Lets see what these prominent historians think
Despite national myth to the contrary, during the long 19th century the United States engaged in imperial expansion. American imperial ambitions manifest themselves in expanding across the North American continent, obtaining overseas holdings, and influencing other nation-states through economic or military action. From its earliest westward expansion shortly after its birth, the United States has been as consistent in imperial power as any of its European contemporaries. Therefore, American foreign policy decisions in the late 19th century represent a crescendo of overt American imperial activity.
Some scholars view American ambition as driven by economic factors, others see ideology and American exceptionalism as a driving force, still others argue that realpolitik undergirded American actions.
One primary intellectual tradition within diplomatic history is known as the Wisconsin School. Spearheaded by a group of University of Wisconsin professors and graduate students in the 1950s and 1960s, the Wisconsin School argues that economics and the desire for new markets drove American foreign policy and created the American empire.
In his 1959 book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams argued that three conceptions guide American foreign policy. One, a legitimate humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. Two, the principle of self-determination applied at the international level, which asserts every society’s right to establish its own goals and realize them through the means it decides are appropriate. Three, a belief that people cannot solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it the same way as the United States. However, these principles became corrupted by economic impulses through an “open door” backlash against Europe style colonialism.
Leaders who opposed traditional colonialism instead advocated for a policy of an “open door” through which American economic strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world. The open door policy then became the American foreign policy strategy into the first half of the twentieth century. Open-door imperialism was intended from the outset to create an informal empire of economic dependence. Americans, of course, failed to see that the kind of economic activity they encouraged in developing countries was exploitative, institutionalized dependency, and discouraged progress. This blindness, in turn, led the United States to pursue counterrevolutionary policies in its foreign affairs to maintain the status quo. Expansionism is another theme prevalent in the book. Williams demonstrates that the United States has been an expansionist since its revolutionary roots. He argues that Americans thought of themselves as an empire from colonization and that this served as part of the assertive self-consciousness which culminated in the American Revolution. Regardless, Williams is a staunch believer that economic opportunities drove American imperial efforts throughout its existence, particularly in the nineteenth century.
Walter LaFeber was a pupil of Williams’ at the University of Wisconsin, and therefore a member of the Wisconsin School. Predictably, he also argues that economics served as the driving factor behind American expansion and imperialism during the 19th century. In his 1963 dissertation turned book, LaFeber indicates that the primary motivator for American expansion in the 1890s was commercial. He sees the 1893 depression as critical in pushing capitalists and the government to find foreign markets for American production. Therefore, expansion overseas was an outlet for the United States’s growing industrial capacity and domestic turmoil. “US policymakers’ great fear of domestic violence and radicalism, emerging out of the depression, drove them to the conclusion that imperialism was preferable to domestic reform,” he argues. For LaFeber, the conclusion is clear: the US did not set out to expand in the 1890s all of a sudden, but rather it was a deliberative process. Expanding foreign markets was the cure for recurring depressions in the minds of US officials. He emphasizes the economic forces that resulted in commercial and landed expansion because he believes these are the most important causes of its imperial action. No matter who was in charge, the result was that the growth of economic interests created political strife and increased military responsibilities.
Until 1898, the US believed its political institutions were suitable only for the continent, but after the annexation of Hawaii and the acquisition of the Philippines, the US tried to expand outside North America. However, this was not to fulfill some altruistic or even paternalistic colonial ideal but rather to “use these holdings as a means to acquire markets for the glut of goods pouring out of highly mechanized factories and farms.” The desire, to LaFeber, was not to occupy every morsel of available land but rather to feed the expansive American industrial complex with raw materials. Late nineteenth-century policymakers realized that the economic machine needed continuous feeding with raw materials and new markets. By the 1880s, the industry was also growing more favorable to the idea of free trade — low tariffs or no tariffs for the sake of cheaper raw materials, which, along with increasing mechanization, would soon enable American industrialists to undersell England anywhere in the world. LaFeber’s point is that the American empire was seen by nearly every influential contemporary as an inevitable result of an economic change in the late nineteenth century.
