Study material generated by AI from this openly licensed book (CC BY-SA 4.0). Not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher.
The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 4 · pp. 85–128
After the Civil War, the United States extended its control over the whole continent between the oceans, often by breaking its own treaties. This chapter follows that process in several settings: the Plains and the Native nations who lived there, the railroads and ranching economy, the myth of the cowboy, the borderlands with Mexico, and the overseas empire the US built around 1900. This part covers how settlement and war reshaped the West.
In the mid-1800s, Native nations still controlled most of the land west of the Mississippi. No outside power had real political or military control over most of it. The Civil War removed the slavery question from western expansion, and the US industrialized and laid rails at the same time. Together these changes pushed the country's growing population west (p. 86).
Settler colonialism is the term many historians use for what happened next. In this style of colonial control, the state does not mainly rule a conquered people from the top down. Instead, land-hungry settlers move onto Native land from the ground up (p. 86). Each settler may simply want cheap land. But their arrival causes conflict, and that conflict gives the army a reason to step in and secure the territory. So farmers, ranchers and miners served American sovereignty even without a formal colonial government (pp. 86–87).
Two things made this migration so large:
As a result, settlers crossed the Mississippi in record numbers. Earlier migrants had often just passed through on the way to California or Oregon. Now people stayed in the continent's interior to farm, raise livestock and mine (p. 86).
Some newcomers attacked Native ways of life more directly. Hunters came to the Plains for bison hides. Tough bison leather was turned into belts for eastern factory machines and into clothing. The skulls were ground into an ingredient in fertilizer. Organized teams killed and skinned the animals, and the slaughter peaked in the early 1870s (p. 87).
The numbers show the scale. There were more than ten million bison in the middle of the century, but only a few hundred by the early 1880s. Plains peoples relied on the herds for food, materials and trade, so this loss undermined their whole way of life. Railroads then made it possible for cattle to take the bison's place on the grasslands (p. 87).
The 'Indian wars' of folklore look like scattered, short, local clashes between soldiers and Native groups. Many people still picture them that way. In fact the fights were tied to larger forces: new settlement, railroad building and the extraction of resources. For example, settlers cut across the seasonal routes Native peoples used to hunt bison, raid enemies and trade, and this provoked conflict (pp. 87–88).
Federal policy was also part of the pattern. Thomas Jefferson had once imagined Native nations living apart in the West. That idea stopped being workable once settlers pressed in from all sides. Removal had long been federal policy, but after the war the government pushed harder to confine Native people to reservations. It used treaties first, then pressure, then force. Generals William Sherman and Philip Sheridan coordinated campaigns that took advantage of local conflicts started by settler invasions and illegal business ventures (p. 88). The US also built a network of forts and army posts across the frontier (p. 89).
Buffalo Soldiers took part in these campaigns. They were African American cavalrymen in the first all-Black regiments of the regular army in peacetime. The name came from the Native Americans they fought. They faced prejudice from civilians and from other soldiers, yet their service was essential to US victories on the Plains (p. 88).
The Comanche and Kiowa had long been powerful in Texas and the southern Plains. The Comanche controlled huge territory and raided from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico and the Texas Gulf Coast. After the Civil War, the army turned its attention to them (p. 89).
The process began with peace talks at Medicine Lodge Creek in fall 1867. The two sides understood the terms differently. US officials believed the Comanche had agreed to live on reservations. Comanche leaders believed they had been promised broad hunting lands. Bands used reservation land as a base to gather supplies and government goods while still hunting, trading and raiding in Texas (p. 89).
Raids continued, especially under the war leader Quanah Parker. The army then announced that any Native people not on reservations by fall 1874 would be treated as 'hostile.' Many bands refused to move, and the Red River War began. It was total war: soldiers destroyed horses, homes and food stores. Cold, hungry and already weakened, the last free bands were defeated in the canyons of the Texas Panhandle and moved to the reservation at Fort Sill. Many fighters were imprisoned. Comanche and Kiowa independence was over (p. 89).
