"Upon the sacredness of property, civilization itself
depends." Andrew Carnegie, 1889 Between two great wars -- the Civil War and the First World
War -- the United States of America came of age. In a period of
less than 50 years it was transformed from a rural republic to an
urban state. The frontier vanished. Great factories and steel
mills, transcontinental railroad lines, flourishing cities and
vast agricultural holdings marked the land. With this economic
growth and affluence came corresponding problems. Nationwide,
businesses came to dominate whole industries, either
independently or in combination with others. Working conditions
were often poor. Cities grew so quickly they could not properly
house or govern their growing populations. TECHNOLOGY AND CHANGE "The Civil War," says one writer, "cut a wide
gash through the history of the country; it dramatized in a
stroke the changes that had begun to take place during the
preceding 20 or 30 years...." War needs had enormously
stimulated manufacturing, speeding an economic process based on
the exploitation of iron, steam and electric power, as well as
the forward march of science and invention. In the years before
1860, 36,000 patents were granted; in the next 30 years, 440,000
patents were issued, and in the first quarter of the 20th
century, the number reached nearly a million. As early as 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse had perfected electrical
telegraphy, and soon afterward distant parts of the continent
were linked by a network of poles and wires. In 1876 Alexander
Graham Bell exhibited a telephone instrument and, within half a
century, 16 million telephones would quicken the social and
economic life of the nation. The growth of business was speeded
by the invention of the typewriter in 1867, the adding machine in
1888 and the cash register in 1897. The linotype composing
machine, invented in 1886, and rotary press and paper-folding
machinery made it possible to print 240,000 eight-page newspapers
in an hour. Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp eventually lit
millions of homes. The talking machine, or phonograph, too, was
perfected by Edison, who, in conjunction with George Eastman,
also helped develop the motion picture. These and many other
applications of science and ingenuity resulted in a new level of
productivity in almost every field. Concurrently, the nation's basic industry -- iron and steel --
was forging ahead, protected by a high tariff. Previously
concentrated in the Eastern states, the iron industry moved
westward as geologists discovered new ore deposits, notably the
great Mesabi iron range at the head of Lake Superior, which
became one of the largest ore producers in the world. The ore lay
on the surface of the ground and was easy and cheap to mine.
Remarkably free of chemical impurities, it could be processed
into steel of superior quality at about one-tenth the previously
prevailing cost. CARNEGIE AND THE ERA OF STEEL Andrew Carnegie was largely responsible for the great advances
in steel production. Carnegie, who came to America from Scotland
as a child of 12, progressed from bobbin boy in a cotton factory
to a job in a telegraph office, then to one on the Pennsylvania
Railroad. Before he was 30 years old he had made shrewd and
farsighted investments, which by 1865 were concentrated in iron.
Within a few years, he had organized or had stock in companies
making iron bridges, rails and locomotives. Ten years later, the
steel mill he built on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania was
the largest in the country. Carnegie acquired commanding control not only of new mills,
but also of coke and coal properties, iron ore from Lake
Superior, a fleet of steamers on the Great Lakes, a port town on
Lake Erie and a connecting railroad. His business, allied with a
dozen others, could command favorable terms from railroads and
shipping lines. Nothing comparable in industrial growth had ever
been seen in America before. Though Carnegie long dominated the industry, he never achieved
a complete monopoly over the natural resources, transportation
and industrial plants involved in the making of steel. In the
1890s, new companies challenged his preeminence, and at first,
stung by competition, Carnegie threatened to build an even more
powerful business complex. But now, a tired old man, he was
persuaded to merge his holdings with an organization that
eventually would embrace most of the important iron and steel
properties in the nation. CORPORATIONS AND CITIES The United States Steel Corporation, which resulted from this
merger in 1901, illustrated a process under way for 30 years: the
combination of independent industrial enterprises into federated
or centralized companies. Begun during the Civil War, the trend
gathered momentum after the 1870s, as businessmen began to fear
that overproduction would lead to declining prices and falling
profits. They realized that if they could control both production
and markets, they could bring competing firms into a single
organization. The "corporation" and the
"trust" were developed to achieve these ends. Corporations, making available a deep reservoir of capital and
giving business enterprises permanent life and continuity of
control, attracted investors both by the anticipated profits and
by the limited liability in case of business failure. In turn,
the trusts, were in effect combinations of corporations whereby
the stockholders of each placed stocks in the hands of trustees.