A historiographical counter to the Wisconsin School comes from Michael Hunt. In his 1987 book, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, Hunt argues that American foreign relations were based on three interrelated ideas: visions of national greatness, notions of racial hierarchy, and hostility to revolution. In a word: ideas. Hunt argues that a critique of American foreign policy that focuses on ideology is needed to understand US foreign policy decision-making during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hunt defines ideologies as “integrated and coherent systems of symbols, values, and beliefs” and relies on ideas that Clifford Geertz associates with culture as an interrelated web. Using this framework, Hunt proposes that strong ideological impulses “stemming from racial or ethnic identity, strong nationalist preoccupations, evangelical faith, and pronouncedly regional concerns.” He analyzes these impulses as part of three core ideas: 1) a desire for national greatness precipitated through the promotion of liberty, 2) attitudes toward other peoples in terms of a racial hierarchy, and 3) limits of acceptable political and social change overseas. His scholarship counters the realist school by highlighting the continuity between twentieth-century policy and the “old ideas” of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Hunt’s analysis counters Williams and LeFeber’s arguments by demonstrating that expansionist ideologies predate the rise of the late nineteenth-century corporatist government.
An updated ideological overview of American diplomatic history comes from Anders Stephenson in his 1995 work, Manifest Destiny. Throughout, Stephenson analyzes American expansionism’s ideological foundations as encapsulated by the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” Stephanson uses the term in its broader, Wilsonian sense, as a nationwide conviction of providence to lead the world toward better days. For Stephanson, the ideology of Manifest Destiny shaped how the United States understood itself and its foreign relations. He is not arguing that ideology shapes policy but rather that a belief in a prophetic, universal mission has undergirded America’s vision of itself, the world, and its place within the world, since colonization. This vision has led the United States to create an idealized democratic nation-state that the rest of the world could emulate while also trying to change the world through intervention. Manifest Destiny thus serves as an update to Michael Hunt’s earlier work. Stephanson advances the argument further by avoiding an overemphasis on American hostility to social revolutions while placing greater weight on religion as a driving factor in expansionist ideology.
A pair of works from 1998 capitalized on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish-American War to advance new interpretations of that conflict: Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood and Louis Perez’s The War of 1898. Each book explores the moment through decidedly different lenses but advances our understanding of the war, its causes, and American imperialism writ large. The impact of culture and gender on foreign policy is part of an expanding field of study for American foreign relations historians. Kristin Hoganson argues that gendered ideas about citizenship and power were an integral part of the US foreign policy’s broad cultural framework. Through problematic ideas about masculinity and war, this culture encouraged American imperialistic actions in Cuba and the Philippines.
For Hoganson, the war is a cultural reaction to perceptions regarding war as reinforcement for masculinity and the renegotiation of male and female roles in late 19th-century America. Hoganson highlights how domestic concerns have significant impacts on US policies. Gendered cultural motivations fueled political debate and rhetoric, which led to militant policies and two wars on opposite sides of the globe. The core of Hoganson’s argument centers on the partisan political debates between the jingoes who favored war and those who favored a more restrained foreign policy. While the jingoes favored an aggressive foreign policy, their anti-imperialist opponents advocated a style of politics based on intelligence, morality, and self-restraint. The aging of the Civil War generation and the subsequent infusion of women into political life threatened the jingo’s sense of American manhood, which then endangered their privileged status at home. Jingoes believed the only way to reinforce their manhood and preserve national honor was through war.