On the northern Plains, many Lakota and Dakota had signed treaties after earlier defeats and gathered at agencies for rations. Others kept resisting, especially in Red Cloud's War, which was an unusual victory for Plains peoples. It ended with the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) with Lakota, Dakota and Arapaho bands. The treaty recognized Native control of the Black Hills of South Dakota within the 32-million-acre Great Sioux Reservation (pp. 89–90).
That promise broke down in 1874, when a US expedition found gold in the Black Hills. Prospectors rushed in, ignoring the treaty. Officials knew citizens were violating it but would not stop them. Instead they pressed the Lakota to sign the Hills over, while Sheridan quietly moved troops into the area. Early Native victories, along with Sitting Bull's visions of a greater triumph, drew in even bands that had already accepted reservation life (p. 90).
In June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led part of the 7th Cavalry toward a large camp on the river the Lakota called Greasy Grass, which Custer's map labeled Little Bighorn (in modern Montana). Bands that had left the reservations had swelled the village far beyond his estimate. His force was badly outnumbered, and Custer and 268 of his men died (p. 90).
The defeat shocked the public and brought demands for a harsh response. The army sent more expeditions, and resisting bands, weakened by a hungry winter, gave up one by one. Crazy Horse surrendered in May 1877. Sitting Bull surrendered in July 1881. The Plains appeared to be pacified (p. 90).
The dispute over the Black Hills is not fully settled. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), the US was found to have violated the Fort Laramie treaty. Over $1 billion now sits unused in a Bureau of Indian Affairs account, earning interest. Lakota leaders have refused it, because accepting payment would mean giving up their claim of sovereignty over the Black Hills (p. 90).
After the Civil War, many Native groups refused to accept confinement on reservations. Three well-known cases show how these refusals ended.
The Modoc War (1872–73). The Modoc had been forced onto the reservation of the Klamath Nation. In 1872 they left it and went back to their homeland at Lost River, on the California/Oregon border. White settlers had moved onto that land after the Modoc were removed, and they complained loudly. About fifty warriors led by Kintpuash, whom settlers called Captain Jack, would not go back. They took defensive positions along the state line. For eleven months they fought a guerrilla war and killed at least two hundred US troops before they were forced to surrender. Some settlers who knew the Modoc asked for mercy. The federal government ignored them and hanged Kintpuash and three other leaders in a carefully staged public execution. (p. 91)
Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce (1877). The Nez Perce had helped Lewis and Clark generations earlier. In 1877 one band led by Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, known as Chief Joseph, would not move to a reservation. They tried to reach Canada, but the US Cavalry chased them. The band was outnumbered. It traveled about a thousand miles and was attacked nearly two dozen times. In the end, hunger and exhaustion forced them to surrender. They were first sent to Indian Territory. The flight drew national attention, and Joseph's surrender speech, which ended with a vow to "fight no more forever," became famous in American public speaking. Joseph used his fame to negotiate a move to a reservation closer to his people's historic home. (pp. 91–92)
Geronimo and the Apache (1886). In the Southwest, Apache bands had long traded violence with settlers, miners and other groups. They suffered forced removals and harsh reservation life. When they fled, both the US and Mexican armies pursued them across the border. In the mid-1880s the Bedonkohe Apache leader Geronimo became famous for escaping the army again and again. General George Crook ran a campaign that made headlines, then resigned when he could not catch him. Geronimo finally surrendered at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, in 1886. He and his warriors were held as prisoners of war and exiled from Arizona. Geronimo became a celebrity and even rode in Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inauguration, but he and his people never went home. (p. 92)
These stories share a pattern. Each group tried to stay on or return to its own land. Each was met with military force, and each lost the land in the end.
