THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING OF CLASS WAR --- Episode 2

                AMERICA IN THE LATTER PART OF THE 1800s

   Several years before his election to the presidency, William McKinley said : "We want a foreign market for our surplus products." Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana in early 1897 declared : "American factories are making more than the American people can use ; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us ; the trade of the world must and SHALL be ours." The Department of State explained in 1898 :

   It seems to be conceded that every year we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus of manufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operatives and artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargement of foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshops has, therefore, become a serious problem of statesmanship as well as of commerce. 

   These expansionist military men and politicians were in touch with one another. One of Theodore Roosevelt's biographers tells us : "By 1890, Lodge, Roosevelt, and Mahan had begun exchanging views," and that they tried to get Mahan off sea duty "so that he could continue full-time his propaganda for expansion." Roosevelt 
once sent Henry Cabot Lodge a copy of a poem by Rudyard Kipling [who promoted British colonialism], saying it was "poor poetry, but good sense from the expansionist standpoint." 

   When the United States did not annex Hawaii in 1893 after some Americans [ the combined missionary and pineapple interests of the Dole family ] set up their own government, Roosevelt called this hesitancy "a crime against white civilization." And he told the Naval War College : "All the great masterful races have been fighting races . . . No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war."

   Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior.  When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrsnts, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was "rather a good thing" and told her he had said as much at a dinner with "various dago diplomats . . . all wrought up by the lynching." 

   William James, the philosopher, who became one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote Roosevelt that he "gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life. . ." 

   Roosevelt's talk of expansionism was not just a matter of manliness and heroism ; he was conscious of "our trade relatios with China." Lodge was aware of the textile interests in Massachusetts that looked to Asian markets. Historian Marilyn Young has written of the work of the American Development Company to expand American influence in China for commercial reasons, and of State Department instructions to the American in China to "employ all proper methods for the extension of American interests in China." She says [ The Rhetoric of Empire ] that the talk about markets in China was far greater  than the actual amount of dollars involved at the time, but this talk was important in shaping American policy toward Hawaii, the Philippines, and all of Asia. 

   While it was true that in 1898, 90 percent of American products were sold at home, the 10 percent sold abroad amounted to a billion dollars. Walter Lefeber writes [ The New Empire] : "By 1893, American trade exceeded that of every other country in the world except England. Farm products, of course, especially in the key tobacco, cotton, and wheat areas, had long depended on international markets for their prosperity." And in the twenty years up to 1895, new investments by American capitalists overseas reached a billion dollars. In 1885, the steel industry's publication Age of Steel wrote that the internal markets were insufficient and the overproduction of industrial products "should be relieved and prevented in the future by increased foreign trade." 

   Oil became a big export in the 1880s and 1890s ; by 1891, the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil Company accounted for 90 percent of American exports of kerosene and controlled 70 percent of the world market. Oil was nw second ony to cotton as the leading product sent overseas. 

   MORE TO COME