Imperialism: Debates

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify the principal economic, strategic, and ideological pressures that pushed the United States toward overseas empire in the 1890s.
• Compare the imperialist case made by Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, Josiah Strong, and Alfred Thayer Mahan with the anti-imperialist case made by Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, William James, and the Anti-Imperialist League.
• Explain how Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 frontier thesis and Mahan's 1890 The Influence of Sea Power Upon History supplied the intellectual scaffolding for an expansionist foreign policy.
• Account for the chain of events that produced the 1898 annexation of Hawaii, from the planter coup against Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 to the McKinley joint resolution of 1898.
• Use Skill 2 (Comparison) to weigh the perspectives, evidence, and underlying assumptions of imperialists and anti-imperialists on a single contested case.

By 1890 the United States had finished a century of continental expansion. The 1890 census reported that the line between settled and unsettled territory in the West had effectively dissolved, and three years later the historian Frederick Jackson Turner turned that finding into the argument that the moving frontier had been the engine of American democracy and that the country would now have to find a new outlet for the same restless energy. Whatever later historians would do with the frontier thesis, Turner's contemporaries seized on it as warrant for empire. Coupled with the panic of 1893, which pushed industrial output past what the domestic market could absorb, and with a generation of European empire-building that had carved up Africa and reached deep into Asia, the closing-frontier argument fed a confident sense that the United States now had to look outward (KC-7.3.I.A).

The strategic case for empire was made most influentially by the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan. His 1890 study The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 argued from the example of the British that a great power required a modern steam-and-steel navy, a global network of coaling stations at which to refuel that navy, an isthmian canal to move warships between oceans, and overseas markets and raw materials to sustain the industrial base behind it. The book was read in Washington, in London, and in Tokyo. Mahan personally lobbied Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, both of whom embraced his program. By 1898 the U.S. Navy had moved from rusting Civil War-era monitors to a modern force of steel battleships and protected cruisers. The strategic logic supplied a ready set of geographic targets, the Caribbean for an isthmian canal, the Pacific for a route to the China market, and Hawaii as the indispensable mid-Pacific way station (KC-7.3.I.A).

The ideological case rested on a stack of assumptions that nineteenth-century Americans found mutually reinforcing. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana made the most quoted version of it in his 1898 campaign speech "The March of the Flag," in which he framed expansion as the next chapter in a divine plan that ran from Plymouth Rock through the Northwest Ordinance to the Philippines. The Reverend Josiah Strong, in his widely circulated 1885 book Our Country, argued that Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization had been chosen to remake the rest of humanity, a claim he braided with anxieties about urban poverty and Catholic immigration at home. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and President William McKinley drew on the same blend of Social Darwinism, racial hierarchy, and Christian mission. The English poet Rudyard Kipling supplied the period's most compact slogan when he addressed the United States directly in 1899 with the poem "The White Man's Burden," urging Americans to take up the work of governing what he called "your new-caught, sullen peoples." Imperialists, in short, claimed that empire was simultaneously good business, good strategy, and good moral duty (KC-7.3.I.A).

The anti-imperialist case formed almost as quickly. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in Boston in November 1898 in response to the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War, gathered an unlikely coalition. The novelist Mark Twain wrote searing essays against the war in the Philippines, including "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" in 1901. The industrialist Andrew Carnegie, the wealthiest American of the age, offered to write a personal check for twenty million dollars to buy Philippine independence outright. The Harvard philosopher William James warned that empire would corrupt the country's republican character. Three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan made anti-imperialism the central plank of his 1900 campaign, arguing that the United States could not become an empire without contradicting the founding principle that government rests on the consent of the governed. The League's case rested on three braided lines of argument: the constitutional claim that the Republic had been founded against empire and could not become one without ceasing to be itself, the practical claim that ruling distant peoples without their consent violated the Declaration of Independence, and, in some quarters, an explicitly racial argument that opposed absorbing non-white populations into the body politic (KC-7.3.I.B).