The government also targeted Native children. The Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania opened in 1879 as the first off-reservation boarding school for Native children. Federal agencies had almost unlimited power to take children from their families and place them in such schools. Administrators tried to erase the children's Native identity and make them "American." Richard H. Pratt, Carlisle's superintendent, stated the aim in 1892: "Kill the Indian, and save the man." (pp. 92–93)
Students reacted in different ways. Some assimilated. Others resisted. At Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma, students used "trixing," meaning pranks, jokes and sabotage. Curtis Carr, a Muscogee/Creek alumnus, explained that they did it to show the staff that they could still outwit them. (p. 93)
Besides farming and resource extraction such as logging and mining, two industries drove the western economy: railroads and ranching. They grew up together. Both brought more settlers who pushed Native peoples aside. Both also shaped how Americans later remembered the "Wild West." Ranching, for example, depended on rail links to eastern markets. (p. 93)
Scale and subsidies. No business of the time drew as much capital or as much government help. Historian Alfred Chandler called railroads the "first modern business enterprise." By linking a huge continent, they "annihilated time and space" and made the American West possible. (p. 94)
The transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific built east from the West Coast, and the Union Pacific built west from the East. They met in Utah in 1869. Congress paid heavily for this. The 1862 Pacific Railroad Act offered construction bonds of 48,000 per mile, plus large land grants. From 1850 to 1871, railroads received over 175 million acres of public land, an area bigger than Texas. Investors made huge profits. One congressional critic complained that the companies kept any profit while the government absorbed any loss. (p. 94)
Labor. By 1880 about 400,000 men, nearly 2.5 percent of all American workers, worked for railroads. The jobs were dangerous and paid little, so companies relied on immigrants. Irish workers were common earlier, and Chinese workers later. More than 200,000 Chinese migrants lived in the US by 1880. Brakemen had the most dangerous job. Before automatic brakes, they ran along the tops of moving trains in any weather and turned brakes by hand. One slip could kill them. They also joined cars with large pins, so a hand or finger could easily be lost. (pp. 94–95)
Growth and hubs. Track mileage rose from about 9,000 in 1850 to about 190,000 in 1900, including several transcontinental lines. To manage the traffic, companies brought lines together at hub cities. (p. 95)
Chicago. Chicago was the greatest hub. It grew from about 200 people in 1833 to over a million by 1890. It linked the farms and ranches of the Plains to eastern markets. Trains carried Texas cattle there to be slaughtered and processed. Refrigerated rail cars then shipped the packaged meat to New York and other eastern cities. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition showed off this rise. Its temporary "White City" was built in a neoclassical style. (p. 95)
The cattle drives of the 1860s and 1870s came directly from this rail network. Just after the Civil War, railroads connected eastern markets and hubs like Chicago but had not yet reached Texas. Ranchers therefore drove their herds north to rail terminuses in Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. The Chisholm Trail was a common route. Native Americans in Indian Territory and Kansas farmers objected to large, destructive herds crossing their lands. This pushed ranchers to open other routes: the Western, Goodnight-Loving and Shawnee Trails. (p. 95)
Historians estimate that 12,000 to 40,000 men worked as cowboys. Perhaps a quarter were African American, and probably even more were Mexican or Mexican American. Cowboy culture borrowed heavily from Mexican vaqueros, including gear and words like rodeo, bronco and lasso. At least sixteen verified accounts describe women on drives. Molly Dyer Goodnight went with her husband. Lizzie Johnson Williams drove her own herds and made at least three trips up the Chisholm Trail. (p. 96)
The work was hard and the pay was low. Beginners earned 25 a month, experienced hands 45, and trail bosses a little over $50. Many cowboys hoped to own a ranch someday, but jobs were insecure. They worked long hours in extreme heat, cold and blowing dust, and they ate limited food with irregular supplies. (p. 96)
The cowboy of the cattle-drive era was not one type of person. Historians estimate that between 12,000 and 40,000 men worked as cowboys in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps one in four was African American, and Mexican and Mexican American men were probably even more numerous. (p. 96)
Much of cowboy life was borrowed from Mexican vaqueros. Cowboys took up their methods of handling cattle, their gear, and their vocabulary. Words such as rodeo, bronco, and lasso all trace back to that vaquero tradition. (p. 96)
Most drivers were men, but at least sixteen verified accounts describe women on the trail. Molly Dyer Goodnight went along with her husband. Lizzie Johnson Williams drove her own herds and made at least three trips up the Chisholm Trail. (p. 96)
The work paid poorly. A beginner earned about 25 a month, and a veteran might get 45. Trail bosses made a little over $50. Many cowboys hoped to own a ranch someday, but jobs were insecure. On a drive they put in long hours and faced heat, cold, and thick blowing dust. Their food was limited and supplies came irregularly. (p. 96)