Such trusts made possible large-scale combinations, centralized
control and administration, and the pooling of patents. Their
larger capital resources provided power to expand, to compete
with foreign business organizations, and to drive hard bargains
with labor, which was beginning to organize effectively. They
could also exact favorable terms from railroads and exercise
influence in politics. The Standard Oil Company, founded by John D. Rockefeller, was
one of the earliest and strongest corporations, and was followed
rapidly by other combinations -- in cottonseed oil, lead, sugar,
tobacco and rubber. Soon aggressive individual businessmen began
to mark out industrial domains for themselves. Four great meat
packers, chief among them Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift,
established a beef trust. Cyrus McCormick achieved preeminence in
the reaper business. A 1904 survey showed that more than 5,000
previously independent concerns had been consolidated into some
300 industrial trusts. The trend toward amalgamation was manifest in other fields,
particularly in transportation and communications. Western Union,
earliest of the large communications combinations, was followed
by the Bell Telephone System and eventually by the American
Telephone and Telegraph Company. In the 1860s, Cornelius
Vanderbilt consolidated some 13 separate railroads into a single
line connecting New York City and Buffalo, about 800 kilometers
away. During the next decade he acquired lines to Chicago,
Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan -- and the New York Central
Railroad System came into being. Other consolidations were
already under way, and soon the major railroads of the nation
were organized into trunk lines and systems directed by a handful
of men. In this new industrial order, the city was the nerve center,
bringing to a focus all the nation's dynamic economic forces:
vast accumulations of capital, business and financial
institutions, spreading railroad yards, smoky factories, and
armies of manual and clerical workers. Villages, attracting
people from the countryside and from lands across the sea, grew
into towns and towns into cities almost overnight. In 1830 only
one of every 15 persons lived in communities of 8,000 or more; in
1860 the ratio was nearly one in every six; and in 1890 three in
every 10. No single city had as many as a million inhabitants in
1860; but 30 years later New York had a million and a half, and
Chicago, Illinois, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, each had over
a million. In these three decades, Philadelphia and Baltimore,
Maryland, doubled in population, Kansas City, Missouri, and
Detroit, Michigan, grew fourfold, Cleveland, Ohio, sixfold,
Chicago tenfold. Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Omaha, Nebraska, and
many communities like them -- hamlets when the Civil War began --
increased 50 times or more in population. RAILROADS, REGULATIONS AND THE TARIFF Railroads became increasingly important to the expanding
nation, and unfair railroad practices proliferated. Rail lines
extended cheaper rates to large shippers by rebating a portion of
the charge, operated to the disadvantage of small shippers. Also,
some railroads charged arbitrarily higher rates to some shippers
than to others between certain points, regardless of distance. Moreover, while competition held down freight charges between
cities with several rail connections, rates were excessive
between points served by only one line. Thus it cost less to ship
goods 1,280 kilometers from Chicago to New York than to places a
few hundred kilometers from Chicago. And by joint action to avoid
competition -- pooling -- rival companies divided the freight
business according to a prearranged scheme that placed the total
earnings in a common fund for distribution. Popular resentment at these practices stimulated state efforts
at regulation. These had some effect, but the problem was
national in character and demanded congressional action. In 1887 President Grover Cleveland signed the Interstate
Commerce Act, which forbade excessive charges, pools, rebates and
rate discrimination, and created an Interstate Commerce
Commission (ICC) to guard against violations of the act. In the
first decades of its existence, however, the railroads used
conservative Supreme Court decisions to thwart virtually all the
ICC's efforts at regulation and rate reductions. Cleveland was also active in combating the high tariff, which,
adopted originally as an emergency war measure, had come to be
accepted as permanent national policy under the Republican
presidents who dominated the politics of the era. Cleveland, a
Democrat, regarded excessive tariffs as responsible in large
measure for a burdensome increase in the cost of living and for
the rapid development of trusts. After many years, during which
the tariff had not been a political issue, the Democrats in 1880
demanded a "tariff for revenue only," and soon the
clamor for reform became insistent. In his annual message to
Congress in 1887, Cleveland, despite warnings to avoid the
explosive subject, startled the nation by denouncing the extremes
to which the principle of protecting American industry from
foreign competition had been pushed. The tariff became the main issue of the presidential election
campaign in 1888, and Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison, a
defender of protectionism, won in a close race. The Harrison
administration, fulfilling its campaign promises, passed in 1890
the McKinley tariff bill, a measure designed to protect
established industries as well as to foster so-called
"infant industries." The new tariff's generally high
rates contributed to high retail prices, triggering widespread
dissatisfaction. During this period, public antipathy toward the trusts
increased. The nation's gigantic corporations, subjected to
bitter attack through the 1880s by such reformers as Henry George
and Edward Bellamy, became a hotly debated political issue. To
break the monopolies, the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890,
forbade all combinations in restraint of interstate trade and
provided several methods of enforcement with severe penalties.
