For one hundred years—roughly between the ratification of the United States Constitution and 1890—the “extended republic” James Madison described in The Federalist did indeed extend, from sea to shining sea. As American settlers populated each new swath of territory they sought and received recognition as states of the Union, equal to all states that preceded them, including the original thirteen. This great period of American empire-building far exceeded anything done subsequently (for example, the acquisition of territories from Spain in the late 1890s) and proved far more lasting than the ‘scramble for empire’ undertaken by the European states during that time. America became what Jefferson wanted it to be: an “empire of liberty,” that is, a union of free and equal states, with republican regimes securing the natural rights of all its citizens in principle and of most if not all in practice.
The question of the exact terms and conditions of American federalism, especially of the status of the states within it, was answered in principle by Publius and by George Washington in his Farewell Address. It was answered in principle and in practice by Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis. It was answered most eloquently in principle and most forcefully in practice by Abraham Lincoln and the Union armies, respectively, in the Civil War. The pseudo-republican oligarchies of the states that formed the Confederacy were defeated, although they reconstituted themselves to a substantial degree, in different form, after Reconstruction ended. States’ rights could no longer serve as a carapace for slavery, although it would so serve for legal re-segregation for much of the next century. But the Union had survived.
The year 1890 saw another, less stark but still unsettling crisis. For the past century, the migration of Americans to the West had relieved the older states of the need to address the worst economic and social tensions modern industrial societies had faced. Now, however, the United States effectively had become an island, bordered by oceans on each side, the Caribbean in the south, and to some extent the Great Lakes in the north. It was a gigantic island, but an island nonetheless. With immigrants still coming in from Europe, with industrialism and urbanization intensifying in the east and Midwest, what would become of the country? Could the regime of commercial republicanism sustain itself against populist and socialist ideologue who sought to exploit these pressures? Could federalism withstand pressures to ‘nationalize’ everything—that is, bring it under the rule of the central government to the diminution of the state governments?
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner formulated perhaps the most high-level expression of this anxiety. In his 1893 paper presented to the American Historical Assocition’ annual meeting in Chicago, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that it was the settlement of the frontier, fostering the character of Americans as independent, self-governing yeoman farmers, which had (to coin a phrase) made American great. Not so much Christianity, not the principles of the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, and surely not any biologically-based racial superiority over the American Indians, but the frontier itself, the virtues the cultivators cultivated along with their crops, gave Americans the moral strength needed to make them a free and united people. With the closing of the frontier, the elimination of the conditions of this character-building way of life, would Americans not succumb to moral decline, and ultimately lose both their empire and their republicanism? The ‘Turner thesis,’ as it came to be called, galvanized academic and even journalistic discussion for decades thereafter.
Not only professors and pundits saw this problem. As it happened, an ambitious young politician named Theodore Roosevelt had published two volumes of his book The Winning of the West in the years immediately preceding the appearance of Turner’s study. The young civil service reformer from New York City, who had ‘gone West’ himself, to the Dakotas, after his beloved wife’s death in 1884, also argued for the importance of the frontier way of life in forming the American ethos. Roosevelt understood the West not so much as a land for peaceful if hard cattle ranching and farming but as an arena for warfare, pitting semi-civilized Americans against uncivilized Indians. The West built not only the steady, yeoman virtues of Jeffersonian agrarianism but also and above all the martial virtues of George Washington. Europeans (so long as they stayed in Europe) could only exercise those virtues against other civilized nations, putting themselves at risk of succumbing to the vices attendant (most spectacularly) in Napoleonic despotism; if they abandoned such ambitions, as proposed in projects for “perpetual peace” such as that proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, they risked a softening of spirit, moral decay. Americans had solved the problem by advancing civilization without colonization —that is, without keeping newly-won territories in political subservience to the ‘Mother Country.’
Whether one argued for Turner’s yeomanry or Roosevelt’s militias and posses, or some combination of them, as inspiriting conditions of American courage and self-government, the dilemma of the 1890s remained the same: How will Americans perpetuate their republican regime and their empire of liberty, now that the frontier has closed?
Roosevelt also saw another danger, outlined in the 1890s by the American naval strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan. As far back as 1787, in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton had argued that oceans are as much highways as they are barriers; as a Caribbean-born transplant the the port city of New York, he needed no book to teach him that. By 1890, technology had made this obvious to everyone, as steam-powered vessels replaced the old sailing ships and telegraphs made ‘messaging’ nearly instantaneous. These improved means of transportation and of communications had strengthened European empires; by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Britannia not only ruled the waves but about one-fourth of the land on earth and about one-fifth of its population while France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and even Belgium had substantial holdings as well.
