to dramatic price decreases that
threatened southern farmers’ livelihoods and property. These farmers soon blamed
their woes on railroads’ high freight rates, high interest-rate loans from bankers and
merchants, and the fiscal policies of the federal government that reduced the money
supply and farm prices. In response, farmers organized the Farmers’ Alliance in
Texas in the late 1870s, which quickly spread to dozens of states. The alliance at
first stayed away from politics, and established cooperatives called “exchanges” to
finance and market crops. But when banks refused to loan money for the exchanges,
the alliance proposed the “subtreasury plan”: the federal government would
establish warehouses where farmers could store their crops until sold, and by using
the crops as collateral, the government would issue loans directly to farmers at low
interest rates, ending their dependence on bankers and merchants for credit.
Demands for the subtreasury led the alliance to politics.
In the early 1890s, the alliance formed the People’s Party (called Populists), the
era’s greatest political insurgency. The Populists appealed, not just to farmers, but to
all “producers,” including miners, industrial workers, and small businessmen. But
most of its supporters were cotton and wheat farmers in the South and West. The
Populists organized massive educational campaigns using pamphlets, newspapers,
and revival-style mass meetings throughout the country. This was the last
expression of the nineteenth-century idea that America was a commonwealth of
small producers whose freedom rested on individual ownership of productive
property and the dignity of labor. But the Populists were forward-looking,
embracing scientific methods of agriculture and modern technologies that made
large-scale cooperatives possible, such as the railroad, telegraph, and national
market, and they wanted the federal government to regulate them for the public
interest, a very twentieth-century idea.
The Populists adopted a famous platform at their 1892 Omaha convention. It
proposed many measures to restore democracy and economic opportunity for
ordinary Americans, some of which came to pass in the next century, such as direct
election of U.S. senators, government control of currency, a graduated income tax,
low-cost public financing for farmers, and workers’ right to organize unions. The
platform also called for national ownership of railroads to allow farmers to
inexpensively get their crops to market.
In some parts of the South, the Populists heroically tried to unite black and white
farmers on a common political and economic program, but the barriers were too
great. Racism, the legacy of the Civil War, and the fact that many white Populists
were landowning farmers while black farmers were tenants and agricultural
laborers facing a different set of problems all militated against such an alliance.
Black farmers organized their own Cotton Farmer’s Alliance, whose strikes were
suppressed by white authorities, some of whom were even sympathetic to white
Populists. While white Populists were hardly anti-racist, some recognized that
whites would have to appeal to blacks in order to break the Democratic Party’s hold
on the South and its opposition to reform, and in a few places, like North Carolina,
white and black Populists together won state elections. In most of the South,
however, Democrats defeated the Populists by mobilizing whites to vote against
“Negro supremacy,” intimidating blacks, and rigging elections. The Populists also
engaged the reform efforts of farmer and middle-class women, and endorsed
women’s suffrage in many states. In 1892, the Populist candidate for president,
James Weaver, won more than 1 million votes, and the party carried five western
states and elected three governors and fifteen members of Congress.
When a severe depression in 1893 intensified conflict between labor and capital, it
seemed that the Populists might gain the votes of industrial workers who had
traditionally supported the two major parties. Employers used state or federal
authority to protect their economic power and suppress labor unrest. In May 1894,
the federal government dispersed Coxey’s Army, a march of the unemployed led by
Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey that converged on the nation’s capital.
Also in 1894, workers in Pullman, Illinois, who manufactured railroad cars for the
Pullman company went on strike against pay cuts. When the 150,000 members of
the American Railway Union, a union of skilled and unskilled workers led by the
charismatic Eugene V. Debs, refused to work on Pullman cars and thus paralyzed the
nation’s rail traffic, President Grover Cleveland won an injunction from federal
courts that ordered the strikers back to work. Violence between strikers and troops
from Maine to California left 34 dead, and when union leaders, including Debs, were
imprisoned for violating the injunction, the strike collapsed. The Supreme Court
reaffirmed Debs’s sentence in a famous ruling approving the use of injunctions
against strikes. Debs claimed that powerful capitalists aligned with state and
national government now infringed on Americans’ freedoms.
