Introduction
America wasn’t really into foreign expansion after the Civil War because they were still dealing with Reconstruction and stuff like that. However, at the end of the 19th century there was a momentous shift in U.S foreign policy.
America Turns Outward
Farmers and factory owners began to look for markets beyond American shores as agricultural and industrial production boomed. The country was bursting with a new power from the growth in population, wealth, and productive capacity.
Overseas markets might provide a safety valve to relieve the pressures of labor violence and agrarian unrest.
The “yellow press” of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hurst described foreign exploits as manly adventures.
Missionaries, inspired by books like the Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, looked overseas for new souls to harvest. Strong talked about the superiority of the Angelo-Saxon civilization and summoned Americans to spread their religion and values to the “backward people.”
Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were interpreting Darwinism to mean that the Earth belonged to the strong and fit. This view was strengthened as:
Europe partitioned Africa in the 1880s.
Japan, Germany, and Russia extorted concessions from the Chinese empire.
The development of a new steel navy also focused attention overseas. Captain Alfred Thayar Mahan’s book of 1890, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, said that control of the sea was key to world dominance. Mahan helped stimulate the naval race among the great powers.
Americans joined in the demands for a mightier navy and an American-built isthmian canal between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Two-time secretary of state James Blaine pushed his “Big Sister” policy, aimed at rallying the Latin American nations behind America’s leadership and opening Latin American markets to Yankee traders.
Blaine presided over the 1st Pan-American Conference in 1889, held in Washington D.C
Diplomatic crises or near-wars also marked the path of American diplomacy.
The American and German navies nearly came to blows in 1889 over the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific, which were formally divided between the two nations in 1899.
The lynching of 11 Italians in New Orleans in 1891 brought America and Italy to the brink of war until the U.S agreed to pay compensation.
American demands on Chile after the deaths of 2 American sailors in the port of Valparaiso in 1892 made hostilities seem inevitable, until the Chileans finally agreed to pay an indemnity.
Argument between the U.S and Canada over seal hunting near the Pribilof Islands off the coast of Alaska; resolved by arbitration in 1893.
Serious crisis between U.S and Britain in 1895-96. The jungle boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela had long been in dispute, but the discovery of gold in that area elevated the conflict.
President Cleveland and secretary of state Richard Olney waded into the affair with a combative note to Britain invoking the Monroe Doctrine. British officials just shrugged off the threats from Cleveland and Olney.
However, Cleveland sent a message to Congress urging an appropriation for a commission of experts who would run the line where it ought to go. If the British wouldn’t accept this boundary, he implied, the U.S would fight for it.
A rising challenge from Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, as well as a looming war with the Dutch-descended Boers in South Africa, left Britain in no mood for war with America. They backed off and consented to arbitration.
The British, their eyes opened to European peril, were determined to cultivate a Yankee friendship. The British inaugurated an era of “patting the eagle’s head.” Sometimes called the Great Rapprochement, or reconciliation, between the U.S and Britain.
Spurning the Hawaiian Pear
In the early years of the 19th century, Hawaii was a way station and provisioning point for Yankee shippers, sailors, and whalers.
In 1820 the first New England missionaries arrived, preaching Protestant Christianity and protective calico. They came to do good, and did, as Hawaii became an increasingly important center for sugar production.
Americans gradually came to regard the Hawaiian Islands as a virtual extension of their own coastline. The State Department, beginning in the 1840s, sternly warned other powers to stay away.
America’s grip tightened in 1887 by a treaty with the native government guaranteeing priceless naval-base rights at spacious Pearl Harbor.
However, Old World pathogens had pushed the indigenous Hawaiian population down to 1/6 of its size at the time of the first contact with Europeans, leading American sugar lords to import lots of Asian laborers to work the canefields, etc. By the end of the century, Chinese/Japanese immigrants outnumbered whites/native Hawaiians, amid worries that Tokyo might be tempted to intervene on behalf of its often-abused nationals.
The sugar markets went sour in 1890 when the McKinley Tariff raised barriers against the Hawaiian product.
White Americans who wanted to annex Hawaii were blocked by Queen Liliuokalani.
In early 1893, desperate whites aided by American troops organized a successful revolt. A treaty of annexation was rushed to Washington, but before it could be pushed through Senate, Republican president Harrison’s term ended and Democratic president Cleveland came.
Suspecting America had wronged the Queen and her people, Cleveland withdrew the treaty. Although the Queen couldn’t be reinstated, the move for annexation had to be temporarily abandoned until 1898.
Cubans Rise in Revolt
Cuban masses, frightfully misgoverned, rose against their Spanish oppressors again in 1895. The roots of their revolt were partly economic: sugar production was crippled when the American tariff of 1894 restored high duties on the product.
Desperate Cubans tried to drive out the Spanish with a scorched-earth policy. The insurrectos torched canefields, sugar fields, etc.
American sympathies went out to the Cubans. American business also had an investment stake of $50 million in Cuba and an annual trade stake of $100 million, all of it put at risk by revolutionary upheaval. In addition Cuba lay right on the line that led to the much anticipated Panama Canal. Lodge said whoever controlled Cuba, controlled the Gulf of Mexico. So much was riding on what went down in Cuba.
In 1896 Spanish general “Butcher” Weyler arrived in Cuba. He tried to crush the rebellion by herding many civilians into barbed-wire reconcentration camps, where they couldn’t give assistance to the armed insurrectos.
Atrocities in Cuba were red meat for the sensational new “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Where atrocity stories didn’t exist, they were invented. Hearst sent the gifted artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to draw sketches.
Remington depicted Spanish customs officials brutally disrobing and searching an American woman. He also publicized a private letter from the Spanish minister in Washington, Dupuy de Lome. The letter described President McKinley in unflattering terms. The resulting uproar forced Lome’s resignation.
In early 1898, Washington sent the battleship Maine to Cuba for a so-called “friendly visit.” In reality it was to protect and evacuate Americans if a dangerous flare up was to occur and to demonstrate Washington’s concern for the island’s stability.
On February 15, 1898 the Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor (260 sailors died).
2 investigations ensued: one by Americans and one by Spanish officials. The Spaniards concluded that the explosion had been accidental. The Americans argued it had been caused by a submarine mine.
In 1976, U.S Navy Admiral H.G Rickover confirmed the Spanish finding that the initial explosion had resulted from spontaneous combustion in one of the coal bunkers adjacent to a powder magazine.
However, Americans in 1898 were mad for war and embraced the less likely explanation. They leapt to the inaccurate conclusion that the Spanish government had been guilty of intolerable treachery.
The national war fever burned ever higher, even though American diplomats had already gained Madrid’s agreement to Washington’s 2 basic demands: an end to the reconcentration camps and an armistice with Cuban rebels.
The cautious McKinley found himself in a jam. He didn’t want hostilities, but he also didn’t want Spain to remain in possession of Cuba or a fully independent Cuba either, over which the U.S could exert no control.
Roosevelt said McKinley didn’t have “the backbone of a chocolate éclair.”
McKinley eventually yielded and gave the people what they wanted - but that wasn’t the only reason he went to war. He also had little faith in Spain’s often broken promises, worried about Democratic reprisals in the upcoming Presidential election if he continued to appear indecisive, and acknowledged America’s commercial/strategic interests in Cuba.
On April 11, 1898 McKinley sent his war message to Congress, urging armed intervention to free the oppressed Cubans.
The excited legislators likewise adopted the hand-tying Teller Amendment: a proviso that proclaimed to the world that when the U.S had overthrown Spanish misrule, it would give the Cubans their freedom.