Couched in vague generalities, the law itself accomplished little
immediately after its passage. But a decade later, in the
administration of Theodore Roosevelt, its effective application
earned the president the nickname of "trust-buster." REVOLUTION IN AGRICULTURE Despite the great gains in industry, agriculture remained the
nation's basic occupation. The revolution in agriculture --
paralleling that in manufacturing after the Civil War -- involved
a shift from hand labor to machine farming, and from subsistence
to commercial agriculture. Between 1860 and 1910, the number of
farms in the United States tripled, increasing from 2 million to
6 million, while the area farmed more than doubled from 160
million to 352 million hectares. Between 1860 and 1890, the production of such basic
commodities as wheat, corn and cotton outstripped all previous
figures in the United States. In the same period, the nation's
population more than doubled, with largest growth in the cities.
But the American farmer grew enough grain and cotton, raised
enough beef and pork, and clipped enough wool not only to supply
American workers and their families but also to create
ever-increasing surpluses. Several factors accounted for this extraordinary achievement.
One was the expansion into the West. Another was the application
of machinery to farming. The farmer of 1800, using a hand sickle,
could hope to cut 20 percent of a hectare of wheat a day. With
the cradle, 30 years later, he might cut 80 percent of a hectare
daily. In 1840 Cyrus McCormick performed a miracle by cutting
from two to two-and-a-half hectares a day with the reaper, the
curious machine he had been developing for nearly 10 years.
Foreseeing the demand, he headed west to the young prairie town
of Chicago, where he set up a factory -- and by 1860 sold a
quarter of a million reapers. Other farm machines were developed in rapid succession: the
automatic wire binder, the threshing machine and the
reaper-thresher or combine. Mechanical planters, cutters, huskers
and shellers appeared, as did cream separators, manure spreaders,
potato planters, hay driers, poultry incubators and a hundred
other inventions. Scarcely less important than machinery in the agricultural
revolution was science. In 1862 the Morrill Land Grant College
Act allotted public land to each state for the establishment of
agricultural and industrial colleges. These were to serve both as
educational institutions and as centers for research in
scientific farming. Congress subsequently appropriated funds for
the creation of agricultural experiment stations throughout the
country and also granted funds directly to the Department of
Agriculture for research purposes. By the beginning of the new
century, scientists throughout the United States were at work on
a wide variety of agricultural projects. Ironically, the federal
policy that enabled farmers to increase yields ultimately
generated vast supplies which drove market prices down -- and
disheartened farmers. One of these scientists, Mark Carleton, traveled for the
Department of Agriculture to Russia. There he found and exported
to his homeland the rust- and drought-resistant winter wheat that
now accounts for more than half the United States wheat crop.
