The Fabric of America (39 page)

Nevertheless, the abrasive confidence with which the United States moved to expand its frontier in the far north suggested that its dreams of expansion were not likely to end with Alaska. However, one resemblance with the stiffening resistance to U.S. policies in the south should have given the expansionists pause for thought. North of the frontier, resentment against what were called American “tactics of bully and bluster” produced an outburst of nationalist feeling that led directly to the creation of modern Canada.

The core was formed by the four provinces most directly threatened by
U.S. ambitions: Upper Canada or Ontario, Lower Canada or Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. In 1867 the British Parliament passed the British North America Act, which brought these provinces under a single government and created the Dominion of Canada. Although foreign policy remained under British control, the Canadian Parliament conducted its own domestic affairs, and its westward policy was driven by the same concerns as the United States' had been. Just as the Oregon settlers were encouraged to go west to prevent the British arriving there first, so Canada's Prime Minister John A. Macdonald committed his country to expand across the prairies in response to the American threat. “I would be quite willing, personally, to leave that whole country a wilderness for the next half century,” he declared, “but I fear if Englishmen do not go there, Yankees will.”

In 1870 Manitoba joined the Dominion, followed a year later by British Columbia. With the earlier purchase of Rupert's Land, comprising the northern expanse of Canada from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869, the outlines of the modern nation were in place just four years after Alaska's purchase. Seward and Sumner deserve at least some of the credit.

On the U.S. side of the frontier, the new sense of national identity focused on Great Britain. Historically hostile relations with Britain had always served to create a sense of unity within the United States. As Lincoln himself observed, so long as the active memory of the Revolution lasted, “the deep-rooted principles of
hate
, and the powerful motive of
revenge
, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation.” Anglophobia had been integral to the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, with its agenda of reaching the Pacific before the British, and remained powerful enough to generate national outrage at any kind of accommodation with an empire whose monarchical, aristocratic society represented everything the United States was not. “It is not in the nature of things that she can be our friend,” Stephen Douglas declared, denouncing the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer treaty with Britain, which guaranteed Nicaragua's neutrality. “Sir, we have wounded her vanity and humbled her pride. She can never forgive us.”

The hostility existed alongside an equally fierce attachment to the liberties and culture that the United States had inherited from Britain, so that in
1842 Congressman Henry Wise of Virginia could in a single speech boast of having “derived
every drop of the blood
in his veins” from Britain and admit that he “honored her; loved her arts; loved her learning,” yet also declare that “he hated English arrogance; he hated English selfishness; he hated English ambition.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, the ambivalence gave rise to a curiously intense sense of rivalry, not just for economic superiority but for cultural dominance.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century the power of the second British empire grew, boosted by patented technology, by profits from the ever-increasing American market, and by the moral certainties of an abolitionist foreign policy. Its most visible aspect could be found at sea, where the Royal Navy policed the world's shipping routes in the interests of Britain's policy of free trade.

Yet inexorably the statistics reflected the rise of U.S. power. By the 1880s the population of fifty million was almost double that of Great Britain, and at last factory production was matching the leap forward its great competitor had made half a century earlier. In 1890, coal mining, the basic source of energy, was still 20 million tons behind at 160 million tons a year, but the number of patents issued, a critical indicator of innovation, was almost level at approximately sixteen thousand, and the building blocks of industry, iron and steel production, were creeping ahead at around nine million tons each. “
One held one's breath at the nearness of what one had never expected to see
,” wrote Henry Adams as the twentieth century approached, “the crossing of courses and the lead of American energies.”

Yet still Great Britain's overwhelming naval power dominated the oceans, and even the Anglophile Theodore Roosevelt had no doubt about the threat that posed to the United States. “The British Navy,” he wrote his friend Rudyard Kipling, “when, as was ordinarily the case, the British Government was more or less hostile to us, was our greatest danger.” A start was made to develop a rival U.S. navy in the 1880s, but not until Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published his 1890 study,
The Influence of Seapower upon History,
did it become a priority.

“The nation neither has nor cares to have its sea frontier defended,” Mahan scolded his readers. “Not only has Great Britain a mighty navy and we a long, defenseless seacoast, but it is a great commercial and political advantage to her that her larger colonies, and above all Canada, should feel that
the power of the mother country is something which they need, and upon which they can count… What harm can we do Canada proportionate to the injury we should suffer by the interruption of our coasting trade, and by a blockade of Boston, New York, the Delaware, and the Chesapeake? Such a blockade Great Britain certainly could make technically efficient, under the somewhat loose definitions of international law.”

Other empires offered a challenge. Germany was moving into the Pacific, and the Meiji regime in Japan was creating a new modern power, but still Britain was the rival to be surpassed. To defend the sea frontiers that suddenly seemed to be so vulnerable, Mahan recommended a navy of modern, steel-hulled, steam-powered warships and, since they needed to take on coal after four thousand miles or two weeks at sea, the seizure of Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific for use as coaling stations. To buttress his argument, he introduced the newly fashionable Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest, reminding his audience that they were engaged in “the race of life” in which “nation is arrayed against nation.” In the last decade of the century it was a compelling thought.

