Stages of American imperialism from colonial expansion to overseas empire

American History Final Exam

Stages of the American Empire

Starting in the colonial period and continuing up through the Manifest Destiny phase of the American Empire in the 19th Century, the main goal of imperialism was to obtain land for white farmers and slaveholders. This type of expansionism existed long before modern capitalism or the urban, industrial economy, which did not require colonies and territory so much as markets, cheap labor and raw materials. It was also a highly racist type of policy that led to the destruction of Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks, as well as brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in overseas colonies like the Philippines and Haiti. Northeastern capitalists in the United States, dating back to the nascent period in the late-18th Century, were not particularly enthusiastic for this type of territorial expansion to the West or the growth of the agrarian sector of the economy. The party of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, which represented the South planters and white small farmers, was always the main driving force behind manifest destiny, including the Mexican War and the early filibustering expeditions to Latin America. After the Civil War, with the rise of giant industrial and financial corporations that basically took over the national government, imperialism began to take the form of Open Door policies abroad and the idea of expanding investments, trade and raw materials overseas. This did not necessarily mean the acquisition of old-style European colonies, although the U.S. did seize a few of these after 1898, but rather a method of installing 'friendly' governments and maintaining indirect control. Such policies of overseas imperialism also brought the U.S. into conflict with other empires such as Britain and Spain, as well as the rising industrial powers of Germany and Japan. As early as World War I, Woodrow Wilson expressed the desire to put a system of global capitalism in place, although the U.S. had no power to do so at them, or indeed until after 1845.

1. Richard White, "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in The Frontier in American Culture.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West "spectacles presented an account of Indian aggression and white defense; of Indian killers and white victims; on, in effect, badly abused conquerors" (White 27).

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, in its presentation of Custer's Last Stand and other events in the West, became the standard template for Hollywood movies on the subject, although obviously it presented a distorted and one-sided version of history. American overseas imperialism has much in common with the previous era of frontier expansion, wars against Native Americans and the annexation of half of Mexico in 1848. Manifest Destiny and the racial attitudes towards blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans that accompanied it existed long before the U.S. became an urban, industrialized economy. Racism dates back to the colonial period in the 17th and 18th Centuries, and the type of expansion that occurred was mainly agrarian and aimed at acquiring land, which was the base of the economy until well into the 19th Century. To that extent, American racism was atavistic and existed long before capitalism and the desire of industrialists and financiers to acquire markets, trade and investments overseas in the 1890s and early-1900s, yet all of the overseas colonies and dependencies were ruled in a highly racist manner.

2. Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, chapter 3, 4 or 5.

American leaders always "redefined empire to suit their needs: empire of liberty (Jefferson), empire of destiny (Polk), empire of colonies (Roosevelt), empire of values (Wilson)" (Cumings 55).

Before World War II, American interventionism was often overt and direct, simply landing troops on the shores of some prospective banana republic and installing a 'friendly' government there. This is exactly what happened in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, in some cases more than once. Theodore Roosevelt was hardly shy about admitting that he sent troops to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, taking Panama from Columbia or landing in person with the army in Cuba in 1898. Woodrow Wilson imagined that he was bringing democracy to Mexico in his repeated interventions there. Indeed, more sober and pragmatic imperialists feared that they were too unsound in boasting about a new, global American Empire. During the Cold War, though, overthrowing governments was more commonly done in the shadows through CIA covert operations, but once the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the U.S. increasingly reverted to the older methods of direct intervention.

3. Speech or essay assigned since the midterm by Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, Frank Norris, or Frederick Douglass.

In his 4th of July address, Frederick Douglass declared that "I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us" (Douglass 1852).

Nothing could be clearer that the absolute repugnance that Douglass felt toward the institution of slavery and how he hoped to inspire Northern whites to take action against it -- by any means necessary. Douglass had great moral authority because he had been born a slave but had escaped and gone on to become one of the leading black abolitionists in the North by 1852. He mentioned how at an early age had watched as slaves were shipped from Baltimore to New Orleans and Mobile, to the even harsher bondage of the Deep South cotton and sugar plantations. Douglass advocated justice, freedom and equal citizenship for blacks in the United States, although he also argued that violence would probably be necessary to end slavery, just as it had been to win independence from Great Britain.

4. Great Speeches by Native Americans, ed. Blaisdell

"It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever" (Blaisdell 148).

