By 1882, many Americans insisted that their country must control an isthmian canal, and when Great Britain showed no willingness to scrap the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, providing for joint ownership and operation, the ever brash New York Herald offered its trans-Atlantic cousin some gratuitous advice. If Britain felt compelled to impose its designs on other peoples, the Herald opined, it should "take another turn" at the Boers, the Zulus, or the Afghans. "She need not bother with this side of the sea. We are a good enough England for this hemisphere."1
The newspaper's boast was more than a bit inflated when rendered, but by the 1890s it would approximate reality. During the so-called Gilded Age, a reunited and increasingly industrialized America lurched in fits and starts toward great power status. Absorbed in domestic problems and less concerned with external threats than at any time in their nation's history, Gilded Age Americans elevated traditional doctrines of nonentanglement to holy writ. At the same time, they were more than ever drawn to far-flung areas in search of adventure, opportunity, commerce, and "heathen" souls to be saved. Conscious of their rising power, they were more disposed to intervene in their own hemisphere and indeed beyond. During these years, such intrusions were often clumsy and counterproductive. Expansionist initiatives were frequently thwarted by a hostile Congress or junked by incoming administrations. By the turbulent 1890s, however, an increasingly powerful and anxiety-ridden United States began to assert its claims more vociferously and back them with action. Especially under the aggressive and sometimes bellicose leadership of President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine, the United States between 1889 and 1893 moved decisively to strengthen its position at the expense of potential rivals in the Pacific Basin region and the Caribbean. At least for the Western Hemisphere, it was a "good enough England" indeed.
The world of the late nineteenth century was a turbulent place of rapid—and, to contemporaries, often bewildering—change. The railroad, steamship, and telegraph shrank distances dramatically, providing the means, contemporaries believed, to "erase ignorance and isolation, erode away the misunderstandings between peoples, and facilitate the getting and distribution of the new plenty."2 People, goods, and capital moved freely across international boundaries in this first rush of what is now called "globalization," connecting disparate areas through an intricate network of commerce and investments. "The world is a city!" French banking magnate Carl Meyer von Rothschild approvingly exclaimed in 1875.3
Technological advances also made the world more dangerous. The transportation revolution permitted more rapid movement of larger military forces over larger areas, enabling the Western imperial powers to administer colonial holdings from greater distances. After almost a decade of false starts and frustrations such as fires, breaks in the line, and storms at sea, the United States and Britain in 1866 were linked by cable. Such ties soon extended to continental Europe and East Asia. The cost of sending telegraph messages initially limited the cable's utility in diplomacy, but its wider use over time speeded up communications, accelerating the pace of diplomatic activity, giving diplomatic crises a new urgency, and shifting control from diplomats on the scene to Washington.4 The era also brought innovations in printing that, when combined with rising literacy rates in the Western industrialized countries, produced a rapt audience for exciting events in other places, creating both opportunities for mobilization of disparate peoples and popular pressures on those who wielded power. Above all, as the American Civil War so grimly demonstrated, the harnessing of modern technology to the once genteel "art" of war created enormous and still not fully appreciated powers of destruction.
The ethos of the age stressed competition and struggle, adding to the turbulence that marked the international system. Published in 1859, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species theorized that plant and animal life had evolved through an ongoing competition in which only the "fittest" flourished; the weak fell by the wayside. As popularized and applied to international politics, Darwin's ideas emphasized a struggle among nations and survival of the strongest, encouraging peoples already inclined toward the pursuit of power and wealth to compete more aggressively for the world's resources and use force to achieve their goals. "Nations, like men, will shrink and decline when they fail to grasp firmly the opportunities for success and use them to the utmost," Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan grimly proclaimed.5
Britain remained the number-one power in a still Europe-centered world. The empire on which the sun never set encompassed by century's end some twelve million square miles of territory and nearly one-fourth of the world's population, the largest the world had ever seen. London also maintained a precarious industrial and commercial supremacy, but its strengths had increasingly become its weakness. Its vast holdings and commitments compelled it to struggle merely to hang on to its existing position.6
Newcomers to the great game of international politics increasingly challenged Britain and the other traditional powers, rattling the post-1815 equilibrium. Although still weak by European standards, a newly unified Italy posed a regional danger to declining powers such as France and Austria-Hungary. The main threat to the existing order came from Germany, which emerged with stunning speed. By late century, it had surpassed France and was beginning to challenge Britain in industry and commerce. Germany was the first power to realize the military potential of the modern nation-state. Its crushing of Austria in 1866 and even more shocking defeat of France in 1871 marked its coming of age. Through artful diplomacy, the "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, managed to expand his nation's interests without arraying the other powers against him. The Germany of Wilhelm II (1888–1918) was more aggressive and less clever, arousing growing fears in Europe, Britain, and even the United States.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the Europeans again took their competition on the road. Colonies had fallen out of fashion at midcentury, but in the eighties they once again became sought after as sources of power and wealth, setting off a new and furious scramble for political and economic advantages in unclaimed areas across the globe. Now joined by the Germans and Italians, the British and French competed for colonies in the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and East and Southeast Asia and even, to the alarm of Americans, made gestures in the direction of Latin America. Between 1870 and 1900, Britain added more than four million square miles to its imperial holdings, France more than three and a half million, and Germany one million. The new rush for empire further destabilized an already unsettled world.7
Even as Europe expanded into new areas, its centuries-old preeminence was under challenge from emerging powers. Russia's vast size and wealth of resources were more than offset by its administrative and political weakness, but its enormous potential made its Continental rivals uneasy. Emulating the Europeans, Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 set out to modernize, industrialize, and build a Western-style military apparatus. The Japanese remained well behind the Europeans to the turn of the century, but their remarkable advance in a short time gained notice. Their defeat of hapless China in the so-called Pigtail War of 1894–95 marked their advent as a rising power in East Asia.
No nation surpassed the United States in economic growth, and nothing was more decisive for the future of the international system than America's emergence as a world power. Powerful and prosperous, with relatively greater individual liberties, at least for white men, than any other nation, the United States after the Civil War continued to attract millions of people searching for opportunity. Before the war, most immigrants had come from northern and western Europe; after, they came mainly from southern and eastern Europe. These millions of so-called new immigrants dramatically altered the makeup of the nation, provoked rising domestic tensions, and had profound implications for the future of U.S. foreign relations. Hordes of immigrants combined with continued high birth rates to push the population of the United States to more than seventy-five million people by 1900, second only to Russia among the world's leading nations.
Consolidation proceeded apace. The South was slowly and at times painfully reintegrated—often at the expense of African Americans on whose behalf the Civil War had presumably been fought. Railroads and the telegraph bound the vast territory acquired before the Civil War. Six new states entered the Union between 1889 and 1893, the most in any four-year period, bringing the total to forty-four.
