21 An Emerging World Power

1890–1918

The Protestant minister Josiah Strong defined America’s responsibility to “civilize and Christianize” the world by encouraging missionaries to promote the gospel. This evangelical motive was but one among a number of impulses driving late-nineteenth-century supporters of American expansionism, a latter-day expression of Manifest Destiny. Others emphasized the strategic and economic importance of overseas territories as critical to America’s Social Darwinist competition with other world powers. The confluence of motives led policymakers to step offshore into the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Asia as well as Europe during World War I, but not without resistance. Opponents marshaled compelling counterarguments to American imperialism, bolstered by native protests and the evidence of domestic unrest inspired by wartime curtailment of civil liberties. This turn-of-the-century debate about the United States’s legitimate and necessary role on the world stage splintered the American public into factions and colored the politics of the period. The disillusionment of World War I tempered overseas enthusiasm, but President Woodrow Wilson’s lofty rhetoric about “making the world safe for democracy” established a precedent for future interventions framed as the selfless duty of a privileged nation.