European imperial dominance of much of the
globe, of Africa, of India and eastern Asia extending
to China reached its zenith in the early twentieth
century, but already then was challenged.
There were limits to further expansion. Europe
was overextended, the US and Japan would
counter what they conceived as threats in their
own hemispheres and in the process run into conflict
with each other. They also followed their
own imperial roads.
The emergence of the US as a superpower by
the mid-twentieth century is one of the most
striking changes of modern history. The state of
the American economy and America’s decision as
to where and in what manner to intervene in any
part of the globe have profoundly affected every
continent. The US came to wield an influence
such as no other single nation has exercised
before. What is striking is that this impact on the
world has been so recent, scarcely pre-dating the
turn of the century. How did it come about and
where are the roots of American world power?
The growth of the population, and of the
industrial and agricultural production of the US,
were phenomenal. Their sustained increase
through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
overcoming two depressions in the mid-1870s
and the mid-1890s as well as the serious depression
of the 1930s, is one of the ‘economic
wonders’ of modern history. There was a contemporary
awareness of America’s good fortune,
and ‘growth’ was both expected and regarded as
the unique ‘American way’. When we compare
the population growth of the US with that of the
European great powers, we see clearly how relatively
sudden the transformation of the US into
the present-day colossus has been. In 1880 the
total population of the US was about the same as
Germany’s ten years later and only 5 million more
than Germany’s at the same time. Thus, in population
the US only just ranked in the same
league as the largest of the European nations.
But, from then on, the US’s rapid outdistancing
of previously comparable countries was one fundamental
reason for the emergence of the US as
a superpower.
A crucial factor in this growth of population
was another feature of the New World, the largescale
emigration from Europe. Driven largely by
poverty and the hope of a better life a great mass
of humanity flooded into the US, more than 13
million between 1900 and 1914 alone. Most of
them were peasants from central and southern
Europe. The majority of these ‘new immigrants’
(to distinguish them from the ‘old’ immigrants
from Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia)
settled in the towns where they preferred to
join their countrymen who had kept close
together in the cities and found unskilled industrial
work. Immigrants contributed significantly
to the growth of major cities, reinforced economic
expansion and helped to bring about the
mass market which is characteristic of twentiethcentury
America. Of the 13 million, more than a
million were Jews leaving the pogrom-ridden
Russian Empire; they helped to make New York
into one of the great clothing manufacturing
centres of America.
The rich cultural variety of the US, the diversity
of ethnic groups from the West and the East,
as well as the sheer numbers of immigrants, are
among the unique features of America’s national
growth. America, as one historian put it, was less
a ‘melting pot’ – intermarriage and common allegiances
did not speedily obliterate national differences
of origin – than a ‘salad bowl’. All the same,
the fusion of peoples of every national origin and
religion and, over a much longer period, the
fusion of races black and white, Asian and
Hispanic into a national community has proved a
more powerful force than national and racial differences
and conflict.
In the twentieth century the shared experiences
of two world wars were powerful influences
in making for more toleration and mutual acceptance
– one of the most significant aspects of the
development of the US for world history.
The immigrants added immensely to the vitality
of the US. Starting from nothing, they and
their descendants acquired new skills and an education.
The US was the country where the accident
of a father’s social status mattered least in the
Western world. As far as the African Americans
were concerned, this generalisation did not hold
true. As long ago as 1868 some of the framers of
the fourteenth amendment of the constitution
sought to protect the rights of black people. The
amendment declared that Americans enjoyed
equal rights and equality before the law, and
specifically laid down that no state could ‘deprive
any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law’. However, as a protection of
the civil rights of African Americans, the fourteenth
amendment proved worthless because it
was not enforced. It was used instead by the rising
industrialists and financiers to amass greater fortunes
and influence through combinations and
mergers.
The age distribution of the immigrants and
their tendency to have larger families than the
American-born kept the increase of population at
a much higher level than could otherwise be sustained.
