The foundations of federalism were laid in the colonial period, when power was shared between governments in the American provinces and the British metropolis. The sources and limits of political authority in the empire were increasingly controversial in the years leading up to independence, and the failure to resolve these constitutional issues led to the revolutionary-era outburst of state constitution writing. Abjuring their allegiance to King George III, revolutionary constitutionalists invoked the “sovereignty” of the people. But relocating legitimate authority did not clarify the distribution of authority in an extended republican polity. Pressed by the exigencies of war making on a continental scale, revolutionaries sought to cement the alliance of the states under the Articles of Confederation (drafted by Congress in 1777 and finally ratified when Maryland acceded in 1781) and the Constitution (drafted in 1787 and ratified by 11 states in 1787–88).
In theory, the sovereign people, acting through their state republics, delegated strictly defined powers to a central government exercising sovereign powers in the international system. In practice, however, the location of sovereignty remained controversial. The process of constitution writing taught Americans that the actual distribution of power was subject to their political will. The bitterly contested constitutional politics of the Revolutionary years culminated in the debate over the Constitution between Federalist proponents and anti-Federalist opponents, thus preparing the way for the vicious party battles of the 1790s and subsequent struggles over the character of the federal union. The constitutional ambiguity was never fully resolved before the victory of Union forces in the Civil War and the imposition of a new federal regime through Constitutional amendments and the Reconstruction of the seceding southern states.
The crisis that destroyed the British Empire in North America resulted from a constitutional deficit—from the failure of the British government to negotiate terms of union that would have secured provincial autonomy and guaranteed colonists the rights of Englishmen. Antebellum Americans suffered no such deficit. Quite the contrary, the destruction of their federal union was the result of a contentious, highly polarized political culture—a surfeit of constitutionalism—that inspired politicians and theorists to raise fundamental questions about the sources of legitimate authority and its proper distribution. From crisis to crisis, the union survived only through a series of increasingly tenuous compromises: in 1820–21, over admitting Missouri; in 1832–33, over South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff; and in 1850, over the future of the West, the rendition of fugitive slaves, and other related issues. Every compromise left a legacy of bitterness for principled constitutionalists.
Security issues had prompted the colonists to consider forming intercolonial alliances before the Revolution, most notably in the abortive Albany Plan of Union in 1754, drafted by Benjamin Franklin. His plan to manage Indian relations under the aegis of an American grand council and a crown-appointed governor general was rejected both by provincial governments, wary of curbs on their autonomy, and by imperial authorities. In the subsequent war with France and its Indian allies (1757–63), the British ministry made no further effort to tamper with colonial constitutions, instead promoting colonial cooperation though large-scale spending and generous financial guarantees. Led by provincial assemblies determined to defend traditional privileges and liberties, patriotic Americans thus linked loyalty to king and empire with expansive conceptions of colonial autonomy; primed to resist postwar reforms that jeopardized the constitutional status quo, defenders of British American rights looked to their king, George III, to protect them against encroachments by the British Parliament.
Before the empires final rupture, the idea that the American colonies were distinct dominions, or “kingdoms,” was embraced by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson, and other forward-looking patriots. Through their allegiance to a common sovereign, the American provinces constituted a federal union. When George III definitively rejected this extraordinary conception of his authority and unleashed massive force against his recalcitrant American subjects, reluctantly independent Americans had to forge bonds of union on an entirely new basis. Although they had improvised ad hoc extraconstitutional structures, from local committees through the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, the protracted mobilization against imperial authority systematically undercut the legitimacy of imperial—or continental—governance. The great challenge for American constitutionalists was to reverse these centrifugal tendencies and find a way to superimpose a strong executive power capable of making war and of securing peace, over a loose federation of independent republics. The first step was for delegates from the respective states to symbolically kill the king and to assert their own authority—or, rather, the authority of the sovereign peoples they represented.
Americans did not resist British imperial authority with the intention of creating unconnected, independent state republics that would exercise full sovereign powers. The Declaration of Independence, Jefferson later recalled, was “the fundamental act of union of these States.” But the war effort itself led many Americans to fear they might be creating a monster in their own midst. The drafting and ratification of the Articles of Confederation followed the wartime exercise of unprecedented governmental power over the lives of ordinary Americans, imposing strict limits on a central government and securing the residual “sovereignty” of member states. Defenders of the subsequent Constitution attempted to resolve this conceptual incoherence; sovereignty, they claimed, remained in the people—whoever (and wherever) they were. But clever rhetoric could not make the problem go away. Conditioned by the imperial crisis to see a fundamental tension between provincial liberties and imperial authority, Americans struggled to create and preserve a tenuous federal balance among legitimate—that is, sovereign—authorities.
Federal union was supposed to secure the protection that the American colonies had formerly enjoyed under the empire. But Americans feared that an energetic central government would jeopardize their liberties; they also feared that some states would gain the advantage over others, reducing them to subject provinces. State equality was therefore the fundamental premise of the confederation, an alliance that would protect the states from each other as well as from external threats. Though the Constitution introduced the principle of proportional representation in the lower house, the state equality principle survived in the senate as well as in Article IV, Section 3, providing for the equality of new states. Expansion would also stabilize the union by mitigating power imbalances among the original states.
Because the invention of American federalism reflected various—sometimes conflicting—imperatives, the Constitution has been subject to an extraordinary range of interpretations. On one hand, American constitutionalists sought to construct a regime that would secure a place for the United States as an independent nation in the system of Atlantic States. This “nationalist” impulse emphasized energetic administration and state building on the federal level, drawing inspiration from Britain’s powerful fiscal-military state. In response, advocates of states’ rights harked back to the defense of provincial liberties against imperial reform efforts in the run-up to the American Revolution: the Articles of Confederation struck the original federal balance and remained the benchmark for strict constructionists even after the Constitution’s ratification.
Concerns about the new nation’s faltering position in the postwar period—the Confederation’s inability to raise revenue, service its debts, or negotiate effectively with other powers—led to a new push for energetic government, but reformers had to accommodate widely shared concerns about the dangers of centralized, “consolidated” authority. Federalists thus presented the Constitution as a “peace plan” that would guarantee collective security and protect the states from one another, thus enabling them to enjoy the full benefits of their republican governments. Federalist assurances that the new regime would secure, not destroy, the states constituted the first great exercise in constitutional interpretation (however disingenuous), buttressed by the subsequent implementation of campaign promises to adopt amendments that would protect states and citizens from federal overreach. James Madison pushed ten amendments (collectively known as the Bill of Rights) through the first federal Congress, demonstrating the reformers’ good faith and providing skeptical oppositionists with potentially useful lines of defense.
Far from clarifying the character of the new federal regime, the proliferating commentaries on the Constitution initiated by the ratification debate generated massive interpretive confusion. To some extent, controversy over the limits of federal authority had a stabilizing effect, channeling political conflicts into the courts and promoting the formation of broad political party coalitions. But, in the 1790s, clashing views on the constitutionality of the first Bank of the United States and other key planks of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s ambitious state-building program also gave new life to fundamental questions about the distribution of authority that had destroyed the British Empire and chronically jeopardized the American union. Hamiltonian “loose constructionists” betrayed impatience with—if not contempt for—the Constitution as a mere text, seemingly confirming anti-Federalist skepticism about the Federalists’ good faith. For their part, Jeffersonian “strict constructionists” convinced themselves that the whole point of the Constitution was to limit federal authority and secure states’ rights, thus turning the original reform impulse on its head.
The party battles of the 1790s thus perpetuated the constitutional politics of the ratification debate, with controversy centering on how to interpret the Constitution and party mobilization focused on maintaining or gaining control of the federal government. Jeffersonian Republicans promoted state sovereignty claims, intimating during the darkest hours of High Federalist oppression during the undeclared war with France of 1798–1800 that liberty-loving states might have to exercise their primal exit rights and leave the union. But their goal was to redeem the union from hypercentralization and reinforce the consensual bonds that, Jefferson later asserted, made the government of the union “the strongest on earth.” Meanwhile, High Federalists invoked patriotic sentiments to build a powerful war-making federal state, implementing direct taxation, curbing seditious speech, and taking controversial steps to contain the alien menace (all in 1798): at best, the states would have only a subordinate, administrative role under the new dispensation. The Republican response, articulated in Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions (1798), Madison’s Virginia Resolutions (1798), and Madison’s report to the Virginia legislature (1800), became the new orthodoxy—“the principles of 1798”—in the wake of Jefferson’s “Revolution of 1800.” Recognition of the states’ foundational role, their original sovereignty and continuing autonomy, was the hallmark of the new orthodoxy. Yet the character of American federalism would remain incoherent and controversial in subsequent decades—until the union finally collapsed in 1861.
Beginning in 1801, Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency but not the federal court system. The Jeffersonians’ subsequent campaign to purge the Federalist-dominated judiciary was foiled, as Federalist Chief Justice John Marshall beat a prudent retreat. Marshall went on to establish the Supreme Court’s role as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality under the new regime in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and other landmark federalism cases. Yet notwithstanding the charges of orthodox Jeffersonians, Marshall was no High Federalist intent on dismantling the states. To the contrary, the thrust of Marshall’s jurisprudence, and particularly of his expansive readings of the Commerce Clause (in Article I, Section VIII), was to promote mobility and market exchange in a continentwide free trade zone and so foster the interdependent interests that Republicans agreed were the most durable bonds of union.
Marshall’s long tenure as chief justice (1801–35) coincided with a period of extraordinary economic growth in which state governments played the most crucial role. Freed from the crippling tax burdens of the confederation years by the new federal government’s assumption of Revolutionary War debts, the states responded to popular pressure for internal improvements, banks, and state-sanctioned business enterprises. The “commonwealth” period of mixed enterprise and aggressive state promotion of market development was the heyday of early American federalism, with governments at all levels demonstrating increased capacity in an expanding economy. The federal government guaranteed free trade at home, regulated overseas commerce, acquired new territory, and secured the states against foreign threats; it also subsidized the circulation of news and financial information through the postal service; sponsored a wide range of improvements, from lighthouses to post roads, that were related (sometimes only very loosely) to its primary security functions; removed Indians from their homelands; privatized public lands; and promoted political and economic development in western territories (most importantly by opening the Southwest to slavery).
The federal balance was not well defined in the antebellum decades, though periodic crises would revive old arguments about the source and location of legitimate authority. What is most remarkable about the period is the generally high level of tolerance for theoretical ambiguity and the ability of politicians to foster good working relations between state and federal governments. Intergovernmental cooperation was helped by the circulation of party elites from the local to the national level, from the more or less distant periphery to the center of action in Washington, D.C., the republican metropolis. The overlap and interpenetration of governments through the “corruption” of party politics—loaves and fishes to the politicians, and pork to their constituents—made federalism work, substituting a virtuous circle of expanding benefits for the vicious cycle of escalating threats that periodically threatened the union. Theorizing about federalism, whether in the British Empire or in the antebellum United States, tended to culminate in irreconcilable sovereignty claims.
The Constitution created a “more perfect union” that periodically threatened to fall apart. Major economic interests vying for advantage were concentrated in particular sections: for example, southern cotton producers sought free trade with foreign trading partners while northern manufacturers pressed for a protected home market. Struggles over national commercial policy led in turn to new controversies over constitutional interpretation. Opponents of protection argued for a narrow construction of the Commerce Clause, insisting high tariffs distributed benefits unequally and thus threatened to subvert the union; protectionists responded that collective security depended on achieving economic independence and balanced development in an expansive home market. Differing assessments of risk and opportunity in a world trading system that had been chronically wracked by war pitted economic “nationalists” who preached preparedness against cosmopolitan free traders who began to question the value of the union. Discounting the threat of foreign war, strict constructionists instead emphasized the danger of concentrated power within the union: their Constitution, seen as a more perfect version of the Articles of Confederation, was supposed to guarantee the rights of states against the “foreign” power of a corrupt and despotic central government.
In the federal arena, policy disputes tended to rise (or descend) to fundamental questions about the character of the union. Depending on changing calculations of costs and benefits, combatants shifted grounds, sometimes embracing federal authority, sometimes resisting its supposed encroachments. The “slave power” was notoriously changeable, first using the federal government to guarantee slave property, secure foreign markets, and remove Indians from productive western lands. Then, debates over the tariff transformed John C. Calhoun and other southern “nationalists” into defenders of states’ rights who feared that any exercise of federal authority jeopardized their peculiar institution. Yet even as they threatened to bolt the union, Southerners pressed for constitutional protections of slavery throughout the union—and a new federal regime strong enough to enforce them.
Radical Southerners, determined to perpetuate the institution of slavery talked about strict construction and state sovereignty in order to justify secession, but they envisioned the creation of a powerful new slaveholding nation that would assume a prominent place in the world. For northern nationalists, America’s future greatness depended on preserving and strengthening the union, with or without slavery. Northerners mobilized to block slavery’s expansion only when the Republicans emerged as a strictly sectional party, but even then few challenged the institution where it already existed.
Yet, despite the limited appeal of antislavery, slavery proved to be the polarizing, nonnegotiable issue that destroyed American federalism. As Southerners and Northerners embraced incompatible conceptions of American (or southern) nationhood, the founders’ provisions for union and collective security seemed less and less compelling. The threat of sectional domination—whether by the slave power or by a prospective antislavery majority—came from within, not from abroad. For growing numbers of alienated or principled Americans, North and South, the intersectional party coalitions that made federal policy making possible increasingly reeked of corruption: majority rule threatened minority rights. The virtuous circle of federal politics, fueled by the growing capacity of governments at all levels to deliver benefits, now lurched into reverse. Efforts to mend the system accelerated its collapse. As the sectional crisis deepened, increasingly desperate unionists proposed to amend or rewrite the Constitution, thus depriving the union of its last shred of legitimacy and preparing the way for disunion and war.
Americans talked themselves into Civil War. Alienated by the tariff and fearful of moves against slavery by Constitutional majorities, Southerners moved from strict construction to first principles, bringing the sovereignty question back to the fore: if sovereign states had made the union, they could also unmake it. In response, Northerners embraced an increasingly robust conception of union as nation, but also moved away from the original understanding of “the union as it was.” The destiny of the United States was to be a great nation, humankind’s best hope. Pledging to uphold “our national Constitution,” Abraham Lincoln thus promised his fellow Americans in his first inaugural address that “the Union will endure forever.” Of course, it only endured because the rump Union was finally able to impose its will on the Confederacy.