During the last third of the nineteenth century, at the expense of Native Americans, the United States solidified its hold on the trans-Mississippi West. The discovery of gold and silver, the 1862 Homestead Act offering cheap land to settlers, and the completion of a network of western railroads sparked yet another mass migration after the Civil War. Americans settled more land between 1870 and 1900 than in all their previous history. The population of the last frontier beyond the Mississippi more than quadrupled. As before, the mass influx of white settlers sparked conflict with Indians native to the region and some tribes removed from the East. As in the East, the government sought to deal with the problem by confining the Indians to reservations on generally undesirable lands. It was left to the U.S. Army to implement a policy the fiercely independent western Indians despised and resisted by force. For nearly a quarter century, the western tribes waged relentless guerrilla warfare against the frontier army, fighting nearly one thousand mostly small engagements. As on earlier frontiers, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The army used its mobility, firepower, superior numbers, and ruthless attacks on winter encampments to cripple resistance. Even more important was the massive influx of settlers whose crops and cattle destroyed the grass and wildlife, especially the buffalo, that provided the basis of Indian society, forcing them to the reservation—or death.8
The United States' Indian policy changed markedly during this last stage of forced displacement to western reservations. At one time treated as independent nations, by the 1830s they were viewed as what Chief Justice John Marshall called "a domestic dependent nation," what amounted to protectorate status. Treaties continued to provide a measure of self-rule, but in 1871 the government stopped making agreements with the Indians, and the Supreme Court empowered Congress legally to nullify earlier commitments. After this point, Indians were treated as dependent peoples, indeed colonial subjects. George Washington and Henry Knox's well-intentioned ideal of civilization with honor gave way to an attitude of civilization or else. Rather than enticing the Indian to white man's ways with trinkets, tools, and Bibles, the government imposed civilization on them by requiring them to use the English language, accept Christianity, hold private property, and adopt subsistence agriculture. Agents were sent to the reservations to implement the new policies. The Bill of Rights did not apply. Indians could not even leave the reservation without permission. There was a direct line between the handling of Native Americans in the Gilded Age and the acquisition of overseas empire in the 1890s. "The ties between the Indian and foreign policy . . . were not so much broken as transformed," historian Michael Hunt has concluded. "The rationale used to justify the defeat and dispossession of one people would in the future serve to sanction claims to American superiority and dominion over other people."9
The Union's triumph in the Civil War positioned the nation to exploit its enormous economic assets: rich land; a wealth of natural resources; a growing and energetic population; the absence of foreign threat or other obstacles to growth. Possessing numerous advantages and few disadvantages, the United States transformed itself at near miraculous pace. Agricultural and industrial production soared. By 1900, the United States surpassed even Britain in manufacturing output. The nation began to pour its agricultural and industrial products across the world while maintaining a high tariff to protect its own industries from foreign competition. American "hyperproductivity," along with recurrent and increasingly serious economic crises, fed rising fears among elites that the home market could not absorb a mounting surplus, the so-called glut thesis, provoking agitation for the acquisition of new markets abroad and a more active foreign policy. Only in military power did the United States lag behind the Europeans, but even here the gap was closing by the turn of the century. In any event, America's smaller military expenditures provided an advantage obscured in an age where the trappings of power often masked its essentials. The costs of maintaining an empire in fact could be a source of weakness rather than strength. The rapid expansion of two new powers caused Europeans increasingly to fret about a world order dominated by a crude and backward Russia and a rich and vulgar America. The explosive growth of the United States—an "entire rival continent"—provoked the first of repeated European warnings about the Americanization of the world.10
Once dismissed by internationalist historians as an isolationist backwater and the nadir of statesmanship, Gilded Age diplomacy has been rehabilitated in recent years. Revisionist writers have found in the post–Civil War era the roots of the modern American empire. Drab and colorless the diplomatists may have been, it is argued, but they were hardworking and dedicated public servants who pursued the national interest with dogged determination. Concerned with the economic crisis produced by mounting agricultural and industrial surpluses, they were especially energetic in searching out foreign markets. They developed the rationale and began to create the instruments for the acquisition of overseas territory in the 1890s.11
Foreign relations have thus been brought back into the mainstream of Gilded Age history and the Gilded Age into the mainstream of U.S. foreign relations. To be sure, as critics have pointed out, "the era was marked by uncoordinated diplomacy, amateurish emissaries, shallow rhetoric, and much public and congressional indifference."12 There was strong opposition to international involvement and especially commitment. Anti-imperialists defeated numerous expansionist initiatives. There was no master plan for empire. Still, diplomacy was much more important, active, systematic, and deliberate than previously allowed. During this period, the ideology and instruments that provided the basis for America's global involvement in the twentieth century took form. The Gilded Age was a transition period between the continental empire of Jefferson and Adams and the insular empire of the early twentieth century.13
Attitudes toward the outside world were paradoxical. For the first time in its short history, the new nation did not face a major external threat. Its position in North America was firmly established. Europe was retreating from the Western Hemisphere. The relative stability on the Continent spared the danger of a general European war. America's headlong economic growth and consolidation of the Union absorbed the energies and attention of its people after the Civil War. Under these circumstances, world events naturally receded in the scale of national priorities. Americans did not think of themselves as isolationists—indeed, the term isolationism was just beginning to creep into the national political vocabulary by the end of the century. But the nation's leaders did speak in reverential tones of the foreign policy principles bequeathed by Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe. Our "traditional rule of noninterference in the affairs of foreign nations has proved of great value in past times and ought to be strictly observed," President Rutherford B. Hayes proclaimed in 1877, a mantra ritualistically repeated by his Gilded Age successors.14 Some ultra-nationalists even echoed in less qualified terms Jefferson's dream of scrapping an unrepublican and allegedly unnecessary diplomatic corps.
In the Gilded Age, as before and after, of course, Americans were anything but isolated from the outside world. From the beginning of the republic, U.S. foreign relations had been driven as much by private citizens as by government, and in these years, a society bursting with energy sent Americans abroad in varied roles.15 The growing ease of travel, increased wealth, and the emergence of a tourism industry produced an explosion of overseas travel after the Civil War. By the end of the century, the State Department issued thirty thousand passports each year. Children of the elite took a Grand Tour modeled on that long practiced by the British aristocracy. Students flooded prestigious European universities. Immigrants returned home for visits. Some critics worried that foreign travel might taint the purity of the American character; the rude behavior of some of these travelers eternally stereotyped Americans to their European hosts. Visitors from the United States still found through exposure to foreign cultures confirmation of the virtues of their own society. After an extended stay in Europe, a young Harvard graduate and future ambassador to Germany and Britain in 1888 "bade adieu . . . to the 'effete despotisms of the old world.' " A year later, humorist Mark Twain boasted that "there is today only one real civilization in the world."16 Nevertheless, the burst of tourism helped broaden America's perspectives and break down its parochialism. The experience of foreign travel significantly shaped the views of those who made up the nation's foreign policy elite in the twentieth century.17
Often on their own, sometimes with public sponsorship, Americans took part in multifarious activities in distant lands. The charting of North America completed, adventurers set off to explore the new frontier in Alaska. The government sponsored expeditions into the Arctic region. Private groups explored the Holy Land and the rain forests of South America.
The Gilded Age also saw the first organized and officially sponsored efforts to export Yankee know-how, especially in Japan. As part of its effort to beat the West by joining it, the Japanese government recruited some three thousand foreign experts (oyatoi) to facilitate its rush toward modernization. Japanese leaders were not drawn to American democracy, preferring the German system of government. They relied mainly on Europeans to build a Western-style military establishment, although Japanese students did enroll at the U.S. Naval Academy and a U.S. citizen directed Japan's first naval school. Americans also assisted the Japanese in mastering Western diplomatic protocol and international law as a means to free them from the burdens of the Western-imposed unequal treaties. Americans played their most important role in education and agriculture. They helped establish a system of public education modeled loosely on that recently instituted in the United States. Experts from U.S. colleges, sponsored by the commissioner of agriculture, disseminated the latest methods of dairy farming and growing corn and wheat. Specialists from the Massachusetts agriculture college sought to extend the land grant model to Japan by helping establish at Sapporo an experimental farm and agricultural school that would become the University of Hokkaido. Americans brought to Japan such things as the McIntosh apple and Concord grapes. As expatriates seeking recreation, they introduced the Japanese to baseball, helping to start teams that in time would compete with Americans residing in that country. To the dismay of British observers, baseball by the end of the century had become more popular in Japan than cricket.18
Born earlier in the century, the Protestant missionary movement exploded after the Civil War. The number of foreign missions jumped from eighteen in 1870 to ninety in 1890. In China alone, the number of missionaries increased from 81 in 1858 to 1,296 in 1889. The missionaries fanned out across the world, from Catholic South America to the Muslim Middle East. They were especially active in "pagan" China and Japan and even began to establish an American presence in Africa.
