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American History
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CHAPTER 7: Growth and Transformation
An Outline of American History
"Upon the sacredness of property, civilization itself depends."
-- Andrew Carnegie, 1889
Between two great wars -- the Civil War and the First World War -- the
United States of America came of age. In a period of less than 50 years it
was transformed from a rural republic to an urban state. The frontier
vanished. Great factories and steel mills, transcontinental railroad lines,
flourishing cities and vast agricultural holdings marked the land. With this
economic growth and affluence came corresponding problems. Nationwide,
businesses came to dominate whole industries, either independently or in
combination with others. Working conditions were often poor. Cities grew so
quickly they could not properly house or govern their growing populations.
TECHNOLOGY AND CHANGE
"The Civil War," says one writer, "cut a wide gash through the history of
the country; it dramatized in a stroke the changes that had begun to take
place during the preceding 20 or 30 years...." War needs had enormously
stimulated manufacturing, speeding an economic process based on the
exploitation of iron, steam and electric power, as well as the forward march
of science and invention. In the years before 1860, 36,000 patents were
granted; in the next 30 years, 440,000 patents were issued, and in the first
quarter of the 20th century, the number reached nearly a million.
As early as 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse had perfected electrical telegraphy,
and soon afterward distant parts of the continent were linked by a network
of poles and wires. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell exhibited a telephone
instrument and, within half a century, 16 million telephones would quicken
the social and economic life of the nation. The growth of business was
speeded by the invention of the typewriter in 1867, the adding machine in
1888 and the cash register in 1897. The linotype composing machine, invented
in 1886, and rotary press and paper-folding machinery made it possible to
print 240,000 eight-page newspapers in an hour. Thomas Edison's incandescent
lamp eventually lit millions of homes. The talking machine, or phonograph,
too, was perfected by Edison, who, in conjunction with George Eastman, also
helped develop the motion picture. These and many other applications of
science and ingenuity resulted in a new level of productivity in almost
every field.
Concurrently, the nation's basic industry -- iron and steel -- was forging
ahead, protected by a high tariff. Previously concentrated in the Eastern
states, the iron industry moved westward as geologists discovered new ore
deposits, notably the great Mesabi iron range at the head of Lake Superior,
which became one of the largest ore producers in the world. The ore lay on
the surface of the ground and was easy and cheap to mine. Remarkably free of
chemical impurities, it could be processed into steel of superior quality at
about one-tenth the previously prevailing cost.
CARNEGIE AND THE ERA OF STEEL
Andrew Carnegie was largely responsible for the great advances in steel
production. Carnegie, who came to America from Scotland as a child of 12,
progressed from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to a job in a telegraph
office, then to one on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before he was 30 years old
he had made shrewd and farsighted investments, which by 1865 were
concentrated in iron. Within a few years, he had organized or had stock in
companies making iron bridges, rails and locomotives. Ten years later, the
steel mill he built on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania was the largest
in the country.
Carnegie acquired commanding control not only of new mills, but also of coke
and coal properties, iron ore from Lake Superior, a fleet of steamers on the
Great Lakes, a port town on Lake Erie and a connecting railroad. His
business, allied with a dozen others, could command favorable terms from
railroads and shipping lines. Nothing comparable in industrial growth had
ever been seen in America before.
Though Carnegie long dominated the industry, he never achieved a complete
monopoly over the natural resources, transportation and industrial plants
involved in the making of steel. In the 1890s, new companies challenged his
preeminence, and at first, stung by competition, Carnegie threatened to
build an even more powerful business complex. But now, a tired old man, he
was persuaded to merge his holdings with an organization that eventually
would embrace most of the important iron and steel properties in the nation.
CORPORATIONS AND CITIES
The United States Steel Corporation, which resulted from this merger in
1901, illustrated a process under way for 30 years: the combination of
independent industrial enterprises into federated or centralized companies.
Begun during the Civil War, the trend gathered momentum after the 1870s, as
businessmen began to fear that overproduction would lead to declining prices
and falling profits. They realized that if they could control both
production and markets, they could bring competing firms into a single
organization. The "corporation" and the "trust" were developed to achieve
these ends.