2
In 1894, the Populists doubled their efforts to appeal to industrial workers, and in
state and congressional elections that year, with the depression worsening, voters
abandoned the Democrats. The Populist vote in rural areas increased, but most
workers did not vote Populist. Few Populist demands spoke to workers’ needs, as
their calls for higher agricultural prices would raise food costs for workers and
diminish the value of their wages, and the movement’s Protestant and revivalist
culture alienated Catholic and immigrant workers. Urban workers instead voted for
the Republicans, who argued that higher tariff rates would revive the economy by
protecting American manufacturing and workers from imports and cheap foreign
labor. The Republicans gained a massive 177 seats in the House.
In 1896, the Democrats and Populists united behind presidential candidate William
Jennings Bryan, a young congressman from Nebraska. Bryan had won the
Democratic nomination in a speech that captured the fears and hopes of farmers.
Bryan called for the “free coinage” of silver (the unrestricted minting of silver
money), and he used Biblical imagery to condemn the gold standard in perhaps the
most famous lines of political oratory in American history: “You shall not press
down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind
upon a cross of gold.” Bryan’s demand for free silver was the latest expression of a
long-standing view that increasing the amount of currency in circulation would
raise the prices of farmers’ crops and make it easier for them to pay their debts.
Bryan’s nomination represented a shift in Democratic leadership away from elites
live Cleveland who had long been tied to eastern businessmen. But Bryan’s appeal
was highly religious and revivalist, and influenced by the Social Gospel.
Part 2
Republicans argued gold was the only “honest” currency, and that abandoning it
would prevent economic recovery by scaring creditors away from making loans.
They nominated Ohio governor William McKinley, who passed the highly
protectionist McKinley Tariff in Congress in 1890. The 1896 election was the first
modern presidential election. The Republicans poured an unprecedented amount of
money into a highly organized campaign that used a massive educational effort
directed against the Democrats’ calls for free silver. The results showed a nation
divided along regional lines. McKinley won the election with the votes of industrial
states in the Northeast and Midwest. Labor conflict did not produce political results.
Party politics seemed to mute class conflict, not reinforce it. Industrial America,
from workers to industrialists, voted solidly Republican, and continued to do so for
years. McKinley’s victory shattered the political stalemate of the previous twenty
years, launched a period of Republican dominance that would last until the 1930s,
and marked a height in voter participation, which ever since has been in decline.
Populism’s defeat in the South allowed for the imposition of a new racial order. The
Redeemers, a coalition of merchants, planters, and businessmen who ruled the
region after 1877 and claimed to have “redeemed” the south from the corruption
and horrors of “black rule,” worked to reverse Reconstruction’s achievements. They
reduced taxes and public spending, and cut back public schools, which especially
3
hurt blacks. New laws allowed the arrest of those without employment and
increased punishment for petty crimes. As the South’s prison population rose,
convicts, mostly poor blacks, were rented out to railroad, miners, and lumber
companies as cheap, involuntary labor, at a high profit. Labor unions in the South
assailed the convict labor system.
In the 1880s, Atlanta editor Henry Grady relentlessly promoted the dream of a New
South in which industrialization and agricultural diversification would deliver
prosperity to the region. While planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered,
the region as a whole became more impoverished. While mining and textiles
developed in some areas, the region’s low wages and taxes and convict labor did not
spur much economic development. By 1900, except for the major iron and steel city
of Birmingham, Alabama, southern cities had little industry and mostly exported
cotton, tobacco, and rice. The South as a whole stayed dependent on the North for
capital and manufactured goods.
Black farmers, the most disadvantaged rural southerners, suffered the most from
the region’s economic condition. In the Upper South, mines, iron mills, and tobacco
factories offered some jobs to black workers, and some black farmers owned land.
In the rice kingdom of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the plantations went to
ruin, and many blacks acquired land and became self-sufficient farmers. In most of
the Deep South, however, blacks owned a smaller percentage of land in 1900 than
they had in the late 1870s. In southern cities, institutions such as schools, churches,
businesses, and clubs created by blacks during Reconstruction formed the basis of
dynamic black urban communities. But the labor market was racially divided, and
black men were excluded from skilled and professional occupations, while black
women were limited to wage-work as domestic servants, and were excluded from
occupations open to white women. Most unions in the South excluded blacks from
membership.
