Imperialists linked overseas expansion to practical, economic considerations, but race was also a key component in their arguments for empire. Drawing on Herbert Spencer’s concept of “survival of the fittest,” many Americans and western Europeans declared themselves superior to nonwhite peoples of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Buttressing their arguments with racist studies claiming to demonstrate scientifically the “racial” superiority of white Protestants, imperialists claimed a “natural right” of conquest and world domination (see chapter 19).
Imperialists added an ethical dimension to this ideology by contending that “higher civilizations” had a duty to uplift inferior nations. In Our Country (1885), the Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong proclaimed the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, or white northern European, race and the responsibility of the United States to spread the “blessings” of its Christian way of life throughout the world. Secular intellectuals, such as historian John Fiske, praised the English race for settling the United States and predicted that “its language . . . its religion . . . its political habits, and . . . the blood of its people” would become “predominant” in the less civilized parts of the globe.
As in Hawaii, Christian missionaries served as foot soldiers for the advancing American commercial empire. In fact, there was often a clear connection between religious and commercial interests. For example, in 1895 industrialists John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Cyrus McCormick created the World Student Christian Federation, which dispatched more than five thousand young missionaries throughout the world, many of them women. Likewise, it was no coincidence that China, an enormous potential market for American products, became a magnet for American missionary activity. By 1920 missionaries in China were operating schools, hospitals, orphanages, leper colonies, churches, and seminaries, seeking to convert the “backward” Chinese to Christianity and the American way of life. Many Americans hoped that, under missionary supervision, the Chinese would become consumers of both American ideas and American products.