Before the Civil War, Joseph Story and other nationalists had countered the orthodox Republican claim that the states had exercised their original, sovereign powers in creating the union, insisting instead that the “nation” had come first. The war resolved any lingering ambiguity on the question of origins, confirming a new orthodoxy: the nation had created—and continued to sustain—the union. The Civil War Amendments (1865–70) constitutionalized U.S. rule over the defeated Confederacy. They outlawed slavery, defined national citizenship, and promised to uphold freedmen’s voting rights, thus overturning slave state constitutions and transforming the character of the old federal union. In the Supreme Court case Texas v. White (1869), Chief Justice Salmon Chase echoed Lincoln in concluding that the Constitution had created “an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible states.” The national polity would thus preserve constitutionally subordinate jurisdictions: if the precise distribution of authority sometimes generated controversy, the practical business of federalism now focused on politics, administration, and intergovernmental relations. The sovereignty issue had been definitively resolved.
Yet if the Civil War seemed to resolve the fundamental theoretical questions that had finally destroyed the antebellum Union, the perpetuation of multiple jurisdictions offered subsequent generations of American politicians and lawyers continuing opportunities to promote and protect particular interests, sometimes in apparent defiance of the national will—as in the case of segregated “Jim Crow” regimes in the South. During the early twentieth century, progressive reformers would also seek to recalibrate the federal balance in favor of the states, celebrating them as “laboratories of democracy.” And, during the first year of the Obama administration, some conservative Republicans asserted a right to “state sovereignty,” based on their reading of the Tenth Amendment. The legacy of antebellum conflicts over the nature of the Union thus persists in both opportunistic and principled efforts to renew or redefine American federalism.
See also anti-Federalists; Civil War; Constitution, federal; era of new republic, 1789–1827; state constitutions.
FURTHER READING
Edling, Max M. A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Greene, Jack P. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Handlin, Oscar. Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Hendrickson, David. Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Wiley, 1978.
Hyman, Harold M. A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution. New York: Knopf, 1973.
Knupfer, Peter. The Union As It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
McDonald, Forrest. States’ Rights and Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: Norton, 1988.
Onuf, Nicholas, and Peter Onuf. Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
Onuf, Peter S. “Federalism, Republicanism, and the Origins of American Sectionalism.” In All Over the Map: Rethinking Region and Nation in the United States, edited by Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Stephen Nissenbaum, 11–37. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
____. Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
White, Edward G. The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815–1835. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
PETER S. ONUF
Disagreements over domestic and foreign policy within George Washington’s cabinet, then within Congress, brought on the emergence of the first two political parties in the world with recognizably modern attributes. One of those parties was the Federalist Party.
The party was not a product of earlier divisions over ratification of the Constitution. Nor were its adherents, who always championed a vigorous national government, the direct descendants of those, also called “federalists,” who had championed the writing and ratification of the new Constitution in 1787 and 1788. To be sure, the party’s leaders had led that movement to replace the Articles of Confederation. Yet, so had many others, like James Madison, who, after joining the new government, soon formed the core of the Federalists’ opposition, the Democratic-Republican Party. Both original parties thus came into being because of new circumstances of government and new policy issues after 1789.
What justifies calling the Federalist Party a “party” in the first place, when, considered as a political party, it was a pale image of what have since become continuing, clearly defined popular organizations with large staffs, impressive fund-raising capacities, and office seekers and officeholders at all levels of government? The justification is that the Federalist Party had many of the characteristics possessed by modern parties in nation-states with open societies governed under popular constitutions by freely elected representative assemblies and executive officers. The party put up candidates who engaged in competition for public office. It built the capacity to define public issues, educate the public about its policies, and mobilize people to vote by holding election rallies. By printing political handbills, pamphlets, and sermons; founding newspapers; and raising funds, the party created what we know of as political campaigns. It worked to get out the vote from qualified male voters, and even from women in those few places where, for a time, women could vote. It developed a rudimentary kind of organization—with a rough leadership hierarchy from congressional and legislative caucuses to state, town, and ward committees and with responsibilities distributed among adherents. It took over existing non-partisan institutions, like volunteer militia companies, to make them accessories of the party. “Membership” was open to anyone who wished to support the party. In that respect, it was a voluntary association, not an emanation of the national state, and it operated under the rule of public law. It also developed a clearly defined political ideology, many of whose elements, like the championship of strong federal intervention in the economy and opposition to the spread of slavery, had enduring consequences in American history.
The Federalist Party was a party in a modern sense. It was not, for instance, a “faction” or “interest,” a group of like-minded men—long characteristic of British government, the Continental states, and the colonies—who protected each other’s interests and sought preferment on personal, regional, or class grounds rather than for policy ends. Nor was it a closed association—one that required its members to pass a kind of test for entry. No coercion or state sponsorship (like that exhibited in totalitarian, Communist, and some post-Communist nations like Russia) were involved in its creation or development. It was not the expression of a tribal identity or clan affiliation, as in many parts of the Middle East and Africa. Nor was it a kind of family possession, as was the case with some parties in, for example, Pakistan. Instead, the Federalist Party was an institution, recognized as such, with whom anyone could freely associate as compatriots whose principal aim was to put up candidates to contest and win elective offices and thus gain the power to enact legislation and steer bureaucratic policies in particular directions.
But why did the United States and not another nation give birth to modern parties? The Constitution created a national arena in which each contest for the presidency, the principal elective national office, had to be organized and waged. Unlike parliamentary systems, in which the largest party or a coalition of smaller parties elect a prime minister, under the Constitution, a majority of electoral votes cast in all the states was made to decide the presidential contest, and so the electoral outcome in no state could be left to chance. Control of Congress also depended on fielding candidates of like political mind in every state. Under electoral methods prevailing in the nation’s early years, state governments usually elected each state’s senators, and thus control of the state legislatures themselves was imperative if a party was to gain control of Congress. Finally, since American elections were—as they are today—single winner-take-all contests in which a plurality of votes, not a majority, was necessary for election (with no second-chance, runoff elections as in, for example, France), each contest was a deciding struggle between candidates. It did not, therefore, take long for the generation of the framers and those who staffed the early administrations and served in the early congresses to realize that, despite their dislike of parties, partisanship, and political discord, the realities of the constitutional government they had created and of the world into which they had launched the new constitutional system called for national political organization.
Signs of partisan division appeared soon after the new government came into being in 1789. Washington himself, while disdaining parties and disclaiming party affiliation, was, by political view and personal inclination, a Federalist and the party’s great figurehead, and he drew to himself other leading figures—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and John Marshall—who were of like mind. Policy differences within Washington’s cabinet originated after Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, in 1790 proposed a set of bold, strategic, precedent-setting steps to stabilize the nation’s finances. Hamilton urged the federal government to assume the states’ Revolutionary War debts, pay those debts at their par value rather than at their depressed market value, and charter a national bank. Because, if enacted, these proposals would reward speculators in federal and state debt instruments and significantly boost the power of the national government over the nation’s financial system, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson argued vigorously within the cabinet against the initiatives, and Virginia congressman James Madison led opposition to Hamilton’s plan in the House of Representatives, where he was then serving. This opposition was confined more or less to circles in the capital (then New York, soon, until 1800, Philadelphia) and did not spread much beyond. Moreover, the opposition failed, and Hamilton’s proposals were enacted into law in 1791.
The Federalist Party began to take more organized shape and gain a larger set of adherents within the general public. In 1794 the administration called up troops to quell the “Whiskey Rebellion” in western Pennsylvania, and in 1795 and 1796 Congress debated the ratification and implementation of a new treaty with Great Britain (known as Jay’s Treaty, after Chief Justice John Jay, its American negotiator). Under Hamilton’s leadership, the party began to gain its historic identity as a champion of strong national government; decisive executive leadership; domestic order, maintained if necessary by military force; wide-ranging judicial oversight of legislation; a preference for commercial links with Britain; and a deep suspicion of French policies (especially after the commencement of the French Revolution in 1789). The classic statement of the party’s views, prepared with Hamilton’s help, was Washington’s celebrated Farewell Address of 1796. The president’s valedictory deplored partisan division and urged the avoidance of all permanent alliances with foreign powers (a veiled attack on the 1778 wartime alliance, still in force, with France).
While Washington had avoided openly identifying himself with the Federalist Party, Vice President John Adams, who succeeded Washington in 1797, was the first president to be an avowed partisan. Adams initially maintained Washington’s cabinet members and policies, and his administration engaged in a popular undeclared naval war with France, the so-called Quasi War. Adams also supported and implemented the Alien and Sedition Acts after congressional Federalists, having gained control of both the House and Senate in the 1798 elections, enacted them. Their passage marked the Federalists’ political high watermark.
Soon the party came under withering attack for implementing these laws, which limited free speech and put immigrants under suspicion of disloyalty. As a result of a popular backlash, never again would the Federalists control both the presidency and Congress. In fact, the party began to splinter in 1799 as Hamilton’s wing of the party attacked Adams for opening negotiations with France to end the Quasi War. The Hamiltonians finally broke with Adams when he reorganized the cabinet with men loyal to himself and not to Hamilton. These actions, taken in part to strengthen Adams’s own political position, proved insufficient to gain him reelection. Nevertheless, before handing over the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, Adams concluded peace with France and saw his nominee, John Marshall, confirmed as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Through Marshall’s court, Federalist principles became the foundation of American constitutional law and extended the party’s influence and principles well into the future.
In the minority after 1801, Federalists had to accept the need to create a system of state party organizations and adopt more democratic electoral practices to parallel and compete with those of their Democratic-Republican rivals. Even with such a system in place, Federalists remained a minority party whose following was found principally in the commercial Northeast, especially in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and in Delaware and sections of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina among the commercial elite. The party also attracted workingmen attached to commercial interests and adherents of established religious bodies, like Congregationalists and Episcopalians. But it lacked appeal among the nations largest bloc of voters, small farmers in the South and West, as well as among religious dissenters (like Baptists) and slaveholding plantation owners in the South, especially once the party began to attack the over-representation of slave states in Congress and the Electoral College because of the Constitutions three-fifths clause.
Federalist policies appealed principally to those who supported a strong national government to counterbalance state governments, an economic system controlled by a national bank, tariffs to protect American commerce, and a military force capable of protecting the nation and, if necessary, putting down domestic disorders. And, although they were forced by circumstances to adopt popular methods of campaigning and to encourage the gradual broadening of the electorate, the party’s leaders, whose style was generally elitist, opposed as long as possible the general spread of political and social democracy. Not surprisingly, Federalist ideology and policies, plus the resulting geographic limitations on the party’s support, led to its repeated defeats (save in a few states), its inability to mount successful national candidacies, and its eventual demise.
Jefferson’s election in 1800 and the popularity of his administration made the Federalists’ chances of regaining the presidency with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in 1804 difficult at best. But their opposition in 1803 to the popular Louisiana Purchase, because it threatened the influence of northeastern states and was too costly, resulted in Federalists’ resounding defeat in that election. Hamilton’s death in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr the same year cost the party its most energetic, if divisive, leader. Those setbacks might have been enough to destroy the party, but the Jeffferson administration’s 1807 embargo on all foreign trade, which seriously injured the economy, gave Federalists a new lease on political life. Yet they failed once again to win the presidency when Secretary of State James Madison defeated the Federalist candidate, again Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in the 1808 presidential election. Even after Madison’s administration declared war against Great Britain in 1812, the Federalists could not mount an effective challenge to his reelection that year, when the party carried only New York, New Jersey, and some of Maryland, in addition to New England. The party’s days seemed numbered.
With another approach, Federalist leaders might have built upon their renewed popularity after the embargo of 1807 and given the party a fighting chance at a new majority. Instead, by choosing to oppose the War of 1812 and then to obstruct it—the kind of strategy always tempting but usually dangerous for opposition parties in time of war—the Federalists sealed their political doom. Convening in Hartford in 1814 to discuss how to affect the course of the war by legal means, Federalists instead faced charges, however unjust and inaccurate, that they had secessionist and treasonous aims. It did not help that the report of the Hartford Convention appeared just as news of the war-ending Treaty of Ghent arrived in the United States in early 1815. Facing ridicule, the party never recovered. In the 1816 presidential election, Secretary of State James Monroe swamped Federalist candidate Rufus King, who carried only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. This was the last time the party would contest a presidential election.
Following that defeat the party could only hold on for a while in Congress and in some states and cities. With Monroe’s administration and Congress enacting many measures (such as chartering a second national bank) urged earlier by the Federalists, and with the emergence of new issues in the 1820s that brought about a general reorganization of American politics, the Federalist Party was no more. Finding a home in both the Democratic Party and the Whig Party, Federalists thereafter transferred their energies into civic, charitable, professional, historical, and cultural organizations and into corporations and banks, where in many places, especially in cities, they had lasting influence.
How are we to assess the history of the first American political party to die? Its death surely was due in large part to its inability, despite its adoption of many popular political and electoral methods, to adjust its views, strategies, words, and tone to the nations increasingly democratic culture. Federalist resistance to democracy, while gaining some support among workingmen in the nation’s commercial towns and cities, could not appeal to the majority of Americans who, as farmers, were suspicious of the government and its influence over the economy and were increasingly less inclined to accept the political dominance of members of the wealthy elite. Federalist attacks on slave representation made the party in effect a regional party of the Northeast. In addition, the party’s close association with British interests, both commercial and strategic, gradually eroded its popularity. When it then opposed war with Britain, it seemed to be nothing more than an opposition party—one without commitment to the national interest. Not for the last time did a party opposing a popular war cast its future into doubt.
Nevertheless, the Federalist Party left an enduring legacy to the nation. Its principles—an energetic executive, a vigorous federal government, a national economy comparatively free of internal restraint, and a judiciary capable of interpreting law and Constitution—eventually became bedrocks of American government and politics. A reluctance to get involved in troubles overseas, especially in Europe, classically expressed in Washington’s Farewell Address, became the fundamental, if not always honored, theme of American foreign policy. By even briefly, if not with full commitment, seeking and accepting the votes of women, the party recognized (more so than the Democratic-Republicans) the political agency of that part of the population that would not be fully enfranchised until the twentieth century. And by introducing into partisan politics many issues about slavery—its immorality, the excess political strength it gave the South, and its further spread westward, issues subsequently taken up by the Whig, and then Republican, parties—the Federalists laid the groundwork for defining northern politics as distinct from those of the South and for the political abolitionism that would ineluctably lead to the Civil War.
See also anti-Federalists; federalism.
FURTHER READING
Banner, James M., Jr. To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815. New York: Knopf, 1970.
Ben-Atar, Doron, and Barbara B. Oberg, eds. Federalists Reconsidered. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Koschnik, Albrecht. “Tet a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
Livermore, Shaw, Jr. The Twilight of Federalism: The Disintegration of the Federalist Party, 1815–1830. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962.
Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
Zagarri, Rosemarie. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
JAMES M. BANNER JR.
The word feminism comes from the French word feminisme, which was coined in the nineteenth century by followers of communitarian socialist Charles Fourier to denote their women’s rights stance. By the end of that century, feminism in Europe became associated with an emphasis on enlightened motherhood as a key to social reform and on establishing national welfare programs to provide financial support to unmarried mothers so that they could stay home to raise their children. The word feminism and the ideas associated with it first appeared in the United States in 1910. They especially appealed to younger women who wanted both careers and families and who were critical of older women’s rights leaders for not marrying, being antimale, and focusing on political and legal issues above maternal and psychological ones. Until 1910 the terms woman’s rights and women’s rights denoted the drive for equality for women in the United States. From this perspective, the use of the word feminism to apply to earlier women’s rights endeavors in the United States is technically inaccurate, although the usage has become standard among historians. By the 1960s, feminism was adopted as an umbrella term for a variety of intellectual positions that called for gender equality.
Historians often use the metaphor of a wave to categorize three major periods of feminist advocacy in the history of the United States. Many women in the 1960s and 1970s described their conversion to feminism in terms of an ocean “wave” crashing over and carrying them along in its wake. In the historical framework based on this metaphor, the first wave occurred between 1848 and 1920; the second in the 1960s and 1970s; and the third in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1848 a convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, launched the women’s rights movement, and in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment, giving the vote to women, became law. In the 1960s, groups of women discovered that discriminatory laws and practices against women existed on the local, state, and national levels. They worked to eliminate them, inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the student movement of the 1960s. The term third wave is sometimes applied to the “post-feminists” of the 1970s and 1980s who, paralleling their predecessors in the 1910s, launched an attack on the previous generation of feminists as antifamily, antimale, and, in this instance, puritanical about sex.
Within the wave framework, the period from 1920 to 1960 is usually viewed as an interlude between first wave and second wave feminism. According to this interpretation, once the suffrage amendment became law, the energy of the women’s movement dissipated and it factionalized into different groups, while the political and social conservatism of the 1920s and the national focus on the sexual revolution of the decade hampered its progress. A revisionist interpretation by younger historians, however, stresses greater continuity between historical periods and questions the use of the wave metaphor.
Even before the Seneca Falls Convention marked the formal beginning of the equal rights movement, individual women—like communitarian socialist reformer Frances Wright—had called for legal and social rights for women equal to those of men. In addition, women had been leaders in antebellum reform groups, such as ones organized to eliminate prostitution and alcoholism, both seen as male vices. Some historians use the term social feminism to denote women’s participation in general reform movements that advanced women’s position. The Seneca Falls Convention, however, focused on gaining legal, political, and social rights for women at a time when married women were defined as legal appendages of their husbands—with no right to their property, their earnings, their children, and even their bodies—and when most colleges and professions were closed to them. They did not have voting rights. The famed Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments detailed such wrongs visited on women and called for their elimination.
During the 1850s and 1860s, the women’s rights movement took a backseat to the militant antislavery movement and to issues raised by the Civil War. After the war, and especially after antislavery leaders refused to include women under the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised black men, the women’s movement focused on attaining woman suffrage. In 1868 a woman suffrage amendment was introduced into Congress. At the same time, groups of feminist women (and men) in municipalities and states throughout the nation secured women’s entry into higher education and into the professions, while significant advances were made in overturning legal codes that discriminated against women. By the end of the nineteenth century, in most states women had rights to their property and earnings, and in cases of divorce, mothers usually were awarded custody of their children.
Women’s involvement in social feminism soared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as women helped initiate and lead the Progressive reform movement of that era. Women—both black and white—participated in community and state efforts throughout the nation to provide public services like paved roads, sewage systems, playgrounds, and parks. They joined organizations like the many settlement houses located in urban ghettos that were designed to help the impoverished improve the conditions of their lives, and they established local and national organizations like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Association of Black Women. They lobbied for pure food and drug acts, subsidized housing for the poor, and legislation to provide payments to unmarried women with children. To justify these reform endeavors, women used the Victorian argument that they were “morally superior” to men combined with the new “feminist” emphasis on the moral superiority of motherhood and Jane Addams’s proposal that women’s experiences as domestic managers of homes could translate into an ability to become effective “municipal housekeepers.”
Women’s reform efforts supported the growing campaign for a woman suffrage amendment to the constitution. That campaign dated from the Reconstruction Era, when women were excluded from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. For more than 40 years, national woman suffrage organizations lobbied legislatures and organized electoral campaigns to achieve women’s right to vote. They finally secured that right in 1920 with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Some historians of women argue that the period between 1920 and 1960 was not static with regard to women’s advance. Indeed, organizations like the women’s clubs, the National Parent-Teachers Association, and the League of Women Voters had sizable memberships, while all worked to a greater or lesser degree to further a woman’s rights agenda. In the face of a strong conservative backlash, however, women’s organizations expended considerable energy maintaining the advances that had been won, giving the incorrect impression that they were ineffectual. Both conservatives and the media caricatured feminism as out of date and unnecessary, while the term itself was less and less used. An equal rights amendment guaranteeing women’s equality was introduced into Congress in 1923, but it failed to pass either house in the interwar period. The sexual revolution of the 1920s and its flagrant consumerism also gave the false impression that women had achieved all the rights they desired. In the 1930s, the economic depression occupied the attention of the nation, and strong leftist organizations like the Communist Party focused on issues concerning labor and class, and overlooked gender. Yet some historians contend that feminism remained sufficiently strong in the interwar years that the wave metaphor as the paradigm for the history of women in the United States should be abandoned altogether.
During World War II, men joined the armed services and journeyed overseas, while women entered the workforce in large numbers. Yet this participation did not spark a new feminist movement. Once the war ended, many women returned to the home, and the domestic ideal of the 1950s, which drew strong distinctions between masculinity and femininity and viewed women’s proper place as in the home, undermined any desire on the part of women to agitate for rights that were still denied them. On the other hand, some historians argue that the women’s organizations in existence pursued a proto-feminist agenda, while the very domesticity of many 1950s women may have inspired their daughters in the 1960s to demand equal rights and social participation.
Once the civil rights movement emerged in the 1950s and the student movement followed in the early 1960s, it was probably inevitable that women would follow suit, especially since numerous women involved in the civil rights and student movements found that their male colleagues treated them as second-class citizens. Such treatment led them to identify with the disadvantaged groups whose goals they were furthering and to realize that they also were oppressed. At the same time, a number of women in the leadership ranks of labor unions and in government service grouped around Eleanor Roosevelt to persuade John F. Kennedy to call a presidential commission on the status of women soon after he was elected president. That commission, which identified existing discriminations against women, implicitly publicized the goals of feminists.
Second-wave feminists, doing their own research in books and magazines, studies and reports, found widespread evidence of discrimination against women. Professional schools enforced quotas on the number of women they admitted, as they did on blacks, Hispanics, and Jews. Women in business were relegated to the clerical pool or low-level management, while the entire workforce was segregated by gender into women’s and men’s occupations, with women’s occupations, like airline stewardess, paying less than similar jobs for men. Under the law, women could not serve on juries; they did not have access to credit in their own names; they could not join the regular military forces; and men had control over the family in the case of divorce. Antiabortion laws were strictly enforced, and in the case of rape, women were usually considered the instigators. Men dominated municipal governments, state legislatures, and the federal government.
In response to discrimination, women formed national and state organizations—like the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966—to right these wrongs. Laws were passed extending government protections to women—like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which extended to women the concept of affirmative action, under which sex discrimination in hiring became illegal. In 1972, under pressure from women marching in the streets and organized in the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal throughout the nation.
With many adherents on college campuses and in radical study groups, the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s generated a number of theoretical perspectives. Many of them were grounded in the major male intellectual paradigms of the previous century. Eight dominant strains of feminism emerged: liberal, Marxist, radical, spiritual, psychoanalytic, eco-feminist, women of color feminism, and post-feminism. Liberal feminists, grounded in the equal rights traditions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and of John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century, focused on changing laws, equalizing education, and opening the professions and politics as equally to women as to men. Marxist feminists, whose theories were based on the ideas of Karl Marx, grounded the oppression of women in their economic exploitation, while they related women’s oppression to the oppression of social class. Psychoanalytic feminists revised Sigmund Freud’s doctrine that women suffered from “penis envy” to argue that men, in fact, had a more difficult time developing an adult identity than did women.
Radical feminists located the oppression of women in the objectification of their bodies under the domination of a male “gaze,” while they contended that a male patriarchy controlled both women and the social order. Spiritual feminists who belonged to Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and Islamic religions worked for the ordination of women as ministers and rabbis and produced feminist versions of traditional liturgies. Other spiritual feminists eschewed traditional religion and developed woman-centered religions like Wicca (witchcraft) and goddess worship. Eco-feminists interpreted both the oppression of women and the oppression of nature as part of the general system of patriarchal oppression. Women of color often sided with black men over white women as their natural allies, attacked the entire feminist enterprise as disregarding their concerns, and accused it of treating women of all races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations as the same, ignoring major differences that existed among them.
The post-feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, influenced by the theoretical perspectives of post-modernism and deconstruction, seconded the critique advanced by women of color, by accusing mainstream feminists of “essentialism”—or of positing the existence of universalizing constructs like patriarchy, which, they argued, varied widely over time and by geographic location. Yet some of them, influenced by the theories of Antonin Gramsci and Michel Foucault, contended that women internalized their oppression and enforced it on their own bodies. At the same time, responding to the fall of communism, the end of the cold war, and the seeming triumph of capitalism, some post-feminists proposed advancing the cause of women by the subversion of cultural styles through dress, music, and behavior, and they argued that women’s true freedom lay in reinvigorating femininity by sexualizing their bodies and behaviors in order to attain power through manipulating men.
Throughout U.S. history, the definition of feminism—whether as a concept or just a word—has changed, as in 1910, when a new generation of women adopted the word to challenge the ideology of the previous generation of women’s rights reformers, as did the post-feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, changes in the meaning of feminism often have been motivated by conflict between generations. This recurring conflict may provide the grounding for a cyclical interpretation of the history of feminism that might replace the wave concept. Historians have stretched the definition of feminism to cover a variety of historical phenomena. Thus, some historians have identified a “domestic” feminism that grew out of women’s attempts to exert themselves through their experiences in the home, as in the dramatically lessened birth rates over the course of the nineteenth century, which may have indicated a drive on the part of women to take control over their lives. Then there is social feminism, which refers to women’s involvement in general reform movements. Finally, some historians have coined the term maternal feminism to apply to the movement for financial aid to unmarried women with children, which culminated in the Aid to Dependent Children provision of the Social Security Act of 1936.
Since the 1980s, the successes of second-wave feminism have occasioned a backlash. Especially troubled by the legalization of abortion, the religious right waged a campaign to overturn Roe. v. Wade and to impose constraints on women’s bodies. Political conservatives focused on ending affirmative action, and an increasingly conservative Supreme Court decreased its effectiveness. The equal rights amendment finally passed both houses of Congress in 1973, but it subsequently failed to achieve the votes of two-thirds of the state legislatures that were necessary for its passage. Identifying second-wave feminists as “man-haters” and “lesbians,” many in the media successfully convinced younger generations of women that the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were unthinking dissenters whose actions were irrelevant to the opportunities they possessed. Even within the feminist movement, alternatives to the word feminism were proposed, such as “womanist,” which many African American activists prefer, or “humanist,” which, some individuals argue, might more explicitly include men within any movement for gender equality. Once before in the history of the United States, a major movement for women’s rights took a new direction with the aging and then the death of its original members, as first-wave feminists aged and then died. As second-wave feminists undergo the same life cycle realities, feminism itself may once again disappear—or take on new forms.
See also civil rights; woman suffrage; women and politics.
FURTHER READING
Banner, Lois W. Women in Modern America: A Brief History. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.
Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Ferree, Myra Marx, and Beth H. Hess. Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement Across Four Decades of Change. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Freedman, Estelle, ed. The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
Frost-Knappman, Elizabeth. Women’s Suffrage in America. New York: Facts on File, 2005.
Love, Barbara J. Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
McMillan, Sally. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000.
LOIS BANNER
Foreign observers of the United States were preceded by those who developed an idea of America during the Age of Discovery. Indeed, long before the idea of America broke upon the general consciousness of the world, originally as a place to immigrate and eventually as a power whose military, movies, music, and money spanned the globe, European elites were aware of what they called the New World. Mundis novis and de orbe novo were the terms the educated literate classes in Western Europe used to describe the Americas after Christopher Colum-bus’s voyages of discovery. The idea of America gripped the imaginations of both rulers and thinkers. Rulers envisioned it as a place rich in resources and territory that could add strength and grandeur to their empires; thinkers viewed it as a dramatic challenge to established ways of knowing about the human condition. As J. Martin Evans argues in America: The View from Europe, the discovery of the Americas challenged the notion of limitation, which was simply assumed to be a characteristic of the human condition.
The discovery of America not only required that maps of the world be redrawn, but also that ideas about humankind be rethought and recentered. The leading intellectuals of Europe quickly invested the New World with idealistic meaning. It was paradise, a tabula rasa, a place of innocence, regeneration, and new beginnings. After Columbus, it was no longer possible to contemplate the human condition and its possibilities without taking America into account. Before America became a place to be fought over and plundered by the Old World and a destination for its emigrants, it was already an idea. The mythic significance of America to the elite classes preceded its practical significance on the world stage.
For the masses in Europe, however, America represented something different. Emigration on a significant scale did not begin before the early 1600s, and even then it was small compared to the huge migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For these millions, the attraction of America had little to do with a philosophical idea of the place and more to do with a dream of opportunity, an exile from misfortune, or flight from religious persecution. It is doubtful that many of the millions who emigrated did so because they had read accounts like St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s “What is an American?” (published in England in 1782 in Letters from an American Farmer, and a year later in France). Crèvecoeur extolled the freedom, egalitarian spirit, and opportunities for material betterment and personal dignity that America offered the European masses. Hundreds of European observers visited the United States during the period from the War of Independence to the early twentieth century, a period during which roughly 30 million immigrants arrived. Some, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce, published famous accounts of their visits.
