1901 Dbq

By the year 1901, the United States possessed the third-largest navy in the world, a substantial overseas empire, and a growing reputation as a world power. It had developed this international superiority through its involvement in the eager imperialism of the era; the rapid expansion, colonization, and competition that was occupying the most influential nations of the world. America's new found role as a colonial power was not, however, an abrupt development. Whereas the United States expansionism of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries was a clear continuation of the social and cultural principles that had fueled the nation's past imperialism, it was to a greater degree a parting from the methods of the past through its hunt for new economic and political motives.

American imperialism of the late 1800s and early 1900s demonstrated the same cultural and social validations of previous expansionism. The original doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which appeared in the 1840s, encouraged a belief that America was destined by God to expand its borders across the continent in order to spread the blessings of liberty. As Senator Albert J. Beveridge explains in his 1900 speech to 56th Congress (Doc. E), this belief was equally influential in later imperial America; he expresses the Americans' self-recognition as God's chosen people, a race not only blessed, but bound by a holy duty to enlighten the rest of the world through their own expansion. In the past, this duty had been attempted by the Christian preachers' permeation of the Indian tribes of the west, and was continued at the turn of the nineteenth century by the United States' supposed efforts to civilize the inhabitants of foreign territory. Josiah Strong confirmed this thought in his book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (Doc. B) as he described the holy mission of the Anglo-Saxon race to spread civil liberty and Christianity throughout continents across the globe. He thereby justified American imperialism with a declaration of cultural and racial superiority that had been a motivation of American expansion since the early nineteenth century.

Although expansionism around the year 1900 shared some similar motivation with that of earlier decades, it was to a greater degree the result of new economic and political pursuits. Past expansion had involved occupying neighboring territory with the present states that enabled the spread of American settlement; it was used for the spread of agriculture and the American population, and all acquired territory was intended to ultimately become states. Contrastingly, new territory in the age of imperialism was acquired with the economic intent of use as a colony: a provider of raw materials and markets for the products of industrialism. By denying citizenship to the inhabitants of the territory of the Philippines in the Insular Case Downes v. Bidwell (Doc. H) the Supreme Court demonstrated that the Constitution did not "follow the flag", thereby proving that the United States had no intention of granting new territories equal status to states; they would instead be colonies serving American economic interests that contrasted with the settlement-based expansion of past decades.

A further deviancy from past