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This chapter focuses on the emergence of the United States as a ‘superpower’ in 1945. It begins with a discussion of how America rose from being a group of British colonies to a continental empire containing human slavery during the period 1776–1865. It then examines how the reunification of the country after the Civil War, and the industrial revolution which followed, turned America into the world’s leading economic power by the early twentieth century. It also considers Woodrow Wilson’s empire of ideology and how the United States got involved in World War I, how the American economic system sank into depression between 1929 and 1933, and US role in the Cold War between 1933 and 1945.

This sharply argued and well‐researched book is quite timely. Since 2012, Japan's policies have aimed at loosening the post‐1945, US‐imposed restraints on the Japanese military. Many Americans and ...

Months before the September 11 attacks, a few observers, working almost entirely within the Washington, DC beltway, argued that the United States was an empire and its people the fortunate Chosen who were to spread an imperialism beneficial to all, apparently whether already stable and functioning parts of the world wanted it or not. Americans, these observers elaborated, were imperial not in the old sense of wanting to hold territory, but in their determination to expand globally American ideas based on capitalism and democracy-two concepts that actually have often been at cross-purposes throughout most of the post-1900 so-called American Century. The new imperialists rightly noted that earlier U.S. imperialism had been linked to American Progressivism and especially to the international, supposedly progressive ideals of Woodrow Wilson and the big-stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. The twenty-first-century imperialists, however, who defined themselves as Reagan conservatives, concluded that large political payoffs could bless their wing of Republicanism if they could sell the idea of an imperial foreign policy that combined American political and economic principles, unilateralism, a McDonald's-Disney culture, and-the necessary accompaniment-a military that absorbed nearly as much of the gross national product as it did during the height of the cold war, when the GNP was considerably smaller.1 Such military costs were nevertheless logical, given the ambition.

The success of U.S. drive after the Spanish-American War of 1898 had been long in forming, but the catalyst was the 1873-97 depression and economic downturn, which transformed a long era of deflation into an economic crisis in the United States. In 1890s, farmers had been bludgeoned by falling crop prices, harsh winters, expensive transportation, and massive foreclosures. Richard Olney placed the American crisis within a larger, indeed global, crisis of capitalism. Americans try to escape the crises by being constantly in motion or becoming attracted to those who were. Many debtors in the country and the city turned to silver as a panacea. The importance of the 1896 election is that it was determined by the long depression, especially by the 1893-96 crisis. Thayer Mahan and William McKinley were prepared to take the leap from the chaos of the mid-1890s to an overseas empire of the twentieth century.

This chapter examines how the United States evolved as a world power during the period 1776–1945. It first considers how Americans set out after the War of Independence to establish a continental empire. Thomas Jefferson called this an ‘empire for liberty’, but by the early nineteenth century the United States had become part of an empire containing human slavery. Abraham Lincoln determined to stop the territorial expansion of this slavery and thus helped bring about the Civil War. The reunification of the country after the Civil War, and the industrial revolution which followed, turned the United States into the world’s leading economic power by the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses Woodrow Wilson’s empire of ideology and concludes with an analysis of U.S. economic depression and the onset of the Cold War.

Amidst the Global Bloodshed, national upheavals, attempts of racial extermination, and the massive movement of what turned out to be historic political, economic, and social movements in a period of just five years, Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplished a great deal—enough to rank him, along with Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson, in the highest echelon of American leaders. Battling the last throes of isolationism during the later years of the 1930s, FDR finally took a unified nation into war in 1941. During the conflict, his administration did a remarkable job of maintaining a pro-war consensus and convincing Americans—most of whom had indicated only a few years earlier that they would not allow their sons and daughters to fight and die abroad, especially after Roosevelt himself had said as late as 1940 that such sacrifice might not be necessary—to participate wholeheartedly in a conflict that covered much of the globe, mobilized more than sixteen million American men and women, and killed in battle 292,000 of them.1

Since 1776, when their Declaration of Independence listed their lengthy grievances against British colonial rule and argued eloquently for self-government based on ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’, Americans have professed to lead the world’s decolonization struggle.1 They have professed to do so, and sometimes have actually done so, but at critical junctures in the past two centuries, they have easily sacrificed the principles of decolonization for the practices of imperial conquest and global hegemony. Americans, to paraphrase St Augustine’s famous prayer, have often demanded decolonization, but then added they do not want it quite yet.