Corporations, making available a deep reservoir of capital and giving
business enterprises permanent life and continuity of control, attracted
investors both by the anticipated profits and by the limited liability in
case of business failure. In turn, the trusts, were in effect combinations
of corporations whereby the stockholders of each placed stocks in the hands
of trustees. Such trusts made possible large-scale combinations, centralized
control and administration, and the pooling of patents. Their larger capital
resources provided power to expand, to compete with foreign business
organizations, and to drive hard bargains with labor, which was beginning to
organize effectively. They could also exact favorable terms from railroads
and exercise influence in politics.
The Standard Oil Company, founded by John D. Rockefeller, was one of the
earliest and strongest corporations, and was followed rapidly by other
combinations -- in cottonseed oil, lead, sugar, tobacco and rubber. Soon
aggressive individual businessmen began to mark out industrial domains for
themselves. Four great meat packers, chief among them Philip Armour and
Gustavus Swift, established a beef trust. Cyrus McCormick achieved
preeminence in the reaper business. A 1904 survey showed that more than
5,000 previously independent concerns had been consolidated into some 300
industrial trusts.
The trend toward amalgamation was manifest in other fields, particularly in
transportation and communications. Western Union, earliest of the large
communications combinations, was followed by the Bell Telephone System and
eventually by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. In the 1860s,
Cornelius Vanderbilt consolidated some 13 separate railroads into a single
line connecting New York City and Buffalo, about 800 kilometers away. During
the next decade he acquired lines to Chicago, Illinois, and Detroit,
Michigan -- and the New York Central Railroad System came into being. Other
consolidations were already under way, and soon the major railroads of the
nation were organized into trunk lines and systems directed by a handful of
men.
In this new industrial order, the city was the nerve center, bringing to a
focus all the nation's dynamic economic forces: vast accumulations of
capital, business and financial institutions, spreading railroad yards,
smoky factories, and armies of manual and clerical workers. Villages,
attracting people from the countryside and from lands across the sea, grew
into towns and towns into cities almost overnight. In 1830 only one of every
15 persons lived in communities of 8,000 or more; in 1860 the ratio was
nearly one in every six; and in 1890 three in every 10. No single city had
as many as a million inhabitants in 1860; but 30 years later New York had a
million and a half, and Chicago, Illinois, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
each had over a million. In these three decades, Philadelphia and Baltimore,
Maryland, doubled in population, Kansas City, Missouri, and Detroit,
Michigan, grew fourfold, Cleveland, Ohio, sixfold, Chicago tenfold.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Omaha, Nebraska, and many communities like them
-- hamlets when the Civil War began -- increased 50 times or more in
population.
RAILROADS, REGULATIONS AND THE TARIFF
Railroads became increasingly important to the expanding nation, and unfair
railroad practices proliferated. Rail lines extended cheaper rates to large
shippers by rebating a portion of the charge, operated to the disadvantage
of small shippers. Also, some railroads charged arbitrarily higher rates to
some shippers than to others between certain points, regardless of distance.
Moreover, while competition held down freight charges between cities with
several rail connections, rates were excessive between points served by only
one line. Thus it cost less to ship goods 1,280 kilometers from Chicago to
New York than to places a few hundred kilometers from Chicago. And by joint
action to avoid competition -- pooling -- rival companies divided the
freight business according to a prearranged scheme that placed the total
earnings in a common fund for distribution.
Popular resentment at these practices stimulated state efforts at
regulation. These had some effect, but the problem was national in character
and demanded congressional action.
In 1887 President Grover Cleveland signed the Interstate Commerce Act, which
forbade excessive charges, pools, rebates and rate discrimination, and
created an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to guard against violations
of the act. In the first decades of its existence, however, the railroads
used conservative Supreme Court decisions to thwart virtually all the ICC's
efforts at regulation and rate reductions.