Blacks, trapped at the bottom of an economically stagnant South, emigrated by the
tens of thousands. In 1879 and 1880, nearly 60,000 African-Americans moved to
Kansas, seeking political rights, safety, and education and economic opportunity. Its
participants called the move the Exodus, named after the biblical account of the
Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt. But despite worsening conditions, most blacks
had no choice but to stay in the South. While economic expansion took place in
Northern cities, most employers there offered jobs only to white migrants from
rural areas and European immigrants, not blacks. Only in World War I did jobs open
up for blacks, helping spur a massive movement northward called the Great
Migration.
Despite Redemption, blacks continued to hold office and vote in the South after
1877. Even while Democrats restructured southern politics to limit blacks’ political
power and representation, blacks continued to hold office in states and Congress.
But black political opportunities diminished in this period. Talented and ambitious
black men increasingly avoided politics and entered business, law, or the church.
4
Black women became political leaders, and “respectable” middle-class black women
pressed for women’s rights and racial progress through organizations like the
National Association of Colored Women, formed in 1896. In some states, however,
blacks continued to vote and Republicans stayed competitive with Democrats. By
the 1890s, however, Populist and Republican-led state governments, such as North
Carolina’s, fell to racial violence and electoral fraud.
Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional
provisions intended to eliminate the black vote. Because the Fifteenth Amendment
prohibited the use of race as a qualification for the suffrage, southern lawmakers
designed laws that seemed color-blind, but were meant to keep blacks from voting.
Most popular were the poll tax (a fee citizens must pay to be eligible to vote),
literacy tests, and a requirement that a voter show an “understanding” of the state
constitution. Although some white leaders presented disenfranchisement as a “good
government” measure that would end fraud and violence in elections, it was a
means for ending black participation in politics, and it worked—by 1940, only 3
percent of adult blacks in the South were registered to vote. Poor and illiterate
whites were also disenfranchised by these laws. Disenfranchisement led to a
generation of southern “demagogue” politicians who mobilized white voters by
appealing to their racism. And disenfranchisement could not have occurred without
Northern approval. In 1891, the Senate defeated a proposal to protect black voting
rights in the South, and the Supreme Court approved disenfranchisement laws.
According to the Fourteenth Amendment, any state that deprived its male citizens of
the franchise was supposed to lose part of its representation in Congress, but this
was not held to apply to blacks. Thus southern congressmen had far greater power
than their small electorates warranted.
Alongside disenfranchisement in the 1890s, segregation was imposed throughout
the South. Laws and local customs that required separating the races had existed in
the North before the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, southern schools and
other institutions had been segregated. In the 1880s, though, race relations in the
South were fluid, with some railroads, theaters, and hotels admitting blacks and
whites, while others discriminated. In 1883, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil
Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination by hotels and other
public facilities, and held that the Fourteenth Amendment banned unequal
treatment by state authorities, not private business. In the landmark 1896 ruling
Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court approved state laws requiring separate facilities for
blacks and whites, arguing that segregated facilities did not discriminate as long as
they were “separate but equal.”
States responded to Plessy by passing laws requiring segregation in every part of
southern life, in schools, hospitals, toilets, and cemeteries. Despite the doctrine of
“separate but equal,” facilities for blacks were either inferior or nonexistent.
Segregation was an important part of a system of white supremacy in the South, in
which each part, such as disenfranchisement, economic inequality, inferior
education, reinforced the others. Segregation did not so much keep races apart as
5
ensure that whites would have the advantage wherever they did meet. A racial
social etiquette developed, in which blacks had to give way to whites on sidewalks
and could not raise their voices at whites or otherwise be assertive.
Blacks who challenged white supremacy or refused to accept the indignities of
segregation faced political and legal power and immediate violent reprisal. In each
year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, most of them black, were
lynched (killed by a mob) in the South. Lynching continued well into the twentieth
century. Some were secret, others were public and promoted by organizers and the
media. Lynchings often resulted in atrocities against the victims, and law
enforcement rarely prevented lynching or punished lynchers. Many victims were
accused of having raped or assaulted white women, an allegation often without
basis. But many white southerners considered preserving white womanhood a
sufficient basis for extrajudicial murder. Lynching is virtually unknown as a
phenomenon anywhere else in the world.