Among the hundreds of accounts written by foreign visitors to America during the early decades of the republic, many dealt with the subject of the Indian population. One of the best known and most influential of such accounts was Francois Rene de Chateaubriand’s Travels in America (1827). Chateaubriand did not subscribe to the uninformed romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom the Indians were “noble savages.” Instead, he argued that “The Indian was not savage; the European civilization did not act on the pure state of nature; it acted on the rising American civilization … it found manners and destroyed them because it was stronger and did not consider it should mix with those manners.” The fate of the Indian population in the face of Americas expanding western frontier was, Chateaubriand believed, tragic and inevitable. This judgment was shared by his more famous compatriot, Alexis de Tocqueville. In Book I of Democracy in America (1835) he observed, “Before the arrival of white men in the New World, the inhabitants of North America lived quietly in their woods, enduring the vicissitudes and practicing the virtues and vices common to savage nations. The Europeans having dispersed the Indian tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering life, full of inexpressible sufferings.” The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson included the Indians with the Chinese as what he called the “despised races” in America. In Across the Plains (1892), an account of his journey from New York to San Francisco, Stevenson wrote, “If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out…”
The Civil War that threatened to bring the American union to an end was also a subject of considerable interest for many of Europe’s most prominent intellectuals. In a letter written in 1864 to President Lincoln, Karl Marx made clear that he believed the defeat of the Confederacy would be a victory for the working class: “The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes.” Most of the British press commenting on the Civil War saw in it nothing more than an economic struggle between a protectionist industrializing North and a pro-free trade, agricultural South. Slavery, most British observers argued, had little or nothing to do with the conflict. Charles Dickens, who returned to visit the United States shortly after the war, agreed with this assessment. And, like many of his British contemporaries, he characterized Lincoln as a brutal tyrant. Although British opinion leaders were, in the main, supportive of the South, they opposed the institution of slavery. Harriet Martineau, one of the most prominent British feminists and social reformers of the nineteenth century and a longtime abolitionist, was among the few prominent defenders of Lincoln and the North.
“[W]ithout an image of America,” Hannah Arendt observed in 1954, “no European colonist would ever have crossed the ocean.” That image, she argued, was never homogeneous across class and ideological lines. Among the lower classes, America represented the dream of opportunity and material betterment. Among liberal and democratic thinkers, it represented the promise of greater freedom and equality. Yet for the traditional European bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and what might be described as anti-modern intellectuals, America represented a sort of nightmare, the “evening land” of human civilization, as D. H. Lawrence put it in 1923.
Outside of Europe, foreign elites have not always given a great deal of thought to America. The Muslim world paid little attention to the United States before the middle of the twentieth century, and in such parts of the world as China, India, Japan, and Africa, little was written about America before the United States emerged as a world military power at the end of the nineteenth century.
Many Latin American intellectuals, however, at first viewed the independence of the United States with optimism. They saw the Americas, including the United States, as what Greg Grandin calls a “renovating world force distinct from archaic Europe.” But by the mid-nineteenth century, a particular form of anti-Americanism arose in reaction to the Mexican-American War, the invasion of Nicaragua, and the growing economic influence of American business in Latin America. It was characterized by mistrust of American motives, disappointment over what was seen as U.S. abandonment of the democratic ideals it had represented only a generation or two earlier, and resentment toward what was perceived as the tendency of the new nation to impose its values, institutions, and preferences on other peoples.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the criticisms Latin American intellectuals had long expressed toward the United States were largely replaced by a more widespread anti-Americanism based on the perception of the nation as an imperialist power. As in other regions of the world, some of this anti-Americanism was the product of what Alan McPherson calls “elite opportunism.” But the record of American involvement in Latin American countries, particularly during the cold war era, made it both easy and often plausible to portray the United States as the cause of every problem from political instability to poverty and weak economies. The slogan “Yankee go home!” resonated throughout the region, from Mexico to Argentina, although it did not entirely submerge admiration for some perceived attributes of Americans and American society.
In Europe, the idea of America has long been an obsession among many national elites, for reasons that early on had nothing to do with the military or economic power of the United States. Among French elites, the idea of America has shaped the way they understand their own society, the human condition, and world history since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, but particularly and less sympathetically since Georges Duhamel’s extremely negative portrait of American civilization in America: the Menace (1930). Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Revel, Regis Debray and Bernard-Henri Levy were among the prominent French thinkers who, since Duhamel, attempted to understand the meaning of America in world history.
There is some disagreement over whether the preponderance of European elite observation and interpretation of America has been, historically, mainly favorable or antipathetic. In a collection of foreign writings on the subject, America in Perspective (1947), Henry Steele Commager notes that the European view of America was mainly flattering. But Andrei Markovits argues that European elites have long held a mainly negative image of America. He uses the term réssentiment—the French word for resentment, but with connotations of a deeper, more passionate emotion—to characterize the hostility that Western European elites have long expressed toward the United States. Markovits places emphasis on the holders of hostile sentiments rather than their object, arguing that anti-Americanism has long operated as a sort of prejudice in that its holders prejudge the object of their hostility based on what they believe America signifies, rather than on the actual characteristics and actions of the United States and its citizens.
Chinese perceptions of the United States appear to have moved through a number of phases since the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese visitors first arrived in America and recorded their impressions. These phases, as described by R. David Arkush and Leo Lee, begin with a period of exotic wonder, lasting until roughly 1900, followed by a half century during which admiration of an idealized America was mixed with criticism of what were seen as serious flaws in its culture and social institutions. A long period of state-orchestrated, anti-American propaganda followed (though not in Taiwan, where the United States was viewed as a friend and protector). Since the 1980s and the liberalization of the Chinese economy, both official and popular attitudes toward the United States and American society have lost the virulent and paranoid qualities that continue to characterize North Korean propaganda. Nevertheless, the continued high degree of state censorship and control over the media ensure that Chinese public opinion is strongly influenced by whatever image of the United States the political authorities wish to project.
There is, of course, no single or simple image of America held by opinion leaders from Paris to Beijing. The image of America held by the members of a national population is often quite complex and segmented. In some countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom, the idea- and information-generating class has long been divided in how it portrays and assesses the United States. In a country like South Korea, there is a considerable divide between generations when it comes to public opinion toward America. And in virtually all countries it is important to recognize conflicting ideas, beliefs, and sentiments toward different aspects of America. Admiration for what are thought to be particular American traits, values, historical figures and events, or accomplishments can coexist with a lively dislike or even hatred of other traits or motives ascribed to America or its government, particular policies or actions, and specific influences believed to be exerted by American governments, businesses, culture, or other institutions.
The systematic comparative study of mass perceptions of America may date from William Buchanan and Hadley Cantril’s 1953 publication, How Nations See Each Other, which drew upon survey data carried out for UNESCO in 1948–49. The images of America that emerged were overwhelmingly positive and were also, in most cases, quite different from the way these populations were inclined to see themselves or other nations. Progressive, practical, hardworking, and generous were among the words most often selected by foreigners as describing Americans.
As is also true of national elites, the perceptions of mass publics include a mixture of positive and negative beliefs and images. The negative elements have gained influence during certain periods, particularly when American foreign policies were seen as harmful for world peace or inconsistent with the values that its citizens claimed to represent and that other nations expected of American behavior. During the Vietnam War, and again in the 1980s when the Reagan administration accelerated spending on missile defense, mass publics throughout the world followed the lead of their elites in becoming less positive toward the United States. Most commentators suggest that these occasional downdrafts in America’s image abroad involve foreign perceptions of the U.S. government or of corporate interests.
A sharp international decline in popular sympathy for and admiration of the United States occurred in 2002, leading up to and continuing after the invasion of Iraq. But even as the image of the United States was taking a drubbing, a 2003 survey of 11 countries revealed that national populations continued to admire such aspects of America as its scientific and technological innovation, economic opportunities, and, to a lesser degree, its respect for freedom of expression and its democratic institutions. This corroborated the findings of a 43-country survey conducted in 2002 by the Pew Centers Global Attitudes Project, which in addition to reporting widespread admiration for what were seen as America’s technological and scientific accomplishments also found that American popular culture and American ideas about democracy were widely admired.
In an empirical analysis of ambivalence in foreign perceptions of America, Giacomo Chiozza observes that “contradictory perceptions coexist in people’s minds because America is an inherently multidimensional ‘object’ to which individuals relate in different manners.” Muslim foreign observers of America are often thought to be the least sympathetically disposed toward American values and actions, but, even in this case, Chiozza maintains that a love-hate relationship more accurately describes the Muslim world’s perception of America. “Muslim respondents are not systematically opposed to all aspects of America,” he asserts. “The appreciation of American political and societal ideals coexists in the minds of the highly informed with the rejection of America’s foreign policy choices in the Middle Eastern political arena.”
In Western European populations, Chiozza found that widespread dislike of President George W. Bush and his administration’s foreign policies did not produce a corresponding decline in the generally warm sentiments toward American political values and America as a positive symbol. It appeared that in many countries throughout the world, national populations were quite able to separate their perceptions of the American government from those of the American people and society.
Recent attempts to understand what foreigners believe about America have focused on anti-Americanism. This, according to Josef Joffe, is the inevitable result of the United States occupying the role of “Mr. Big” on the world stage and thus being the focus for the resentments, grievances, and criticisms of opinion leaders and populations in societies as diverse as Russia, Iran, and France. Joffe argues that what America actually does is less important than what America is or is seen to be.
Casting the United States as “the Great Satan” has proved an influential tool for mobilizing public opinion and maintaining popular legitimacy in parts of the Muslim world since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Bernard Lewis argues that the rise of militant and fundamentalist Islam in the last half century is largely due to resentment over the undeniable decline of Islam’s stature in the contemporary world and the effort to locate the source of this deterioration in the actions and values of the West. As the obvious embodiment of what the West is understood to represent, the United States has been the chief target of this anger and resentment.
Anti-Americanism has performed a rather different ideological function in Western Europe, argues Markovits. He contends that the construction of a European identity centered on the institutions of the European Union, a project embraced by most Western European elites, requires a measure of hostility toward America and is built on a foundation of anti-Americanism. “History teaches us,” he notes, “that any entity—certainly in its developing stages—only attains consciousness and self-awareness by defining itself in opposition to another entity.” Anti-Americanism has become a necessary part of the construction of a European identity and the idea of America serves as a measure against which those engaged in this enterprise of identity construction define what they maintain is a more human, civilized, and just alternative.
Foreign observers of the United States continue to be gripped by ideas of America, as was the learned elite of Western Europe five centuries ago. Some of the meanings attributed to America during this earlier time—as a place of new beginnings, opportunity, regeneration, and freedom from limits—remain important in foreign perceptions of the United States. But the view from abroad has become much more complex and ambivalent as the characteristics of American society, and the role of America in the world, have changed enormously through history.
See also transnational influences on American politics.
FURTHER READING
Arkush, R. David, and Leo O. Lee, eds. Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Brooks, Stephen. As Others See Us: The Causes and Consequences of Foreign Perceptions of America. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006.
Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959. (Originally published in 1888.)
Buchanan, William, and Hadley Cantril. How Nations See Each Other: A Study in Public Opinion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953.
Chateaubriand, François René de. Travels in America and Italy. London: H. Colburn, 1828. (Originally published in 1827 as Voyages en Amérique et en Italie)
Chiozza, Giacomo. “Disaggregating Anti-Americanism: An Analysis of Individual Attitudes toward the United States,” in Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds. Anti-Americanism in World Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007, pp.93–126.
Commager, Henry Steele, ed. America in Perspective: The United States through Foreign Eyes. New York: Random House, 1947.
Evans, J. Martin. America: The View from Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford Alumni Association, 1979.
Grandin, Greg. “Your Americanism and Mine: Americanism and Anti-Americanism in the Americas.” American Historical Review (October 2006), 1042–66.
Hollander, Paul. Anti-Americanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Joffe, Josef. “Who’s Afraid of Mr. Big?” The National Interest 64 (Summer 2001), 43–52.
Katzenstein, Peter J., and Robert O. Keohane, eds. Anti-Americanism in World Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Markovits, Andrei. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
McPherson, Alan. Yankee No!Anti-Americanism in U.S.—Latin American Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Revel, Jean-Francois. Anti-Americanism. New York: Encounter Books, 2003.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Across the Plains. London: Chatto and Windus, 1892.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracracy in America. New York: Knopf, 1994. (Originally published as 2 vols., 1835 and 1840.)
STEPHEN BROOKS
During the first century of its existence, the United States pursued a foreign policy that had three main goals. During the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, it engaged with foreign powers to confirm its existence as an independent nation-state and to preserve this freedom during international crises caused by the French revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic Wars. With independence secure, the United States then pursued two further goals: to ensure prosperity for American elites and the bulk of the enfranchised American public by diplomatically opening foreign markets to American producers and consumers on favorable terms, and to expand the territorial size of the United States on the North American continent through both diplomacy and the use of military force. The desire for expansion culminated in a war with Mexico in the mid-1840s and the acquisition of new territory that vastly increased the size of the United States. This territorial expansion fueled internal debates about the expansion of the institution of slavery, which culminated in the Civil War, during which the United States of America and the Confederate States of America pursued diametrically opposite foreign policies, with the Confederacy seeking international recognition of its independence and the Union doing all it could to prevent such recognition. Keeping foreign powers out the Civil War facilitated the defeat of the Confederacy and allowed the federal government to retain control over the entire nation.
The primary goals of American foreign policy during the Revolutionary War were straightforward: the United States wanted foreign powers to recognize its independence and to assist materially, financially, and militarily in its war against Great Britain. The Continental Congress began to look for foreign assistance in its resistance to British policy months before the formal Declaration of Independence. On November 29, 1775, the Congress created the Committee of Secret Correspondence, with the stated mission of communicating with the “friends” of the American cause in Britain, Ireland, and “other parts of the world.” The committee initially made discreet inquiries to known friends of the American cause in Europe and also made contact with one the few colonial agents (the colonies’ lobbyists to Parliament) in Britain who still supported the congressional cause, Virginian Arthur Lee. In December 1775, the committee received a clandestine agent of the French government, Julien-Alexandre Archard de Bonvouloir, dispatched from his official post in the Caribbean by the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. Bonvouloir made it clear to the Continental Congress that France was prepared to support the American effort against Britain, at least with some material and financial assistance. In early March 1776, the Continental Congress dispatched Connecticut merchant Silas Deane to Paris to work with Arthur Lee and began to make more formal inquiries for French assistance. Although Vergennes was eager to support the American cause in order to weaken Britain, until the American colonies formally declared independence French assistance had to be secret and, of necessity, small in scope.