In The War of 1898, Louis Perez explores the assumptions, norms, and myths that have shaped our understanding of the wars of 1898. His book is primarily concerned with the war’s historiography and the war’s place in American memory rather than the narrative. For example, the term “Spanish-American War” demonstrates an American misunderstanding of the conflict and denies Cuban nationals’ credit for participation in their struggle for liberation from Spanish rule. Perez argues that the dominant US historical narrative has emphasized an idealistic America intervening in Cuba to free the downtrodden Cubans rather than the reality — that the United States was pursuing a calculated set of national interests. Perez captures the friction between Cuban and American objectives regarding potential intervention on the island well before the first US troops landed on Cuban soil. The US wanted to protect its southeast coast in the strategically critical Caribbean region, while the Cubans sought sovereignty and independence with no obligations. Perez asserts that the failure to achieve mutual goals moved American officials and later North American scholars to depict Cubans as culpable in destroying American property and inflexible in attempts to secure a resolution to the conflict. Nevertheless, Perez makes three critical points: 1) Cuban insurgents deserve more credit for their role in the war. 2) the war should be labeled the Spanish-Cuban-American War to reflect the Cuban’s efforts on their island. And 3) most historians’ continued failure to recognize that the US war effort was against two opponents has perpetuated the myth that US foreign policy in 1898 was a disinterested idealism function. He treats 1898 as a critical moment in long-term US policy ambitions but focuses almost entirely on Cuba. Perez attributes US motivations to more pragmatic realpolitik and realist foreign policy and focuses on the problematic historiography. He is refuting historians’ claims that the US was reluctant to intervene and that the primacy of humanitarian outrage drove the US to invade.
As stated throughout this article, contrary to the commonly held national belief that the United States was mostly isolationist and neutral before the twentieth century, the United States was aggressive in acquiring territory and dominating other nations. In his 2006 book Dangerous Nation, Robert Kagan describes a gap between American self-perception and the perception of others regarding pre-twentieth-century US foreign policy in that most believe America was an isolationist power. Kagan argues that Americans steadily increased global power and influence since its inception for commercial, territorial, or even idealistic reasons. Kagan emphasizes the alarming impact of American territorial expansion on Indian tribes and the European powers. He also highlights the troubling impact of American revolutionary ideology and liberal society.
From initial settlements in the seventeenth century onward, Kagan argues that North American settlers were expansionist by nature — harboring an insatiable appetite for a territory that bred both racism and capitalism. With what seemed an unlimited supply of “pristine” land, every white male settler could fulfill their dream of becoming a landowner. Dangerous Nationdescribes an expansionist fervor driven by waves of settlers convinced that they too would get rich — a critical aspect of the United States becoming the “the world’s first modern commercial, liberal republic.” Kagan emphasizes the revolutionary nature of the liberal capitalist desire, arguing that expansionism brought a vast veritable wilderness under the control of the market economy. But rather than arguing for pure economic causation, Kagan depicts these capitalist desires as an ideology and is therefore arguing against LeFeber and Williams. Kagan is asserting that ideology drives expansion, imperialism, and US foreign policy, which serves as a significant counterpoint to those who argue for the primacy of economic motives. Kagan’s narrative demonstrates that American expansionist ideology was inundated with economic motives and ambitions far grander than any singular economic interest at any given time or place.
Another exploration of ideology, this time racial, Paul Kramer’s Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines, explores the racial underpinnings in US imperial policy. Focusing on the post-1898 moment, Kramer argues that after arriving on the world stage as an expansionist power in 1899, the United States embarked on a brutal, racialized war of imperial conquest against the Philippines. Kramer shows how racial politics and empire-building transformed race and nationalist ideas in both the United States and the Philippines. In the wake of what ultimately devolved into a racial war, US officials alongside Filipino elites created a “civilized” and “savage” dichotomy within the population along religious lines — Christian and Muslim. The “savage” Muslims were thereafter subjected to a calibrated colonialism that only permitted them self-government as they demonstrated their civility and ability to shoulder the responsibility. Kramer provides a full account of race and empire’s centrality to twentieth-century US and Philippine histories, argues against pure economic motivations for US imperial interests, and presents a racial ideology view of reality in the Philippines. He also laments the previous historiography for mostly leaving the Philippine-American war absent when discussing US imperial actions, particularly in the post-1898 world.