Cleveland was also active in combating the high tariff, which, adopted
originally as an emergency war measure, had come to be accepted as permanent
national policy under the Republican presidents who dominated the politics
of the era. Cleveland, a Democrat, regarded excessive tariffs as responsible
in large measure for a burdensome increase in the cost of living and for the
rapid development of trusts. After many years, during which the tariff had
not been a political issue, the Democrats in 1880 demanded a "tariff for
revenue only," and soon the clamor for reform became insistent. In his
annual message to Congress in 1887, Cleveland, despite warnings to avoid the
explosive subject, startled the nation by denouncing the extremes to which
the principle of protecting American industry from foreign competition had
been pushed.
The tariff became the main issue of the presidential election campaign in
1888, and Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison, a defender of
protectionism, won in a close race. The Harrison administration, fulfilling
its campaign promises, passed in 1890 the McKinley tariff bill, a measure
designed to protect established industries as well as to foster so-called
"infant industries." The new tariff's generally high rates contributed to
high retail prices, triggering widespread dissatisfaction.
During this period, public antipathy toward the trusts increased. The
nation's gigantic corporations, subjected to bitter attack through the 1880s
by such reformers as Henry George and Edward Bellamy, became a hotly debated
political issue. To break the monopolies, the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed
in 1890, forbade all combinations in restraint of interstate trade and
provided several methods of enforcement with severe penalties. Couched in
vague generalities, the law itself accomplished little immediately after its
passage. But a decade later, in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt,
its effective application earned the president the nickname of
"trust-buster."
REVOLUTION IN AGRICULTURE
Despite the great gains in industry, agriculture remained the nation's basic
occupation. The revolution in agriculture -- paralleling that in
manufacturing after the Civil War -- involved a shift from hand labor to
machine farming, and from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Between
1860 and 1910, the number of farms in the United States tripled, increasing
from 2 million to 6 million, while the area farmed more than doubled from
160 million to 352 million hectares.
Between 1860 and 1890, the production of such basic commodities as wheat,
corn and cotton outstripped all previous figures in the United States. In
the same period, the nation's population more than doubled, with largest
growth in the cities. But the American farmer grew enough grain and cotton,
raised enough beef and pork, and clipped enough wool not only to supply
American workers and their families but also to create ever-increasing
surpluses.
Several factors accounted for this extraordinary achievement. One was the
expansion into the West. Another was the application of machinery to
farming. The farmer of 1800, using a hand sickle, could hope to cut 20
percent of a hectare of wheat a day. With the cradle, 30 years later, he
might cut 80 percent of a hectare daily. In 1840 Cyrus McCormick performed a
miracle by cutting from two to two-and-a-half hectares a day with the
reaper, the curious machine he had been developing for nearly 10 years.
Foreseeing the demand, he headed west to the young prairie town of Chicago,
where he set up a factory -- and by 1860 sold a quarter of a million
reapers.
Other farm machines were developed in rapid succession: the automatic wire
binder, the threshing machine and the reaper-thresher or combine. Mechanical
planters, cutters, huskers and shellers appeared, as did cream separators,
manure spreaders, potato planters, hay driers, poultry incubators and a
hundred other inventions.
Scarcely less important than machinery in the agricultural revolution was
science. In 1862 the Morrill Land Grant College Act allotted public land to
each state for the establishment of agricultural and industrial colleges.
These were to serve both as educational institutions and as centers for
research in scientific farming. Congress subsequently appropriated funds for
the creation of agricultural experiment stations throughout the country and
also granted funds directly to the Department of Agriculture for research
purposes. By the beginning of the new century, scientists throughout the
United States were at work on a wide variety of agricultural projects.
Ironically, the federal policy that enabled farmers to increase yields
ultimately generated vast supplies which drove market prices down -- and
disheartened farmers.
One of these scientists, Mark Carleton, traveled for the Department of
Agriculture to Russia. There he found and exported to his homeland the rust-
and drought-resistant winter wheat that now accounts for more than half the
United States wheat crop. Another scientist, Marion Dorset, conquered the
dreaded hog cholera, while still another, George Mohler, helped prevent
hoof-and-mouth disease. From North Africa, one researcher brought back
Kaffir corn; from Turkestan, another imported the yellow-flowering alfalfa.