With the Declaration of Independence of July 1776, the United States formally sought recognition of its sovereignty from other powers as well as foreign assistance. Although Vergennes was predisposed to direct King Louis XVI to recognize and support the United States, he knew that such recognition meant open war with Great Britain, and he thus wished to wait until an ongoing French military and naval buildup was close to complete. In the interim, Vergennes employed writer Pierre Augustin, Caron de Beaumarchais, to head a dummy corporation, known as Roderigue Hortalez and Company, to funnel arms and other war materiel to the Americans. The arrival in early 1777 of a third American minister to France, Benjamin Franklin, assisted the American cause in giving the United States a famous public face in that country, and helped sway French public opinion toward favoring the Americans. By the autumn of 1777, the French government was disposed toward formal recognition of the United States. When word of American General Horatio Gates’s victory over Britain’s General John Burgoyne at Saratoga reached Europe, the negotiations between Vergennes and the American ministers moved into high gear, and two treaties—the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce—were concluded between the United States and France on February 6, 1778.
The need for a formal alliance with France was disturbing to some of the political leadership in America. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress had approved a blueprint for American diplomacy with the European powers, known formally as the Plan of Treaties but sometimes called the Model Treaty. Drafted largely by John Adams, the Plan of Treaties called for the United States to seek out commercial connections with all of the European states but to avoid political connections. America would replicate its colonial economic relationship with Britain with the rest of Europe. The United States would send agricultural produce and other raw materials to Europe and to colonies in the Caribbean in exchange for European manufactured goods. U.S. diplomats were thus called on to negotiate commercial treaties that would open foreign markets but not political alliances that would draw the United States into the European balance of power. The French Alliance—rooted in both a political and a commercial treaty—thus went against this cardinal principle. Diplomatic historians point to the unwillingness of the French to agree to the terms of the Plan of Treaties as a reflection of the foreign policy idealism that informed it. Despite this, American policy makers continued to hope for commercial treaties and relationships with the European powers without committing to formal political alliances.
The French Alliance proved crucial in securing American victory in the Revolutionary War. Many French officers volunteered for service in America even before the alliance had been concluded. In May 1780, the Expeditionary Force under General Jean-Baptise de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau departed France and arrived in Newport late the next month. By 1781 Rochambeau and Washington were conducting joint operations around New York City, and in late summer, the forces of both men hurried to Virginia to trap British General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, following victory over the British fleet of French Admiral Francois-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse-Rouville. The Comte de Grasses victory and the subsequent successful capture of Cornwallis were both products of the French-American alliance and of the larger coalition that Vergennes had built.
After the Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States was concluded, the Comte de Vergennes began to negotiate a treaty of alliance between the kingdoms of Spain and France. Although the Spanish kingdom of Carlos III did not recognize the independence of the United States, Spain joined France in the fight against Britain. A formal alliance was concluded with the Treaty of Aranjuez in April 1779. When Great Britain declared war on the Netherlands in December 1780, it too joined Vergennes’s coalition against Great Britain. It would not be until April 1782 that the Dutch would formally recognize American independence, when they received John Adams as minister. Adams was able to negotiate a Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and the Netherlands, which was concluded in October 1782. As diplomatic historian Jonathan Dull has argued, this alliance of France, Spain, and the Netherlands put to sea a combined navy far larger than that of Great Britain. Forced to defend itself against three major European powers, Britain’s resources available for returning the former American colonies to its empire were severely diminished. The alliance thus paved the way for the Comte de Grasses victory, as well as the inability of the British government to send another army to America after Cornwallis’s was captured.
The United States commissioned ministers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens to negotiate a peace treaty with the British government. After the collapse of Frederick North, Lord North’s ministry, and the death of his successor the Marquis of Rockingham, the prime ministership fell to William Petty-Fitzmaurice, Earl of Shelburne, who favored a quick and generous peace treaty with the Americans. Shelburne appointed a Scots merchant, Richard Oswald, to lead the negotiations in Paris with the Americans; they concluded a preliminary peace treaty on November 30, 1782. The Preliminary Peace, as it was known, was generous to the Americans: the United States was given title to North American territory that included not only the first 13 states but land bounded to the west by the Mississippi River, to the north by the Great Lakes, and to the south by the Floridas. Americans were also granted rights to fish the Grand Banks of the Atlantic Ocean. Controversially, the American commissioners agreed to language in the treaty that the Continental Congress would “recommend” to the individual states that they restore the property of loyalists that had been seized. Similarly, the British committed to restoration of property (including slaves) that was taken from American citizens. Neither of these promises were honored in full. An additional controversial element about the treaty between the United States and Great Britain was that it was done without consulting the French government, a violation of the Treaty of Alliance. Vergennes, however, did not publicly voice displeasure with the Americans; France and Spain concluded an armistice with Great Britain on January 30, 1783. The final peace treaties were signed between Britain and the United States on September 3, 1783, in Paris, with Spain and France signing their treaty with Britain the same day at Versailles. The first objective of American foreign policy during the Revolution—recognition of American independence—had been achieved. The second foreign policy goal of the United States—the opening of foreign markets to American commerce—would prove to be much more elusive.
The primary goal of American foreign policy during the years under the Articles of Confederation was to negotiate commercial treaties that would open European and colonial markets to American agricultural produce and other raw materials, and in turn secure favorable terms for importing foreign manufactures and other goods. American diplomats had only limited success in achieving these goals, as the United States was seen as having a weak government that could not enforce the treaty provisions it signed. Few European powers were willing to sign commercial agreements with the United States. The weakness of the confederation government in conducting foreign policy was a major impetus behind the moves to reform the Articles of Confederation, a measure that culminated in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, and the new Constitution.
In the years following the Revolutionary War, securing favorable treaties with foreign powers proved a difficult task for the men charged with managing U.S. diplomacy. Upon his return from negotiating the Treaty of Paris, John Jay was appointed the Continental Congress’s secretary for foreign affairs in December 1784. When the Spanish government closed the mouth of the Mississippi River to American shipping in 1784, Jay opened negotiations with the Spanish minister to the United States, Don Diego de Gardoqui. Conducted during 1785, the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations put forward a controversial compromise: Spain proposed to allow American merchants and shippers open access to commerce with Spain and the Canary Islands (but not Spanish America) in exchange for granting Spain the exclusive right to navigate the Mississippi River for 25 years. Although Jay moved forward with negotiations, delegates to the Continental Congress from the states with western interests (especially in the South) were horrified by the proposal, which promised to retard the growth of western settlements and only benefit northern shipping interests. Congress ordered Jay to suspend negotiations, but word of the proposed treaty inflamed nascent sectional tensions.
The U.S. ministers to Great Britain and France after 1784, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, respectively, found diplomacy with the European powers equally difficult. After his formal reception as the U.S. minister to the Court of St. James on June 1, 1785, Adams was unsuccessful in negotiating a new commercial treaty with the British government. From the conclusion of the Preliminary Peace Treaty, British policy toward the United States was informed by a set of principles known as neomercantilism. The British government encouraged essentially free trade within the British Empire, but offered most-favored-nation status to only a few other foreign nations. Neomercantilist commentators—most notably, John Holroyd, Lord Sheffield—had posited that the newly independent United States would continue to engage in the majority of its commercial activity with Britain and the British Empire. The British government could therefore withhold most-favored-nation status and still capture the bulk of American commerce. This assessment proved accurate. There was little Adams could do to change British policy.
At the same time, Jefferson faced a difficult situation in France. French commerce was theoretically open to Americans under the terms of the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce, but the realities of the legal regime and economic order of France made trade problematic. The French governments practice of tax farming (delegating the collection of all taxes) resulted in the body with the privilege of collecting most taxes—the farmers-general—having enormous power to decide which goods could enter and leave France and who could engage in this trade.
Jefferson’s lobbying to change this system met with little success. Although he won an opening in the French market for American whale oil, he was only able to open the tobacco market for a minority of American planters. Jefferson’s greatest success came in late 1788, when he completed negotiations on a new consular convention between France and the United States. Notably, this new convention made consuls subject to the laws of the land in which they operated, not where they were appointed. All told, in dealing with the most powerful nations in Europe in the 1780s—Great Britain and France—U.S. diplomats found themselves with very little power and legitimacy, and their ability to affect positive changes in the position of the United States vis-à-vis these European states was quite limited.
The weakness of the United States in the realm of diplomacy was a primary motive among those who wished to reform and strengthen the Articles of Confederation. Under the articles—although Congress had the power to appoint diplomats and conclude treaties—commercial regulations were left to the individual states. Several states sent delegations to the 1786 Annapolis Convention to discuss new commercial regulations for all of the United States, and the delegates quickly concluded that a full revision of all of the Articles of Confederation would be necessary. This became the Philadelphia Convention of May-September 1787. Of all of the issues that animated debate during the ratification process of the Constitution, among the least controversial was that of foreign policy. The Constitution put all the powers involved in making foreign policy in the hands of the central, or federal, government. Within the federal government, the bulk of foreign policy powers was given to the executive branch. The president had the power to appoint a secretary of state, subordinate diplomats, and to negotiate treaties. Treaties required a two-thirds vote of the Senate in order to be ratified, and the Senate also had to approve presidential diplomatic appointments. The extent to which the Senate’s power to provide “advice and consent” to the president allowed it, and Congress as a whole, to participate in the treaty-making process would be a subject of heated debate during the early years of the federal government and beyond.
The Electoral College overwhelmingly chose George Washington as the first president of the United States. After taking the oath of office on April 30, 1789, Washington and his administration were almost immediately confronted with a series of foreign policy crises. With the rechristening of the French Estates General as the French National Assembly in June 1789, the French Revolution began. The majority of Americans supported the French Revolution during its early years, as the creation of a constitutional monarchy, the abolition of feudalism, and the promulgation of a Declaration of the Rights of Man were all seen as developments either related to, or an extension of, the American Revolution. In September 1792, the government of the National Assembly was replaced by the more radical National Convention. This new government proceeded to abolish the monarchy, and then tried and executed King Louis XVI in January 1793. Already at war with Prussia and Austria, France declared war against Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain. The American reaction to the execution of Louis was divided. Also unclear was the question of whether the 1778 Treaty of Alliance bound the United States to assist France in its war against the rest of the European powers. Washington’s cabinet was divided on both counts. Representing the emerging pro-administration party known as the Federalists, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton did not approve of the radical turn of the French Revolution and believed that the execution of Louis XVI rendered the Treaty of Alliance null and void, since the treaty had been between the United States and him. Speaking for the emerging opposition known as the Republicans, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson lamented the bloodshed in France but continued to approve of the larger revolution. He believed that treaties existed between nations, and therefore the alliance was still in effect. Washington split the difference between the two viewpoints. He chose to formally receive the new French government’s minister, Edmond Genet, but issued the Proclamation of Neutrality on April 22, 1793, declaring that the United States would remain neutral in the conflict between France and its enemies. The Proclamation of Neutrality was an important milestone—it confirmed the ability of the president to interpret treaties, and the controversy helped coalesce the Federalist and Republican movements into something resembling political “parties”—although historians debate to extent to which this first “party system” resembled that of later, more modern political parties.
The ongoing wars of the French Revolution continued to affect the United States during the remainder of the 179 os. Although the United States maintained its neutrality, Great Britain began seizing American merchant ships bound for the European continent, claiming a broad definition of contraband goods that justified the seizures. Washington dispatched John Jay to Britain to negotiate a compromise, and the resulting Treaty of Amity and Commerce became known as the Jay Treaty. Under the terms of the treaty, commerce between the United States and Great Britain would now exist on a most-favored-nation basis, and Britain would evacuate posts in the American West it continued to occupy. But commerce between the United States and the British islands in the West Indies would be restricted—Americans could only employ vessels of under 70 tons, and the export of several staple crops to the Indies was forbidden. These restrictions promised to affect the planters and farmers of the South and West greatly, and to secure a pro-ratification vote, the Senate struck out the West Indies article. The treaty still barely passed. Before Washington could sign it, public opposition—led by Jefferson and James Madison’s Republican Party—grew. Washington ultimately signed the treaty after the British government leaked intercepted French documents that implicated Jefferson’s successor as secretary of state, Edmund Randolph, as secretly favoring France over Britain. Although there was nothing substantial to the accusations, the controversy gave Washington political cover to sign the Jay Treaty, which he did on August 18, 1795.
Not all of Washington’s diplomatic efforts were controversial. A treaty with Spain negotiated by Thomas Pinckney and ratified in early 1796 clarified the southern boundary of the United States with Spanish Florida, and also gave Americans the right to navigate the Mississippi River and transship their goods onto oceangoing vessels at the Port of New Orleans; this was known as the right of deposit. As Washington prepared to leave office at the close of his second term as president, he issued his now-famous Farewell Address, which restated the principle of the Plan of Treaties—that the United States should seek out commercial connections with foreign powers while avoiding political connections.
Avoiding foreign entanglements proved difficult for Washington’s successor, John Adams. In the wake of the Jay Treaty’s ratification, France (now being governed by an executive council called the Directory) interpreted the new treaty as an American alliance with Britain, and began interdicting American shipping. Adams sent a team of three ministers—John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry, and Charles C. Pinckney—to negotiate with the Directory’s foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. Before formal negotiations began, agents of Talleyrand solicited bribes from the American ministers and asked them to arrange an American loan for the French government. The commissioners balked at this offer, and when word of the proposed bribes reached the United States and was published (Talleyrand’s agents were code-named X, Y, and Z. in the public dispatches), a clamor for war with France swept through much of American public opinion. Following the lead of Congress, Adams signed authorization for an expansion of the U.S. Army, the creation of a navy, and the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts. An undeclared naval war—the Quasi-War—between France and the United States ensued. Rather than ask Congress for a formal declaration of war, however, Adams pursued further negotiations that culminated in the September 1800 Convention of Mortefontaine. Word of the peace treaty reached the United States after the presidential election, which Adams lost to Thomas Jefferson.
During his two terms as president, Jefferson sought to keep the United States out of the European wars between Napoleonic France and the various coalitions against it led by Great Britain. During Jefferson’s first term, American neutrality, combined with a brief peace between France and Britain, allowed American commerce to flourish. The only exception was American commerce in the Mediterranean, which was subject to seizure by pirates sponsored by the state of Tripoli (one of the “Barbary States” of North Africa). Although he campaigned on drydocking the blue-water force of frigates of the U.S. Navy in favor of relying on smaller, short-range gunboats for coastal defense, Jefferson put aside those plans and dispatched the Navy against the Tripolitan forces. During operations in 1803, a frigate, the USS Philadelphia, ran aground in Tripoli harbor and surrendered; its crew was taken hostage. A subsequent operation bombarded Tripoli, and a small force of U.S. Marines captured the smaller Tripolitan port of Derna, forcing the pasha of Tripoli to sign a treaty with the United States and return the prisoners.