Around the world, the last spasm in a century of land seizure by Europe was taking place. In fifty years France had expanded south from its Algerian base, taken by force in 1830, to the banks of the Congo River and, by the 1880s, was acquiring most of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Germany was balancing its acquisition of Pacific islands with chunks of southern Africa. Russia had used the $7.5 million Seward had paid for Alaska to consolidate its hold on Central Asia and in the 1880s was developing Vladivostok as the center of its Far East empire. And the British were adding to their control of nearly one quarter of the world's landmass by establishing an East African empire from Kenya to Cape Town, a process that in 1898 pitted them against the resistance of Boer farmers in the Transvaal. Not to make use of superior technology to acquire strategic territory and valuable raw materials was unthinkable. Indeed, possession of the Gatling gun and the steam turbine engine virtually made it a moral duty to spread the civilization that made such inventions possible.

“
I went down on my knees
and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night,” President William McKinley reported of his decision to take over the Philippines in 1898. “And one night late it came to me this way…that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all.”

Other, more materialist reasons existed for this lurch into empire building. Business was only just recovering from a sharp economic crash in 1893, and as Republican senator John M. Thurston, formerly chief counsel for the Union Pacific Railroad, put it to his fellow senators, “War with Spain would increase the business and earnings of every American railroad; it would increase the output of every American factory, it would stimulate every branch of industry and domestic commerce.”

The hunger of the railroad and steel industries for new international markets meshed with Mahan's argument for the United States to join the imperial contest. The naval program accelerated until two new fleets could be put to sea, in the Pacific and the Atlantic. In 1898 President McKinley's Republican administration, backed by an impressive array of Wall Street, railroad, and newspaper interests, took advantage of Cuba's rebellion against Spain to push the frontiers of the United States far overseas. By the time the Spanish-American War was concluded, the new American navy had destroyed Spanish fleets in the Philippines as well as Cuba, and American power had colonized the Philippines, Guam, and the other Mariana islands, made protectorates of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and annexed Hawaii and Wake Island.

What Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war” commanded wide support in the United States, but it appealed especially to the executive branch of government. For a forceful president anxious to overturn the supremacy established by the legislature during Reconstruction, imperialism possessed one great quality—constitutional checks on the president's power inside the frontier of the United States ceased to apply outside it or at worst were brought to bear too late. The perfect example was provided by President Theodore Roosevelt's preemptive decision in 1903 to recognize the creation of the state of Panama following an American-inspired revolt against Colombian rule, and to commit funds to begin construction of a canal.

The proper response, as Roosevelt gleefully recalled in a speech at Berkeley, California, in 1911, would have been to submit “an admirable state paper occupying a couple of hundred pages detailing all of the facts to Congress and asking Congress' consideration of it. In that case there would have been a number of excellent speeches made on the subject in Congress; the debate would be proceeding at this moment with great spirit and the beginning of
work on the canal would be fifty years in the future. [Laughter and applause.] Fortunately the crisis came at a period when I could act unhampered. Accordingly I took the Isthmus, started the Canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me. [Laughter and applause.]”

In his desire to sell the imperial adventure to the people, however, Teddy Roosevelt argued that its roots were deeper than that and grew from the very history of the United States. In the introduction he wrote in 1900 to
The Winning of the West
, he declared that in occupying the Philippines the United States had simply “finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and [driven] the Spaniard outright from the western world…At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement.”

The United States would pay a heavy price for Roosevelt's interpretation of history.

A congressional amendment to the declaration of the Spanish-American War prevented full annexation of Cuba, although treaties with the fledgling nation effectively made it an American protectorate. In 1904, under pressure from its protector, Cuba granted the United States an unlimited lease of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. But technically the island remained independent. It was, therefore, the long campaign in the Philippines against a popular guerrilla movement led by Emilio Aguilnaldo that brought the United States face-to-face with its possession of an empire. Not only did the death toll account for some 250,000 Filipinos and more than 4,000 Americans, but the tactics used, including the use of fortified camps to enclose the civilian population, were as brutal as those used by other empires.

In a way that astonished many, appalled some, and brought pleasure to a few, American imperialism seemed almost indistinguishable from the British variety. Mahan himself pointed to the similarities each faced and argued, “The annexation of the Boer republics was a measure forced upon Great Britain as the annexation of the Philippines has been upon ourselves.” The once Anglophobic
Chicago Tribune
proclaimed its belief that “the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are drawing nearer and nearer together for cooperation in peace, and, in logical sequence, in war as well.”

In the early 1900s the crossing point in coal production was reached, and
superiority over the British empire was no longer in doubt. But instead of arriving at an independent identity, it seemed as though the republic's face had simply merged with the imperial image on the other side of the frontier.

Attacking U.S. policy, the anti-imperialist commentator J. W. Martin condemned the way that “England has suddenly become a guiding star to many of the American people.” In 1902 a committee of inquiry set up by Secretary of War Elihu Root turned up the sort of evidence that is inseparable from military occupation and armed resistance.

“Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap,” the wife of an officer sickened by the killings wrote to the
Philadelphia Ledger
in November 1901. “Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men ‘to make them talk,' have taken prisoners of people who had held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and, an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them up on a bridge, and shot them down one by one to drop into the water below and float down as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.”