Luther Burbank, in California, produced scores of new fruits and vegetables;
in Wisconsin, Stephen Babcock devised a test for determining the butterfat
content of milk; at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the African-American
scientist George Washington Carver found hundreds of new uses for the
peanut, sweet potato and soybean.
THE DIVIDED SOUTH
In the 1880s, the South pushed hard to attract industry. Large inducements
were offered to investors to develop the steel, lumber, tobacco and textile
industries. Yet in 1900 the South's percentage of the nation's industrial
base remained about the same size as it had been in 1860. Moreover, the
price of this drive for industrialization was high: disease and child labor
proliferated in Southern mill towns.
Thirty years after the Civil War, the South remained largely poor,
overwhelmingly agrarian and economically dependent. Its society enforced a
rigid social segregation of blacks from whites, and tolerated recurrent
racial violence.
Intransigent white Southerners, who resisted Reconstruction through their
positions in the national government in Washington, found ways to assert
state control to maintain white dominance. Several Supreme Court decisions
bolstered the views of these Southerners, beginning in the 1870s, by
upholding traditional conservative views of the appropriate balance between
national and state power.
In 1873 the Supreme Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment (citizenship
rights not to be abridged) conferred no new privileges or immunities to
protect African Americans from state power. In 1883, furthermore, it ruled
that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prevent individuals, as opposed to
states, from practicing discrimination. And in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the
Court found that "separate but equal" public accommodations for African
Americans, such as trains and restaurants, did not violate their rights.
Soon the principle of segregation by race extended into every area of
Southern life, from railroads to restaurants, hotels, hospitals and schools.
Moreover, any area of life that was not segregated by law was segregated by
custom and practice. Faced with pervasive discrimination, many African
Americans supported the program of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent
black leader of the late 19th and early 20th century, who counseled them to
focus on modest economic goals and to accept temporary social
discrimination. Others, led by the African-American intellectual W.E.B.
DuBois, wanted to challenge segregation through political action. But, with
the complicity of two major parties, calls for racial justice attracted
little support, and segregationist laws remained common in the South well
into the second half of the 20th century.
THE LAST FRONTIER
In 1865 the frontier line generally followed the western limits of the
states bordering the Mississippi River, bulging outward to include the
eastern sections of Kansas and Nebraska. Beyond this thin edge of pioneer
farms lay the prairie and sagebrush lands that stretched to the foothills of
the Rocky Mountains. Then, for nearly 1,600 kilometers, loomed the huge bulk
of mountain ranges, many rich in silver, gold and other metals. On the far
side, plains and deserts stretched to the wooded coastal ranges and the
Pacific Ocean. Apart from the settled districts in California and scattered
outposts, the vast inland region was populated by Native Americans: among
them the Great Plains tribes -- Sioux and Blackfoot, Pawnee and Cheyenne --
and the Indian cultures of the Southwest, including Apache, Navajo and Hopi.
A mere quarter-century later, virtually all this country had been carved
into states and territories. Miners had ranged over the whole of the
mountain country, tunneling into the earth, establishing little communities
in Nevada, Montana and Colorado. Cattle ranchers, taking advantage of the
enormous grasslands, had laid claim to the huge expanse stretching from
Texas to the upper Missouri River. Sheep herders had found their way to the
valleys and mountain slopes. Farmers sank their plows into the plains and
valleys and closed the gap between the East and West. By 1890 the frontier
had disappeared.
Settlement was spurred by the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted free
farms of 64 hectares to citizens who would occupy and improve the land.
Unfortunately for the would-be farmers, the land itself was suited more for
cattle ranching than farming, and by 1880 nearly 22,400,000 hectares of
"free" land was in the hands of cattlemen or the railroads.
In 1862 Congress also voted a charter to the Union Pacific Railroad, which
pushed westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa, using mostly the labor of
ex-soldiers and Irish immigrants. At the same time, the Central Pacific
Railroad began to build eastward from Sacramento, California, relying
heavily on Chinese immigrant labor. The whole country was stirred as the two
lines steadily approached each other, finally meeting on May 10, 1869, at
Promontory Point in Utah. The months of laborious travel hitherto separating
the two oceans was now cut to about six days. The continental rail network
grew steadily, and by 1884 four great lines linked the central Mississippi
Valley area with the Pacific.