Jefferson’s pragmatic abandonment of his campaign promises was also evident in his acceptance of Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1803 offer to sell the United States the French territory of Louisiane (Louisiana). The offer to purchase Louisiana came after the Spanish intendant of New Orleans suspended the American right of deposit in late 1802. Hearing of the eminent transfer of New Orleans and Louisiana from Spain to France, Jefferson dispatched James Monroe to assist Robert R. Livingston in negotiating with Napoleon’s government and gave both diplomats explicit instructions to offer to buy New Orleans and the Floridas from France. Having lost an army in a futile attempt to reconquer the former French colony of Haiti and build an empire in the Americas, Napoleon responded with an offer of Louisiana (Spain had retained the Floridas), which Monroe and Livingston accepted. Although the diplomats had technically violated their instructions, and Jefferson was uncertain whether the Constitution allowed the annexation of new territories, he sent the treaty to the Senate anyway, where its ratification was approved and the sale confirmed by the end of 1803. Although Haitian military success paved the way for the sale of Louisiana, Jefferson refused to recognize Haiti when it formally declared its independence on New Year’s Day, 1804. Not wanting to support an independent nation born of a successful slave rebellion, American administrations would refuse to recognize Haiti until 1862.
The Louisiana Purchase was the final time the events of the Napoleonic Wars would redound to the advantage of the United States. At the end of 1803, war between France and the British-led coalition resumed. Between 1805 and 1807, Napoleon defeated Austria, Prussia, and Russia, leaving Britain and France the only belligerents locked in what both saw as a war for survival. Both countries imposed blockades on the other’s trade, and the French and British navies were soon seizing American merchants who attempted to trade with the opposite power. At the same time, the British government extended the use of the policy of impressment, under which the Royal Navy searched American ships looking for deserted British seamen and other British subjects, who when found would be forced into the British service. In addition to the humiliation this practice caused to American honor, many American citizens were inadvertently caught up in this gauntlet and the British government was slow to respond to their complaints, if it did at all. The height of humiliation came in 1807, when the HMS Leopard, looking for British deserters, fired on the USS Chesapeake within sight of the American shore. Public opinion called for war, but Jefferson demurred, preferring to suspend American commerce altogether in an attempt to force Britain and France to comply with American understandings of neutral rights. The embargo lasted for the final two years of Jefferson’s presidency and did little to change the policies of France or Britain.
When James Madison succeeded Jefferson as president in 1809, he convinced the Congress to abandon the embargo and adopt a policy of nonimportation of British and French goods, with the promise that the United States would open its ports to the first power to rescind its restrictions on American commerce. When in late 1810, a back-channel communication from a French diplomat indicated that Napoleon was considering repealing his restrictions (the Berlin and Milan Decrees), Madison removed restraints on American commerce with France, and only nonintercourse with Britain remained. Impressments and interdictions by the British navy continued through 1811. The British were also blamed as tensions rose in the trans-Appalachian West, with the emergence of a large American Indian resistance movement against American expansion, led by the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh. Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war against Great Britain on June 1, 1812, and both the House and Senate voted to declare war, although the votes were very close, with all the Federalists and several Republicans voting against war.
The War of 1812 formally lasted from June 1812 until the Treaty of Ghent of December 24, 1814. The slow speed of communication, however, meant that the war continued into the early months of 1815. The United States attempted multiple invasions of British Canada—the intention being to seize as much of British North America as possible to force concessions in maritime and commercial policy at the bargaining table. The American invasions of 1812 were thwarted by British forces. The American campaigns of 1813 were a little more successful—the United States established naval superiority on the Great Lakes by the end of the year, and Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813. By the summer of 1814, Napoleon had been defeated, and Britain brought its naval superiority to bear on the American coast, capturing and burning Washington in August 1814 and briefly shelling Baltimore’s outer fortifications weeks later. By the end of the year, the British Navy was engaged in a similar campaign of harassment on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
The relative stalemate between British and American forces, and a desire on the part of both parties to end the war brought diplomats from both countries together in Ghent, Belgium, in August. The Ghent negotiations came after an 1813 offer by the Russian government to mediate the conflict, which the British government turned down, and an offer in early 1814 by British foreign minister Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, to engage in direct talks with the Americans. Madison had commissioned John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, James Bayard, and Jonathan Russell to negotiate for the United States; Britain sent three relatively minor officials: Dr. William Adams, an admiralty lawyer; Lord Gambier, a naval officer; and Henry Goulburn, an undersecretary in the Colonial Office. Goulburn took charge of the British delegation, while Adams, Clay, and Gallatin were the dominant voices for the Americans. The negotiations dragged on for months; although both sides dropped discussion of the issue of impressments, the British negotiators presented a series of demands that infuriated most of the American delegation, including a proposal to create an American Indian buffer state in the Great Lakes region, and a proposed reworking of American rights to the Canadian fisheries.
However, as the talks at the more important Congress of Vienna dragged on, the British government instructed its diplomats to agree to a treaty that simply restored the prewar status quo. The Americans jumped at this opening. British plans for an American Indian buffer state were dropped, and American Indian nations within U.S. borders lost their last major remaining European diplomatic partner, clearing a path for American westward expansion. Other outstanding issues, such as the boundary between the United States and Canada, would be settled by subsequent commissions. The Treaty of Ghent allowed Britain to focus on European diplomacy and the Americans to claim a peace with honor. News of the treaty reached the United States at the same time that word was spreading of Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans—allowing the War of 1812 to be remembered as an American victory even though its result was as equivocal as any war in U.S. history.
Following the War of 1812, American foreign policy was directed toward opening foreign markets to American commerce, keeping European political interference in the Americas to a minimum, and increasing the territorial size of the United States. The war transformed the domestic political scene. First, it spelled the end of the Federalists as a national political force. Between December 1814 and January 1815, New England Federalists had convened a special Congress called the Hartford Convention to discuss difficulties caused by the war. Although the convention ultimately called for some policy changes by the Madison administration and Congress in the conduct of the war, and proposed seven amendments to the Constitution, the body’s secret meetings allowed Republican opponents to smear its activities as treasonous. Outside New England, Federalism had acquired the taint of disloyalty.
Second, the setbacks the United States had faced during the war in terms of mobilization, materiel, transportation, and, most of all, funding prompted a split within the Republican Party. Many, including Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun became known as National Republicans, who advocated federal government funding of a system of internal improvements, coastal fortifications, a standing army, and a national bank. These were measures that the so-called Old Republicans like James Madison and James Monroe balked at, as they had a whiff of the old Hamiltonian program about them. These basic divides would inform the ultimate split of the Republicans into Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and Henry Clay’s Whigs in the 1830s.
These different visions extended to approaches to foreign policy. Although the embargo and the War of 1812 and the resulting disruptions in trade helped facilitate the growth of an American manufacturing sector (a process that had begun in the 1790s), the United States remained an overwhelmingly agricultural nation in the late 1810s and 1820s. Planters and farmers desired to ship their foodstuffs and staples to Europe and the European colonies in the Americas and wanted diplomacy devoted to ensuring the continued flow of transatlantic commerce. This became the policy position of the Old Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats. The National Republicans, and then the Whigs, had a different vision: they hoped the federal government could spur the expansion of the American industrial and financial sectors and wanted to develop internal transportation and markets. Under Henry Clay’s leadership in Congress, this became known as the “American System.” Its most controversial aspect was high protective tariffs, which passed Congress in 1828 during John Quincy Adams’s presidency. In 1832 the so-called Tariff of Abominations almost split the Union, as South Carolina threatened nullification of the law. A compromise was reached, but the crisis showed how central commercial and foreign policy was to the domestic political scene.
No matter what the tariff rates, the United States still actively sought to expand its access to world markets during this period. Under the initiative of merchant John Jacob Astor and others, Americans expanded the scope of the fur trade in the American West and Pacific Northwest, and regular shipping to the Pacific Coast soon extended to Hawai’i and across the Pacific to East Asia. American trade with China, begun in the 1790s, increased in scope in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the U.S. Navy was operating across the Pacific by the late 1840s; under the expedition of Commodore Matthew Perry, the United States forced open trade with Japan with the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa. American merchants and financiers also seized the opportunities provided by the collapse of the Spanish Empire, and American trade with the newly independent republics of the Americas increased during the 1820s and 1830s as well.
Responding to the end of the Spanish Empire and the various Latin American independence movements provided the United States with its first great diplomatic challenge of the post-War of 1812 world. The bulk of the Spanish colonies had experienced a de facto independence of sorts during Napoleon’s occupation of Spain. Although the particulars varied from country to country, Latin American settler elites generally resisted the attempts of the Spanish government to reimpose direct imperial rule after Napoleon’s fall.
While many Americans were sympathetic to the various Latin American revolutionaries (especially South America’s Simon Bolivar), the Monroe administration held off recognizing Latin American independence while Spain still wielded a modicum of power. This allowed Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, to conclude the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, which established a firm western border between the United States and New Spain (Mexico), and also to broker the purchase of the Floridas from Spain at the same time. The acquisition of the Gulf Coast was a boon to the states to the Deep South, as it guaranteed their access to Atlantic markets and abetted the ongoing expansion of the Cotton Belt. In 1822, following military successes on the part of Bolivar’s forces in South America and a successful revolution in Mexico, the Monroe administration finally recognized the independence of four Latin American republics—Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Rio de la Plata (Argentina).
When it appeared that Spain’s European allies would support an attempt to send another expedition to reconquer the republics, Secretary of State Adams and President Monroe drafted a proclamation declaring that the United States was opposed to any attempts by the European powers to recolonize the Americas, and would resist attempts to draw the Americas into the European balance of power. This statement, issued on December 2, 1823, became known as the Monroe Doctrine, and would be used to justify American diplomacy and military activity in the Western Hemisphere for the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The Monroe Doctrine was also significant in that Monroe and Adams rejected an opportunity to issue a joint declaration on Latin American affairs with the British government, despite the fact that both governments shared the same policy. British-American relations evolved in a generally amicable direction during the 1820s and 1830s, as trade between the two countries remained vital to the economies of both. However, tensions over the U.S.-Canadian border flared in the late 1830s, and the Americans had tended to be recalcitrant in providing naval vessels to assist with British efforts to interdict the African slave trade (which Britain had abolished in 1807, with the United States following in 1808). Both issues were resolved by a treaty negotiated by Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British Minister Alexander Baring, Baron Ashburton, in August 1842. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty formalized the contested boundary between Maine, New Brunswick, and Quebec (the Revolutionary Era maps the boundary had been drawn on in 1783 proved highly inaccurate) and committed the United States to a more robust presence in assisting the British West Africa Squadron in slave trade interdiction.
With the expansion of American access to overseas markets came a desire to increase the amount of American territory under settlement and cultivation and to increase the size of the United States in total. This desire for expansion was felt by most white Americans, but under the term Manifest Destiny (coined by a Democratic newspaper editor named John L. O’Sullivan) it became a hallmark of the Democratic Party’s platform. The notion that it was the Manifest Destiny of the United States to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific (and even beyond) informed the presidential election of 1844. Running against Whig Henry Clay, Democrat James K. Polk wanted to follow up the successful Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 with negotiations (or belligerence) that would compel Britain to cede the United States all of the so-called Oregon Country (modern-day Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia). More important, Polk called for the immediate annexation of the Republic of Texas, a breakaway province of Mexico that had declared and won its independence in 1836. Mexico, however, refused to recognize Texas’s independence. The issue proved immensely popular in the South and the West, and spurred Polk to victory in 1844. His belligerence, however, put Mexico and the United States on a collision course for war.
Polk’s predecessor, John Tyler, had begun to pursue the annexation of Texas as early as 1843, and negotiated an annexation treaty that finally passed in Congress days before Polk took office. Almost immediately after Polk’s inauguration, Mexico suspended diplomatic relations with the United States. Polk sent a special envoy with extensive knowledge of Mexico, John Slidell, as a fully accredited minister to negotiate with the Mexican government. Controversy ensued over Slidell’s credentials as a normal minister plenipotentiary, which caused Mexican officials to believe that if they received Slidell it would indicate their acquiescence in the Texas annexation. Also factoring into Mexico’s response was an ongoing internal political debate between conservative centralizers and liberal federalists that made compromise on Texas very difficult.
As Slidell’s mission was failing, Polk dispatched the bulk of the U.S. Army under General Zachary Taylor to the disputed borderland between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. A violent confrontation ensued between U.S. and Mexican forces, and war formally began in May 1846.
The war dragged on longer than expected. For all his success as a polemicist, Polk proved to be a poor war president. He withheld support for Taylor during the latter part of his successful campaign in northern Mexico, fearing his Whig-leaning general was becoming too popular. Polk then allowed Mexico’s exiled president and military leader Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to return to Mexico; rather than negotiate an end to the conflict, Santa Anna took charge of the Mexican war effort. It fell to General Winfield Scott to defeat Santa Anna, which he did, landing at Veracruz in March 1847 and capturing Mexico City in September of that same year. During the winter of 1847–48, Nicholas Trist, a State Department clerk who had accompanied Scott, negotiated with delegates from the Mexican Congress (now in charge after Santa Anna’s resignation).
Although Polk hoped for the acquisition of most, if not all, of Mexico, Trist was less ambitious. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed American control of Texas, a boundary at the Rio Grande, and granted the United States the territories of Upper California and New Mexico in exchange for a $15 million payment and the assumption by the United States of the claims of all American citizens against the Mexican government. Polk was unhappy with the treaty but did not want to prolong the war and feared that he could not negotiate a better treaty. The Senate voted to ratify the treaty on March 10, 1848.
The acquisition of the Mexican Cession moved the question of the extension of the institution of slavery into western territories to the forefront of American political debate. The number of states that would be carved from the new territory and the question of whether they would be slave states or free states vexed American politics until the Compromise of 1850; the desire on the part of Southerners to add territory that could be open to slavery did not abate, however.
The southern cause was pursued by a small number of private adventurers known as filibusters—men who gathered small forces of mercenaries and attempted to conquer several Latin American states and eventually incorporate them into the United States. A Venezualan-born Cuban exile named Narisco Lopez sought American support for his plans to capture Cuba from Spain and annex it to the United States; he led three unsuccessful invasions of Cuba between 1849 and 1851. Another notable filibuster was a Tennessee doctor named William Walker who launched a private invasion of Mexico in 1853 and actually succeeded in controlling Nicaragua during a filibuster between 1855 and 1857. Driven out by the local population, Walker made three more expeditions to Central America before being captured and executed in Honduras in 1860.
