2.5 American Imperialism
The scramble for empire was well underway by the time the Americans, Japanese, and Germans entered in the late 19th century. Spain and Portugal still clung to the remnants of colonial empires dating from the 15th and 16th centuries. Meanwhile, England, France, and Russia accelerated their drive to control foreign peoples and lands. The late 19th century became the new age of imperialism because the technology of armaments, and networks of communication, transportation, and commerce brought the prospect of effective, truly global empires within closer reach.
Americans were not imperialists, or at least that’s what they claimed. The vision Americans held of themselves relied on ideals of Manifest Destiny. In the minds of most Americans, they had a duty to spread their ideals to those less fortunate or inferior. This is how they justified imperialism. The growth of industrial networks linked them to the international markets as never before. As economic systems became more tightly knit and political systems more responsive to industrialists and financiers, a rush for markets and distant lands was perhaps unavoidable.
While the United States expanded their interests abroad, they also gained an increasingly higher influx of immigrants at home. As the population of new immigrants rose, a growing resentment from native-born, white Americans began to swell. New immigrants were encouraged to assimilate quickly and this brought about other, urgent questions such as what it really meant to be “American” and should newcomers be allowed to become Americans?
Imperialistic Ideology
An elite group – Christian missionaries, intellectuals, business leaders, and commercial farmers – joined with career naval officers to push for a more active American imperialism. Increasingly during the 19th century, American Protestant missionaries sought to convert “heathen” non-believers, not only at home but as far away as the Middle East, China, and the islands of the Pacific. Yet most missionaries were not territorial imperialists. They eagerly took up what they called “the white man’s burden” (further satirized and defined by Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name) of introducing civilization to the “colored” races of the world, but they opposed direct military or political intervention.
From scholars, academics, and scientists came racial theories to justify European and American expansion, especially Social Darwinism based on the arguments of Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States. Social Darwinists believed that the theory of evolution – the survival of the fittest through natural selection – also governed social order. By natural as well as divine law, the fittest people (those descended from Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic stock according to Spencer and Sumner) would assert their dominion over lesser peoples of the world. When applied aggressively, Social Darwinism was used to justify theories of white supremacy as well as the slaughter and enslavement of non-white native populations who resisted conquest.
William Henry Seward
No one did more to initiate the idea of an empire for the United States than William Henry Seward. Secretary of State under presidents Lincoln and Johnson, he employed skillful diplomacy to avert European intervention in the Civil War. Seward made two notable territorial acquisitions. In 1867, an American naval officer raised the American flag over the Pacific island of Midway as a result of Seward’s efforts. By itself, Midway was unimportant, but it was very valuable as a way station on the sea route to Asia and provided the US with a Pacific toehold near Hawaii where missionary planters were already establishing an American presence. Seward’s second notable acquisition was the purchase of Alaska in 1867. Critics called it “Seward’s Folly” and the “Polar Bear Garden,” but the Alaskan purchase turned out to be a bargain. The United States paid Russia $7.2 million or about 2 cents an acre for a mineral-rich territory two times the size of Texas.
