First, merchants, industrialists, and farmers complained that domestic markets were inadequate to absorb all that they produced. The basis of this ideological consensus rested on two assumptions. Proposals to implement such a foreign policy received bi-partisan support in the House of Representatives and the Senate. To many American thinkers, businessmen, and politicians, overseas expansion seemed a sensible response. Republicans and Democrats agreed that they had to undertake some drastic measures not only to relieve the present emergency but also to prevent its recurrence. The ominous prospects of labor violence, social chaos, and political revolution cast a pall over the United States, threatening the future of the country.
The Panic of 1893 and the depression that followed brought the rapid failure of hundreds of banks and thousands of businesses, leaving four million Americans unemployed. The economic crisis of the 1890s made an imperialist foreign policy an even more attractive expedient. By the 1870s, more than two decades before Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the frontier, expansion had come to involve the acquisition of lands separate from the United States. It was, many Americans agreed, the “manifest destiny” of the United States to become a continental empire.ĭuring the late nineteenth century, with little remaining potential for territorial growth, Americans began to look overseas. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, as the population of the United States grew and moved westward, the American government continually acquired new land: the Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Territory, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, California, Oregon, and, after the Civil War, Alaska. Americans had been expansionist even before the birth of the Republic, chaffing, for example, at the British prohibition against settlement west of the Appalachians. But for American thinkers and policymakers they had been inextricably linked since at least the end of the nineteenth century. Trade and salvation seem irreconcilable opposites. This extraordinary transformation of public opinion and foreign policy signaled an equally remarkable change in attitude, as both the American people and their leaders abandoned the familiar effort to dominate the Western Hemisphere and set out instead to save the world. Still fewer could have predicted that by 1917 American troops would have crossed the Atlantic to fight and die on French soil. Yet, apart from fears about the disruption of international commerce, few Americans regarded the outbreak of another war in the Balkans as a matter demanding serious attention or concern. Entry into the First World War revealed the entanglement of interest and idealism that has long characterized American politics and thought.
0 kommentar(er)
