Discussion Question

Lecture Notes

The expansionist and eventually imperialistic orientation of United States foreign policy

after 1865 stemmed from the country’s domestic situation. Those who led the internal expansion

of the United States after the Civil War were also the architects of the nation’s foreign policy.

These national leaders, known collectively as the foreign policy elite, believed that extending

American influence abroad would foster American prosperity, and they sought to use American

foreign policy to open and safeguard foreign markets.

Many Americans harbored fears of the wider world, but the foreign policy elite realized

that those fears could be alleviated if the world could be remade in the American image.

Therefore, after the Civil War, these leaders advocated nationalism based on the idea that

Americans were a special people favored by God. Race-based arguments, gender-based

arguments, and Social Darwinism were used to support the idea of American superiority and

further the idea of expansion, and American missionaries went forth to convert the “heathen.”

Furthermore, a combination of political, economic, and cultural factors in the 1890s prompted

the foreign policy elite to move beyond support of mere economic expansion toward advocacy of

an imperialistic course for the United States—an imperialism characterized by a belief in the

rightness of American society and American solutions.

The analysis of American expansionism serves as a backdrop for scrutiny of the

American empire from the end of the Civil War to 1914. William H. Seward, as secretary of state

from 1861 to 1869 and as a member of the foreign policy elite, was one of the chief architects of

this empire. In examining Seward’s expansionist vision and the extent to which it was realized

by the late 1880s, we again see the relationship between domestic and foreign policy.

Acquisition of territories and markets abroad led the United States to heed the urgings of

Captain Alfred T. Mahan and to embark on the building of the New Navy. The fleet gave the

nation the means to protect America’s international interests and to become more assertive, as in

the Hawaiian, Venezuelan, and Cuban crises of the 1890s. The varied motives that led the United

States into the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War offer another striking example of the

complex links between domestic and foreign policy. In these crises of the 1890s, the American

frame of reference toward peoples of other nations became more noticeable in the shaping of

foreign policy. In the Cuban crisis, as in the Venezuelan crisis, Americans insisted that the

United States would establish the rules for nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War, sparked a

debate between imperialists and anti-imperialists over the course of American foreign policy. We

examine the arguments of the two groups and the reasons for the defeat of the anti-imperialists.

Finally, we turn to the American empire in Asia and Latin America. The American frame

of reference with regard to other ethnic groups, along with American political, economic, and

social interests, led to U.S. oppression of the Filipinos and shaped the Open Door policy as well

as relations with Japan. The same factors determined American relations with Latin America.

But in Latin America, the United States used its power to impose its will and, through the

Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, assumed the role of “an international police

power.”