Another scientist, Marion Dorset, conquered the dreaded hog
cholera, while still another, George Mohler, helped prevent
hoof-and-mouth disease. From North Africa, one researcher brought
back Kaffir corn; from Turkestan, another imported the
yellow-flowering alfalfa. Luther Burbank, in California, produced
scores of new fruits and vegetables; in Wisconsin, Stephen
Babcock devised a test for determining the butterfat content of
milk; at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the African-American
scientist George Washington Carver found hundreds of new uses for
the peanut, sweet potato and soybean. THE DIVIDED SOUTH In the 1880s, the South pushed hard to attract industry. Large
inducements were offered to investors to develop the steel,
lumber, tobacco and textile industries. Yet in 1900 the South's
percentage of the nation's industrial base remained about the
same size as it had been in 1860. Moreover, the price of this
drive for industrialization was high: disease and child labor
proliferated in Southern mill towns. Thirty years after the Civil
War, the South remained largely poor, overwhelmingly agrarian and
economically dependent. Its society enforced a rigid social
segregation of blacks from whites, and tolerated recurrent racial
violence. Intransigent white Southerners, who resisted Reconstruction
through their positions in the national government in Washington,
found ways to assert state control to maintain white dominance.
Several Supreme Court decisions bolstered the views of these
Southerners, beginning in the 1870s, by upholding traditional
conservative views of the appropriate balance between national
and state power. In 1873 the Supreme Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment
(citizenship rights not to be abridged) conferred no new
privileges or immunities to protect African Americans from state
power. In 1883, furthermore, it ruled that the Fourteenth
Amendment did not prevent individuals, as opposed to states, from
practicing discrimination. And in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the
Court found that "separate but equal" public
accommodations for African Americans, such as trains and
restaurants, did not violate their rights. Soon the principle of segregation by race extended into every
area of Southern life, from railroads to restaurants, hotels,
hospitals and schools. Moreover, any area of life that was not
segregated by law was segregated by custom and practice. Faced
with pervasive discrimination, many African Americans supported
the program of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent black
leader of the late 19th and early 20th century, who counseled
them to focus on modest economic goals and to accept temporary
social discrimination. Others, led by the African-American
intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, wanted to challenge segregation
through political action. But, with the complicity of two major
parties, calls for racial justice attracted little support, and
segregationist laws remained common in the South well into the
second half of the 20th century. THE LAST FRONTIER In 1865 the frontier line generally followed the western
limits of the states bordering the Mississippi River, bulging
outward to include the eastern sections of Kansas and Nebraska.
Beyond this thin edge of pioneer farms lay the prairie and
sagebrush lands that stretched to the foothills of the Rocky
Mountains. Then, for nearly 1,600 kilometers, loomed the huge
bulk of mountain ranges, many rich in silver, gold and other
metals. On the far side, plains and deserts stretched to the
wooded coastal ranges and the Pacific Ocean. Apart from the
settled districts in California and scattered outposts, the vast
inland region was populated by Native Americans: among them the
Great Plains tribes -- Sioux and Blackfoot, Pawnee and Cheyenne
-- and the Indian cultures of the Southwest, including Apache,
Navajo and Hopi. A mere quarter-century later, virtually all this country had
been carved into states and territories. Miners had ranged over
the whole of the mountain country, tunneling into the earth,
establishing little communities in Nevada, Montana and Colorado.
Cattle ranchers, taking advantage of the enormous grasslands, had
laid claim to the huge expanse stretching from Texas to the upper
Missouri River. Sheep herders had found their way to the valleys
and mountain slopes. Farmers sank their plows into the plains and
valleys and closed the gap between the East and West. By 1890 the
frontier had disappeared. Settlement was spurred by the Homestead Act of 1862, which
granted free farms of 64 hectares to citizens who would occupy
and improve the land. Unfortunately for the would-be farmers, the
land itself was suited more for cattle ranching than farming, and
by 1880 nearly 22,400,000 hectares of "free" land was
in the hands of cattlemen or the railroads. In 1862 Congress also voted a charter to the Union Pacific
Railroad, which pushed westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa, using
mostly the labor of ex-soldiers and Irish immigrants. At the same
time, the Central Pacific Railroad began to build eastward from
Sacramento, California, relying heavily on Chinese immigrant
labor. The whole country was stirred as the two lines steadily
approached each other, finally meeting on May 10, 1869, at
Promontory Point in Utah. The months of laborious travel hitherto
separating the two oceans was now cut to about six days. The
continental rail network grew steadily, and by 1884 four great
lines linked the central Mississippi Valley area with the
Pacific. The first great rush of population to the Far West was drawn
to the mountainous regions, where gold was found in California in
1848, in Colorado and Nevada 10 years later, in Montana and
Wyoming in the 1860s, and in the Black Hills of the Dakota
country in the 1870s. Miners opened up the country, established
communities, and laid the foundations for more permanent
settlements. Yet even while digging in the hills, some settlers
perceived the region's farming and stock-raising possibilities.