The first great rush of population to the Far West was drawn to the
mountainous regions, where gold was found in California in 1848, in Colorado
and Nevada 10 years later, in Montana and Wyoming in the 1860s, and in the
Black Hills of the Dakota country in the 1870s. Miners opened up the
country, established communities, and laid the foundations for more
permanent settlements. Yet even while digging in the hills, some settlers
perceived the region's farming and stock-raising possibilities. Eventually,
though a few communities continued to be devoted almost exclusively to
mining, the real wealth of Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and California
proved to be in the grass and soil.
Cattle-raising, long an important industry in Texas, flourished after the
Civil War, when enterprising men began to drive their Texas longhorn cattle
north across the open public land. Feeding as they went, the cattle arrived
at railway shipping points in Kansas, larger and fatter than when they
started. Soon this "long drive" became a regular event, and, for hundreds of
kilometers, trails were dotted with herds of cattle moving northward.
Cattle-raising spread into the trans-Missouri region, and immense ranches
appeared in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakota territory.
Western cities flourished as centers for the slaughter and dressing of meat.
Ranching introduced a colorful mode of existence with the picturesque cowboy
as its central figure. Although the reality of cowboy life, with its low pay
and grueling work, was far from romantic, its mythological hold on the
American imagination has remained strong, from the "dime" novels of the
1870s to the films of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood in the late 20th
century.
Altogether, between 1866 and 1888, some six million head of cattle were
driven up from Texas to winter on the high plains of Colorado, Wyoming and
Montana. The cattle boom reached its height in 1885, when the range became
too heavily pastured to support the long drive, and was beginning to be
crisscrossed by railroads. Not far behind the rancher creaked the covered
wagons of the farmers bringing their families, their draft horses, cows and
pigs. Under the Homestead Act they staked their claims and fenced them with
a new invention, barbed wire. Ranchers were ousted from lands they had
roamed without legal title. Soon the romantic "Wild West" had ceased to be.
THE PLIGHT OF THE INDIANS
As in the East, expansion into the plains and mountains by miners, ranchers
and settlers led to increasing conflicts with the Indians of the West. Many
tribes of Native Americans -- from the Utes of the Great Basin to the Nez
Perces of Idaho -- fought the whites at one time or another. But the Sioux
of the Northern Plains and the Apache of the Southwest provided the most
significant opposition to frontier advance. Led by such resourceful leaders
as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the Sioux were particularly skilled at
high-speed mounted warfare. The Apaches were equally adept and highly
elusive, fighting in their environs of desert and canyons.
Conflicts with the Plains Indians began with a Sioux massacre of whites in
1862 and continued through the Civil War. In 1876 the last serious Sioux war
erupted, when the Dakota gold rush penetrated the Black Hills. The Army was
supposed to keep miners off Sioux hunting grounds, but little was done to
protect Indian lands. Yet when ordered to take action against bands of Sioux
hunting on the range according to their treaty rights, the Army moved
vigorously.
In 1876, after several indecisive encounters, General George Custer found
the main encampment of Sioux and their allies on the Little Big Horn River.
Custer and his men -- who were separated from their main detachment -- were
completely annihilated. Later, in 1890, a ghost dance ritual on the Northern
Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, led to an uprising and a
last, tragic encounter that ended in the death of hundreds of Sioux men,
women and children.
Long before this, however, the way of life of the Plains Indians had been
destroyed by the slaughter of the buffalo, almost exterminated in the decade
after 1870 by indiscriminate hunting. Meanwhile, the Apache wars in the
Southwest dragged on until Geronimo, the last important chief, was captured
in 1885.