The role and impact of American missionaries have been subjects of much controversy. Persuaded that God had blessed them with modern technology to facilitate their evangelizing of the world and fervently committed to "bring light to heathen lands," they brought to their task a self-righteous arrogance that would make them an easy target for critics in later centuries. In some areas, they were the advance guard for American commercial penetration. While spreading their gospel, they were often guilty of the worst kind of cultural imperialism. They invariably ran afoul of local customs and provoked nationalist opposition that, in places like Japan, sharply limited their influence. On the other hand, they stimulated American philanthropy. They opposed the introduction of opium into treaty ports in China and took the unpopular position of opposing exclusion of Chinese immigrants in debates that raged across the United States in these years. For better or worse, they introduced the modernization process into lands where they served. They were among the leading agents of the internationalization of America. They brought distant areas to the attention of a sometimes parochial nation and shaped popular attitudes toward other peoples. Their appeals for support and protection sometimes forced the government to act in areas where its role had been nonexistent.19
Missionary work provided opportunities abroad for Americans whose roles were constricted at home. African American missionaries sought converts in Africa while promoting colonization schemes with distinctly imperialist overtones. Increasingly frustrated with their place in U.S. society, ministers such as Alexander Crummell and Henry McLeod Turner advocated missionary work in Africa and "back to Africa" colonization schemes like those Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln had once endorsed. They sought through return to the continent from which their race had come escape from their growing oppression in the United States and a means to establish their American national identity. While hailing Africa's higher morality, they shared with European colonialists a belief that the "dark continent" was in need of a civilizing mission and brought to their task a sense of their own superiority. Some even rationalized that slavery had been part of a divinely inspired master plan to prepare African Americans to regenerate a backward Africa. In the 1890s, Turner promoted missions in Liberia and Sierra Leone as bases for his larger colonization project. Crummell went to Liberia as a missionary and proposed a U.S. protectorate over the nation founded by freed American slaves. These early pan-African schemes got little support from the African American middle class—the churches were dubious precisely because they smacked too much of earlier colonization plans. "We have no business in Africa," a bishop protested.20 An indifferent U.S. government provided no backing. The only results were to provide intellectual justification for and indirect encouragement to European colonialism of Africa.21
Missionary work and other international charitable activities offered outlets and opportunities for women still denied full equality at home. By 1890, wives of male missionaries or groups of unwed women operating on their own made up roughly 60 percent of the total number. Their contributions were unique. Their approach to missionary work was more personal than that of men, resembling the sort of nurturing work they did in the domestic sphere at home. In China, women more often than men identified with and expressed concern for the powerlessness of the local population in dealing with the West. Dominated by their husbands, they protested the way outsiders dominated Chinese. By standing up for China, they stood up for themselves. In doing so, they took an important step toward their own liberation. Paradoxically, although empathizing with the Chinese, by promoting Westernization they exercised authority over them.22
Women also took a leading role in late-century international relief programs. When famine struck Russia in 1891, women at the local and national level under the leadership of legendary Civil War nurse and American Red Cross president Clara Barton organized a massive campaign to get corn and flour to the victims. Congress refused to appropriate funds, so the entire effort had to be privately financed. The women managed to secure some free transportation from the railroads and steamship companies. Some women traveled to Russia with the food to ensure that good meals were prepared for recipients. Critics groused that the autocratic tsarist government had inflicted the disaster on its own people, but the organizers appealed to the nation's humanitarian instincts, traditional Russian-American friendship, and Russia's timely support during the Civil War. Americans helped feed as many as 125,000 people in one of their first major overseas relief efforts. Women's involvement in the famine relief campaigns expanded their area of influence by pushing them into the traditionally male-dominated realm of international relations.23
In an era and nation where business reigned supreme, no segment of American society was more active abroad. It would be wrong, of course, to exaggerate the commitment of U.S. business to overseas expansion. Preoccupied with production for the home market, many businessmen were among the last to appreciate the importance of foreign markets. Congress was sometimes indifferent. The Republican devotion to a protective tariff hampered foreign trade. Americans were rank amateurs at overseas marketing, and the dumping of inferior and even dangerous products sometimes deservedly gave them a bad name.
Still, after the Civil War, U.S. business became more involved internationally. Government and business sponsored participation in expositions and world fairs to attract immigrant laborers and foreign capital and peddle their wares. For the first time, the nation had surplus capital to export. American entrepreneurs exploited mines and built railroads in other countries, especially in such friendly environs for foreign investors as Porfirio Diaz's Mexico. With the backing of J. P. Morgan & Co., James Scrymers linked the United States to much of South America by cable. United States companies dominated Russian markets in such diverse areas as farm machinery and life insurance. No firm exceeded John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil in the breadth of its overseas operations. From the outset, Rockefeller set out aggressively to capture "the utmost market in all lands." Assisted by U.S. consuls who even bought lamps with their own funds and distributed them to create demand, his oil and kerosene found a huge market in a rapidly industrializing Europe. According to a Standard Oil representative, the corporation "forced its way into more nooks and corners of civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product in business history emanating from a single source." Throughout East Asia, Standard Oil's blue tin cans were a mainstay of the local economies, used to make tile roofs, opium cups, and hibachis. As late as the 1940s, "Rockefeller lamps" were status symbols in Vietnam.24
America's Gilded Age foreign policies reflected these crosscurrents. Statesmen devoted relatively little time to foreign policy because there was no need to do so and because domestic issues were generally more pressing. "The President has rarely leisure to give close or continuous attention to foreign policy," Englishman James Bryce observed.25 Most leaders understandably hesitated to take on major commitments abroad. As far as Europe was concerned, they absolutely refused to do so. What has been called "old paradigm" foreign policy generally consisted of improvised and ad hoc responses to developments abroad.26
But that was only one side of the picture. Many younger Americans, especially offspring of the elite, shared a growing sense of the nation's rising power and status in the world. Some warned of dangers in a changing international situation and urged reconsideration of traditional foreign policy principles. Some saw domestic imperatives as demanding more active policies. There was no master plan or grand design, to be sure, but many Americans agreed upon the need to expand foreign markets and increase U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. Some even expressed interest in acquiring territory.
In an era when political parties were fragmented and nearly equal in strength and when domestic issues held center stage, party positions on foreign policy were not sharply drawn. Republicans and Democrats agreed that the United States should abstain from involvement in Europe's politics, alliances, and wars. Most Americans supported expanding their nation's influence in the Western Hemisphere.
Composed of diverse regional and socioeconomic interests, the Democratic Party remained true to its Jeffersonian roots in supporting laissez-faire, limited government, and public frugality. Most Democrats advocated free trade and opposed protectionism. Some like Alabama's Morgan kept alive the expansionism of southern Democrats in the 1850s, advocating aggressive pursuit of foreign markets, a large modern navy, and construction of an isthmian canal to help free the South from "foreign" oppression at the hands of British creditors and northern reconstructionists. Morgan even endorsed the acquisition of overseas territory to boost the South's political power and provide a haven for colonized blacks. The great majority of southerners, on the other hand, opposed policies that might result in the absorption of non-white peoples, strengthening of the federal government, and competition with their agricultural products. Most Democrats viewed commercial and territorial expansion as contrary to American traditions and principles. Some like Georgia's James Blount saw colonial acquisitions as all too reminiscent of the North's imposition of outside rule on the defeated South.27
The Republican Party had in many ways outlived the anti-slavery platform that brought it into being. Most Republicans still believed in a strong central government and subsidizing economic growth through a protective tariff. Some clung to cautious Whiggish notions opposing expansion. Others followed Seward in pushing for a more assertive foreign policy, a large navy, and a canal. The party was changing from its Whig roots to outright support of expansion and even imperialism.