Eventually, though a few communities continued to be devoted
almost exclusively to mining, the real wealth of Montana,
Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and California proved to be in the grass
and soil. Cattle-raising, long an important industry in Texas,
flourished after the Civil War, when enterprising men began to
drive their Texas longhorn cattle north across the open public
land. Feeding as they went, the cattle arrived at railway
shipping points in Kansas, larger and fatter than when they
started. Soon this "long drive" became a regular event,
and, for hundreds of kilometers, trails were dotted with herds of
cattle moving northward. Cattle-raising spread into the
trans-Missouri region, and immense ranches appeared in Colorado,
Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakota territory. Western
cities flourished as centers for the slaughter and dressing of
meat. Ranching introduced a colorful mode of existence with the
picturesque cowboy as its central figure. Although the reality of
cowboy life, with its low pay and grueling work, was far from
romantic, its mythological hold on the American imagination has
remained strong, from the "dime" novels of the 1870s to
the films of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood in the late 20th
century. Altogether, between 1866 and 1888, some six million head of
cattle were driven up from Texas to winter on the high plains of
Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. The cattle boom reached its height
in 1885, when the range became too heavily pastured to support
the long drive, and was beginning to be crisscrossed by
railroads. Not far behind the rancher creaked the covered wagons
of the farmers bringing their families, their draft horses, cows
and pigs. Under the Homestead Act they staked their claims and
fenced them with a new invention, barbed wire. Ranchers were
ousted from lands they had roamed without legal title. Soon the
romantic "Wild West" had ceased to be. THE PLIGHT OF THE INDIANS As in the East, expansion into the plains and mountains by
miners, ranchers and settlers led to increasing conflicts with
the Indians of the West. Many tribes of Native Americans -- from
the Utes of the Great Basin to the Nez Perces of Idaho -- fought
the whites at one time or another. But the Sioux of the Northern
Plains and the Apache of the Southwest provided the most
significant opposition to frontier advance. Led by such
resourceful leaders as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the Sioux were
particularly skilled at high-speed mounted warfare. The Apaches
were equally adept and highly elusive, fighting in their environs
of desert and canyons. Conflicts with the Plains Indians began with a Sioux massacre
of whites in 1862 and continued through the Civil War. In 1876
the last serious Sioux war erupted, when the Dakota gold rush
penetrated the Black Hills. The Army was supposed to keep miners
off Sioux hunting grounds, but little was done to protect Indian
lands. Yet when ordered to take action against bands of Sioux
hunting on the range according to their treaty rights, the Army
moved vigorously. In 1876, after several indecisive encounters, General George
Custer found the main encampment of Sioux and their allies on the
Little Big Horn River. Custer and his men -- who were separated
from their main detachment -- were completely annihilated. Later,
in 1890, a ghost dance ritual on the Northern Sioux reservation
at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, led to an uprising and a last,
tragic encounter that ended in the death of hundreds of Sioux
men, women and children. Long before this, however, the way of life of the Plains
Indians had been destroyed by the slaughter of the buffalo,
almost exterminated in the decade after 1870 by indiscriminate
hunting. Meanwhile, the Apache wars in the Southwest dragged on
until Geronimo, the last important chief, was captured in 1885. Government policy ever since the Monroe administration had
been to move the Indians beyond the reach of the white frontier.