The reconciliation of the North and South in the 1880s and 1890s came at the cost of
widespread hopes for racial equality that had existed during and after the Civil War.
In popular literature and at veterans’ reunions, the war came to be remembered as a
tragic quarrel between brothers, in which blacks had played no role, and which had
been caused by clashes over states’ rights and the preservation of the Union, not
slavery. Reconstruction came to be universally seen as a period of black misrule
imposed on the South by the North, a view which legitimized disenfranchisement
and segregation in the South. Southern governments and schools celebrated the
“Lost Cause” of the Confederacy and condemned the evils of Reconstruction.
Part 3
The effective nullification of Reconstruction-era laws and amendments and the
making of blacks into second-class citizens reflected trends across the nation.
America seemed to be fracturing along racial and class lines in the late nineteenth
century. One observer noted that the result was a far-reaching obsession with
redrawing the boundary of freedom by identifying and excluding those unworthy of
freedom’s blessings. Many Americans seemed to adopt a more exclusive definition
of nationhood and national identity.
Immigrants were increasingly seen as a threat to Americans’ sense of identity and
traditions. This was largely due to a change in the sources of immigration to the
United States. Despite prolonged depression, 3.5 million immigrants came to the
United States in the 1890s, looking for industrial work in the Northeast and
Midwest. They came not from Ireland, England, Germany, or Scandinavia, as had
earlier European immigrants, but from nations in southern and eastern Europe,
particularly Italy and the Russian and Austo-Hungarian empires. These “new
immigrants” were seen as members of distinct “races” whose lower level of
civilization was held to explain their acceptance of low-paying jobs and their innate
criminality. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894, called
6
for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the country. This
measure was adopted by Congress in 1897 but vetoed by President Cleveland,
though most states adopted the secret ballot as a means of disenfranchising
immigrants, many of whom did not read English and thus had had their ballots cast
by party workers. States stopped allowing immigrants to vote before they had
become citizens and imposed new residency and literacy requirements. Along with
black disenfranchisement in the South, suffrage seemed more and more a privilege,
not a right.
Although single Chinese men had been welcomed as cheap contract labor in the
West, when Chinese families started to migrate in the 1870s, Congress barred
women from migrating. In 1883, Congress temporarily excluded all Chinese
immigrants from entering the country. This was the first time that race had been
used to exclude an entire group of people from entering the U.S., and it was made
permanent in 1902. When exclusion occurred, more than 100,000 people of Chinese
descent lived in America, mostly on the West Coast, and they suffered intense
discrimination and occasional mob violence. States like California discriminated
against the Chinese in education and other areas. While the Supreme Court upheld
the right of Chinese to pursue a living and the citizenship of Chinese born in the
United States, the Court also affirmed the right of Congress to erect racial
restrictions on immigration.
Social movements that helped to expand nineteenth-century boundaries of freedom
now revised their goals so they could be achieved in the new economic and
intellectual environment. Some black leaders, for example, started to emphasize
self-help and individual self-advancement into middle-class America as an
alternative to politics. Booker T. Washington symbolized this change in black life. In
1895, Washington delivered a speech at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition urging blacks
to accommodate segregation and cease agitation for civil and political rights. He
founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a center for vocational training
(education for jobs, not broad liberal arts), as he believed obtaining farms and
skilled work was more important than full citizenship for blacks. He told a white
audience in Atlanta, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the
fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Whites who
wanted a docile labor force that would not form unions and work cheaply embraced
his vision, while many blacks supported him from a belief that direct assaults on
white power were failures and that blacks should build up their own communities.