Because the times did not demand it (and probably would not have permitted it), no Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, or Seward arose among Gilded Age diplomatists, and efforts on the part of historians to make one of James G. Blaine remain unconvincing. Secretaries of State William Evarts (1877–81), Frederick Frelinghuysen (1881–85), and Thomas Bayard (1885–89) were in most matters cautious. They managed American diplomacy without bravado but with quiet competence.28 President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was stubborn, unimaginative, and insular in his thinking, but he was not afraid to make tough foreign policy decisions. He displayed on occasion an admirable tendency to do the right thing for the right reason, injecting an element of morality into an area of endeavor and political climate where it was normally absent.
Blaine served at the beginning of the 1880s and 1890s and was far and away the most colorful, controversial, and important of the lot. Charming, energetic, and hugely ambitious—"When I want a thing, I want it dreadfully," he once said—the "Plumed Knight" was a total political animal and a rabidly partisan Republican.29 Intense, suspicious, and given to intrigue, he was often linked with the corruption that marked the age. If he was involved, he was too clever to get caught. As secretary of state, he was much more inclined to project American power abroad than the lawyers who preceded and followed him. He pursued with characteristic energy the expansion of U.S. trade and influence in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. He shared with earlier generations of Americans a sense of the nation's greatness and destiny. He developed a vision of empire that included U.S. preeminence in the hemisphere, commercial domination of the Pacific, an American-owned canal, and even the acquisition of Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Especially in his first term as secretary of state, "Jingo Jim," as he was called, could be impulsive, heavy-handed, and insensitive to other peoples. His diplomacy was also sometimes marked by demagoguery.30 He was denied greatness in part because of such deficiencies in his leadership but even more because his tangible accomplishments were few and because the times did not provide the sort of foreign policy challenges faced by his more illustrious predecessors. At the same time, his "blueprint" for U.S. expansion and his mentoring of such future leaders as William McKinley and John Hay establish him as a major link between antebellum expansionism and late nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism.31
The instruments of Gilded Age foreign policy reflected more the nation's insular past than its global future. The State Department escaped the worst abuses of the era of spoilsmen, but its staff of eighty-one people remained small for an incipient world power. Work hours were a leisurely 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.; the pace was very slow.32 State's methods of operation dated to John Quincy Adams. Much of the work was done by a single person, the legendary Alvey Adee, a bureaucrat par excellence who served nearly forty years as second assistant secretary of state. The State Department's institutional memory and a master of diplomatic practice, Adee drafted most of its instructions and dispatches. "Why there isn't a kitten born in a palace anywhere on earth that I don't have to write a letter of congratulation to the peripatetic tomcat that might have been its sire," Theodore Roosevelt would later joke, "and old Adee does that for me!"33
The rank of ambassador was still considered too pretentious for a republic, and U.S. diplomats were often outranked by representatives of much smaller nations. All were political appointees. Some such as James Russell Lowell in England and Andrew Dickson White in Germany distinguished themselves. Most of the "foreign service" consisted of "second-rate personnel frequently forced to live in third-rate surroundings," provoking John Hay to compare the diplomatic vocation to the " 'Catholic Church, calculated only for celibates.' "34 In places like Japan, because of recurrent attacks on foreigners and devastating fires, diplomatic service could be life-threatening. A remarkable informality and ease of movement characterized the diplomatic community. Ebenezar Don Carlos Bassett became the first U.S. minister to Haiti and the first African American to hold a diplomatic position. When his term expired, he entered the Haitian foreign service and subsequently became consul-general in the United States.35 The number of consulates had grown to two hundred by this time, supplemented by four hundred agencies in less important areas. Some consulates provided respectable pay; most compensated scant money with an exotic place to live.36
The state of the military reflected the mood of a nation without major external threat and still suffering from the fallout of a long and bloody war. The mighty army that had defeated the Confederacy was demobilized. A tiny remnant scattered in posts across the West occupied itself with eliminating Indian resistance. The once proud U.S. Navy was also scuttled, by the 1870s ranking below the "fleets" of Paraguay and Turkey. "The mention of our Navy only excites a smile," a shipbuilder snarled. "We have not six ships that would be kept at sea in war by any maritime power," the future high priest of sea power Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan protested.37
Even in the Gilded Age, however, there were signs of the institutional changes that would mark America's rise to world power. Substantive reform of the State Department awaited the twentieth century, but the consular service was upgraded and focused toward finding markets. The army sought to improve the quality of its enlisted personnel and better educate its officers, created an intelligence arm, and in 1885 conducted its first large-scale maneuvers. The real focus of Gilded Age reform was the navy. Spurred by aggressive and sometimes alarmist naval officers and by a war scare with Chile, the Chester A. Arthur administration in the early 1880s initiated major efforts to build a modern fleet, establishing a Naval War College and the Office of Naval Intelligence and commissioning three new armor-plated cruisers to protect merchant ships in remote areas. Cleveland continued the naval building program. Modernization was well under way by the 1890s.
Symbolic of an emerging nation—if still way ahead of the upgrading of the agencies it housed—was the completion in 1888 of the State, War, Navy Building just west of the White House. Built at a cost of more than $10 million, this masterpiece of Victorian excess had a total floor area of ten acres and almost two miles of corridors. Some Americans boasted that it was the largest and finest office building in the world. At the very least, a Washington newspaper proclaimed, it was the "finest in the United States, and in every way worthy . . . [of] the uses to which it is to be devoted."38
Immigration strikingly reshaped U.S. society in the late nineteenth century, and some of the most complex problems for Gilded Age diplomacy stemmed from the increasing number, size, and diversity of ethnic groups in the United States. The pattern of immigration during the Gilded Age shifted from northern to eastern and southern Europe and Asia, bringing to U.S. shores millions of so-called new immigrants much less familiar in terms of their ethnicity, language, religion, and culture. The presence of immigrants from exotic races provoked growing internal tensions and in different ways sparked conflict with other countries. The harsh treatment of the new ethnic groups by bigoted Americans provoked diplomatic crises with the nations of their origin. The involvement of immigrants or naturalized Americans with revolutions in their homelands brought the United States into conflict with the threatened governments. Anticipating one of the major problems of twentieth-century foreign relations, some ethnic groups sought to get the U.S. government to defend their compatriots from oppression. The emergence of such problems in the Gilded Age highlighted the uniqueness of the American political system, the changing nature of U.S. foreign relations, and the nation's increasingly close connections with the outside world.
An old standby, the Irish problem, flared up anew in the late nineteenth century. Naturalized Americans played an increasingly prominent role in the ongoing Irish rebellion against British rule. The United States became a leading source of arms and explosives for Irish terrorists. The British Parliament sought to contain the flare-up in 1881 with a Coercion Act that permitted detention without trial of suspected revolutionaries. Some U.S. citizens were imprisoned under the act and appealed to Washington for help. The British also pressed Washington to shut down the Irish-American newspapers that encouraged arms shipments. A notorious Anglophobe, Blaine at first demanded release of the Americans. His successor, the usually calm Frelinghuysen, stood firmly for freedom of the press. Long-standing tensions in Anglo-American relations and Britain's traditional role as a whipping boy of U.S. politics created the potential for a crisis.