But inevitably the reservations had become smaller and more
crowded, and many began to protest the government's treatment of
Native Americans. Helen Hunt Jackson, for example, an Easterner
living in the West, wrote a book, A Century of Dishonor (1881),
which dramatized the Indians' plight and struck a chord in the
nation's conscience. Most reformers believed the Indian should be
assimilated into the dominant culture. The federal government
even set up a school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to
impose white values and beliefs on Indian youths. (It was at this
school that Native American Jim Thorpe, often considered the best
athlete the U.S. has produced, gained fame in the early 20th
century.) In 1887 the Dawes Act reversed U.S. Indian policy, permitting
the president to divide up tribal land and parcel out 65 hectares
of land to each head of a family. Such allotments were to be held
in trust by the government for 25 years, after which time the
owner won full title and citizenship. Lands not thus distributed,
however, were offered for sale to settlers. This policy, however
well-intentioned, proved disastrous, since it allowed more
plundering of Indian lands. Moreover, its assault on the communal
organization of tribes caused further disruption of traditional
culture. In 1934 U.S. policy was reversed again by the Indian
Reorganization Act, which attempted to protect tribal and
communal life on the reservations. AMBIVALENT EMPIRE The last decades of the 19th century were a period of imperial
expansion for the United States, as it extended its influence,
and at times its domain, over widely scattered areas in the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and into Central America. The United
States took a different course than its European rivals, however,
because of its own history of struggle against European empires
and its unique democratic development. The sources of American expansionism in the late 19th century
were varied. Internationally, it was a period of imperialist
frenzy, as European powers raced to carve up Africa and competed
for influence and trade in Asia -- along with a new rival, Japan.
Many Americans, including such influential figures as Theodore
Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root, felt that to
safeguard its own interests, the United States had to stake out
spheres of economic influence as well. That view was seconded by
a powerful naval lobby, which called for an expanded fleet and
network of overseas ports as essential to the economic and
political security of the nation. More generally, the doctrine of
"manifest destiny," first used to justify America's
continental expansion, was now revived to assert that the United
States had a right and duty to extend its influence and
civilization in the Western Hemisphere and the Caribbean, as well
as across the Pacific. At the same time, the voices of anti-imperialism from diverse
coalitions of Northern Democrats and reform-minded Republicans
remained loud and constant. As a result, the acquisition of an
American empire was piecemeal and ambivalent, and colonial
administrations were often more concerned with trade and economic
issues than political control. America's first venture beyond her continental borders was the
purchase of Alaska -- sparsely populated by Inuit and other
native peoples -- from Russia in 1867. Most Americans were either
indifferent to or indignant at this action by Secretary of State
William Seward, and Alaska was widely referred to as
"Seward's Folly" and "Seward's Icebox." But
30 years later, when gold was discovered on Alaska's Klondike
River, thousands of Americans headed north, and many of them
settled in Alaska permanently. When Alaska became the 49th state
in 1959, it replaced Texas as the largest state in the Union. The Spanish-American War, which was fought in 1898, marked a
turning point in American history. Within a few years after the
war ended, the United States was exercising control or influence
over islands in the Caribbean Sea, the mid-Pacific and close to
the Asian mainland. By the 1890s, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only remnants of
Spain's once vast empire in the New World, while the Philippine
Islands comprised the core of Spanish power in the Pacific. The
outbreak of war had three principal sources: popular hostility to
autocratic Spanish rule; American sympathy with demands for
independence; and a new spirit of national assertiveness in the
United States, stimulated in part by a "jingoistic" or
nationalistic and sensationalist press. In 1895 Cuba's growing wrath against the tyranny of the mother
country burst into a war of independence. The United States
watched the course of the uprising with mounting concern. Most
Americans were sympathetic with the Cubans, but President
Cleveland was determined to preserve neutrality. Three years
later, however, during the McKinley administration, the U.S.
warship Maine was destroyed while lying at anchor in Havana
harbor, under circumstances that are still unclear. More than 250
men were killed, and an outburst of indignation, intensified by
sensationalized press coverage, swept across the country.
Although for a time McKinley tried to preserve the peace, within
a few months, believing delay futile, he recommended armed
intervention. The war with Spain was swift and decisive. During the four
months it lasted, not a single American reverse of any importance
occurred. A week after the declaration of war, Commodore George
Dewey, then at Hong Kong, proceeded with his squadron of six
vessels to the Philippines. His orders were to prevent the
Spanish fleet based there from operating in American waters. He
caught the entire Spanish fleet at anchor and destroyed it
without losing an American life. Meanwhile, in Cuba, troops landed near Santiago, where, after
winning a rapid series of engagements, they fired on the port.