Owners and investors did far better than the workers. Just after the Civil War, a steer worth 40 in Kansas. Profits slowly leveled off, but they stayed large. (p. 97)
The long drives existed because of the railroads. Herds walked north to rail terminuses so the cattle could be shipped to meatpackers. Then the railroads ended the drives. By the 1880s, rail lines had reached into Texas, so cattle no longer had to be walked north. The drives were largely finished. (p. 97)
Ranching itself did not end. The Plains suited grazing better than farming, so ranchers kept supplying beef to national markets. What disappeared was the cowboy's trail work. His image, however, lived on in popular culture. This is a good example of a larger point: by tying the Plains to national markets and moving people and goods quickly, railroads built the modern American West. (p. 97)
Treaties between the United States and Native nations usually made a bargain. If a tribe moved onto a set reservation, it would hold that land collectively. But as more Americans moved west and open land ran out, settlers began to complain. They said Native people had more than their share, that reservations were too large, and that the land was used "inefficiently." They also said Native people still preferred hunting to intensive farming and ranching. (pp. 97–98)
By the 1880s, many Americans backed laws to move Native land to farmers and ranchers. Reformers added another argument. They believed that giving land to individuals instead of tribes would push Native people toward American-style farming and toward "civilization." Notice that two groups with different motives, land-hungry settlers and reformers, supported the same policy. (p. 98)
Congress passed the Dawes General Allotment Act on February 8, 1887. It split reservations into individual family homesteads:
Native people had four years to choose their plots. After that, an agent named by the secretary of the interior would choose for those who had not. Allotments were held in trust for twenty-five years and could not be sold, supposedly to protect owners from swindlers. Any land left over after allotment went back to federal control and was sold to American settlers. (p. 98)
That last rule shows the real effect. If a reservation held more land than the allotments used up, the "surplus" left Native hands. (p. 98)
The act was promoted as a humanitarian reform, but it upended Native ways of life and took away tribal control of land. It said it would protect Native property by extending US laws over Native people. In practice, tribal governments and legal principles could be set aside and replaced by US law. Native nations struggled to keep some tribal sovereignty. Theodore Roosevelt himself later described the act as a "mighty pulverizing engine" against tribal unity. (p. 98)
Years of conquest left many Native people looking to prophets and holy men for comfort. On January 1, 1889, the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka had a vision in western Nevada. He said he traveled to heaven and came back during a solar eclipse. His message was peaceful: do no harm, do not fight, and live rightly. People were to perform a ceremony called the Ghost Dance. If they danced and lived justly, he promised, the dead ancestors would rise, droughts would end, whites in the West would vanish, and the buffalo would return. (p. 100)
Wovoka was not the first prophet to face American power, and he mixed Christian ideas, such as heaven and a messiah, with Indigenous spiritual traditions. His message still spread fast. Arapaho, Bannock, Cheyenne, and Shoshone people, among others, took up the Ghost Dance. The Lakota were perhaps the most eager dancers. (p. 100)
The Lakota were in desperate shape. South Dakota became a state in 1889 on land the Lakota held by treaty. Homesteaders poured in, reservations shrank, and corrupt agents cut food rations. Starvation set in, and drought struck the Plains. Fearing a future as landless subjects, the Lakota sent eleven men led by Kicking Bear west to Nevada to join Ghost Dance pilgrims. They brought the revival back to the Dakotas. (p. 100)
Settlers and officials were frightened by the movement's energy. Agent Daniel Royer, new at the Pine Ridge Reservation, sent alarmed reports to Washington and urged a military crackdown. Newspapers sensationalized the dance. Agents began arresting Lakota leaders, and in December 1890 Sitting Bull and several others died in a botched arrest. Many bands then fled the reservations to join others farther west. There, Ghost Dance followers preached that dancers could not be hurt by bullets. (p. 100)
Two weeks later, cavalry stopped a band of 350 Lakota led by Chief Spotted Elk, also called Bigfoot. More than 100 of them were women and children. They were seeking refuge at the Pine Ridge Agency. Soldiers escorted them to Wounded Knee Creek to camp for the night. (p. 100)
On December 29, 1890, the cavalry went into the camp to disarm the band. Tension rose, a shot rang out, and the confrontation became a massacre. Soldiers fired heavy weapons into the camp without aiming at particular targets. About two dozen soldiers died, some from hidden Lakota weapons and some from friendly fire. Between 150 and 300 Native men, women, and children were killed. (pp. 100–101)
Wounded Knee ended sustained armed Native resistance on the Plains. Individuals still resisted assimilation and kept their cultural practices alive. But military defeats, lost control of land and resources, and deep reservation poverty made the last decades of the century a very dark time for western tribes. For white Americans, though, this history turned into myth. (p. 101)
By the late 1800s, Americans were learning about the West less from real ranch life than from stories, contests, and stage shows. Together these made a mythic "Wild West."