More legitimate were attempts by the U.S. government to acquire Cuba, where Spain had remained in charge and where slavery remained legal. President Franklin Pierce made several attempts to purchase Cuba from Spain to placate southern Democrats. Meeting secretly at Ostend, Belgium, the U.S. ministers to Britain, France, and Spain vowed to work together to acquire Cuba by purchase or force. When word of this secret plan (known as the “Ostend Manifesto”) leaked, controversy ensued, and Pierce was forced to recall the most controversial of the diplomats, Louisiana’s Pierre Soulé.
Attempts to increase American territory did not placate the South and only served to exacerbate sectional tensions. With the formation of the new Republican Party in 1856 (a party committed to halting the extension of slavery and the protection of free labor) and the election of its presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the process of secession began and the United States was at war with itself by April 1861. The Confederate States of America sought foreign recognition of its independence and foreign assistance for its war against the federal government. The United States sought to prevent European powers from recognizing and assisting the Confederacy. The U.S. Navy blockaded the ports of the South. Most controversially, in November 1861, the commander of the USS San Jacinto boarded the British mail ship HMS Trent and captured two Confederate diplomats bound for Britain. The seizure provoked a minor diplomatic incident, but the U.S. minister to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, succeeded in keeping Britain from recognizing the Confederate government and thus out of the war. Starved for materiel and unable to sell its cotton crop abroad, the Confederacy capitulated in April 1865.
See also Articles of Confederation; Civil War and Reconstruction; Constitution, federal; federalism; Mexican-American War; War of 1812; war for independence.
FURTHER READING
Bemis, Samuel Flagg. The Diplomacy of the American Revolution. New York: American Historical Association, 1935.
Combs, Jerald A. The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
DeConde, Alexander. Entangling Alliance: Politics and Diplomacy under George Washington. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958.
____. The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801. New York: Scribner, 1966.
____. This Affair of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
Dull, Jonathan R. A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
____. The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Hickey, Donald R. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Paterson, Thomas G., J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan. American Foreign Relations: A History. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1995.
Perkins, Bradford. Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
Stagg, J.C.A. Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Stourzh, Gerald. Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
LEONARD J. SADOSKY
In foreign policy as in domestic politics, if the period before the Civil War concerned itself with whether the United States would remain a nation, then 1865–1933 helped determine what kind of nation it would be. The themes of this contest for national self-definition included the limits to continental and extracontinental expansion; the role of industry in expansion and vice versa; the power of the executive; the debate over “imperialism”; the sharpening markers of race, religion, and gender; and the definition of citizenship.
As presidents, secretaries of state, members of congress, business lobbyists, missionaries, journalists, and other opinion makers wrestled with these themes, patterns emerged. On one hand, a powerful majority of Americans supported expansion beyond the continental limits of the nation as an outlet for commercial and moral energies. On the other, a smaller but not negligible group called for restraint in the exercise of global power. Interestingly, both the dominant expansionists and the so-called isolationists articulated arguments based on similar domestic pressures and ideologies.
In the area of westward expansion, there was relatively strong consensus. The ideals of Manifest Destiny gained ever-greater currency after the Civil War. Both political parties sided with President Andrew Johnsons desire to speed up the readmission of the former Confederate states into the Union so as to move on to what they considered the more pressing matter of developing the West. The end of the war also worsened the odds for tribes beyond the Mississippi, because in 1871 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could override the traditional treaty system and consider tribes “local dependent communities” to be controlled, rather than independent nations. This led to a cycle of violence ending in the confinement of most Native Americans on reservations by the 1890s.
The “winning of the west,” as Theodore Roosevelt called it, shaped future U.S. conquests of nonwhites. Starting with the War of 1898, U.S. troops overseas referred to the enemy as “Indians” and called hostile territory “Indian country.” Eighty-seven percent of American generals who fought against Filipinos after 1898 were seasoned “Indian chasers.” Native American wars also produced land laws that would be redrafted for overseas possessions, drew a blueprint for the “Americanization” of foreign cultures, prepared U.S. military tacticians for guerrilla tactics, and inoculated enlisted men against the brutality of race war. In 1902 Elihu Root, corporate lawyer and soon-to-be secretary of state, justified taking the Philippines thusly: “Without the consent of hundreds of thousands of Indians whom our fathers found in possession of this land,” he said, “we have assumed and exercised sovereignty over them.” He prescribed the same for “the ignorant and credulous Filipinos.”
Policy makers after the Civil War were much less united in their desire for overseas possessions. Among the expansionists, Secretary of State William Henry Seward (1861–69) was a visionary. He understood that “political supremacy follows commercial ascendancy,” and argued against European-style colonization. His plan, rather, was to secure naval bases in the Pacific and a canal in the Caribbean to create a “highway” for U.S. commerce with Asia. Against those who derided Alaska as “Seward’s Icebox,” the secretary purchased the barren land from the Russians for $7.2 million in 1867. The same year he annexed the Midway Islands for a possible way station and cable point in the Asian trade.
Those who pressed to end the post—Civil War feud with London shared Seward’s imperial optimism. Many Americans remained outraged that British ships used by the Confederacy had destroyed or disabled about 250 Union ships, and they asked for millions in what were called the Alabama claims. Anti-British sentiments even ensured a GOP victory in 1872. Against this crowd, expansionists felt that settling these claims would strengthen the bonds of “Anglo-Saxonism.” Equally important, it would keep England and America out of each others empire. Eventually, deals struck in 1872 and 1893 resolved the claims peacefully. “I feel very strongly that the English-speaking peoples are now closer together than for a century and a quarter,” wrote a relieved Theodore Roosevelt to a friend.
Other expansionists issued calls for strengthening U.S. military power. After the Civil War, the Union army and navy demobilized and, by the 1880s, they respectively ranked a lowly thirteenth and twelfth in the world. The army was so depleted that even the Pinkerton Detective Agency was larger. In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, which convinced many that the path to global power lay with the military. In response, the navy, described by its secretary, John D. Long, in 1885 as “an alphabet of floating wash-tubs,” won appropriation after appropriation from the Congress until, by the end of the century, the United States ranked sixth in the world in battleships commissioned or under construction. All the while, officer colleges sprang up and the diplomatic corps grew more professional, ridding itself of its most embarrassing political appointees and finally using the rank of ambassador, as of 1893.
A countervailing force of antiexpansionists was more powerful in the Gilded Age than at any time since. Few of them, however, cited moral qualms against expansion. Instead, domestic politics motivated many objections. The House, for instance, refused to pass the Alaska appropriations in 1867 until it moved to impeach Johnson. Others thought overseas expansion too expensive. The New York Evening Post cited the “unprofitableness” of empire, and, in 1867, the Senate thought $7.5 million to be too steep a price for the Virgin Islands. When Seward moved on Hawai’i, the Senate defeated his treaty on the basis that it would hurt the tariff. Still others used racist arguments against empire. In 1869, when President Ulysses S. Grant negotiated the annexation of the Dominican Republic, opponents in the Senate countered that the United States could not absorb such a mixed-race people, and ratification fell short of the two-thirds needed.
The extraordinary industrial boom of the late nineteenth century fueled an expansionist surge. U.S. share of world trade climbed from 6 percent in 1868 to 16 percent in 1929, producing a century-long trade surplus starting in 1874. Transnational corporations such as Singer Sewing Machines and Eastman Kodak appeared in the 1880s, and industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Cyrus McCormick, and J. P. Morgan became shapers of foreign policy. By 1929, with only 6 percent of the worlds population, the United States accounted for about half of its industrial goods and gold reserves. The railroad, steamship, telephone, and transatlantic cable eroded the cherished insularity of Americans. In 1901 President William McKinley marveled at “how near one to the other is every part of the world. Modern inventions have brought into close relations widely separated peoples…. The world’s products are being exchanged as never before … isolation is no longer possible or desirable.”
Despite booms and busts affecting all regions—at century’s end, 70 to 80 percent of the South’s cotton was exported—until 1913 Republicans tended to favor Republican foreign policies and Democrats, Democratic ones. Diplomatic posts were largely political footballs. For instance, Republicans defeated an important Canadian fisheries agreement in 1888 because it had been reached by Democrats, and when Grover Cleveland gained the presidency—the only Democrat to do so during the Gilded Age—he rolled back Republican actions on a Nicaraguan canal (1885) and on the Congo (1885), Hawai’i (1893), and Samoa (1894). Regional interests also mattered, as when Republicans from the interior voted against a bigger navy while seacoast Democrats voted in favor.
The tariff was the most divisive partisan issue. High tariffs, erected during the Civil War to raise revenue, remained high afterward for protectionist reasons. Groups interested in the tariff were many and complex, but the general fault lines had the Republicans mostly in favor because they protected infant industries and held workers’ wages high, and the Democrats less in favor because high tariffs elicited countertariffs against crops such as cotton. Allegiances ebbed and flowed: industrialist Andrew Carnegie once said he got into the business of steel because its tariff was high, but by 1885 he argued for lowering tariffs to enable the purchase of cheap raw materials. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897 lowered rates somewhat, but U.S. rates remained far higher than those in Europe. The power of the tariff was a testament to the hold on foreign policy enjoyed by Congress in the nineteenth century.
Farmers also had their own foreign policies. To be sure, farmers shared in the export boom. But agrarian reformers organized as the Populist Party to protest farmers’ shrinking piece of the export pie and the downward pressure on prices exerted by agricultural powerhouses Russia, Canada, Argentina, and India. Populist sympathizers such as Democrat William Jennings Bryan wished to disengage from the world and merely stand as an example of “the glory that can be achieved by a republic,” and Populist leader Tom Watson railed that the War of 1898 benefited only the “privileged classes.” In the end, Populists faded partly because their signature foreign policy issue—the free coinage of silver—went down in flames with the defeat of Bryan as a presidential candidate in 1896 and the passage of the Gold Standard Act in 1900, which declared the gold dollar the only currency standard.
The year 1893 witnessed the most serious recession in U.S. history to that point, sparking crises whose solution would be perceived to be more, not less, expansion. Some industrialists reasoned that domestic consumers were too few to buy the nation’s output. As a result, many organized in 1895 into the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to promote exports. “We have the Anglo-Saxon thirst for wide markets growing upon us,” said NAM president Joseph C. Hendrix in 1898. Hendrix, like others, saw mounting threats: the workers might revolt; immigrants multiplied; Europeans raised tariffs; and a new power in the Far East, Japan, defeated China in 1895 and now threatened the greatest potential U.S. market. Fear of a “glut” in exports was exaggerated, but plenty of farmers and factory owners shared it.
Many also believed that land had run out. Although there remained millions of unclaimed acres on the mainland, historian Frederick Jackson Turners 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” fueled the crisis atmosphere by arguing that the disappearance of the frontier out West threatened the yeoman democracy and rugged individualism that graced American character. The solution, he said in 1896, was “a vigorous foreign policy … [and] the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries.”
Several groups heeded his words, starting with Protestant missionaries. In 1869 there had been only 16 American missionary societies. By 1900 there were 90, and by 1910, Americans outpaced even the British in financing missionaries. With the rise of Darwinian science, Protestant churches feared losing social status and compensated by sending thousands of missionaries abroad, the large majority to China. Their chief propagandist was Josiah Strong, a Congregationalist minister whose 1885 bestseller, Our Country, argued that the spread of American religion would advance the cause of American foreign policy. Protestants abroad exposed locals to U.S. goods and preached a morality that helped sell those goods, for instance, covering naked bodies with New England’s textiles. Hoping to produce what the Student Volunteers for Foreign Missions called “the Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” millions joined missionary societies in the United States. In 1890 women made up 60 percent of the movement. One woman explained that missionary work “should appeal to every broad-minded Christian woman who is interested in education, civics, sanitation, social settlements, hospitals, good literature, and the emancipation of children, the right of women to health, home and protection; and the coming of the Kingdom of our Lord.”
Just as missionary work filled a void in the 1890s, so did a renewed sense of racial superiority that arose from domestic developments. Social Darwinism had already raised the profile of racism in the United States, southern supremacists had encoded racial segregation for African Americans into law, and xenophobes warned of the “yellow peril” in the West. Americans now integrated visions of domestic and foreign race relations in the dozen or so international expositions of the Gilded Age. The World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, for instance, displayed all the supposed races of the world on its main strip, from least to most civilized, starting with Africans and moving on to Indonesians, Pacific Islanders, other Asians, on up the ladder to Anglo-Saxons. As the century turned, race justified expansion. “We are a conquering race,” argued Senator Albert Beveridge, Republican of Indiana. “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets, and, if necessary, new lands.”
But racism was not simply for conquering. The “White Man’s Burden,” as British poet Rudyard Kipling called it in 1899, posited a moral, paternalistic obligation to uplift inferior races. Theodore Roosevelt shared it fully, explaining “it is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains.” Race and racism, moreover, could be themselves changed by the experience of empire. Americans occupied the Philippines in 1898 with a racial ideology that held that Filipino “niggers” were unredeemable savages but then came out years later with a more subdued view that Filipinos had a “capacity” for self-government if properly directed.
Less obvious was the domestic crisis of gender. Late-century American men felt emasculated by urbanization and modern life. Roosevelt argued that adventures abroad could help men relive “the strenuous life.” “Over-sentimentality, oversoftness …, and mushiness are the great danger of this age and this people,” he complained. He wanted to revive “barbarian virtues” and yearned for a war that would do so. “You and your generation have had your chance from 1861 to 1865,” he told Civil War veteran and anti-imperialist Carl Schurz. “Now let us of this generation have ours!”
As if responding on cue to the domestic martial spirit, the United States fought Spain in 1898 and joined the club of great powers. “From a nation of shopkeepers we became a nation of warriors” is how Democratic Party boss Henry Watterson described the transition. However, while between 1870 and 1900 Great Britain added 4.7 million square miles to its empire and France added 3.5 million to its own, the United States annexed only 125,000. This was not because Americans were “reluctant” imperialists but because they preferred informal control of foreign lands rather than formal colonization.
The struggle over Cuba helped define the U.S. preference for informal empire. The explosion of the USS Maine and the death of 266 American sailors in February 1898 punctuated an already tense situation in which U.S. observers sympathized with Cubans rebelling against corrupt Spanish rule. Even after this tragedy, however, U.S. opinion was by no means united behind war. The “yellow press” and religious publications wanted war on nationalistic and humanitarian grounds, but others warned against the cost of fighting even a weak empire like Spain. U.S. planters in Cuba and trade journals back home were hawkish, but the American Federation of Labor (AFL) feared the islands cheap labor. President McKinley moved for war in April only after the Congress insisted on a promise of nonannexation though the Teller Amendment, named for Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, who acted to protect his state’s beet sugar from Cuba’s cane sugar. In the end, McKinley asked for war not to pander to a jingoistic public but to stop a Cuban revolution that could threaten U.S. property and to stem charges of cowardice from Democrats. The “splendid little war,” as Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt called it, ended quickly, prompting the New York Sun to declare, “We are all jingoes now,” and giving Washington control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. The Platt Amendment, strong-armed into the Cuban Constitution of 1901, gave oversight of the island’s foreign policy to the United States and confirmed the apparent wisdom of informal empire.