Four armored Spanish cruisers steamed out of Santiago Bay and a
few hours later were reduced to ruined hulks. From Boston to San Francisco, whistles blew and flags waved
when word came that Santiago had fallen. Newspapers dispatched
correspondents to Cuba and the Philippines, who trumpeted the
renown of the nation's new heroes. Chief among them were George
Dewey of Manila fame and Theodore Roosevelt, who resigned as
assistant secretary of the navy to lead the "Rough
Riders," a volunteer regiment he recruited for service in
Cuba. Spain soon sued for peace, and in the treaty signed on
December 10, 1898, transferred Cuba to the United States for
temporary occupation preliminary to the island's independence. In
addition, Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam in lieu of war
indemnity, and the Philippines on payment of $20 million. Having overseas possessions was a new experience for the
United States. Consequently, the new territories were encouraged
to move toward democratic self-government, a political system
with which none of them had any previous experience. Nevertheless, the United States found itself in a familiar
colonial role when it suppressed an armed independence movement
in the Philippines in the first decade of its occupation. The
Philippines gained the right to elect both houses of its
legislature in 1916, and in 1936 a largely autonomous Philippine
Commonwealth was established. In 1946, after World War II, the
islands attained full independence. American involvement in the Pacific area was not limited to
the Philippines, however. The year of the Spanish-American War
also saw the beginning of a new relationship with the Hawaiian
Islands. Earlier contact with Hawaii had been mainly through
missionaries and casual traders. After 1865, however, Americans
began to develop the islands' resources -- chiefly sugar cane and
pineapples. When the royal government announced its intention to
end foreign influence in 1893, American businessmen joined with
influential Hawaiians to install a new government, which then
asked to be annexed to the United States. Widespread protests in the United States against the use of
American soldiers and the idea of colonial rule persuaded
President Grover Cleveland and Congress to reject annexation at
first. But, responding to the surge of nationalism generated by
the Spanish-American War, Congress voted overwhelmingly in July
1898 to annex the islands, thus also acquiring an important naval
base at Pearl Harbor. In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state in the
Union. Cuba acquired nominal independence when American troops
departed in 1902. But the United States retained the right to
intervene to preserve civil order, which it did on three
occasions before renouncing that right in 1934. Even with full
Cuban independence, however, American economic and political
influence remained strong until 1959, when Fidel Castro overthrew
the government in power, establishing a Marxist regime with close
ties to the Soviet Union. Puerto Rico, the island lying east of Cuba, followed an
apprenticeship similar to that of Cuba and the Philippines. In
1917 the U.S. Congress granted Puerto Ricans the right to elect
all of their legislators. But the same law created a different
path for the island, making it officially a U.S. territory and,
more importantly, giving its people American citizenship. In 1950
Congress granted Puerto Rico complete freedom to decide its
future. In the referendum of 1952, the citizens voted to reject
either statehood or total independence, and chose instead a
commonwealth status. Large numbers of Puerto Ricans have settled
on the mainland, to which they have free access and where they
acquire all the political and civil rights of any other citizen
of the United States. THE CANAL AND THE AMERICAS The war with Spain revived American interest in building a
canal across the isthmus of Panama, uniting the two great oceans.
The usefulness of such a canal for sea trade had long been
recognized by the major commercial nations of the world; indeed
the French had begun digging one in the late 19th century only to
abandon their efforts due to the difficulties involved. Now that
the United States was a power in both the Caribbean Sea and the
Pacific Ocean, it saw the military necessity of a canal to
provide, when needed, speedier transfer of warships from one
ocean to the other. At the turn of the century, what is now Panama was a northern
province of Colombia. When the Colombian legislature in 1903
refused to ratify a draft treaty giving the United States the
right to build and manage a canal, a group of impatient
Panamanians, with the support of U.S. Marines, rose in rebellion
and declared Panama's independence from Colombia. The breakaway
country was immediately recognized by President Theodore
Roosevelt. Under the terms of the treaty signed in November of
that year, Panama granted the United States a perpetual lease to
a 16-kilometer-wide strip of land between the Atlantic and the
Pacific, in return for $10 million and a yearly fee of $250,000.