Dime novels. Starting in the 1860s, cheap novels exaggerated the lives of real people such as Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid. Owen Wister's The Virginian shaped the best-known version of the cowboy: a tough, quiet man with a rough surface but real courage. In the story he saves others from train robbers, Native Americans, and cattle thieves. This hero was far removed from the daily labor of actual cowboys. (p. 103)
Rodeo. Rodeo helped keep the image alive. It began as informal roping and riding contests between cowboys, held in towns near ranches or at camps where cattle trails ended. Historians treat a contest in Pecos, Texas, on July 4, 1883, as the first true rodeo. Cowboys from the Hash Knife and W ranches competed to settle an argument. Over time, such contests became planned events. Organizers set them for holidays like Independence Day or for the spring and fall roundups. Early rodeos were held on open grass, not in arenas, and featured calf and steer roping and bronc riding. As they grew popular, regular circuits formed. About 90 percent of contestants were men. Women still helped make rodeo popular, and some, like Bertha Kaepernick, entered men's events until about 1916, when women's competition was cut back. (p. 103)
Traveling Wild West shows may have been the unofficial national entertainment from the 1880s to the 1910s. They toured the eastern United States and Europe.
Buffalo Bill's show. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody saw that the stock figures of the West had wide appeal: cowboys, "Indians," sharpshooters, and cavalrymen. In 1883 he combined them in one huge touring production based in Omaha, Nebraska. He avoided the word "show," fearing it suggested fakery, and called it "Buffalo Bill's Wild West." He hired real cowboys and Native Americans. Even so, it was entertainment, much like theater. Its stories covered westward migration, Plains life, and Native attacks, mixed with bronco riding, roping, and shooting contests. (pp. 103–104)
Pawnee Bill and the merger. Gordon "Pawnee Bill" Lillie began as Cody's interpreter for the Pawnee performers in 1886. In 1888 he started his own show. He was Cody's only serious rival until 1908, when the two merged into the "Two Bills Show." Its cast was strikingly varied: American cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, Native Americans, Russian Cossacks, Japanese acrobats, and an Australian aboriginal performer. (p. 104)
Native performers. Both showmen put Native Americans at the center because audiences in the United States and Europe were fascinated by them. Many people believed Native cultures were vanishing, so they felt they had to see the dances, hear the songs, and admire the riding and clothing. The shows hid the real cultural and historical meaning of these acts, and white audiences saw the performers as curiosities. Yet this work was one of the few ways many Native people could earn money at the time. (pp. 104–105)
Women sharpshooters. To attract women to the audience, Cody hired Annie Oakley, "Little Sure Shot." She shot apples off her poodle's head and the ash from her husband's cigar. May Manning Lillie, Gordon Lillie's wife, performed as the "World's Greatest Lady Horseback Shot." As many as eighty women toured at the peak. Their skill pushed against Victorian ideas about women's roles, so they protected their reputations. They rode sidesaddle and wore full skirts and corsets. (p. 105)
The "cowboys and Indians" image rested on nostalgia and on worry about modern life. Factory and office work seemed "soft" to many middle- and upper-class city dwellers. They feared becoming "over-civilized." The cowboy's "aggressive masculinity" seemed a cure. Theodore Roosevelt called the ideal the "strenuous life." He was from a wealthy New York family and had a short, unsuccessful time as a Dakota rancher, yet he made it a strong part of his political image. (p. 105)
In 1893 the American Historical Association met in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition. There, the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his "frontier thesis." He ignored the war and plunder of western expansion and described waves of "civilization." In his view, a frontier line "between savagery and civilization" had moved west from Massachusetts and Virginia, across the Appalachians and the Mississippi, and over the Plains to California and Oregon. He pictured a procession passing through Cumberland Gap: buffalo, Native Americans, fur traders, cattle-raisers, and farmers. (pp. 105–106)
Turner argued that settlers had to build a rough civilization out of the frontier. This gave Americans their energy and democratic spirit and set them apart from the old monarchies of Europe. He also wanted history to study ordinary pioneers as seriously as great statesmen. (p. 106)