The case study that brought every strand of the argument together was Hawaii. American sugar planters had dominated the islands' economy since the 1840s. The 1875 Reciprocity Treaty had given Hawaiian sugar duty-free access to the U.S. mainland market and had tied the islands' economic fate to American buyers. When the McKinley Tariff of 1890 stripped that advantage and threw Hawaiian sugar into a domestic crisis, the planter class began to push for outright annexation as the only durable way back into the U.S. market. Queen Liliuokalani, who came to the throne in 1891, moved in early 1893 to promulgate a new constitution restoring royal authority over the planter-dominated legislature. A small committee of American businessmen, led by Sanford Dole, organized a coup with the open support of U.S. Marines from the warship USS Boston in Honolulu harbor and proclaimed a provisional republic. President Grover Cleveland, taking office shortly after, refused to send the annexation treaty to the Senate, calling the coup a violation of international law and ordering an investigation that confirmed his judgment. The provisional government held on, however, and President William McKinley, taking the question up again amid the Spanish-American War, signed a joint congressional resolution of annexation on July 7, 1898. Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900 and the fiftieth state in 1959. The episode displayed the imperialist program at its most concrete: a strategic mid-ocean station, an economic interest in sugar, and an ideological scaffolding that allowed planters and policymakers to describe the overthrow of an indigenous monarchy as the extension of civilization (KC-7.3.I.A, KC-7.3.I.C).

The two sides of the debate did not divide neatly along party lines. Republicans dominated the imperialist camp but counted the elderly George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts among the League's most determined senators. Democrats supplied most of the anti-imperialist political leadership in Bryan, Hoar's House counterparts, and southern senators worried about the constitutional consequences of acquiring populations of color. Progressive intellectuals split: Theodore Roosevelt was the most enthusiastic imperialist of his generation, while Jane Addams and the social-settlement movement she led leaned strongly anti-imperialist. The 1900 election, fought on the imperialism question more squarely than any other issue, returned McKinley to the White House by a comfortable margin, and the constitutional standing of the new island territories was settled by the Supreme Court's Insular Cases in 1901. The League continued for another two decades, but the political question had been answered. The deeper argument about what kind of country an empire would make would echo through every subsequent foreign-policy debate of Period 7, from Wilson's League of Nations to the Senate's neutrality acts of the 1930s (Theme WOR).

The CED expects students to be able to compare the two cases on their merits, including the points where they shared assumptions. The grid below summarizes the principal arguments on each side and flags the racial premises that, awkwardly, both camps drew on.

Both camps included voices that drew on racial hierarchy. Many imperialists argued that Anglo-Saxons had a duty to govern what they considered lesser peoples; many anti-imperialists argued that the Republic should not absorb non-white populations into the body politic. Students should be able to recognize that the racial premise was shared even where the policy conclusions diverged.

The four excerpts below sample the rhetorical bookends of the debate. Read together, they give students the imperialist and anti-imperialist cases in the words of their most influential makers.

1. (Comparison) Compare the imperialist and anti-imperialist arguments at the level of their underlying assumptions. On which premises did the two sides agree, and on which did they genuinely differ? Use one specific source from each camp to support your answer.
2. (Causation) Trace the chain of pressures that produced the call for overseas empire in the 1890s. Which of the three pressures, economic, strategic, or ideological, do you find most decisive, and why?
3. (Comparison) Compare Albert Beveridge's "The March of the Flag" with William Jennings Bryan's 1900 imperialism speech. What does each say about the consent of the governed, and how does each handle the question of race?
4. (Continuity and Change) Account for the role of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis in the imperialist argument. Was the closing of the western frontier truly a cause of overseas expansion, or did imperialists use the thesis as a rhetorical justification for a policy they had already decided to pursue?
5. (Causation) Account for the chain of events that produced the 1898 annexation of Hawaii. At which decision point, the 1890 McKinley Tariff, the 1893 planter coup, the Cleveland refusal, or the McKinley joint resolution, do you think a different choice would have produced a different outcome?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.