America was in reality, and in self-image,
a young country constantly renewing itself. At the
turn of the century, the US had just recovered
from the depression of the mid-1890s, and
Americans faced the twentieth century with much
optimism believing, rightly as it turned out, that
their country was on the threshold of industrial
expansion and the accumulation of wealth.
Between 1900 and 1914 manufacturing production
nearly doubled and overtook agriculture as
the main source of national wealth. The traditional
America was a nation of farmers, artisans
and small businessmen. The America of the twentieth
century was predominantly industrial, with
the growth of cities, and railways linking the
industrial Midwest and the east. Industry was
increasingly dominated by the giant corporations
such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil
Company or the Trusts of J. Pierpont Morgan,
though small businesses also persisted. The
absolute growth of population, the opening up of
virgin lands in the west, made possible simultaneously
a great expansion of agricultural output
despite the population movement to the towns.
This increasing output was more than enough to
feed the growing American population and leave
sufficient to export. Meat packing and food
canning became important industries. The vast
continent of the US was singularly blessed in all
its resources – fertile land, forests, coal, iron and
oil. Their simultaneous successful development
provided the dynamic of American economic
growth which no European nation could match,
and meant that Americans were less dependent on
imports or exports than any other advanced
Western nation.
In the early twentieth century, American business
nevertheless expanded American exports to
industrialised Europe, seeing this as a necessary
insurance against a glut in the market at home –
yet these exports were only a small proportion of
America’s total production, which was protected
at home by a high tariff. In the early twentieth
century the application of electricity as a new
energy source provided a further boost, and electrical
machinery together with automobiles –
Henry Ford alone producing 125,000 cars a year
by 1913, half the nation’s total output – were the
‘new industries’ maintaining America’s lead as the
world’s first industrial power.
America’s explosive growth was not achieved
without severe political and social tensions. This
was the other side of the optimism expressed at the
turn of the century about the future. People began
to ask who would control the destinies of the US.
Would it be the new breed of immensely successful
and wealthy financiers and businessmen? Was
not their influence already the main reason for the
corruption of government, no longer a government
for and by the people but for the good of
business? The cleavage between the rich and poor
appeared to widen as the Vanderbilts, Morgans,
Rockefellers and Harrimans displayed their wealth.
The western farmers were exposed to the
vagaries of the seasons and also to the increases
and falls of world grain prices. A good harvest
could drive the prices farther down and the
farmers seeking a cause for their misfortunes
focused on the high interest they had to pay on
the loans they needed – the result, as they saw it,
of government dominated by the industrial east.
The southern US remained relatively stagnant,
unable to diversify when, after the worldwide
drop in cotton prices, cotton could no longer
yield the same profit as before the civil war.
The American workers in the mines and factories
also tried to organise to meet the increased
power of business. Socialism as a political force
had developed in the US as well as in Europe
during the nineteenth century, and for a short
while after 1872 the headquarters of Marx’s First
International was in New York. But the Socialist
Labor Party of North America could not establish
itself as a serious force in politics. In the early
twentieth century, under the charismatic leadership
of Eugene V. Debs, the Social Democratic
Party attempted to win over the worker from
trade union economic bargaining to politics, but
was unsuccessful on a national scale, though
Debs, when he became a presidential candidate,
secured almost 900,000 votes. When labour
unions expanded it was under the direction of
men like Samuel Gompers who rejected political
socialism as utopian and saw themselves as practical
men seeking to improve the wages and conditions
of labour day by day without ulterior ends
in view. In 1886 they organised the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) but in the 1890s
found that union militancy could not prevail
against the employers supported by the federal
government. There were some successes to set
against the failures, with the gradual introduction
of maximum working hours and the ending of
the abuse of child labour. Theodore Roosevelt,
when president, showed more sympathy for the
workers. Strikes of national concern, like the coal
strike in Pennsylvania in 1902, were no longer
settled by the federal government siding with the
employers. President Roosevelt intervened and
refused to back the mine owners, who had to
concede higher wages. Roosevelt’s action was
characteristic of one aspect of a new spirit collectively
known as the Progressive Movement.