Government policy ever since the Monroe administration had been to move the
Indians beyond the reach of the white frontier. But inevitably the
reservations had become smaller and more crowded, and many began to protest
the government's treatment of Native Americans. Helen Hunt Jackson, for
example, an Easterner living in the West, wrote a book, A Century of
Dishonor (1881), which dramatized the Indians' plight and struck a chord in
the nation's conscience. Most reformers believed the Indian should be
assimilated into the dominant culture. The federal government even set up a
school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to impose white values and
beliefs on Indian youths. (It was at this school that Native American Jim
Thorpe, often considered the best athlete the U.S. has produced, gained fame
in the early 20th century.)
In 1887 the Dawes Act reversed U.S. Indian policy, permitting the president
to divide up tribal land and parcel out 65 hectares of land to each head of
a family. Such allotments were to be held in trust by the government for 25
years, after which time the owner won full title and citizenship. Lands not
thus distributed, however, were offered for sale to settlers. This policy,
however well-intentioned, proved disastrous, since it allowed more
plundering of Indian lands. Moreover, its assault on the communal
organization of tribes caused further disruption of traditional culture. In
1934 U.S. policy was reversed again by the Indian Reorganization Act, which
attempted to protect tribal and communal life on the reservations.
AMBIVALENT EMPIRE
The last decades of the 19th century were a period of imperial expansion for
the United States, as it extended its influence, and at times its domain,
over widely scattered areas in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and into
Central America. The United States took a different course than its European
rivals, however, because of its own history of struggle against European
empires and its unique democratic development.
The sources of American expansionism in the late 19th century were varied.
Internationally, it was a period of imperialist frenzy, as European powers
raced to carve up Africa and competed for influence and trade in Asia --
along with a new rival, Japan. Many Americans, including such influential
figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root, felt that
to safeguard its own interests, the United States had to stake out spheres
of economic influence as well. That view was seconded by a powerful naval
lobby, which called for an expanded fleet and network of overseas ports as
essential to the economic and political security of the nation. More
generally, the doctrine of "manifest destiny," first used to justify
America's continental expansion, was now revived to assert that the United
States had a right and duty to extend its influence and civilization in the
Western Hemisphere and the Caribbean, as well as across the Pacific.
At the same time, the voices of anti-imperialism from diverse coalitions of
Northern Democrats and reform-minded Republicans remained loud and constant.
As a result, the acquisition of an American empire was piecemeal and
ambivalent, and colonial administrations were often more concerned with
trade and economic issues than political control.
America's first venture beyond her continental borders was the purchase of
Alaska -- sparsely populated by Inuit and other native peoples -- from
Russia in 1867. Most Americans were either indifferent to or indignant at
this action by Secretary of State William Seward, and Alaska was widely
referred to as "Seward's Folly" and "Seward's Icebox." But 30 years later,
when gold was discovered on Alaska's Klondike River, thousands of Americans
headed north, and many of them settled in Alaska permanently. When Alaska
became the 49th state in 1959, it replaced Texas as the largest state in the
Union.
The Spanish-American War, which was fought in 1898, marked a turning point
in American history. Within a few years after the war ended, the United
States was exercising control or influence over islands in the Caribbean
Sea, the mid-Pacific and close to the Asian mainland.
By the 1890s, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only remnants of Spain's once
vast empire in the New World, while the Philippine Islands comprised the
core of Spanish power in the Pacific. The outbreak of war had three
principal sources: popular hostility to autocratic Spanish rule; American
sympathy with demands for independence; and a new spirit of national
assertiveness in the United States, stimulated in part by a "jingoistic" or
nationalistic and sensationalist press.
In 1895 Cuba's growing wrath against the tyranny of the mother country burst
into a war of independence. The United States watched the course of the
uprising with mounting concern. Most Americans were sympathetic with the
Cubans, but President Cleveland was determined to preserve neutrality. Three
years later, however, during the McKinley administration, the U.S. warship
Maine was destroyed while lying at anchor in Havana harbor, under
circumstances that are still unclear. More than 250 men were killed, and an
outburst of indignation, intensified by sensationalized press coverage,
swept across the country. Although for a time McKinley tried to preserve the
peace, within a few months, believing delay futile, he recommended armed
intervention.
