How National Power Expanded at the Turn of the Century

PART II — U.S. HISTORY, 1491 TO THE PRESENT · CHAPTER 24

The United States entered the 1890s with a growing industrial economy and ended the decade controlling territories far beyond the continental mainland. Markets mattered to that expansion, but so did naval strategy, nationalism, racial ideology, missionary assumptions, and the immediate politics surrounding Cuba.

At home, reformers responded to another set of pressures created by industrial cities and corporate growth. Progressivism was not one movement with one program. Its reform impulses could expand democracy and regulation while also supporting segregation, coercive social policy, or exclusion.

Overseas Expansion Had More Than One Cause

Some business and political leaders argued that a rapidly industrializing economy needed larger overseas markets and access to raw materials. That commercial argument mattered, but it coexisted with naval strategy, great-power competition, nationalism, racial and civilizational ideology, missionary goals, and the immediate politics surrounding Cuba. Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that great powers needed a strong navy and overseas coaling stations to project power and protect trade, an argument that shaped American naval buildup and territorial ambitions alike. Racial ideology rooted in Social Darwinism framed expansion as a natural extension of Anglo-Saxon civilization, while a genuine missionary impulse to spread Christianity and American institutions added a further layer of justification. Overseas expansion was multi-causal, not an automatic result of industrial output.

The Spanish-American War Creates an Overseas Empire

Cuban rebels fighting for independence from Spain drew heavy American press coverage, much of it sensationalized by newspaper publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in a style historians call yellow journalism. The unexplained explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898 intensified public and political pressure for war. Sensational newspaper coverage amplified the crisis, but the decision for war also grew from the Cuban independence struggle, humanitarian claims, strategic calculations, commercial interests, and months of deteriorating U.S.-Spanish relations. The brief war ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1898. Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States, while Spain relinquished sovereignty over Cuba. Cuba then remained under U.S. military occupation until formal independence in 1902, and the Platt Amendment sharply limited that independence by preserving a U.S. right of intervention and a naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

Debate Erupts Over What Empire Means for a Republic

The Anti-Imperialist League, whose members included Mark Twain and other prominent Americans, argued that ruling colonial subjects without their consent violated the republic’s founding principles and risked corrupting American democracy itself. Filipino revolutionaries had already fought Spain and declared independence before the United States decided to annex the Philippines. When the Treaty of Paris transferred Spanish sovereignty claims to the United States without recognizing Filipino independence, armed conflict broke out between U.S. forces and the Philippine Republic in 1899. The war exposed a direct contradiction between American rhetoric about liberation and rule over a people claiming their own sovereignty. The Philippine-American War that followed from 1899 to 1902 involved brutal counterinsurgency tactics against Filipino fighters and civilians alike. The Supreme Court’s Insular Cases further complicated matters, ruling that the Constitution did not automatically extend full rights to residents of new territories, leaving their status deliberately ambiguous.

Imperial Policy Continues after the Spanish-American War

The annexation of Hawaii in 1898 gave the United States a strategically valuable Pacific position that American business interests had sought for years. In China, Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door notes asked major powers to preserve equal commercial access instead of dividing China into exclusive colonial markets. Theodore Roosevelt then extended U.S. influence in the Caribbean. His Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine claimed a U.S. right to intervene when instability or debt might invite European involvement. The United States also supported Panama’s separation from Colombia and secured control of a canal zone, allowing construction of the Panama Canal.

These policies did not share one motive. Markets, naval strategy, hemispheric security, nationalism, and racial and civilizational assumptions overlapped. An argument on imperialism should use more than one causal category.

Progressives Turn Social Problems Into Government Action

Journalists known as muckrakers, including Jacob Riis, who documented tenement conditions, Ida Tarbell, who exposed Standard Oil’s business practices, and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle revealed dangerous meatpacking conditions, brought industrial and urban problems into public view in ways that pressured reformminded politicians to act. Jane Addams’s Hull House and similar settlement houses embedded reformers directly in immigrant neighborhoods, providing services while documenting the conditions urban poverty produced. Progressive-era city and state reformers targeted political machine corruption, unsafe housing, and inadequate public health infrastructure with new regulatory tools and professional expertise.

Progressives Expand Democracy Selectively

Progressive reformers pushed successfully for direct democracy measures, including the initiative, referendum, and recall at the state level and the direct election of U.S. senators through the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, taking power away from state legislatures and party bosses. The women’s suffrage movement gained significant momentum during this period, building toward the national voting rights amendment that would follow in 1920. Progressive-era reformers expanded and strengthened state child-labor and workplace-safety regulation, building on earlier state experiments and making labor standards a more prominent public issue.

Progressive Presidents Expand Federal Regulation

Theodore Roosevelt used the presidency to make federal regulation more visible. His administration challenged the Northern Securities railroad combination, mediated the 1902 coal strike, supported stronger railroad regulation, and backed the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act after public concern over industrial food production. Roosevelt also expanded federal conservation through national forests and protected lands.

Progressive regulation continued after Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, creating a new central banking system. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 declared that labor was not a commodity and limited some uses of antitrust law and injunctions against unions. Those provisions offered labor greater statutory protection, although later court interpretation narrowed how protective they proved in practice. The Sixteenth Amendment authorized a federal income tax, the Seventeenth created direct election of senators, the Eighteenth established national prohibition, and the Nineteenth prohibited denying the vote on account of sex.

These laws are not a memorization list to recite in full. The point is that reformers expanded federal capacity in banking, corporate regulation, consumer protection, conservation, taxation, and democracy.

Progressive Reform Has a Darker Side

The same reforming impulse toward expertise, order, and social improvement also produced deeply illiberal outcomes. The eugenics movement, which advocated controlling human reproduction to improve the population’s genetic makeup, gained mainstream scientific and reform credibility during this era, feeding directly into both immigration restriction arguments and forced sterilization laws in several states. President Woodrow Wilson, a self-identified progressive, presided over the resegregation of the federal civil service, rolling back gains Black federal employees had made since Reconstruction. Prohibition, which would culminate in the Eighteenth Amendment, mixed a genuine public health reform impulse with nativist hostility toward immigrant drinking cultures and a broader moralistic urge to control working-class behavior. Progressivism expanded American democracy and regulation in real ways. It did not do so for everyone, and it sometimes moved in the opposite direction entirely.

Answer without looking back.

FOLLOW REFORM INTO FEDERAL REGULATION

1 List three distinct motives, beyond simple market-seeking, that drove American overseas expansion in the 1890s.

2 What territories did the United States gain from the Treaty of Paris, and what limits did the Platt Amendment place on Cuban independence?

3 Why did the Philippine-American War create tension with American rhetoric about liberation?

4 Describe two concrete Progressive-era reforms that expanded democratic participation.

5 Explain, with two specific examples, why Progressivism cannot be described as one unified egalitarian movement.