Chief Joseph had refused to agree placing the Nez Perce on reservations and instead had attempted to flee to Canada, but the army hunted them down. By that time, in 1877, almost all the Native Americans in the West had been placed on reservations, where the conditions were generally horrendous. Few white Americans have ever been willing to face the harsh truth that Indians have always been treated like a conquered enemy people, whose language, culture and religion were nearly destroyed by U.S. government policies. When Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts had passed infamous Severalty Act in 1887, most of the Native American population of North America had already been exterminated. Before whites arrived, the indigenous population north of Mexico may have been as high as 15-20 million, but by the end of the 19th Century it had fallen to about 200,000. Centuries of warfare, slave labor, disease, starvation and deliberate mass murder had led to the near-annihilation of the American Indians, and there were many whites such as William Tecumseh Sherman who were prepared to finish them off completely.

5. Essay by Kevin Gover, Vine DeLoria Jr., Luther Standing Bear, Will Rogers or story or essay by Sherman Alexie.

Luther Standing Bear wrote that at the age of eleven, "I was thrust into an alien world, into an environment as different from the one into which I was born as it is possible to imagine, to remake myself, if I could, into the likeness of the invader" (Luther Standing Bear 41).

He was perfectly correct that the entire purpose of the Carlisle Indian School and all the other missionary and boarding schools was to destroy the Native American languages, cultures and religions. Their founders expressly stated that was their goal, with great clarity and precision, and set about to do just that. They decided that the only way to save the indigenous peoples from total genocide was to remove children from their parents, teach them English, Christianity and various useful skills, so that they would be assimilated into the larger economy and society. This is also why the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 abolished tribal governments and communal landholdings, parceling out reservation land to nuclear families, although not coincidentally, whites ended up with most of the land and resources. In Luther Standing Bear's case, however, the Carlisle School obviously failed in its mission, since he still remembered where he came from long after they had finished with him.

6. Patricia Limerick, "The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century," in The Frontier in American Culture.

"Frederick Jackson Turner or any of his contemporaries would have experienced astonishment at the application of the word 'pioneer' in the late-twentieth century, as this implied kinship between overland travelers and marketing of underwear, stainless steel, and hoagies" (Limerick 85).

Turner lived at a time before a large middle class existed or the U.S. had become a consumer society, so he naturally thought of pioneers as farmers and ranchers who moved the agricultural frontier to the West. In his era, even though the country was rapidly industrializing, the majority of people still lived on farms and in small towns. For this reason and was always the main goal of Manifest Destiny, while industrial capitalism required a different type of imperialism that acquired markets and raw materials overseas rather than colonies. Eastern capitalists since the time of Alexander Hamilton and the early Federalists and Whigs had always had a very limited interest in expanding the agrarian frontier, and even less in the expansion of slavery. They would probably have been less surprised when 20th Century-style capitalism began to appropriate terms like "pioneer" and "frontier" for entertainment and marketing purposes.

7. Speech or essay assigned since the midterm by Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush.

John F. Kennedy referred to the frontier in his speech to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960, describing how the pioneers were "determined to make that new world strong and free, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without" (Kennedy 1960).

Kennedy's New Frontier was not in the West, of course, but more a rhetorical device by which he promised that the U.S. would engage on the side of 'freedom' on the global scale in the war against Communism. In foreign policy, Kennedy was at first determined to escalate the Cold War in both rhetoric and reality, including the war in Vietnam. Initially, at least, he accepted the Cold War consensus that the main task of the United States was to contain the Soviet Union, although this came under increasing criticism by leftist historians who charged that the U.S. And Russia were both expansionist empires, and that America was often the aggressor during the Cold War, attempting to impose its own system on the rest of the world. Possibly Kennedy was unaware -- or pretended to be unaware -- of the CIA interventions in Iran, Guatemala and other countries, although he could hardly have ignored the CIA plan for overthrowing the Cuban government that was presented to him in 1961. Even after this failed, Kennedy escalated the covert war against Cuba under Operation Mongoose, until the installation of Soviet missiles there in 1962 forced him to change course.

8. Essay by Barry Stephenson, John Brown, Jonathan Raban, Paul Rosier, or John Tirman

Jonathan Raban noted in Driving Home how Bernard Mahmoud had experienced life in a town in Washington State in the 1940s and 1950s, writing in A New Life about "the richness and promise of the idea of America -- and its betrayal by a mean-spirited citizenry, people too small to deserve to inherit their gigantic land" (Raban 21).