The war with Spain was swift and decisive. During the four months it lasted,
not a single American reverse of any importance occurred. A week after the
declaration of war, Commodore George Dewey, then at Hong Kong, proceeded
with his squadron of six vessels to the Philippines. His orders were to
prevent the Spanish fleet based there from operating in American waters. He
caught the entire Spanish fleet at anchor and destroyed it without losing an
American life.
Meanwhile, in Cuba, troops landed near Santiago, where, after winning a
rapid series of engagements, they fired on the port. Four armored Spanish
cruisers steamed out of Santiago Bay and a few hours later were reduced to
ruined hulks.
From Boston to San Francisco, whistles blew and flags waved when word came
that Santiago had fallen. Newspapers dispatched correspondents to Cuba and
the Philippines, who trumpeted the renown of the nation's new heroes. Chief
among them were George Dewey of Manila fame and Theodore Roosevelt, who
resigned as assistant secretary of the navy to lead the "Rough Riders," a
volunteer regiment he recruited for service in Cuba. Spain soon sued for
peace, and in the treaty signed on December 10, 1898, transferred Cuba to
the United States for temporary occupation preliminary to the island's
independence. In addition, Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam in lieu of war
indemnity, and the Philippines on payment of $20 million.
Having overseas possessions was a new experience for the United States.
Consequently, the new territories were encouraged to move toward democratic
self-government, a political system with which none of them had any previous
experience.
Nevertheless, the United States found itself in a familiar colonial role
when it suppressed an armed independence movement in the Philippines in the
first decade of its occupation. The Philippines gained the right to elect
both houses of its legislature in 1916, and in 1936 a largely autonomous
Philippine Commonwealth was established. In 1946, after World War II, the
islands attained full independence.
American involvement in the Pacific area was not limited to the Philippines,
however. The year of the Spanish-American War also saw the beginning of a
new relationship with the Hawaiian Islands. Earlier contact with Hawaii had
been mainly through missionaries and casual traders. After 1865, however,
Americans began to develop the islands' resources -- chiefly sugar cane and
pineapples. When the royal government announced its intention to end foreign
influence in 1893, American businessmen joined with influential Hawaiians to
install a new government, which then asked to be annexed to the United
States.
Widespread protests in the United States against the use of American
soldiers and the idea of colonial rule persuaded President Grover Cleveland
and Congress to reject annexation at first. But, responding to the surge of
nationalism generated by the Spanish-American War, Congress voted
overwhelmingly in July 1898 to annex the islands, thus also acquiring an
important naval base at Pearl Harbor. In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state
in the Union.
Cuba acquired nominal independence when American troops departed in 1902.
But the United States retained the right to intervene to preserve civil
order, which it did on three occasions before renouncing that right in 1934.
Even with full Cuban independence, however, American economic and political
influence remained strong until 1959, when Fidel Castro overthrew the
government in power, establishing a Marxist regime with close ties to the
Soviet Union.
Puerto Rico, the island lying east of Cuba, followed an apprenticeship
similar to that of Cuba and the Philippines. In 1917 the U.S. Congress
granted Puerto Ricans the right to elect all of their legislators. But the
same law created a different path for the island, making it officially a
U.S. territory and, more importantly, giving its people American
citizenship. In 1950 Congress granted Puerto Rico complete freedom to decide
its future. In the referendum of 1952, the citizens voted to reject either
statehood or total independence, and chose instead a commonwealth status.
Large numbers of Puerto Ricans have settled on the mainland, to which they
have free access and where they acquire all the political and civil rights
of any other citizen of the United States.
THE CANAL AND THE AMERICAS
The war with Spain revived American interest in building a canal across the
isthmus of Panama, uniting the two great oceans. The usefulness of such a
canal for sea trade had long been recognized by the major commercial nations
of the world; indeed the French had begun digging one in the late 19th
century only to abandon their efforts due to the difficulties involved. Now
that the United States was a power in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific
Ocean, it saw the military necessity of a canal to provide, when needed,
speedier transfer of warships from one ocean to the other.