Colombia later received $25 million as partial compensation.
(Under the Panama Canal treaty negotiated by the two countries 75
years later, the Canal will revert to Panamanian sovereignty by
the year 2000.) The completion of the Canal in 1914 was a major triumph of
engineering directed by Colonel George W. Goethals, while the
conquest of malaria and yellow fever in a tropical jungle proved
to be an outstanding achievement of preventive medicine. Elsewhere in Latin America, the United States fell into a
pattern of fitful intervention. Between 1900 and 1920, for
example, the United States intervened in six Western Hemispheric
nations, establishing protectorates in Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, and periodically stationing U.S. Marines in Nicaragua.
In 1867 the United States pressured the French into removing
troops supporting the Emperor Maximillian in Mexico. Half a
century later, however, as part of an ill-starred campaign to
influence the Mexican revolution, the United States found itself
sending an army of 11,000 troops into the northern part of the
country in a futile effort to capture the elusive rebel and
outlaw Francisco "Pancho" Villa. At the same time, the United States also played an important
role in establishing an institutional basis for cooperation among
the nations of the Americas. In 1889 Secretary of State James G.
Blaine proposed that the 21 independent nations of the Western
Hemisphere join in an organization dedicated to the peaceful
settlement of disputes and to closer economic bonds. Emerging
from the first Pan-American conference in 1890 was a permanent
body known in its early years as the Pan-American Union and today
as the Organization of American States (OAS). Moreover, the later administrations of Herbert Hoover and
Franklin D. Roosevelt repudiated the right of U.S. intervention
in Latin America. In particular, the Roosevelt Good Neighbor
Policy of the 1930s, though by no means ending tensions between
the United States and Latin America, helped dissipate much of the
ill-will engendered by earlier U.S. intervention and unilateral
actions. UNITED STATES AND ASIA Newly established in the Philippines and firmly entrenched in
Hawaii, the United States at the turn of the century, had high
hopes of a vigorous trade with China. Since China's defeat by
Japan (1894-1895), however, various European nations had acquired
naval bases, leased territories and established spheres of
influence. They had also secured monopolistic trade rights as
well as exclusive concessions for investing in railway
construction and mining development. In its own earlier diplomatic relations with Asia, the
American government had always insisted upon equality of
commercial privileges for all nations. However, idealism in
American foreign policy was at odds with the desire to compete
with Europe's imperial powers in the Far East. In September 1899
Secretary of State John Hay addressed a note to the powers
concerned, resulting in the doctrine of the "Open Door"
for all nations in China -- that is, equality of trading
opportunities (including equal tariffs, harbor duties and railway
rates) in the areas they controlled. Despite its idealistic
component, the "Open Door," in essence, became a
diplomatic maneuver to gain the advantages of a colony without
the necessity of wresting one from the Chinese. With the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Chinese struck out
against the foreigners. In June, insurgents seized Peiping
(Beijing) and attacked the foreign legations there. Hay promptly
announced to the European powers and Japan that the United States
would oppose any disturbance of Chinese territorial or
administrative rights or of the Open Door policy. Once the
rebellion was quelled, it required all Hay's skill to carry out
the American program and to protect China from crushing
indemnities. In October, however, Great Britain and Germany once
more signaled their adherence to the Open Door policy and the
preservation of Chinese independence, albeit under foreign
domination, and other nations soon followed. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt responded to American
labor's fears of competition by persuading the Japanese
government temporarily to suspend emigration of laborers to the
United States. Otherwise, American dealings with Japan during the
latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century
were mainly cordial and uneventful. One unusual encounter
involved President Roosevelt's mediation of the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904-1905, during which he warned Germany and France not
to intervene on Russia's side against Japan. As a result of his
efforts in working out a settlement, Roosevelt received the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1906. Embassy of the United States of America
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