Sanity eventually prevailed. Some of the arrested Americans turned out to be shady characters, not the sort of persons causes célèbres are made of. It became increasingly obvious that they were using U.S. citizenship to protect themselves from British law. Blaine dismissed one who had falsified passport information as "a pestiferous fellow" who "deserved what he got."39 Generally, he came to regard the agitators as "the scum of Europe." Some Americans continued to protest the treatment of their fellow citizens and the government's apparent indifference. "Oh, that we only had as much protection given to a live American citizen as . . . a dead Cincinnati hog!" a Brooklyn congressmen protested, an obvious reference to the simultaneous dispute with Britain and other European countries over U.S. exports of pork.40 Most Americans sympathized with Irish nationalism, but not to the point of sparking a crisis with Britain. The increasingly overt and brazen activities of Irish nationalists in the United States and the explosion of bombs in the House of Commons and several English railroad stations provoked a backlash in America. Protest subsided. The Arthur administration took forceful measures to reduce illegal arms shipments. The British adamantly refused to modify the Coercion Law, but in time for reasons of their own released some Americans. The crisis eased, but similar disputes would recur in various forms as the Irish question festered over the next century.41
The problem of Chinese immigrants in the United States was more complex. Lured to America to perform backbreaking work in western mines and on the transcontinental railroad, the Chinese played an instrumental role in developing the nation. But their growing numbers, pronounced cultural differences, resistance to assimilation, and willingness to work for cheap wages provoked a vicious nativist backlash. Chinese were beaten, lynched, and brutally murdered, giving rise to the saying that a doomed person did not have a "Chinaman's chance." There was also rising agitation, especially in the West, for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. China had once been indifferent to the treatment of its nationals abroad, but American actions were so egregious that it could not but express outrage. It must have wondered too at the pretenses of people who claimed to have established a superior civilization. Because of the unequal treaties, China was not even sovereign in its own territory. It could do little but protest. While Westerners enjoyed the protection of extraterritoriality in China, the Chinese government could not safeguard the lives of its citizens who were victimized in America.
The United States settled the issue on its own terms. Congress in 1879 passed a bill limiting the number of Chinese who could come into the country on any ship. As anti-Chinese as he was anti-British, then-Senator Blaine defended the legislation as a blow for the "civilization of Christ" against the "civilization of Confucius."42 Arguing that the bill violated U.S. treaty obligations, Hayes courageously vetoed it. Recognizing the political strength of the agitators, however, the government negotiated a new treaty with China permitting the United States to limit or suspend but not to "absolutely prohibit" Chinese immigration. Congress immediately suspended immigration for twenty years, provoking an Arthur veto. The legislators responded with a new bill suspending Chinese immigration for ten years, the first such exclusion in U.S. history. More exclusionist laws followed. With no choice but to acquiesce, the Chinese in 1894 agreed to a new treaty that "absolutely prohibited" the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. Diplomatic relations worsened during the 1890s.43
The brutal mob killing of eleven Italians in New Orleans provoked an 1891 mini-crisis with Italy. A sharp rise in the number of Italian immigrants and an increase in gang warfare caused rising tensions in that tradition-bound southern city. The murder of a popular young police superintendent, allegedly by Italians with connections to a sinister "mafia," set off popular outrage. When the first group of those charged was found not guilty—a "thunderbolt of surprise," screamed the Times-Picayune—an angry mob including some of the city's leading citizens descended upon the jail, gunned down eight of the accused inside the walls, and removed and lynched three more from nearby tree limbs and lampposts. A dishonored and furious Italian government denounced this "atrocious deed," demanded protection for Italians in the United States, and insisted upon reparations. Belying his nickname "Jingo Jim," an ill and preoccupied Blaine at first responded complacently. Rising to the occasion as the dispute heated up, he retorted in notably undiplomatic language that some of the victims were U.S. citizens, explained that the federal government could not impose its will on the state of Louisiana, and expressed to Italy's minister his indifference what Italians might think about U.S. institutions. "You may do as you choose," he snarled in conclusion. Italy recalled its minister from Washington. Both nations strutted and blustered, and there was talk of war. After months of irresolution, Italy finally backed away from its threats, Harrison expressed regret for the killings, and the Italian minister returned to Washington. The perpetrators went unpunished, but an indemnity of $25,000 was eventually paid to the families of three of the victims. In the United States, the affair stoked a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment leading to pressure for additional exclusionist legislation. Sea power advocates used the threat of war and the alleged vulnerability of U.S. ports even to the Italian fleet to drum up support for a larger navy.44
Quite different and much more significant was an increasingly assertive American response to the treatment of Jews in Russia. Russian anti-Semitism was deeply rooted. It grew much worse in the 1880s when famine ravaged the country and Jews were scapegoated for mounting revolutionary activities and assassination of the tsar. The issue involved the United States in several ways. American Jews traveling to Russia on business suffered various kinds of discrimination and appealed to their government for help. In addition, as their treatment in Russia became unbearable, thousands of Jews fled to a seemingly welcoming United States and through public protests called attention to the plight of those left behind. Americans were reading more about events abroad and beginning to sense that, as an emerging power, their country might exert some influence over other societies. Some began to view Russia's treatment of Jews as an outrage against humanity. Immigration officials and relief societies were overwhelmed by floods of immigrants and pleaded for surcease. Some Americans, including Secretary of State Walter Gresham, privately accused Russia of conspiring to undermine American society by "forcing upon our shores a numerous class of immigrants destitute of resources and unfitted in many important respects for absorption into our body politic."45
The "Jewish Question" assumed growing importance in U.S. foreign relations. The State Department managed to protect the interests of most American Jews through quiet and persistent diplomacy. While affirming U.S. reluctance "officiously and offensively to intermeddle," diplomats also appealed to the Russian government in the most carefully phrased language and on the grounds of its own self-interest to cause the mistreatment of "these unfortunate fellow beings to cease."46 Russian officials retorted that the United States had effectively dealt with problems posed by Chinese immigrants. If the influx of Jews grew too burdensome, they too could be excluded. Heightened Russian repression stimulated further Jewish emigration to the United States. The St. Petersburg government opened a new area of conflict by refusing to issue visas to American Jews. Along with Russian-speaking journalist and lecturer George Kennan's imflammatory mid-1880s expose of the horrific conditions in Siberian prisons, the ongoing dispute over treatment of Jews soured traditional Russian-American friendship and provoked some Americans to call for revolution in Russia. The issue was as important as any other in getting the American public involved in the "new foreign policy" of the 1890s. It was the first of numerous cases where pressure from ethnic groups and humanitarian concerns pushed the United States to challenge other governments, even friendly ones, on issues of human rights.47
The U.S. economy was the marvel of the world in the late nineteenth century. The gross national product quadrupled from $9 billion during 1869–73 to $37 billion between 1897 and 1901. Production soared. Steel output increased from 77,000 tons in 1870 to 11,270,000 in 1900. Wheat and corn production doubled. The quality of American products, their low prices, and improved transportation produced a surge in trade. Exports jumped from $234 million in 1865 to $1.5 billion in 1900. In 1876, the centennial year, exports for the first time began regularly to surpass imports. As a result of rampant industrialization, exports of manufactured goods started to catch up with traditionally dominant agricultural products and would pass them in 1913. Britain was the major consumer of U.S. exports, followed by Germany and France—in all, Europe absorbed close to 80 percent of the total by the late 1880s. Closer to home, Canada and Cuba were the major purchasers. For the first time, Americans had capital to invest elsewhere. By the end of the century, the nation was second only to Britain as an economic power. Americans hailed their rising prowess in the most exuberant terms. It is "our manifest destiny to rise to the first rank among the manufacturing nations," one enthusiast proclaimed. We have sent "coals to Newcastle, cotton to Manchester, cutlery to Sheffield, potatoes to Ireland, champagne to France, watches to Switzerland," boasted another.48
Some Americans increasingly feared that their blessing could become their curse. A severe depression in 1873 wreaked devastation across the land, raising concerns among some businessmen and government leaders that producing more than could be absorbed at home threatened economic stability. Exports still represented only about 7 percent of the gross national product, but they came to be seen as the key to economic well-being. "The house we live in has got too small," economist David Wells warned. Without an expansion of foreign markets, "we are certain to be smothered in our own grease."49 Gilded Age politicians and businessmen thus set out to protect existing foreign markets and find new ones. The government began to play a more important role in this process. Such efforts were not always determined or systematic. Most businesses continued to focus on the domestic market. Devotion to protectionism inhibited the negotiation of new trade agreements and overturned existing ones. The results thus did not match up to the rhetoric.50 At the same time, a growing concern for foreign markets spurred the United States to project its influence into new areas and even participate in an international conference, use old weapons with new vigor, and take a tough line with the European powers on vital trade issues.