The dissolution of the Knights of Labor and the rise of the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) in the 1890s signaled in the labor movement a similar move away from
broad reforms to more limited aims. Strikes like the Pullman strike seemed to show
that direct confrontations with capital devastated workers’ organizations. Unions,
declared Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founder and longtime president, should avoid
seeking economic independence, politics, or the utopian goals of groups like the
Knights. Gompers and the AFL thought unions should simply bargain with
7
employers for higher wages and better working conditions. Like Washington,
Gompers used the language of the era’s business culture; his strategy was known as
“business unionism.” He embraced the idea of freedom of contract and turned it into
an argument against the interference of judges with workers’ right to organize
unions.
In the 1890s, union membership recovered from its decline in the late 1880s. But
the AFL unions that grew abandoned the Knights’ ideal of labor solidarity, and
restricted its membership to skilled workers, a small minority of workers, which
effectively excluded most unskilled workers, who were mostly blacks, women, and
new European immigrants. The AFL became strong in trades with highly skilled
workers, like printing and construction, but was weak or nonexistent in basic
industries like steel or the factories that dominated the economy.
Changes in the woman’s movement reflected the same expansion of activity and
narrowing boundaries. The 1890s began what would be called the “women’s era”—
three decades in which women, though still denied the vote, had greater
opportunities for economic independence and a role in public life. Nearly 5 million
women worked for wages by 1900, and though most were young, unmarried, and
worked in traditional women’s jobs such as domestic service and garments, a new
generation of college-educated women were taking better-paid white-collar jobs.
Women also had more influence in politics and society, through a number of new
organizations, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874,
which moved from demanding prohibition laws to demanding comprehensive
economic and political reform, including the vote. Yet, feminism in this period
moved away demanding equal rights to claims more in line with dominant racial
and ethnic norms. While “equal rights feminism” was never fully repudiated, the
mostly native-born, white and middle-class women who dominated the suffrage
movement laid claim to the vote as members of a “superior race,” and complained
that unworthy non-whites, such as immigrants, had the vote while white women did
not.
Part 4
America’s narrowed definition of nationhood was projected abroad in the late
1890s, as the United States became an imperial power in the world. The last quarter
of the nineteenth century is known as the age of imperialism, when rival European
empires divided large parts of the world among themselves. In this period, the
United States was considered a second-rate power and not included in imperial
competition and diplomacy. Although large land-based empires such as the Russian,
Ottoman, and Chinese empires and overseas empires such as the British, French,
and Spanish, dominated much of the nineteenth century, after 1870 a “new
imperialism” emerged, dominated by European powers and Japan. Belgium, Great
Britain, and France consolidated their colonies in Africa, and Germany acquired
colonies on that continent. The British and Russians intensified their struggle to
8
control Central Asia, and all European powers competed to control parts of China.
By the early twentieth century, most of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific
had been divided among these empires, each of which justified its domination of
other peoples in the name of bringing civilization to backward peoples who
required instruction in Western values, government, Christianity, and labor
practices.
Territorial expansion had been part of American life from the beginning, but the
1890s marked a major transformation of America’s relationship to the rest of the
world. Americans more and more saw their nation as an emerging world power.
Until the 1890s, the expansion of the United States had been in North America,
though the Monroe Doctrine shows that many Americans had seen the Western
Hemisphere as an American sphere of influence. Americans talked of acquiring
Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other territories, but the only territory acquired
after the Civil War was Alaska, regarded by many as worthless. Most who looked
overseas wanted to expand trade, not take new possessions. Many farmers and
manufacturers believed that America’s production could no longer be absorbed in
domestic markets, and thought “overproduction” was causing recurrent economic
crisis. They wanted foreign customers for their products.
Christian missionaries actively spread American influence overseas in the late 19th
century. Groups like the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions believed
it was their mission to prepare the world for Christ’s second coming and enlighten
the heathens abroad. A few late-19th century thinkers actively promoted American
expansionism. Josiah Strong, a well-known Congregationalist clergyman, tried to
update manifest destiny in his book, Our Country (1885). Here he argued that AngloSaxon Americans, who had shown their ability for liberty and self-government in
North America, should spread their institutions and values to “inferior races”
overseas whom, he suggested, would benefit American manufacturers by becoming
new consumers of their goods. Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea
Power Upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large
merchant fleet engaged in international trade and a powerful navy to protect it,
which required overseas bases. Mahan insisted that with the western frontier
closed, Americans had to look overseas for opportunity. Mahan influenced James G.