IN 1985, PETER N. STEARNS, THE EDITOR OF THE Journal of Social History, worried that his vibrant, rapidly growing field was dangerously separating itself from the field of foreign relations. He warned that unless the widening gap was narrowed, "we risk a harmful division of interest between a fascination with domestic matters and an apathy or resignation toward crucial questions of war and peace."' Stearns's warning was only a variation on themes in the first essay in the first issue of the American Historical Review ninety years earlier, William M. Sloane's "History and Democracy." Sloane, a member of Columbia University's department of history and the AHR's initial board of editors, worried that because historians in the 1890s were focusing on narrow national history (in this case especially, stressing "the importance of the United States"), they were violating "the doctrine of the unity of history," which most professed to believe in, and-more important-were reluctant to admit "that no country is more than one wheel in the series which moves the hands on the dial-plate of human progress." Sloane prefaced this emphasis on employing an international framework with words that sound uncomfortably familiar a century later: historians were finding in their "society a widespread discontent with the results of historical study as pursued today." He believed that the scholars of his time were to blame, for by stressing aspects of national history they had ended up emphasizing "American history. . . in deference to patriotic but unintelligent public opinion." With considerable prescience, Sloane identified several of the pivotal points scholars would have to debate in the future if they hoped to broaden their work. "More political history ... will no longer suffice for a public hungering after information"; it would have to be supplemented by accounts of "social, industrial, commercial, aesthetic, religious, and moral conditions of the common man." Historians would notably have to come to terms with the impact of technology and the nation's awesome mixture of races. For "our history has not been one of origins, but exactly the contrary"-that is, it had been continually transforming as the people of the United States met, mixed, and often forcefully collided with other peoples. After all, comparing maps of 1756 and 1895 "will show what proportion of the earth's surface we have pre-empted for our civilization in

The basis of U.S. global power in the early twentieth century was economic. From the 1890s on, the nation had emerged as the world’s greatest and most competitive player in the marketplace. Fearful Europeans warned of an “American invasion” (an overwhelming offensive of U.S.-made goods and multinationals), long before they worried about the challenge of U.S. military, political, or cultural power. The invasion, moreover, proved deadly not only because of its magnitude but also because it was fueled by a growing crisis inside the United States, which was, ironically, caused by that very economic success. The crisis’s depth and disorder marked a historic turning point in the development of both American capitalism and the American empire. The imperial visions of Seward and others who followed the New Yorker were primarily made real not by “large-policy” officials, bureaucratic processes, public opinion, or frustrated Progressive reformers. Those visions were realized by the architects of the Second Industrial Revolution, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cyrus McCormick, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman, who redesigned the productive system. The first Industrial Revolution occurred in late eighteenth-century England, depended on coal, and remained dependent on the old craft system in many respects. The Second Industrial Revolution emerged from new technology produced by inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Edison. Certainly electricity profoundly changed the economy’s structure. Until the immediate pre–Civil War years, U.S. producers had only three alternatives for turning out more goods: adding more laborers (difficult because of labor scarcity), redistributing work into area homes (difficult over long distances because of primitive communications), or producing more power by finding more water, wood, animal, coal, or wind sources.

From the 1890s, United States had emerged as the greatest and most competitive player in the global marketplace. In the 1880s, U.S. multinational corporations began to replace the farmers as players of the most important role in the nation's foreign economic policy. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, were making the U.S. the world's leading power while also making such armories necessary. In 1886, Carnegie published Triumphant democracy, which argued that his law of surplus, among other capitalist principles, was as good for democracy as it would become for Russian railroads. The nation's democracy had produced the new Industrial Revolution, and it had provided the wherewithal to reinforce individual freedom. Capitalism produced democracy as well as, and because of, profits. Darwinism was the loose application of Charles Darwin's theories to the socioeconomic world. Carnegie was among the many who found social Darwinism highly congenial.