But Roosevelt’s outlook was not shared by all
the states, which had retained extensive rights
under the constitution. In 1903 and 1904 the
governor of the state of Colorado, for instance,
had mobilised the militia, jailed the union leaders
of the striking copper miners and beaten down
the strikes with violence and bloodshed; and in all
this he was eventually supported by the Supreme
Court. Gompers himself was imprisoned by
federal courts after another strike and denounced
as a dangerous rabble-rouser subverting the law.
Against this onslaught of employers, and with
business dominating the courts and the state governments,
Roosevelt could do little. Though the
AFL expanded from half a million to 2 million
members by 1914, it could scarcely hold its
own. Only the boom brought about by the Great
War and the shortage of labour enabled the
more moderate unions to gain acceptance and to
negotiate better terms for workers. But the mass
of the unskilled and black people remained largely
outside the unions. The AFL’s successes were
mainly won on behalf of the skilled craft unions
and the semi-skilled.
After the depressed 1880s and mid-1890s the
farmers, who had been a major force behind the
rising challenge to eastern business dominance,
became quiescent. From 1897 until 1914 they
enjoyed a short ‘golden age’ of prosperity, the
value of their crops doubling during this period.
Looking at the US as a whole, the only safe
generalisation is that the problems that forced
themselves on the attention of people varied enormously
from one region to another, as did the
responses of those in power in any particular state.
Thus, in contrast to the conduct of Colorado’s
government, the governor of Wisconsin, Robert
M. La Follette, passed many practical reforms in
his state, as did Woodrow Wilson after becoming
governor of New Jersey in 1911.
‘Progressive’ became a loose label denoting
little more than a recognition of the many varied
ills besetting American society and politics during
years of rapid change and a desire to remedy
whichever of these ills a particular progressive felt
to be the most injurious. The ills were well publicised
by a new breed of journalists who proudly
accepted what was meant to be an insulting
description of their work – ‘The Muckrakers’.
Their targets were manifold – political corruption,
the inequality of wealth, the domination of
politics by big business; they investigated most
aspects of American life; they attacked the doctrine
of freedom which allowed the grasping
entrepreneur to develop America at too great a
price; they stressed the undermining of democracy;
and argued the need for more regulatory
government, not less.
In domestic politics the president’s powers are
limited by the rights of the two Houses of Congress,
the Senate and the House of Representatives,
and by the Supreme Court, the final arbiter
of any dispute about constitutional rights. What
President Theodore Roosevelt and his successors –
the more conservative William Howard Taft, and
then the Democrat Woodrow Wilson – actually
achieved in legislation was less important than the
fact that the presidency gave a reforming lead and
so helped to change the climate of American public
opinion. The Progressives were successful in the
passage of child-labour laws in over forty states,
and of laws governing the working conditions of
women, but their attempts to clean up politics and
smash the power of party machines failed. Lack of
supervision to ensure enforcement also weakened
much of the social legislation passed. After the
Great War was over, in 1919, one reform dear to
many Progressives, Prohibition (of alcoholic
drinks), was enacted by Congress nationwide.
Here, too, a large gap soon became apparent
between law and actual observance.
Theodore Roosevelt was the first president of the
US to play a role as world statesman. As in his
domestic policy, where he was inhibited by political
constraints, so in his ‘world’ diplomacy he was
circumscribed by America’s lack of military power
and the unwillingness of American people to make
sacrifices to back up a ‘large’ American foreign policy.
Superficially Roosevelt succeeded in drawing
international attention to the US and to his own
role as diplomatist. In this respect his greatest
achievement was to act in 1905 as mediator
between the Japanese and Russians and to host the
peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
ending the Russo-Japanese War. The US next
played a part in the international Moroccan conference
at Algeciras in 1906. The following year, in
a characteristically ostentatious gesture, Roosevelt
sent the newly constructed US navy on a world
cruise to show the flag. Roosevelt made America’s
presence felt. But what really lay behind these
great-power posturings was apprehension that the
conditions that had given the US security for the
past century were passing away.