Blaine, President Harrison’s Secretary of State, who advocated the acquisition of
Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba for naval bases. In 1893, American planters in Hawaii
organized a rebellion there that overthrew the native Hawaiian government of
Queen Liliuokalani. Though Harrison asked the Senate to pass a treaty of
annexation, President Cleveland withdrew it. In 1898, during the Spanish-American
War, the United States annexed the Hawaii islands. The depression that began in
1893 intensified Americans’ belief that an aggressive foreign policy would create
markets for manufactured goods.
All these factors contributed to America’s emergence as a world power in the
Spanish-American War of 1898. But the war’s immediate cause was Cubans’ long
struggle for national independence from Spain. Ten years of guerrilla warfare began
in 1868, and revolt resumed in 1895. Reports of Cuban civilians suffering in Spanish
9
detention camps aroused outrage and sympathy in America. Cries for intervention
increased after February 15, 1898, when an explosion, probably accidental,
destroyed the Maine, an American battleship in Havana harbor, killing 270 sailors.
When Spain rejected American demands for a cease-fire and eventual Cuban
independence, the Congress approved President McKinley’s request for a
declaration of war, which was justified as a humanitarian intervention. Congress
adopted the Teller Amendment, declaring that the United States had no intention of
annexing or dominating Cuba. The war was brief and resulted in only a few hundred
American casualties, what one official called a “splendid little war.” The war’s most
important battle actually happened in the Pacific Ocean, in Manila Bay in the
Philippines, a Spanish colony, where Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish
fleet.
The most publicized land battle of the war involved the assault on San Juan Hill,
outside Santiago, Cuba, made by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Roosevelt was
pro-expansionist and believed war would unite the nation and its men, whose
masculinity he thought had suffered in the economic crisis of the 1890s. Although
Roosevelt organized the Rough Riders to be a cross-section of America, it excluded
blacks, and Roosevelt neglected to mention that black troops had actually reached
the top of San Juan Hill before his troops. But Roosevelt’s exploits made him a
national hero, and after being elected New York’s governor that fall, he became
McKinley’s vice-president in 1900.
The war to liberate Cuba soon became an imperial mission that culminated with the
creation of a small overseas American empire. McKinley would not return the
Philippines to Spain or hand it over to the Filipinos who had fought for
independence, because he didn’t believe they could govern themselves. He also
spoke of Americans’ duty to “uplift and civilize” the Filipinos and train them to rule
themselves. In the treaty ending the war, the United States acquired the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, and Guam. Before McKinley recognized Cuba’s independence, he forced
that island’s new government to approve the Platt Amendment to the new Cuban
constitution, which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba with its
military whenever it saw fit. Cuban patriots were extremely disappointed by what
they saw as America’s betrayal, and such resentments would help inspire the
revolution in Cuba fifty years later.
Americans’ interest in their new insular possessions had more to do with trade than
settlement or extracting resources, however, and they sought Cuba and Puerto Rico,
and in the Pacific, the Philippines, Guam and Hawaii, as outposts for trade to Latin
America and Asia. In 1899, secretary of state John Hay declared the Open Door
Policy, demanding that European powers which had divided China into commercial
spheres of influence allow equal trade access to America. Western influence and
presence in China soon led to the Boxer Rebellion, in which Christian Chinese and
foreigners were targeted by Chinese nationalists, and American troops helped quell
the uprising.
10
While many Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans had welcomed American
intervention as a means to wrest independence from Spain, continued American
control, direct and indirect, quickly alienated these patriots and others. After victory
in the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the independence movement
there, established a provisional government with a constitution modeled on that of
America. When McKinley decided to retain possession of the islands, the Filipinos
rebelled. A second longer and far more bloody war ensued, lasting from 1899 to
1903, and costing the lives of more than 100,000 Filipinos and 4,200 Americans. The
war was hotly debated in the United States, where reports of atrocities against
Filipino civilians, including burning villages, torture, and rape and executions,
seemed to damage America’s image as a liberator. McKinley’s administration
justified the war as an effort to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos
(most residents were already Catholics). The American colonial government, led by
William Howard Taft, quickly modernized the islands with railroads, schools and
public health officials, and modern agriculture. But American policies in its new
possessions tended to favor land-based local elites, whether native-born or
American, and usually created persistent poverty for the majority.