The United States drive to become the worlds most powerful nation climaxed successfully in the generation that came to power during and immediately after the Spanish-American War of 1898. The success had been long in forming, but the catalyst was the 1873–97 depression and, especially, the economic crisis of 1893–7 that transformed a long era of deflation into a full-blown economic depression. The post-1898 American empire was a product of the pre-1897 chaos at home. As we have seen, the crisis was triggered by the technological and managerial advances of the Second Industrial Revolution, advances that were exemplified by Carnegie’s policy of “running hard” to compete and indeed dominate market share. By the 1890s the Second Industrial Revolution, by all odds the most important event in American history between 1865 and 1914, had already begun spinning off a new, extracontinental foreign policy whose voices were Seward’s and Blaine’s especially. Culture (as manifested in the missionary movement), ideas (as seen in social Darwinism), and politics (as exemplified by an evolving Republican party and its fresh-found interest in reciprocity), as well as foreign policy had to adapt to the industrial changes. American and Roman Empires By 1893 the social trauma was becoming pronounced. Even the 1877 general strike and the 1886 Haymarket Riot paled in comparison. The percentage of unemployed in the total labor force of the manufacturing and transportation sectors has been estimated at about 4 percent in 1892, doubling to 9.6 percent in a year, and nearly doubling again to 16.7 percent in 1894.

The 1865–1912 era in U.S.–Latin American relations began with Secretary of State William Seward forswearing landed conquest in Mexico and the Congress rejecting footholds in the Caribbean– Central American region, even when tempted by the centuries-old dream of exclusive rights to an isthmian canal. The era ended with the United States exclusively owning and fortifying the canal, militarily and economically dominating the Caribbean through a network of bases, occupying Nicaragua with U.S. Marines, and verging on an invasion of Mexico. Clearly these years are pivotal in understanding how the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which ruled out foreign interference in Latin American affairs, became the Monroe Doctrine of 1912, which justified unilateral U.S. intervention in those affairs. It is equally clear, given the prominence of U.S. military forces in the region after the 1880s, that the nation’s foreign policies did not primarily seek order and stability in Latin America. They instead placed the greatest emphasis on obtaining economic opportunity and strategic footholds from which they could move to obtain further opportunities. These policies, even by the early 1890s, led to disorder and clashes that, in turn, helped pressure U.S. officials to build the naval forces necessary to maintain their new interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine.

The Civil War created the beginnings of a new world for United States foreign policy, but it was another generation before that future could be realized. Out of the deaths of 600,000 Americans emerged, slowly but with certainty, a different nation, which replaced Jacksonian decentralization with centralization, the presidencies of James Buchanan and Rutherford B. Hayes with those of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the Jeffersonian agrarian-ideal commercial farmer with the Andrew Carnegie–J. P. Morgan ideal of the billion-dollar U.S. Steel Corporation, and the 1840s laissez-faire capitalism of James K. Polk’s Democrats with the late 1890s corporate capitalism of Senator Mark Hanna’s Republicans. Of special importance, the nation built on these four domestic transformations to construct a foreign policy that replaced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 with the Open Door policy of 1899–1900; that is, Americans were finished with land expansion from sea to sea. They were confident now in their supremacy over much of the Western Hemisphere and embarked on an imperialist course in parts of Asia and Africa. These historic changes, of course, did not start cleanly in the 1860s. Jefferson and Polk, for example, had demonstrated the incredible potential for presidential power long before Theodore Roosevelt’s birth. The faith that supplying China’s market could put depression-ridden Americans to work dated back to the mid-1780s, not the mid-1890s. Even the once firmly held belief that the Civil War gave birth to the industrialized United States has been disproved. The annual growth rate of U.S. manufactures was 7.8 percent between 1840 and 1860, but 6 percent between 1870 and 1900. Between 1860 and 1870, the value added by manufacturing increased by only 2.3 percent annually, the lowest rate of increase in the nineteenth century.