In his 2011 monograph The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America, Jay Sexton contends that the United States that emerged as the preeminent world power of the twentieth century was the product of three factors: anti-colonial liberation, internal consolidation, and overseas imperial expansion. The Monroe Doctrine became the defining symbol of American statecraft during the 19th century. Through this lens, Sexton charts three interrelated processes central to nineteenth-century America: 1) the ongoing struggle to consolidate independence from Britain, 2) the forging of a new nation, and 3) the emergence of the American empire. Sexton uses his examination of the doctrine as a vehicle for assessing the construction of the American empire, the growth of US national power, and the evolution of a foreign policy independent of Great Britain. The Monroe Doctrine follows Williams’s tradition by centering American foreign policy on “imperial anticolonialism.” Sexton’s new phrase encompasses the idea is that Americans opposed European colonial expansion into the Western Hemisphere and enacted minor imperialist procedures by colonizing the majority of the North American continent, removing native populations, expanding slavery, and conquering territory held by other nations. Essentially, the United States practiced imperialism to prevent colonialism. Although the declaration was a part of the Monroe administration’s diplomatic policy, Monroe addressed his fellow citizens, not foreign governments; besides, the doctrine placed constraints on the European powers, without suggesting any particular course of action the United States could take. Furthermore, the creation of the doctrine was a process that lasted throughout the century, rather than the stroke of a pen in 1823. Americans attached multiple corollaries to adapt it to the union’s changing dynamics. Sexton cites Andrew Jackson allowing the British to seize the Falklands or the annexation of Texas as examples demonstrating the selective use of the doctrine.
Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States represents a contemporary take on the age-old questions surrounding the American empire. He defines empires as territories and peoples under American jurisdiction who did not choose that status and lack full citizenship and representation. Economic domination and military interventions form the core of his definition and vehicles for the United States to secure control of a given territory. Critical to Immerwahr’s argument, though, is the exclusion of territory in most conceptualizations of empire. This is primarily because, in the 20th century, the United States relinquished much territory. Nevertheless, Immerwahr refers to America’s territorial empire as the “Greater United States,” a concept that includes the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam. He argues that US history took place not just in what is now the contiguous United States, but also in a collection of expanding continental and overseas territories subject to US rule.
The history of the United States, according to Immerwahr, occurs in three acts. First, westward expansion and the creation of territories and states therein. Second, overseas territorial annexation included dozens of uninhabited islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific — not to mention Alaska, Hawaii, and the possessions gained after the war with Spain. The third act is the post-World War II moment in which the United States gave up territory, including Philippine independence. The bulk of the book concentrates on act three; however, Immerwahr stresses that territorial expansion is a critical component of the breadth of US history, rather than 1898 as a special episode. Immerwahr is thus neither an economic determinist nor does he subscribe to the ideological reasons for the US empire. Rather, he implies a more pragmatic approach as he places such an emphasis on territorial control that brings the entirety of westward expansion into the conversation on empire. For Immerwahr, imperial expansion is as much about the calculated pragmatism of realpolitik as anything else. Regardless, the choice of title represents the author’s desire to undermine the myth of the United States as a benevolent, isolationist republic by instead revealing its imperial notions from its colonial beginnings.
Regardless of motivation and causation, the United States has clearly engaged in imperial activity since its formation. During the nineteenth century, American expansion is a story of imperialism that was as expansive as those European empires from which the US tried to distance itself. Westward expansion cannot be divorced from the story of the United States as an empire — conquering peoples and territories as settlers moved west. Rather than a mono-causal explanation, in reviewing the historiography, it is clear that capitalism, ideology, and politics played essential roles in American empire-building between the end of the revolution and the dawn of the twentieth century. Be it the search for new markets, the belief in American exceptionalism, or the need to secure American interests from across vast oceans, the United States is and always has been an empire of vast proportions. Despite its creation in an anti-colonial revolt against imperial Britain, the United States turned into precisely what it purported to reject. “The history of the United States,” as Immerwahr tells us, “is the history of empire.”