American rule came with American racial attitudes. In an 1899 poem, British writer
Rudyard Kipling asked the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” of
imperialism. American supporters of empire felt that white domination of nonwhite peoples represented the progress of civilization. But America’s new empire
sparked an intense debate about the relationship between democracy, race, and
American citizenship. America’s governmental system had no provision for
permanent colonies, and the right of every people to self-government was a key
principle of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s idea of America as an
“empire of liberty” assumed that new territories would eventually be admitted as
new states, and its residents would be American citizens.
Yet after the Spanish-American War, nationalism, democracy, and American
freedom seemed aligned with ideas of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Both Democratic
and Republican leaders who wanted to retain the new possessions feared negative
consequences of incorporating “alien races” into America. The Foraker Act of 1900
declared Puerto Rico an “insular” territory different from previous territories in the
American West. Its 1 million inhabitants were defined as citizens of Puerto Rico, not
the United States, and were denied a future path to statehood. Filipinos were given
the same status. In a series of cases decided between 1901 and 1904 known as the
“Insular Cases,” the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not fully apply to
overseas territories held by the United States, thus sharply limiting the extent of
American freedom. Congress had to recognize the fundamental rights of these new
peoples, but could otherwise govern them as it saw fit for an indefinite time. Hawaii
became a traditional territory and was admitted as a state in 1959. The Philippines
became independent in 1946. Although Congress gave American citizenship to
Puerto Ricans in 1917, Puerto Rico has the status of a “commonwealth,” neither a
state or a territory, which has its own government but lacks a voice in Congress and
presidential elections.
11
America’s racial attitudes had a global impact in the age of imperialism. Global
concerns about immigration, race relations, and the “white man’s burden” seemed
to inspire solidarity among “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Chinese exclusion and
segregation in the Jim Crow South influenced discriminatory laws in Canada, South
Africa, and Australia. Other nations seemed to learn from Reconstruction’s “failure”
that multiracial democracy was impossible.
America’s new empire caused intense debate and controversy. Opponents formed
the Anti-Imperialist League, which united writers and social reformers who wanted
reforms at home, businessmen who thought overseas empire was too expensive,
and racists who did not want non-whites brought within the United States. The
League warned Americans that empire was incompatible with democracy and urged
Americans to help Puerto Ricans and Filipinos gain their independence. In 1900, the
Democrats once again nominated William Jennings Bryan to run against President
McKinley, and the Democrats’ platform opposed the Philippine War for militarily
subjugating a foreign people demanding “liberty and self-government.” The
president of the Anti-Imperialist League declared that the nation’s most pressing
question was whether the nation would be a “republic or empire?”
Proponents of American empire embraced the language of freedom, too. Senator
Albert Beveridge of Indiana argued that America sought abroad not material
resources or national power but desired only to bring freedom to other peoples.
America practiced a “benevolent” imperialism that would uplift backward cultures
and spread liberty. America, Beveridge argued, only went abroad for trade, not to
rule other nations. McKinley, benefiting from economic recovery and a swell of
patriotism from winning the Spanish-American war, beat Bryan in 1900.
At the start of the twentieth century, America seemed ready to become a great
power. Writers at home and abroad predicted that American influence would soon
pervade the globe. In his book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, the grandson of
John Quincy Adams, predicted that America’s economic might would make it
“outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.” This did not happen until
after World War II, but the characteristics that would constitute America’s global
strength were already present in 1900. The United States had already surpassed
Britain, France, and Germany in industrial production, the merger movement of
1897–1904 left much of the economy controlled by corporations, politics had
stabilized and the white North and South had reconciled, while hardened racial
lines—segregation, Chinese exclusion, Indian reservations—limited the boundaries
of citizenship and freedom. Yet questions central to nineteenth-century debates
over freedom, such as the relationship between economic and political liberty, the
role of government in creating the social conditions for freedom, and the definition
of citizenship and national identity, had not been finally answered. They would
continue to be central to American life in the twentieth century.
12
13