Americans used the oceans as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe, and a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. As trade developed between white Americans and the Congo, so, did links between Africans and African Americans. The Samoa as in West Africa, as a strategic base would help guard the routes to Asia to relieve the growing glut of U.S. goods. The Review of Reviews argued that Hawaii was essential because of its central position in the commerce of the Pacific Ocean and linked the islands directly to the importance of the China market. In the post-1865 era, U.S. foreign policy was consistently shaped by choosing opportunity, both secular and religious, over stability. Seward had placed U.S. policy in Asia on two principles: the use of force and cooperation with other powers.

The American population is a mosaic, a people whose makeup can resemble the world with which it deals in foreign policy. Between the Civil War and World War I the mosaic became so pronounced, and the number of immigrants so enormous, that a historic turn was reached in the 1880s when, for the first time in the nation’s life, legislation excluded certain immigrants (in this case, Chinese). The exclusionary act was shaped by the economic downturn, but also by a deep-seated racism that, while it excluded some Asians, led to the lynching of numbers of Asians and African Americans in the 1880s and 1890s. It also melded with chaotic and tragic economic conditions in the West to produce a series of wars waged by the U.S. Army against Indians. With the ending of those wars, force had succeeded in consolidating non-Indian control of the continent. Militant laborers and angry farmers only remained to pose a domestic threat to order after 1890. This consolidation of the continent, training of military force, contradictory feelings about immigrants, and, above all, racism not only characterized these late nineteenth-century decades but were central in shaping U.S. foreign policy then and in the new century.

Almost from their beginnings as an independent people, Americans used the oceans not as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe but as a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. In the 1780s, as a century later, merchants were driven abroad by the exigencies of economic depression at home, as well as by the attraction of profits (and settlements) overseas. By the 1830s, colonizers of both the white and black races had, with the help of several presidential administrations, established an American settlement for freed African-American slaves in Liberia. A decade later, driven again in part by the economic bad times of 1837 to 1841, U.S. officials signed their first treaty with China. In the next decade of the 1850s they sent Matthew Perry to open Japan to U.S. interests, both secular and religious. After 1865, the United States rapidly became one of the six great powers fighting over the remains of China’s Manchu dynasty and, for a time, even was an unlikely participant in the great colonial struggle over Africa’s riches. Africa, Kasson, and African Americans Africa burst into American (and much of the world’s) attention in 1870 when the New York Herald sent Henry M. Stanley to find the supposedly lost missionary David Livingstone in the interior of Africa. Stanley’s alleged greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” became famous, but Stanley’s discovery of the Congo’s rich mineral wealth received more attention at the time. In 1878 one of the great U.S. explorers, Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt, sailed along the West African coast and into several of its rivers.

The prominence of U.S military forces in the region after the 1880s placed the emphasis on obtaining economic opportunity and strategic footholds from which the United States could move to obtain further opportunities. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the British relationship with Canada made Great Britain one of the two major obstacles to U.S. expansionism. The opportunities for expansion seemed plentiful, but two problems, race and revolution, brought to a stop the plans of Grant to annex areas in the Caribbean region. Railroad builders had tried to lay track in the 1860s to link up with their own transcontinental system, but the plan fell to Mexico's anti-Americanism. The Good Neighbor approach in the 1889-90 conference produced an arbitration convention to help settle disputes, a recommendation to build a railroad uniting North and South America, and the establishment of the Commercial Bureau of American Republics.

In 1943 the most distinguished, and perhaps most influential, expert on the U.S. Constitution, Professor Edward S. Corwin, pinpointed how Franklin D. Roosevelt had gathered power into the White House after World War II had erupted. Such an observation was not news. The news lay in Corwin’s noting the Labor Day speech of 1942 in which Roosevelt had truly revealed, in Corwin’s view, his disdain for constitutional limits by announcing that after the war was won, “the powers under which I act automatically revert to the people—to whom they belong.” Corwin acidly commented that Roosevelt seemed to believe that he “derives his war powers directly from the people, and not via the Constitution, a doctrine closely akin to the leadership principle which our armed forces are combating today in the four quarters of the globe.”1