Such radically changed circumstances, which would lead to the world wars of the next century, presented American strategists with a set of problems noticeably different from those seen by Washington and his successors. Would the strengthening empires block American trade? Would they again threaten American shores, as they hadn’t done since 1812? Further, having fought a devastating civil war, we were less likely than ever to invite the prospect of another war on our own territory—especially given the increasingly devastating power of modern weapons wielded by the well-organized and trained mass armies raised by modern states. Americans needed to re-think the question of strategic depth, a question they thought they’d answered by turning the middle part of North America into the American Union. We also needed to re-think our policies regarding international commerce. All without eradicating the constitutionally legitimate powers of the state governments.
American strategists proposed several policy choices. The first, advocated by German immigrant and old Republican Party ally of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schurz, was simply to continue Washington’s policy: to eschew not only empire beyond our own continent (“overseas empire”) but even to avoid any major strengthening of the military—this, on the traditional grounds that big military establishments threaten republican regimes. By far the most distinguished American statesman to advocate this policy in the next century was Herbert Hoover, whose “magnum opus” (as he called it), Freedom Betrayed, lays out an argument for staying out of the Second World War, and for what critics called ‘isolationism’ generally. Whatever one thinks of this as a realistic foreign policy for the modern world, it would surely have helped to keep American federalism intact.
The second, opposite, policy was advocated by the young Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who called for a vast imperial project based upon the alleged superiority of the white race, a notion itself based upon the ‘race science’ that formed part of early Progressivism. The most famous of Beveridge’s speeches remains “The March of the Flag,” delivered at a Republican party convention in Indiana. In it, Beveridge called for American conquest of the rest of the Americas and their incorporation into the United States—not, to be sure, as equal states, but as colonial territories. At the time, theories of racial superiority were very much a part of the Progressive movement, and Beveridge might be described as the most vocal representative of the militarist wing of Progressivism, which ranged from the militarism of Beveridge to the pacifism of Jane Addams. This policy would have ended the American practice of considering newly-acquired territories as future states, instead turning the New World into a facsimile of European empires. American federalism and American republicanism would have been seriously compromised.
Roosevelt found a more realistic solution to the problem, the one that has prevailed for more than a century. TR advocated the use of a greatly-expanded navy, which he eventually succeeded in obtaining, and peacetime military conscription for the army, which he hinted at but never formally proposed. These forces, but especially the navy, would be used no so much for imperial expansion but for obtaining naval bases throughout the world, usually but not always with the consent of foreign governments. These bases would counterbalance the much more expensive (and, as it turned out, untenable) imperialism of the Europeans. While happy to seize Cuba and the Philippines form the Spanish, he had no interest in retaining them, but he very much liked the idea of of establishing naval bases at Guantanamo and Subic Bay. As for permanent acquisitions, he intended to hold on to Hawaii and Puerto Rico as outpasts complicating foreign naval attack on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
To reinforce America’s opposition to European imperialism in the New World, and to answer Beveridge, Roosevelt also propounded his well-known “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, stipulating an American right to intervene in Latin American countries if they fell down on their debt payments to European nations. Such refusal to repay loans, if it became “chronic” (as TR put it), would invite European military intervention int the Western Hemisphere—exactly the thing the original Monroe Doctrine was intended to discourage. This policy soon provoked anger from the peoples it was intended to protect, and Franklin Roosevelt replaced it with his “Good Neighbor” policy in the 1930s.
From this perspective, TR’s foreign policy becomes quite coherent: Drive the weakened Spanish imperialists out of the Caribbean and the Philippines while blocking other empires (especially the Brits and the Germans) from seizing them; then spur the peoples of the newly-acquired countries to govern themselves. This meant recurring to the old American policy of regime change (first used by the Washington Administration in the southeaster states in its dealings with the Cherokee and other nations in that area), while obviating the need to (quite implausibly) make these conquests into American states and at the same time avoiding their (un-American) use as permanent colonies of our own. Add the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for both trading and military purposes, and you see that TR aimed at recovering America’s strategic depth under the circumstances caused by the new technologies of war.
Such a policy held out the prospect of retaining American federal republicanism while countering ‘containment’ strategies Great Britain and other regimes, then and in the future, would deploy against us. American federalism was compromised in any event, by Wilson, FDR, Lyndon Johnson and their many allies. This was usually done for domestic reasons, however, although sometimes it proceeded under the cover of the quite different policy of liberal internationalism, which looks forward to the weakening not only of American federalism but of American sovereignty altogether.
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