The search for markets took Americans to distant shores. As early as 1867, Cdr. Robert W. Shufeldt had sought to emulate Perry by opening Korea, the "Hermit Kingdom," but he was twice rebuffed. Finally, in 1882, with the help of Chinese intermediaries, he negotiated the Treaty of Chemulpo, providing for trade on a most-favored-nation basis, the establishment of diplomatic relations, and, as in earlier treaties with China and Japan, extraterritoriality. The Chinese hoped to use the United States to strengthen their own control over a neighboring country, but the Americans insisted, in Frelinghuysen's words, that "Corea is an independent, sovereign power." Seeking to exploit the United States to secure its independence, Korea agreed to an exchange of missions. A group of Koreans visited the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A U.S. naval officer served as adviser to the Korean court. The Yankees quickly learned that Seoul was an especially precarious place to work. Minister Lucius Foote helped arrange a settlement between pro-Chinese and Japanese factions, but the result was to reduce U.S. influence. In any event, the United States quickly contented itself with being a minor player in a country torn by rivalries between larger and nearby nations. Trade was negligible.51
Some Americans also looked to the Congo River basin of West Africa for markets. A series of reports in the New York Herald first drew notice to the region. The newspaper in 1869 sent Scottish-born adventurer Henry M. Stanley to the Congo to find the long-missing medical missionary David Livingstone, who had gained international notoriety by "discovering" the Zambezi River and Victoria Falls. Stanley's 1871 encounter with his fellow Scotsman near Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania, immortalized in the oft-quoted greeting "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," caused a worldwide sensation, attracting more attention to Africa. After a triumphant return to the United States, the intrepid explorer ranged deep into the Congo region, extolling its commercial possibilities. Some timely lobbying by Civil War diplomat and entrepreneur Henry Sanford, at this time serving as an agent for Belgium's King Leopold II, further promoted the Congo as a market for U.S. products. President Arthur himself spoke of "covering those unclad millions with our domestic cottons," calculating that "but three yards per capita would make an enormous aggregate for our cotton mills."52
The lure of African markets caused the United States in 1884 to break long-standing precedent by participating in an international conference held in Berlin to deal with the Congo region. The U.S. delegates were instructed to promote freedom of trade and steer clear of European entanglements—no mean task. The result was far less than America's Congo publicists had hoped. The conference solemnly declared itself in favor of free trade, but it also recognized Leopold's African International Association as the governing body. The association turned out to be a thinly veiled cover for exclusive trading arrangements and the most brutal exploitation of Africans. In any event, Republicans and Democrats denounced the agreement as an "entangling alliance." Cleveland took office in March 1885 just as the act was negotiated and, as with several other expansionist measures, refused to submit it to the Senate. The "noble dream" produced negligible results.53
Republican efforts to use reciprocity treaties to expand foreign trade met a similar fate. Monroe and Adams had employed the device earlier in the century to challenge mercantilist trade barriers. More recently, Hamilton Fish through reciprocity had bound Hawaii economically to the United States. At a time when Europeans threatened to shut America out of foreign markets, reciprocity had a special attraction. It seemed an ideal means to secure new outlets for U.S. products when free trade was impossible and retaliation dangerous while still permitting some protection. In dealing with less developed nations, it had special advantages. It could gain free entry for foreign raw materials and markets for U.S. manufactured goods. As the Hawaiian example had shown, it established a means of control without resort to colonial rule.
Reciprocity was the "linchpin" of Arthur and Frelinghuysen's foreign trade policy. They especially targeted Latin America, a "natural mart of supply and demand," in Arthur's words, hoping to tie Latin economies to the United States, weaken European influence, and promote larger U.S. political aims. They attached special importance to a treaty with Mexico, naming former president U.S. Grant as a negotiator and working out an agreement that exchanged American manufactured goods for Mexican foods and raw materials. Diplomat John W. Foster bludgeoned Spain into agreements for Cuba and Puerto Rico that eliminated virtually all barriers to trade. The Cuban deal, Foster boasted, was "the most perfect reciprocity treaty our Government has ever made," giving the United States "an almost complete commercial monopoly" and thus "annexing Cuba in the most desirable way."54 Foster negotiated an even more favorable agreement with Santo Domingo making the U.S. dollar the unit of currency in bilateral trade.
The Arthur trade offensive met insuperable obstacles at home. The tariff was the most contentious political issue of the age. Democrats who preferred broad and general tariff reductions and Republicans who supported protection both opposed reciprocity. The tariff brought to the fore the competing interests of farmers, manufacturers, and consumers, and any specific proposal could draw fire from a range of groups. Critics of the Mexican treaty complained it would subsidize foreign investors and favor railroad interests. American cigar makers and sugar interests fought the Cuban treaty. In any event, the Arthur treaties were completed as Cleveland took office. A throwback to Jefferson and Jackson, he doubted the validity of the "glut thesis" and sought to reduce tariffs to lower consumer prices and eliminate special privileges for business. Viewing reciprocity as a "conspiratorial device to prevent passage of a general tariff reduction act," he scrapped the treaties negotiated by his predecessor.55
The so-called Pork War with Europe exemplified America's concern with markets and its growing assertiveness and produced better results. A horrible famine on the Continent in 1879 proved a bonanza for the United States, leading to massive exports of agricultural products and full recovery from the Panic of 1873. Alarmed at the flood of American imports, European nations began to limit and then ban them. American meats were probably no less safe than European, but rumors of disease were used to justify what was economically and politically expedient. The British consul bemoaned the fate of one poor victim who found worms "in his flesh by the millions, being scraped and squeezed from the pores of his skin." Britain limited imports of U.S. pork and beef. France and Germany banned all imports even though America's meats had been certified safe by the French Academy of Medicine and its pork was reputedly safer than German.
The European measures provoked fury in the United States. Outraged farmers and producers urged retaliation by banning imports of French and German wines. The Chicago Tribune denounced the "rule or ruin" policies of the European aristocracy. The New York Herald urged "avenging the American hog."56 Responding to domestic pressures, Blaine protested vigorously, but he also proposed that all meat products be inspected before exportation and offered to lower tariffs if the Europeans would rescind their bans. Arthur and Frelinghuysen also handled the matter cautiously. Arthur created an independent commission to study American meat-producing methods. He endorsed "equitable retaliation" but refused to act, fearing that a trade war might hurt the United States more than Europe. Their stopgap measures avoided a dangerous conflict while keeping some European markets open.57
A more assertive United States in 1890 launched all-out war on European restrictions. The issue was of more than passing political importance. "It does not comport with the self-respect and dignity of this government to longer tolerate such a policy," Secretary of Agriculture Jeremiah Rusk advised President Benjamin Harrison. The United States established mechanisms to inspect meat to be exported, thus presumably removing the rationale for European bans. The Harrison administration also threatened to ban imports of German sugar and French wines (known, in some cases, to be adulterated), and Congress in 1890 provided the means to retaliate. When the German government proposed lifting the ban if the United States agreed not to shut off imports of German sugar, Blaine urged acceptance, but a determined Harrison demurred, making clear his readiness to retaliate. In the face of this determination, Germany lifted its ban in return for American promises to keep sugar on the free list. Other European nations followed suit. Exports of U.S. meat products doubled between May 1891 and May 1892.58
In areas of traditional concern such as the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific basin, the United States during the Gilded Age mounted a concerted effort to expand its influence. Americans harbored vague and generally unfounded fears that Europeans might use their strong existing position to extend their colonizing tendencies to the Western Hemisphere. Certain of the superiority of their institutions and conscious of their rising power, they increasingly claimed that their rightful place was at the head of the American nations. They believed they could assist their southern neighbors to be more stable and orderly. For reasons of both economics and security, they sought to roll back European influence and increase their own.