At the turn of the century, what is now Panama was a northern province of
Colombia. When the Colombian legislature in 1903 refused to ratify a draft
treaty giving the United States the right to build and manage a canal, a
group of impatient Panamanians, with the support of U.S. Marines, rose in
rebellion and declared Panama's independence from Colombia. The breakaway
country was immediately recognized by President Theodore Roosevelt. Under
the terms of the treaty signed in November of that year, Panama granted the
United States a perpetual lease to a 16-kilometer-wide strip of land between
the Atlantic and the Pacific, in return for $10 million and a yearly fee of
$250,000. Colombia later received $25 million as partial compensation.
(Under the Panama Canal treaty negotiated by the two countries 75 years
later, the Canal will revert to Panamanian sovereignty by the year 2000.)
The completion of the Canal in 1914 was a major triumph of engineering
directed by Colonel George W. Goethals, while the conquest of malaria and
yellow fever in a tropical jungle proved to be an outstanding achievement of
preventive medicine.
Elsewhere in Latin America, the United States fell into a pattern of fitful
intervention. Between 1900 and 1920, for example, the United States
intervened in six Western Hemispheric nations, establishing protectorates in
Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and periodically stationing U.S. Marines
in Nicaragua. In 1867 the United States pressured the French into removing
troops supporting the Emperor Maximillian in Mexico. Half a century later,
however, as part of an ill-starred campaign to influence the Mexican
revolution, the United States found itself sending an army of 11,000 troops
into the northern part of the country in a futile effort to capture the
elusive rebel and outlaw Francisco "Pancho" Villa.
At the same time, the United States also played an important role in
establishing an institutional basis for cooperation among the nations of the
Americas. In 1889 Secretary of State James G. Blaine proposed that the 21
independent nations of the Western Hemisphere join in an organization
dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes and to closer economic
bonds. Emerging from the first Pan-American conference in 1890 was a
permanent body known in its early years as the Pan-American Union and today
as the Organization of American States (OAS).
Moreover, the later administrations of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D.
Roosevelt repudiated the right of U.S. intervention in Latin America. In
particular, the Roosevelt Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, though by no
means ending tensions between the United States and Latin America, helped
dissipate much of the ill-will engendered by earlier U.S. intervention and
unilateral actions.
UNITED STATES AND ASIA
Newly established in the Philippines and firmly entrenched in Hawaii, the
United States at the turn of the century, had high hopes of a vigorous trade
with China. Since China's defeat by Japan (1894-1895), however, various
European nations had acquired naval bases, leased territories and
established spheres of influence. They had also secured monopolistic trade
rights as well as exclusive concessions for investing in railway
construction and mining development.
In its own earlier diplomatic relations with Asia, the American government
had always insisted upon equality of commercial privileges for all nations.
However, idealism in American foreign policy was at odds with the desire to
compete with Europe's imperial powers in the Far East. In September 1899
Secretary of State John Hay addressed a note to the powers concerned,
resulting in the doctrine of the "Open Door" for all nations in China --
that is, equality of trading opportunities (including equal tariffs, harbor
duties and railway rates) in the areas they controlled. Despite its
idealistic component, the "Open Door," in essence, became a diplomatic
maneuver to gain the advantages of a colony without the necessity of
wresting one from the Chinese.
With the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Chinese struck out against the
foreigners. In June, insurgents seized Peiking (Beijing) and attacked the
foreign legations there. Hay promptly announced to the European powers and
Japan that the United States would oppose any disturbance of Chinese
territorial or administrative rights or of the Open Door policy. Once the
rebellion was quelled, it required all Hay's skill to carry out the American
program and to protect China from crushing indemnities. In October, however,
Great Britain and Germany once more signaled their adherence to the Open
Door policy and the preservation of Chinese independence, albeit under
foreign domination, and other nations soon followed.
In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt responded to American labor's fears of
competition by persuading the Japanese government temporarily to suspend
emigration of laborers to the United States. Otherwise, American dealings
with Japan during the latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th
century were mainly cordial and uneventful. One unusual encounter involved
President Roosevelt's mediation of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905,
during which he warned Germany and France not to intervene on Russia's side
against Japan. As a result of his efforts in working out a settlement,
Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.
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The U. S. Constitution