For this feeling, which actually anticipated
dangers that still lay in the future, there were two
principal reasons: the likely direction of European
imperialism and the consequences of America’s
own flirtation with imperialism at the turn of the
century. Both can be seen clearly at work during
the course of a war just won, the ‘splendid little’
Spanish–American war of 1898.
The American response to European imperialism,
which had led to the partition of Africa and
China, was to try to anticipate a serious challenge
to the Monroe Doctrine, with its declaration of
US opposition to any further European colonial
extension within the western hemisphere. What if
the Europeans next sought to extend their influence
in the Caribbean and Central America and
so surrounded the US with armed bases? Captain
A. T. Mahan, in his day the most influential writer
and proponent of the importance of sea power,
was writing at this time that such a danger did
exist since crucial strategic regions of significance
in world trade would inevitably become areas of
great-power rivalry. One such artery of trade
would be the canal (later Panama Canal) which
it was planned to construct across the isthmus
of Central America. The backward and weak
independent Caribbean island states were also
easy prey for any intending European imperialist.
The island of Cuba, lying close to the mainland
of Florida was, then as now, a particularly
sensitive spot. Before the war with Spain, Cuba
was a Spanish colony, in chronic rebellion and
anarchy. The war on the island was barbarous
as most guerrilla wars are apt to be, and American
opinion, genuinely humanitarian, was inflamed by
the popular ‘yellow’ press. But the hidden aspect
of the situation as seen by the administration was
that a weak Spain as the sovereign power on the
island might be replaced by an aggressive Britain
or Germany.
A group of Americans, including a number of
senior naval officers, Theodore Roosevelt (then
an up-and-coming politician) and Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge, discussed ways and means of taking
precautionary action before these dangers materialised.
They were later seen as ‘imperialists’ or
‘expansionists’ and indeed this was the practical
outcome of their ideas, but their motivation was
essentially defensive – to preserve American security
in the coming conditions of the twentieth
century.
Imperialism was inextricably bound up with
this defensive attitude. The Americans intervened
and made themselves the gendarmes of the
Caribbean. After the war with Spain in 1898,
Cuba, though proclaimed an independent republic,
became a virtual protectorate of the US. A US
naval base was constructed on the island and the
land needed for it was ceded to the US. This
American presence was intended to ensure that
no European power could take over Cuba or
reach the inner naval defences of the US before
meeting the US navy in the western Atlantic.
The US also imposed conditions on Cuba which
allowed the US to intervene in case of internal
discord. Another Caribbean island, Puerto Rico,
was simply annexed for similar strategic reasons.
In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt extended the right
of the US to act as a policeman throughout
Central and Latin America, invoking the Monroe
Doctrine as justification. By helping the Panamanian
revolutionaries against Colombia in 1903,
Roosevelt established another American protectorate
in all but name in the new state of Panama.
Nor did the US hesitate to intervene in the independent
republics of Dominica and Nicaragua.
Although Woodrow Wilson, when he became
president, attempted to revert to the earlier spirit
of inter-American collaboration, he did not
himself hesitate to intervene in Mexico from 1914
to 1916.
In contrast to the advanced industrialised and
agriculturally developed North American continent,
the habitable regions of South America supported
a growing population in, for the most
part, abject poverty. (For a fuller discussion of
Latin America see Part XIV.) The descendants of
the Spaniards and Portuguese and the immigrants
from Europe who formed the minority of inhabitants
enjoyed the wealth and political power of
the American ‘republics’. There was much variety
in the politics and society of Latin America. Their
revolutions, though, had been revolutions from
above in the early nineteenth century. The new
states remained authoritarian, despite their elaborate
constitutions modelled on the French or
American, and their professed ideals of democracy,
with a few notable exceptions, proved a
façade for governments based on force: they were
governments of the generals or of dictators who
commanded the military forces of the state.
