Crusader Nation The United States in Peace And the Great War, 1898-1920

American Renascence Looking back . . . I have thought of the period in America, including the last few years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, as the American Renascence, even the Great American Renascence. Ray Stannard Baker You see, getting down to the bottom of things, this is a pretty raw, crude civilization of ourspretty wasteful, pretty cruel, which often comes to the same thing, doesn't it? And in a lot of respects we Americans are the rawest and crudest of all. Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distributionall wrong, out of gear. We've stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we've got to start to make this world over. Thomas Edison, 1912 In 1898 the United States stepped into the realm of international power politics for the first time. The country had already become a global economic presence, and was feared as a competitor because of its tremendous natural resources and industrial efficiency. Militarily, however, it was viewed with condescension by the Great Powers until it quickly and decisively thrashed Spain in 1898, seizing as the fruits of victory the colonies remaining in that faded empire: Cuba, which was soon given a limited independence, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Mixed into this rather amateurish adventure were motives of economic gain, national prestige, fear of German or other European expansion into the Caribbean, desire for strategic naval bases, and anger over the blowing up of the battleship Maine. But there was also a strong sense of moral outrage about the way the Spanish had been mistreating Cuban civilians while suppressing a revolt on the island. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children had died in concentration camps just ninety miles off the American shore, and the public demanded that an end be put to such horrors. America was encouraged to take the path to a world role by Great Britain, looking for allies against the rising and aggressive strength of Germany. Rudyard Kipling, celebratory poet of the world-circling British Empire, wrote a widely distributed poem urging Americans to "Take up the White Man's burden" of civilizing "sullen peoples, half devil and half child." The challenge was taken up, and yet, in this American assumption of global responsibilities there was a shyness and uncertainty even among those such as Theodore Roosevelt who urged a "large" policy on the United States. The country needed to take a more active role in international affairs, these men believed, if only to protect itself in a Darwinian world where the strong devoured the weak. China, one of the countries being picked apart by stronger nations, provided a negative example for such Americans. The United States could not, argued Roosevelt's close friend and political ally Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, "allow itself to become a hermit nation hiding a defenseless, feeble body within a huge shell . . . shut up and kept from its share of the world's commerce until it was smothered by a power hostile to it in every conception of justice and liberty." At the same time, the policy of extending the country's reach across the seas invited attack on these "hostages to fortune," as Roosevelt recognized by calling the new Philippine colony "our Achilles' heel." A newspaper doggerel writer spoke for many who were unhappy with imperialism: We've taken up the white man's burden of ebony and brown; Now will you tell us, Rudyard how we may put it down? RooTraxel, David is the author of 'Crusader Nation The United States in Peace And the Great War, 1898-1920', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375724657 and ISBN 0375724656.