The closed frontier. Turner was uneasy about the future. The Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890, because no clear north-south line remained. He asked what the country would do without the "safety valve" of free land. Many shared this worry. Theodore Roosevelt wrote that the essay gave shape to ideas that had been floating around loosely. (p. 106)
Misconception: pioneers alone won the West. Turner's thesis suggested that hardy individual pioneers carried "civilization" west. Critics point out that this view treated nonwhites as people who simply fell before progress. It made Chinese and Mexican immigrants invisible. It also overlooked technology, government subsidies, and large businesses. Western history was made by many peoples. Still, the thesis was very influential among historians for much of the twentieth century, and it matched the public's romantic, simplified picture of the West as a march of progress. (pp. 106–107)
The Texas-to-California border region also filled with settlers once Indigenous sovereignty was broken and railroads arrived in the late 1870s and 1880s. (p. 107)
Railroads and boom towns. Tens of thousands of Mexican track workers, called traqueros, built the lines. Border cities became stops for growing American investment in Mexico and grew into economic centers themselves. San Diego grew from about 2,500 people in 1880 to over 16,000 in 1890. El Paso grew from under 1,000 to over 10,000. (p. 107)
Land takeovers. Rail links to city markets let Anglo ranchers buy up huge areas. Some acquired land fairly. Others took it from Mexican American owners, who struggled to prove old Spanish and Mexican land grants in courts that favored Anglos. When courts did not work, intimidation could. In South Texas, Richard King built the King Ranch through business deals, legal tactics, threats, and help from state power. (p. 107)
An open border. Customs officers watched for Chinese immigrants trying to avoid the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, but little else was controlled. In Texas, ferries and bridges let people cross the Rio Grande freely. In the west, the line was almost imaginary, and towns like Nogales spread across it. In 1891 the International Boundary Commission resurveyed the border and rebuilt the few dozen decaying markers. (pp. 107–108)
Resistance and repression. Many Mexicans and Mexican Americans fought back. Catarino Garza in South Texas and the Herrera brothers in New Mexico Territory led uprisings against Anglo ranchers, and cattle raids crossed the border. Ranchers responded with police, the military, and vigilantes. Captain John Gregory Bourke led a brutal counterinsurgency in South Texas during the "Garza War." (p. 108)
By 1900, trade, money, and people moved across the region in both directions. More than half a million Mexican Americans already lived north of the border. (p. 108)
By the late 1800s, US leaders increasingly used force and money to protect American economic interests overseas. This looked a lot like empire. (p. 109)
The Open Door Policy (1899). American ships had sailed to China since 1784. Asian trade was still a small share of US foreign trade, but many Americans believed Asian markets were vital. Secretary of State John Hay worried that Japan and several European powers would divide China into spheres of influence, where each power would control trade in its own zone. He called for all Western powers to have equal access to Chinese markets. In 1900 American troops joined an international force that put down the Boxer Rebellion, a movement against foreign businesses and missionaries. President McKinley sent them without asking Congress. That set a precedent: later presidents could send troops abroad using their own executive powers. (p. 109)
The Guano Islands Act (1856). Guano, the droppings of seabirds, was a valuable fertilizer. This law encouraged Americans to claim guano islands for the United States. The islands became the first unincorporated insular territories. They were not states, they were not federal districts, and they had no path to either status. The law was little known, but it gave later overseas acquisitions a model to follow. (pp. 109–110)
Hawaii's sugar elite. American missionaries reached Hawaii in 1820. They often worked alongside business interests and got large areas of land for sugar plantations. In the nineteenth century a white American (haole) elite tied to the "Big Five" sugar companies dominated the islands. It held great power, yet it operated outside the formal structure of the US government. (p. 110)
Mexico under Díaz. American investors poured money into Mexico during the long rule of Porfirio Díaz, who welcomed them. They controlled mines, smelters, plantations, railroads and huge areas of land. Relations stayed warm while Díaz served those investors. In 1909 Díaz and President Taft met at El Paso and Juárez. It was the first meeting between the two countries' presidents and a rare trip abroad for a sitting US president. The size of these investments explains why the US intervened after the Mexican Revolution began in 1910. (p. 110)