Violence was the language of politics. Trade
with Europe, especially (in the later nineteenth
century) with Britain and Germany, was considerably
greater than with the US, to which there
was much hostility, on account of its claims to
pre-eminence in the Americas. The possibility of
‘Yankee’ interference was the object of particular
Latin American suspicion and animosity.
In 1900 strategic planners in the US clearly saw
the discrepancy between the pretensions of the
Monroe Doctrine and the inability of the US to
exert any military and naval influence south of the
Amazon in Brazil. What if the partition of Africa
were followed by European domination of South
and Central America? In fact, the conflicts in
Europe, the Mediterranean and Near East, in
Africa and in Asia absorbed the military resources
of the European Western powers. Britain, the
major European power with colonies and commercial
interests in Latin America and an empire
extending from colonies in the Caribbean to the
Dominion of Canada in the north, furthermore
made clear its intention not to challenge the US’s
claim for regional supremacy. At the turn of the
twentieth century Britain and the US signed
the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty which granted the US
the sole right of defence of the future Panama
Canal. This was followed by Britain withdrawing
its fleet from the Caribbean and settling all outstanding
disputes with the US. Britain could not
afford to risk the enmity of the US as well when its
interests were more endangered at home, first by
Russia then by Germany, in the Mediterranean,
in Asia and in Europe. And so a war between
Britain and the US became increasingly unthinkable
as the twentieth century progressed. In this
way the conflicts of the European powers in the
early years of the twentieth century continued to
serve the security of the US in its hemisphere.
But in the Pacific and eastern Asia the US
became more deeply involved and exposed.
US interests in the trade of China date back to
the foundations of the American republic itself.
Not until the close of the nineteenth century,
however, did the US acquire a territorial stake in
the Pacific. The annexation of Hawaii in 1898
could still just about be fitted in with the notion
that the island was an essential offshore base of
defence for the western seaboard of the US.
There could be no such claim for the annexation
of the Philippines after the Spanish–American
War of 1898. An American army crushed the
Filipino struggle for independence (1899–1902).
This was imperialism. The US staked its claim for
a share of the China market whose potential was
overestimated. The appearance of the US in
eastern Asia as a Western colonial power aroused
the alarm of Japan and marks the origins of a new
conflict in eastern Asia in the twentieth century.
Theodore Roosevelt had recognised that the
Philippines were indefensible; they were, to use
his words, America’s ‘heel of Achilles’.
In the military sense, America’s role as a world
power was potential rather than actual during the
first decade and a half of the twentieth century.
The American army was small – adequate to deal
with Indians and Mexicans; its warships in the
1880s had been called in Congress a collection of
washtubs. How soon the US could turn military
potential into reality is illustrated by the amazingly
rapid construction of the modern US navy.
In the 1890s American naval power was puny,
just enough to cope with Spain’s antiquated warships;
by 1920, the US navy could match the
British. But to exercise world power requires not
only the means – and no one could doubt in the
early twentieth century America’s capacity – but
also the will. Before 1914, it did not seem realistic
to suppose that the US would become
involved in war over the conflicts of the other
Western powers. The American people saw no
need for war. The large navy, which could ensure
the security of the North American continent and
its approaches, and the small professional army,
indeed, point to the overwhelmingly defensive
attitude of the US. Nevertheless, it was drawn to
war in 1917. But it was only with great reluctance
that Americans came to accept that the US’s circumstances
had fundamentally changed from the
times of the Founding Fathers and their advice
that the US should not entangle its fortunes in
the rivalries of Europe. The war that had begun
in Europe three years earlier spread to every
continent and turned into the first global war.
In eastern Asia Japan emerging as a strong military
power took advantage of Europe’s distress.
China’s disintegration was Japan’s opportunity.
China’s efforts to modernise came too late.