As Raban points out, today the Pacific Northwest no longer has this image of being part of the rural, evangelical culture of Old America, but is part of the new globalized version of capitalism and a haven for Rust Belt refugees. In the new global economy, physical location, size, population and domestic markets are no longer important for success, and stock exchanges no longer require a location at all. Platforms are far more important, including telecommunications, satellites, the Internet, ATM machines, and ability to communicate in English. This new world system has no borders and is often invisible, connected through cyber-technology and no longer measured in money but by multiples and derivatives. Capital flows control the world today, not central governments, and these move trillions of dollars around instantaneously.

Conclusion

The American Empire has passed through several stages that reflected key social and economic changes at home. In its earliest phase, the white republic basically waged a war for the control of land with blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans and any residual European influence in North America that was blocking Manifest Destiny. This was the phase of imperial expansion that Frederick Jackson Turner thought had finished around 1890. American culture was extremely racist toward nonwhites from the colonial period onward, even genocidal, and this existed long before capitalism or the creation of an urban, industrialized economy. Only when the U.S. started to become a global power after 1945 did this type of racism become inconvenient and the liberal, internationalist elite moved to reduce it through civil rights policies and changes in immigration laws. Even so, racism has always been thoroughly entrenched in this society, and attempts to eliminate in the name of liberalism and multiculturalism have been meet with severe backlashes from the Right. As the leading global hegemon and capitalist power, however, the U.S. has had to attempt to present a less racist, provincial and isolationist image. Its rise to globalism was prophesied by the internationalist Woodrow Wilson long before it became possible or practical in reality. After all, there were rival empires like Germany, Japan and Russia that also controlled large areas of the world, and had their own ideologies interests. Only when these powers were defeated in World War II and later the Cold War could the U.S. truly put its plans in place to become the leading capitalist power in the world, with no major rivals.

PART II: REVIEW EVALUATION (15%)

1) Assign a letter grade (A-F) to each of following the books, judging each book by its contribution to your learning this semester and its helpfulness in fulfilling the goals and objectives of the course and the GE category (Category 1).

Atlas, ed., How They See Us: Meditations on America -- C

Blaisdell, ed., Great Speeches by Native Americans -- A

Carroll, ed. Letters of a Nation -- B

Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power -- A+

Katz., ed., Why Freedom Matters -- B

Limerick and White, The Frontier in American Culture -- B

O'Hearn, ed., Half+Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural -- B+

Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 -- C

2) Write a 4-5 sentence explanation of your grade for each of the texts. You are more than welcome to include in this explanation a sentence or two offering your own reason for enjoying or disliking the text apart from the criteria I set forth above.

Atlas, ed., How They See Us: Meditations on America

This was an anthology of essays by various international writers about how they view the U.S., especially in light of the events of September 11th and then the Iraq War. It turns out that many of them were horrified by the Al Qaeda attacks and sympathetic to the U.S. As a result, but then became angered, bitter and disillusioned as a result of Bush's invasion of Iraq. This seems like a superficial view of American history to me, since its imperialist excursions began quite some time ago, long before the war in Iraq and long before Vietnam, for that matter. It was not the rather mindless Bush who formulated these policies in the Middle East, which are mainly concerned with controlling oil supplies. Those go back for many decades, which is why the U.S. maintained the Shah of Iran in power for so long, and why it 'tilted' to Iraq in 1980 when Saddam Hussein attacked the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran. I gave it a C. because it seemed too light on all this history.

Blaisdell, ed., Great Speeches by Native Americans

This was a collection of 82 speeches of Native Americans from the times when they first encountered Europeans to the 20th Century. I gave it an A because even though I had read some of these before, including Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, I have always been impressed by their nobility and courage. They understood perfectly well what the invaders wanted, and that they had to find ways to resist them or lose everything. In the end, of course, they did lose almost everything and ended up with very small populations that existed only in prison-like conditions on reservations, which was a tragedy. Perhaps this did not have to happen, but it is all too clear that the white conquerors never kept any agreements they made, at least no longer than it was convenient for them.