The Middle East. Trade with the region was small, so the US government had little reason to treat it as vital. Most American activity before World War I was missionary, educational and humanitarian. Protestant missionaries arrived in 1819. They won few converts but built hospitals and schools. This work helped lead to Western-style universities such as Robert College in Istanbul (1863) and the American University of Beirut (1866). (p. 111)
From Cuba to a declaration of war. Cubans had fought Spanish rule for decades, and a new uprising began in 1895. To crush it, General Weyler used reconcentration, forcing people to move into military camps. Newspapers played up the cruelty, and American sympathy grew. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Havana in January 1898 to protect Americans there. On February 15 it exploded and sank, and about three-quarters of the 354 people aboard died. "Yellow journals" like Hearst's New York Journal blamed Spain before any investigation was done. Talks failed, and Congress declared war on April 25. (pp. 112–113)
A quick victory. On May 1, Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet near Manila. In July, American forces took San Juan Heights in Cuba, and Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders became famous. Santiago fell on July 17, and a ceasefire came on August 12. Fewer than 400 Americans died in battle during about fifteen weeks of fighting, which is why Hay called it a "splendid little war." (p. 113)
The Treaty of Paris (December 1898). Spain gave up Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The US paid Spain $20 million for the Philippines, and the Senate ratified the treaty in April 1899. (pp. 113–114)
Hawaii. Businessmen who had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy asked for annexation, and the US annexed the islands in 1898. Roosevelt supported this for strategic reasons. Hawaii was in America's sphere. Holding it would block Japanese expansion. It had an excellent battleship harbor at Pearl Harbor. It was also a fueling stop on the way to Asian markets. (pp. 114, 117–118)
From Spanish colony to US war. After Dewey's victory, Americans had to decide whether to support Filipino independence fighters or replace Spain. US troops kept Emilio Aguinaldo's forces out of Manila's Walled City, a sign of what was coming. Aguinaldo became president of the First Philippine Republic in January 1899. Fighting with US forces began in February. McKinley chose occupation over independence. The war ran from 1899 to 1902 and killed far more people than the war with Spain. Filipinos who had fought Spain now fought the country that claimed to have freed them. (pp. 114–115)
Civil government and lasting resistance. It was a brutal guerrilla war, and observers compared it to the Indian Wars. Two Philippine Commissions recommended civilian rule. William Howard Taft became the first governor-general (1901–1903). Roosevelt declared the war over in 1902, but resistance and scattered fighting went on into the 1910s. (p. 115)
Arguments for empire. Supporters gave different reasons:
All of them raised an awkward question: could a nation born in a fight for liberty become a colonizer? (p. 115)
The opposition. The American Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1899, counted Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie and Jane Addams among its members. It argued that ruling other peoples by force violated the right to self-government. Not all opponents shared that principle, though. Some feared that contact with foreign peoples would threaten American racial "purity." (pp. 115–116)
Sea power. As assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt oversaw new battleships and prepared for new shipyards. He was influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan, who argued that controlling the seas meant having a "blue water" fleet of battleships able to win decisive battles. Mahan rejected coastal defense, small ships and commerce raiding. As president, Roosevelt built eleven battleships between 1904 and 1907. Then he sent the sixteen-ship Great White Fleet around the world from 1907 to 1909 to show US power. (pp. 117–118)
The Roosevelt Corollary (1904). In 1823 President Monroe warned European powers not to intervene in the Americas. Roosevelt turned the idea around. He claimed the US could step in to fix "administrative and fiscal" problems in a Latin American country. Debt was a key worry. When governments failed to repay European lenders, Europeans might use force to collect, and that could give them a foothold near the planned Panama Canal. Roosevelt wanted the US to prevent this by acting first, and he described US police power as a duty rather than a choice. (pp. 118, 120)
By the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt wanted the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere, but it could not afford to occupy every country in Central and South America. So his government used a mix of force and money. The sections below explain each tool.