Part of the work was done by individuals without direction or even encouragement from government. Following the devastation of the Ten Years' War, U.S. entrepreneurs bought up sugar estates, mines, and ranches in Cuba. By the 1890s, they dominated the island's economy. Exploiting the generous subsidies and tax breaks offered foreign investors by dictator Porfirio Diaz, Americans came to view Mexico as a "second India, Cuba, Brazil, Italy, and Troy all rolled into one." U.S. capital poured across the border into railroads, mines, and oil, totaling $500 million by 1900, transforming Mexico into a virtual satellite of the United States, and causing growing alarm among Mexican nationalists.59 Some Central American rulers also welcomed U.S. capital as a means to modernize their economies, boost their nations' wealth, and uplift their people. They too granted generous concessions, permitting North Americans to buy up mines and plantations, control great wealth, and wield enormous power.60
For the first time, the United States came out openly and insistently for an American-owned and -controlled isthmian canal. From the outset, some Americans had demanded that they must build and operate such a canal. The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty had provoked bitter opposition on precisely such grounds. By the 1880s, a canal had assumed greater importance to the United States. Central American nations sought to exploit its anxieties. Nicaraguan overtures to British bankers and Colombia's deal with Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, to construct a canal across Panama, stunned a complacent Washington into action. Former Union general Ambrose Burnside pronounced a French-built canal "dangerous to our peace and safety"; Congress responded with a flurry of resolutions. In terms of commerce and security, the normally laconic Rutherford B. Hayes declared, a canal would be "virtually a part of the coast line of the United States." The "true policy" of the United States must be "either a canal under American control, or no canal." Hayes did not stop the de Lesseps venture, but he did secure from the French government an affirmation that it was a private venture without official support.61
Hayes's successors went further. Blaine and Frelinghuysen stood firmly for an American-owned and -controlled canal and made sporadic efforts to modify or abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. Blaine called an isthmian canal as much a "channel of communication" between the East and West coasts of the United States as "our own transcontinental railroad." It was "strictly and solely . . . an American question, to be dealt with and decided by the American governments." Rejecting such claims, the British firmly retorted that any Central American canal concerned "the whole civilized world."62 To counter de Lesseps, Frelinghuysen negotiated a treaty with Nicaragua permitting the United States to build and operate a canal in return for a promise to defend that nation's sovereignty. The treaty was one-sided, the New York Times explained, because the "will of a mighty nation of 55,000,000 of homogenous, progressive and patriotic people is of course irresistible when it runs counter to the wishes of feeble and unstable governments like Central and South America."63 As with so many other Arthur-Frelinghuysen initiatives, the incoming Cleveland administration junked the treaty because it viewed the commitment to Nicaragua as an entangling alliance.
To reduce foreign influence in the hemisphere and increase its own, the United States claimed for itself a new leadership role and initiated a habit of "paternalistic meddling" that would persist far into the future. Blaine was the ringleader in both areas. His efforts reflected his assertive personality but also his conviction that exposure to the United States would have a positive "moral influence" and raise "the standard of . . . civilization" of peoples he regarded as congenitally quarrelsome and contentious, thus eliminating any excuses for European intrusion.64 He first intervened in a boundary dispute between Mexico and Guatemala in 1881, foolishly encouraging Guatemala, which had the weaker claim, and thereby delaying a settlement. His intervention in the War of the Pacific the same year was even more clumsy in execution and harmful in results. Spying Britain's sinister hand behind Chile's efforts to gain territory disputed with Peru, he dispatched two singularly inept diplomats to the scene. One got involved in a shady scheme from which he stood to profit handsomely. Together, the two undercut each other's efforts and alienated both sides, Peru counting on U.S. support that was not forthcoming, Chile correctly viewing the United States as thwarting its ambitions. The British minister dismissed the U.S. intervention as "pretentious incapacity." Frelinghuysen liquidated it as quickly as possible. But it left a deep legacy of suspicion and anger on the west coast of South America.65
The pace of U.S. overseas activity quickened from 1889 to 1893 under the aggressive leadership of President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State Blaine. Defeated by Cleveland for the presidency in 1884, Blaine declined to run four years later. The Republicans nominated instead the Indiana lawyer, U.S. senator, and grandson of President William Henry Harrison. As a Senate mentor, Blaine had helped convert the Indianan to expansionism. The cold, aloof president and his dynamic, charismatic adviser never formed a close working relationship; their collaboration was often beset with rivalry and tension. But the two pursued an activist, sometimes belligerent foreign policy that jump-started a decade of expansionism, energetically reasserting U.S. leadership of the hemisphere, pushing reciprocity with renewed vigor, escalating a minor crisis with Chile to the point of war, aggressively pursuing naval bases in the Caribbean and Pacific, and even giving the green light to a coup d'état in Hawaii. Small of stature with a high-pitched voice, "Little Ben" was especially bellicose and on several occasions had to be restrained by the man known as "Jingo Jim."66
Under Blaine's direction, the United States in 1889 hosted the first inter-American conference since the ill-fated Panama Congress of 1826. Concerned that interhemispheric conflict might invite European intervention, the secretary of state had first proposed such a meeting in 1881 so that the hemisphere nations could find ways to prevent war among themselves. The invitations were canceled after Garfield's assassination, partly to spite Blaine. Appropriately, the Plumed Knight was back in office when the conference finally convened in 1889. By this time, the focus had shifted to trade issues. The delegates were immediately whisked off on a six-week, six-thousand-mile tour of U.S. industrial centers, a crude brand of huckstering that annoyed some Latin visitors. Blaine's ambitious agenda for the six-month conference included such things as arbitration of disputes, a customs union, and copyright agreements. It produced little except the resolve to meet again and establishment of a bureaucracy based in Washington that would evolve into the Pan-American Union. Blaine's efforts brought few immediate, tangible gains, but they made clear U.S. determination to assume hemispheric leadership and initiated "the modern era of an institutionalized hemispheric community."67
Given broad authority by a measure Blaine had included in the tariff bill of 1890 to negotiate agreements without congressional oversight, the Harrison administration also mounted a new drive for reciprocal trade treaties in Latin America. Food and raw materials would be permitted to enter duty free, but if other nations did not respond with similar generosity the United States would reimpose duties. The administration used the first treaty with Brazil to pressure Spain into new agreements with Cuba and Puerto Rico. Of the former, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie observed, Cuba "hereafter will be of as little good to Spain as Canada is to Britain."68 As with many other Republican initiatives, however, the Democrats' return to power in 1893 and passage of the Wilson-Gorman tariff in 1894 undercut Harrison's efforts, leaving little to show for two decades of effort.