Carroll, ed. Letters of a Nation

This was a collection of over 200 letters written from the colonial period through the 20th Century, many of which were from ordinary people rather than the rich, powerful and famous, and written on a wide variety of subjects. Some of them are particularly memorable, such as the famous Frederick Douglass letter refusing to send money to his former owner because he had 'stolen' himself by running away, or Abigail Adams telling John to "remember the ladies" when he was there in Philadelphia founded the new country. I have no evidence at all that he actually did remember them, but a number of the letters were interesting and memorable enough to give the collection an above average grade of B.

Katz., ed., Why Freedom Matters

I gave this collection of various reflections on the meaning of freedom a B, not because I think freedom really matters or because I am a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson, but because some people have been able to take Jefferson's original words and turn them into something valuable. Jefferson was a slaveholder, and said explicitly said that he thought only white men were created equal, but others in the following two centuries broadened the original meaning considerably. Of course, many on the Right use "freedom" in a very narrow way, to mean only self-interest, accumulation of wealth and free enterprise, which is why the word has become so tiresome in America -- a B word. It meant a great deal more to those demanding human rights and equal citizenship for all, and they made much more of it than Jefferson ever intended.

Limerick and White, The Frontier in American Culture

Dislike of Frederick Jackson Turner, General Custer and his scout Buffalo Bill made me give this book a B, since I regard Turner as a celebrant of the expansion of white, Anglo-Saxon farmers to the Pacific, while General Custer took money from railroads and Buffalo Bill was an alcoholic self-promoter who dealt in lies and myths rather than history. Limerick is also correct that the myths these men created are still far too much a part of the standard discourse on this country, insofar as Americans know any history at all. Turner wrote blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics out of his Jeffersonian history of the White Republic, while Buffalo Bull delighted in showing battles and gunfights with them where the cowboys won in the end -- most of the time. Today, the use of terms like "pioneer" and "frontier" have been appropriated by hucksters, entrepreneurs and public relations types to sell various goods and services, and have about as much meaning in that context as "new and improved" or "revolutionary," while most white Americans still have a Disney-fied of their history.

O'Hearn, ed., Half+Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural

This is anthology of eighteen people, many with multicultural and multiracial backgrounds, including O'Hearn, whose father is Irish-American and her mother Chinese. Others are expatriates, working and attending school in various countries, all of which is becoming increasingly common under global capitalism. I thought about giving it a B, but then raised its grade to B+ because I realized that even though it was anecdotal, it did have something useful to say about global capitalism. Karl Marx had it right after all when he predicted in the 19th Century that capitalism would become an international system, breaking down the old barriers or tribe, nationality, region, religion and ethnicity. It had no noble or liberal reasons for doing this, only the desire to increase its profits, but this process certainly seems to be intensifying today.

Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

I gave this one-actor play by Anna Deavere Smith a C. because even though I think the Rodney King riots were a major event, there are other and better sources of information about them that these personal reflections. I do think that Los Angeles is a postmodern city, and may indeed be the original postmodern city, with all the ethic and class tensions that are typical of global capitalism. It does have a mass of submerged and marginalized workers, including illegal immigrants, as well as blacks who have always been ghettoized and segregated. At the same time, it has classes of workers who deal with knowledge, images, technology and symbols, which is what the post-Fordist economy is based on in America.

PART III (5%): MOST VALUABLE TEXT FOR 2ND HALF OF COURSE (since midterm)

3) Conclude the anthology with a short statement in which you explain which text or reading assignment or movie was most important for your education for the second half of the semester. Explain how and why it changed, altered, expanded, or reconstructed your vision of American history, literature, culture or the "American character."

Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power -- A+

I really like the work of Bruce Cumings, including his earlier book about the Korean War, so I gave this one an A+. I agree with him that America is a highly aggressive, expansionist empire, and that the Manifest Destiny variety of expansionism was mainly about control of land and territory -- and control over slave labor in the South. America was not really a global power or capitalist hegemon until 1945, when all its former rivals and competitors were badly damaged or destroyed, but it had already begun its overseas expansionism in the 1890s. By that time, though, I think that Wall Street and industrial, corporate capitalists were really in charge of the government and politics -- and indeed that they still are today. Their needs in foreign policy were not lands, territories and slaves, but markets, labor supplies and raw materials, so their version of imperialism was different from the Manifest Destiny type. They also had to work to develop new policies for a global capitalist empire, which was not really a problem that had confronted their predecessors in the 19th Century.