Direct actions. Roosevelt kept US influence over Cuba even after it became formally independent in 1902, and he did the same with Puerto Rico. In 1903 he sent naval forces to back Panama's independence from Colombia. A friendly new Panama then let the US acquire the Canal Zone (pp. 118, 120). The pattern is clear: the US shaped political outcomes in places that mattered for trade and naval routes.
The Roosevelt Corollary (1904). The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned European powers not to intervene in Latin America. Roosevelt flipped its meaning. He claimed the US itself could step in to fix "administrative and fiscal" failures in a Latin American country. Historians describe this as a claim of US "police power" in the Caribbean (pp. 118, 120).
Roosevelt said he wanted neither glory nor new territory and that intervention should be a last resort. Yet he clearly believed in using force when needed. He also saw the Pacific as part of America's sphere. In 1906 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping Russia and Japan reach a peace agreement (p. 120).
Gunboat diplomacy means sending warships and Marines into a country to protect Western people and property. The troops may take temporary control of the government and push policies that help foreign business, such as repaying loans (p. 119).
Example: In 1905 Roosevelt sent Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic. The US then placed the country's finances under its supervision. The Corollary also supported the creation of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (p. 119).
Supporters called this almost humanitarian. They saw Anglo-Saxon nations such as the US and Britain as skilled at building civilizations. In their view, these nations were helping debtor countries that supposedly lacked self-control and discipline. Roosevelt even called it a "manly duty." This language treated Latin Americans as inferior, which made the interventions sound like uplift (p. 119).
Dollar diplomacy was a cheaper, informal way to build influence. The US government worked with bankers who lent money to Latin American governments. In return, the US gained some control over those governments' finances. Roosevelt began it on a large scale, and Presidents Taft and Wilson kept using it in different forms (pp. 118–119).
Its main advantage was that it avoided the cost and trouble of occupation. Instead of troops, the US held influence through the borrowers' debts.
Debt explains why Roosevelt thought intervention was necessary (pp. 119–120). The chain of events worked like this:
His conclusion was that the US had to keep places like Cuba and the Dominican Republic financially and politically stable. That way, Europeans would have no reason to step in.
Empire was not only a male project of soldiers and diplomats. Women also took part, as supporters and as opponents.
A gendered idea. The racial theory of the time said humans moved through ordered stages of civilization. Europeans and Americans stood at the top. That top stage included an industrial economy and separate but complementary roles for men and women. Progress had freed women from heavy physical labor and given them moral and spiritual authority. So white, middle-class women could be both symbols of American civilization and carriers of its values (pp. 121, 123).
This opened overseas roles for them. They worked as missionaries, teachers, medical workers, business representatives, artists and writers (p. 121). Many saw the work as an extension of what they already did among immigrant, working-class and Native American communities at home. The stakes were higher, though: women were now seen as helping civilization itself survive and advance (p. 123).
Civilization as an economic idea. The stages were defined mostly by economy (hunting and gathering, farming, industry). Buying industrial goods was seen as a step toward being "civilized." Women were closely linked to household shopping, so they fit this message well (p. 123).
Example: In 1903, Margaret McLeod, a 21-year-old from Boston, toured Australia, South Africa, India and Japan with Heinz salesman Alexander MacWillie. She demonstrated products like relish and baked beans. She also presented an image of pure, middle-class American womanhood. Heinz saw itself as spreading the benefits of civilization, not just selling food (pp. 121, 123).
Not all women backed imperialism. Women made up a large share of the Anti-Imperialist League, even though its best-known public voices were men (p. 123).