The Harrison administration's assertiveness was most blatantly manifested in its handling of a minor dispute with Chile. During a drunken brawl in a seedy part of Valparaiso in late 1891, two sailors from the USS Baltimore were killed, seventeen wounded, and thirty-six jailed. The incident quickly escalated. As nationalistic as Americans, Chileans saw themselves as a rival to the United States for hemispheric leadership. Relations between the two nations had been strained since Blaine's ill-conceived intrusion into the War of the Pacific and worsened in 1889 when the United States openly interfered in Chile's internal politics. The Baltimore's captain insisted that his sailors had been "properly drunk," the victims of an unprovoked attack. Blaine was ill, and therefore not involved in the negotiations. A notably bellicose Harrison far exceeded traditional U.S. practice by demanding not only an apology but also "prompt and full" reparation. Still furious at the United States for its earlier meddling, Chile at first denied the charges and accused Washington of lying, but it subsequently expressed "very sincere regret for the unfortunate events." Unappeased and very much in keeping with the mood of the time, Harrison exclaimed that "we must protect those who in foreign ports display the flag or wear its colors." He continued to demand a "suitable apology" and reparation and threatened to break relations. As the two nations edged toward an especially foolish war, Chile blinked first, offering an apology and $75,000 in reparations. Belying his reputation for bellicosity, Blaine persuaded Harrison to accept. To Adm. Bancroft Gherardi, the incident made clear that the United States was "no longer to be trifled with."69
Harrison and Blaine employed economic and diplomatic pressure and gunboat diplomacy in a futile effort to secure naval bases in the Caribbean. The more U.S. leaders talked of a canal, the greater the perceived need for bases to protect it. Haiti's Môle St. Nicolas was especially attractive, and Blaine exerted strong pressure against a government threatened by revolution to acquire it. When that government balked, the United States permitted arms shipments to the rebels, hoping that its generosity would be repaid. After the rebels took power, the administration dispatched the distinguished African American leader Frederick Douglass, himself an ardent expansionist, to negotiate with Haiti. When those negotiations stalled, Blaine sent Admiral Gherardi to take over; when he also failed to budge Haitian leaders, the United States conducted a naval demonstration off its shores. Haiti refused to be cowed. Santo Domingo was no more obliging. The United States' efforts to use the leverage provided by a reciprocity treaty to acquire Samana Bay produced nothing. Blaine resigned in June 1892 and died the following year without realizing his dream of a Caribbean naval base. To the end, he remained confident that the United States would acquire Cuba and Puerto Rico within a generation.70
The Harrison administration also sought to strengthen the U.S. position in the Pacific basin. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, not at all atypical for this turbulent era, the United States assumed a quite remarkable role on Samoa. Shortly after the 1878 treaty, the U.S. consul had signed an agreement neutralizing the town of Apia and establishing a multilateral governing body composed of himself and the British and German consuls. The agreement was never submitted to the Senate, but it operated anyway, "an unprecedented collaboration with European countries on a distant South Sea archipelago."71 Such cooperation soon embroiled the United States in a mini-crisis with Germany. When German naval officers seized Apia in 1885 and then asserted their intention to take control of Samoa, the Cleveland administration balked. On his own, the U.S. consul launched a preemptive strike by declaring an American protectorate over all Samoa. An embarrassed secretary of state Bayard beat a hasty retreat, disavowing the overzealous consul and temporarily easing tensions. In 1887, however, Germany sent warships to Samoa and deported the pro-American king. Claiming sanctimoniously that the United States' "first allegiance" was to the "rights of the natives in Samoa," Cleveland and Bayard also sent warships. Already annoyed with Germany over the Pork War, the American press expressed outrage. Congress appropriated funds to defend U.S. interests on that distant isle.72
The Samoan crisis eased as quickly as it had flared up. The master diplomatist Bismarck did not want war with the United States over a faraway Pacific island and invited America and Britain to discuss the issue at a conference in Berlin. A timely hurricane, along with tidal waves, struck Apia in March 1889, sinking or disabling all German and U.S. warships and killing 150 men. This act of God diverted attention from the great power conflict, removed the instruments of war, and cooled tempers. The Berlin conference later that year, in which the United States was a full participant, quickly reached an agreement declaring Samoa independent but establishing a complex mechanism for what was in effect a tripartite agreement dividing power among the great powers while leaving Samoa nominally autonomous. At Blaine's insistence, the United States retained control over the superb harbor of Pago Pago. Some Americans cheered that their secretary of state had stood up to Germany's Iron Chancellor. For the first time in its history, the United States was formally committed to govern an overseas people. It was also a participant in an entangling agreement with two European nations in an area where it had scant interests.73
In Hawaii, Blaine and Harrison almost pulled off a replay of the methods used to secure Florida, Texas, and California. The reciprocity treaty of 1875 had done its job. By the 1880s, Hawaii was a virtual satellite of the United States, and any foreign challenge met a firm rebuff. When the British and French sought to defend their dwindling interests by insisting on most-favored-nation status, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proclaimed Hawaii a part of "the physical and political geography of the United States." Blaine called it part of an "American Zollverein," the name given to a contemporaneous German customs union. In 1884, the two nations renewed the treaty for an additional seven years. Even Cleveland went along, although he opposed reciprocity in principle, insisting that Hawaii was essential to U.S. commerce in the Pacific.74 Because of opposition from domestic sugar producers, Senate approval came only after three years and after an amendment giving the United States exclusive right to a naval base at Pearl Harbor. The British consul correctly predicted that the base agreement would "lead to the loss of Hawaiian independence."75 Indeed, upon taking power in 1889, Blaine and Harrison negotiated with the American serving as Hawaiian minister to the United States an agreement making Hawaii a U.S. protectorate. The king resisted the provision permitting the United States to use military force to protect Hawaii's independence. The idea died—momentarily.
An abortive move to annex Hawaii made clear the lengths the Harrison administration would go to achieve its expansionist aims. The McKinley tariff of 1890 deprived Hawaiian sugar of its privileged position and spread economic distress on the islands. Along with the determined efforts of the new Queen Liliuokalani to regain the royal powers squandered to the Americans by her late brother and to restore "Hawaii for the Hawaiians," it threatened the economic well-being and political power of U.S. planters. In early 1892, the Americans formed a secret "Annexation Club," sounded out U.S. minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, an old friend and business partner of Blaine, and instigated a plot to overthrow the queen. Harrison carefully maintained what would later be called plausible deniability. Neither he nor Blaine encouraged Stevens's actions, but they presumably agreed with the plan and did nothing to stop it. Indeed, in June 1892, the administration assured a Stevens crony that if the Hawaiian people applied for annexation the United States could not say no. When the queen proclaimed a new constitution, the conspirators made their move. In January 1893, on orders from Stevens, the USS Boston landed sailors to preserve order, a step crucial to the outcome. The plotters seized power in a bloodless takeover. Stevens declared the new government under U.S. protection. "The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it," he advised the State Department.76 Hawaiian representatives hustled to Washington, where, with embarrassing speed, a treaty of annexation was negotiated, signed, and submitted to the Senate. Disclaiming responsibility for the coup, Harrison nevertheless denounced the queen as "effete," warned that the United States must act decisively lest the ripe pear fall into the waiting lap of some rival nation, and urged annexation. Like other expansionist moves, this effort to acquire Hawaii would die—at least temporarily—at the hands of a second Cleveland administration, but it made quite clear the new commitment to expansionist goals and the willingness to use extraordinary means to achieve them. One hundred years later, without acknowledging United States responsibility, Congress would pass a bill formally apologizing to the people of Hawaii for the overthrow of its government.77
FOREIGN POLICY WAS NOT A HIGH NATIONAL PRIORITY in the Gilded Age. There was no threat to the nation's security. The Pork War was the closest thing to a real crisis; the overblown war scares with Italy and Chile, so typical of an age of flag-waving nationalism, patriotic posturing, and inflated concern with honor, were not far behind. Gilded Age diplomatists have been dismissed for not being "internationalists," but there was no need for them to be nor any reason to expect that of them. Dull and plodding they may have seemed, sometimes clumsy in the execution of policies, but they took their jobs seriously. They began to develop the accoutrements of national power. Although the results would not be seen until later, they vigorously pursued new outlets for trade. They defended the nation's interests. They had no master plan or fixed agenda, but the goals they pursued and the decisions they made reflected their commitment to the extension of American power.78 They achieved few tangible results, but in the Caribbean and the Pacific, areas of greatest U.S. interest, they shored up the nation's already strong position. They provided a springboard for another burst of expansionism in the 1890s.