The war in the Philippines—the other major former Spanish colony—garnered far less consensus. Easily defeating Spain, the United States then entered into a years-long brutally racist guerrilla war with Filipino rebels, led by Emilio Aguinaldo. “Civilize ’em with a Krag,” went a popular army song, as Americans administered the “water cure” and other tortures to captured Filipinos. “I want no prisoners,” General Jacob Smith instructed his troops. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.” The war took 4,165 American lives and more than 200,000 Filipino lives. McKinley justified the carnage with a classic euphemism: “benevolent assimilation” meant the desire to uplift Filipinos through Americanization, a program that began in earnest after the war.
But while it lasted, the carnage stirred the period’s greatest domestic debate about foreign policy. Anti-imperialism made for strange bedfellows: writers and editors such as Mark Twain, E. L. Godkin, and William Dean Howells joined industrialists like Carnegie, social reformers like Jane Addams, the AFL’s Samuel Gompers, and politicians of both parties. Opponents formed the Anti-Imperialist League in Boston in June 1898, and its arguments largely reflected domestic politics. Civil rights leader Moorfield Storey, for instance, saw parallels between the treatment of Filipinos and African Americans; and women identified with Aguinaldo’s fury at being governed without his consent. Others feared “the incorporation of a mongrel and semibarbarous population into our body politic,” as a South Carolina senator expressed it. As one observer noted, all the posturing, abroad like at home, achieved little: “Democrats howling about Republicans shooting negroes in the Philippines and the Republicans objecting to Democrats shooting negroes in the South. This may be good politics, but it is rough on the negroes.”
Besides the takeover of Cuba and the Philippines, the War of 1898 had other important consequences. One was the annexation of Hawai’i. By the 1890s, planters, missionaries, navy planners, whalers, and traders on their way to China had long advocated U.S. control of the islands. A treaty from the mid-1870s boosting sugar made Hawaiians “practically members of an American Zollverein in an outlying district of the state of California,” said Secretary of State James G. Blaine. A believer in economic imperialism, Blaine championed annexation as “a purely American form of colonization.” By 1893 Americans made up only 5 percent of Hawai’i’s population but owned 65 percent of its land. That year, they led a coup against a strong-willed Queen Liliuokalani that paved the way for full annexation in the heat of the war with Spain, on August 12, 1898.
Hawai’i foreshadowed another consequence of 1898: the rising power of the executive. When McKinley could not carry two-thirds of the Senate for a Hawaiian treaty, he achieved it through a joint resolution, which required only simple majorities. McKinley and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, especially overpowered Congress in foreign policy. McKinley was the first chief executive with cabinet officers who had few political bases of their own and so were more loyal to him. He was also first to appoint a “secretary to the president,” who assumed the duties of today’s press secretary: holding daily meetings with reporters, issuing press releases, and putting together press scrapbooks. During the war, the president imposed harsh rules on war reporting and had three telegraph wires and 25 telephone lines running into the White House. With such expanded powers, McKinley took unprecedented license. He responded to Chinas Boxer Rebellion of 1900, for instance, by sending troops without congressional permission. Meanwhile, Roosevelt penned several “executive agreements” that could supplant treaties and circumvent Congress. It was not clear, however, if a stronger White House meant an expanded voice for the people in foreign policy. The Oval Office often defied popular sympathies, for instance, when it sided with the British in South Africa’s Boer War. And besides, McKinley and Roosevelt believed the president’s role was not to follow but to “educate,” in the style of the Progressive movement. To Roosevelt, public opinion was “the voice of the devil, or what is still worse, the voice of a fool.”
The Great War of 1914–18, more commonly known as World War I, sparked yet another debate, this one over U.S. involvement in Europe. Americans greeted the news of war with a reflexive reluctance, and as late as August 1917, one journalist assessed that two-thirds of the nation was still against the war. Antiwar groups included Irish Americans who hated the British Empire and German Americans who disapproved of fighting their Heimat (homeland). The Socialist Party made gains with its rhetoric of peace, and the Selective Service Act, or draft, passed the House by a slim margin of 199 to 178, with 52 abstentions. President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 with the motto “He Kept Us Out of War.” In fact, neutrality paid off: before they joined the war, Americans sold some $2.2 billion in arms to the British and their Allies.
Yet the moralistic internationalism advocated by Wilson and fellow progressives led logically to war. Herbert Croly, in his 1909 book The Promise of American Life, had linked progressivism to foreign relations by calling for a centralized Hamiltonian state, a stronger military, and lower tariffs that would promote democracy and capitalism abroad. When Wilson called for war in the spring of 1917, he articulated aims in the “fourteen points” speech of January 8, 1918. Its major principles included self-determination for small nations, freedom of the seas, reduction of armaments, adjustment of colonial claims, open treaties, and a vaguely defined League of Nations. “There are American principles, American policies,” explained the president. Wilson presented a democratic alternative to the specter of communism engulfing Russia as of 1917. “The spirit of the Bolsheviki is everywhere,” he warned.
Wilson’s democratic spirit was a hit with European audiences. Parisians lined their streets under banners that read “Vive Wilson’ and Italians welcomed him as the Redentore dell’Humanita (Redeemer of Humanity). But negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations faced opposition from European victors and crippling criticism at home. Republicans who now controlled the Senate organized as the “reservationists” and “irreconcilables.” The latter wanted nothing to do with the treaty or the league, while the former, headed by Henry Cabot Lodge, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, were wary of surrendering U.S. sovereignty. “Are you willing to put your soldiers and your sailors at the disposition of other nations?” Lodge asked rhetorically. Wilson refused to give Congress oversight over such matters and embarked on an 8,000-mile, 22-day, cross-country speaking tour that worked him into a paralyzing stroke. The tour was in vain. Congress kept the United States out of the treaty and the league.
War also affected domestic groups. African Americans “over here,” as the popular song called the homeland, still lived overwhelmingly in a South that lynched 382 of their own from 1914 to 1920, and met with hostility that often boiled over into race riots when they migrated to the North. Four hundred thousand joined the military but were assigned to camps often segregated with “whites only” signs. Leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois took a respite from encouraging “black nationality” among those of African descent and argued for standing “shoulder to shoulder” with whites in a common struggle for democracy. Du Bois organized a Pan-African Congress in conjunction with the Versailles conference, but his advocacy fell on deaf ears with the Great Powers. Women, too, mobilized for food campaigns, child welfare work, and Liberty bond and loyalty drives. “The Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun” is how one poster described their influence. For women, patriotism brought concrete political gain: the Nineteenth Amendment securing the vote was ratified in 1920.
For those not deemed patriotic enough, repression came swiftly. Respectively passed in 1917 and 1918, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act interpreted any criticism of the war as subversive, and as a result some German-born residents of the United States fell victim to vigilante mobs. In 1919 war’s end brought not only racial but labor strife. When terrorists exploded a bomb outside the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the state rounded up thousands of pacifists and labor leaders, leading to the deportation of more than 500 aliens. Even Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s standard-bearer, was imprisoned under Wilson, against whom he had run for the presidency in 1912.
Despite the rejection of European postwar settlements, the United States did not turn inward. Quite the contrary, it expanded its presence around the world, especially when unopposed by other Great Powers. Cultural and economic radiance were especially intertwined. Marketers spread the “American Dream” of material wealth, and exporters satisfied those urges with the automobile, motion pictures, and the radio. “Foreign lands are feeling the benefit of American progress, our American right thinking,” automaker Henry Ford believed. “Both Russia’s and China’s problems are fundamentally industrial and will be solved by the application of the right methods of thinking, practically applied.” Americans also sent themselves abroad; passport holders multiplied almost tenfold in the 1910s and 1920s. Finally, Americans increasingly imported the world’s goods. French salons, English libraries, Japanese designs, and folk objects from American Indians or Latin America became de rigueur in chic homes.
In the Caribbean area, however, imposing “right thinking” did not go smoothly. Especially after 1898, president after president sent U.S. troops to occupy Latin American ports, negotiate loans in exchange for financial supervision—an arrangement called “dollar diplomacy”—and remake what they perceived to be unstable political cultures into havens for U.S. security, foreign investment, and moral reform. In 1903, when Theodore Roosevelt encouraged the separation of Panama from Colombia through French and U.S. private promoters, it showed the convergence of the U.S. Navy’s need for a canal with American merchants’ desire for increased trade. The result was the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, built by a multinational workforce and managed by thousands of U.S. citizens living in a ten-mile-wide colony bisecting the Central American Isthmus.
The canal engendered another need: securing Caribbean routes leading to it. In 1904, when he signed an agreement with Dominicans to take over their customs houses, Roosevelt declared the need for the United States to exercise “international police power” in its “backyard.” Racist paternalism again mixed with security and business interests to send U.S. troops to invade Caribbean countries at least 34 times in the 30 years after 1903. Wilson’s interventions in the Mexican Revolution were especially contradictory, since he rejected conquest yet sent soldiers so that the Mexican government could “be founded on a moral basis.” A desire to minimize criticism of these adventures, especially by the “peace progressives” in Congress, led Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1920s and early 1930s to call for the end of military interventions, what FDR coined the Good Neighbor Policy.
Puerto Rico fit oddly into this pattern. U.S. troops took it over in 1898 but met no armed resistance. In 1900 the Foraker Act made the island an “unincorporated territory” led by a U.S.-appointed governor and subject to congressional laws, thus taking away Puerto Ricans’ independence but not granting them rights as U.S. citizens. In decisions from 1901 to 1910 known as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court ratified this state of legal limbo. In 1917 the Jones Act gave Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship—just in time to draft them into the war—but awarded the island neither statehood nor independence.
Immigration and foreign policy were closely related in 1865–1933 because defining citizenship was key to U.S. relationships with the world. So while the era was a high point for immigrants from Europe, it was not so for Asians. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning practically all Chinese from entering the United States and marking the first such restriction based on race or nationality. In 1907 Roosevelt signed a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Tokyo, sharply cutting back Japanese immigration in return for putting pressure on the California legislature not to segregate Japanese students. Such xenophobic actions went hand-in-hand with Jim Crow laws in that they relegated nonwhites to a separate, second-class citizenry. Meanwhile, “Americanization” movements aimed to assimilate Europeans into a “melting pot” that allowed them to minimize differences and emphasize their common whiteness.
The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 solidified this narrowing of citizenship. It established the first numerical limits for immigrants of every nation, nonwhites such as those from China and India being limited to 100 per year. Supreme Court decisions in the 1920s went further, barring Japanese and Asian Indians from claiming whiteness and therefore citizenship. Hardened racial lines created the “alien citizen,” or U.S. citizen now seen as alien by most Americans.
For Mexican Americans—the large majority of Latin American immigrants before the 1960s—the process was different but equally revealing of domestic politics. From 1900 to 1930, more than 1 million Mexicans came into the United States, nearly all to work in the fields of the Southwest. The 1924 law did not apply to Mexicans because farmers needed cheap labor, but by the late 1920s, calls for restriction grew more strident. Mexicans did compete for some jobs and housing with U.S. citizens, and were often called ignorant, dirty, lazy, and criminal. Ominously, the 1930 U.S. Census for the first time defined Mexicans as a separate race. When the Great Depression hit, the U.S. government forced half a million Mexicans in America, nearly one in five, back to their homeland.
The Depression caused a sharp downturn in U.S. engagement with the world. Exports declined 60 percent, and Americans virtually stopped investing overseas. In 1930 the protectionist wall, eroded slightly since Wilson, went back up with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Two years later, some 25 nations had retaliated. It would take another war in Europe to reinvigorate U.S. leadership in world affairs.
From the Civil War to the Great Depression, proponents and opponents of expansion tied themselves to the word Americanism, suggesting that they were expressing the best of the country’s values through its behavior abroad. That debate, perhaps more than anything, marked the era. Now that issues such as trade openness, military expansion, and immigration are again debated, the importance of defining America through its foreign relations speaks to the seminal nature of the 1865–1933 period.
See also Alaska and Hawai’i; Americanism; business and politics; Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico, interventions in, 1903–34; immigration policy; Latinos and politics; Native Americans and politics; race and politics; tariffs and politics.
FURTHER READING
Beisner, Robert L. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900. 2nd ed. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan-Davidson, 1986.
____. Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900. Chicago: Imprint, 1992.
Fry, Joseph A. “Phases of Empire: Late Nineteenth-Century U.S. Foreign Relations.” In The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun, 261–88. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996.
Gyory, Andrew. Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Hoganson, Kristin L. “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865–1920.” American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (February 2002), 55–83.
Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Iriye, Akira. The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad 1876–1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
Kramer, Paul. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
LaFeber, Walter. The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913. Vol. 2 of The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Love, Eric T. L. Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Offner, John L. “United States Politics and the 1898 War over Cuba.” In The Crisis of 1898: Colonial Redistribution and Nationalist Mobilization, edited by Angel Smith and Emma Dávila-Cox, 18–44. New York: St. Martins Press, 1999.
Renda, Mary. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1945–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Ricard, Serge, ed. An American Empire: Expansionist Cultures and Policies, 1881–1917. Aix-en-Provence, France: Groupe de Recherche et d’Études Nord-Américaines, 1990.
Rosenberg, Emily S. Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
____. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Skinner, Elliott P. African Americans and U.S. Policy toward Africa, 1850–1924: In Defense of Black Nationality. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992.
Wynn, Neil A. Prom Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986.
ALAN MCPHERSON
Bookended by moments of far-reaching global and national crisis, the period from 1933 through the early twenty-first century opened with the United States in economic depression and enforced retreat from the bold internationalism espoused by President Woodrow Wilson. The long-standing isolationism that dashed Wilsons global aspirations ended abruptly when the United States entered World War II, and when the country emerged from the war as the ascendant global power, with European colonialism collapsing in the wake of wartime challenges. After the Allied Forces’ victory over global fascism, the United States competed for the next 40 years with the Soviet Union for the hearts, minds, and resources of the more than 40 new nations then emerging from decades of European colonial rule. That history of conflict—of the aspirations of formerly colonized peoples seeking national independence, control of their resources, and an independent course for their economic development pitted against cold war policies—remains resonant. By the end of the U.S.-Soviet conflict, both sides had poured millions of dollars and tons of weapons into Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, setting the stage for contemporary ethnic conflicts and the rise of al-Qaeda and global terrorist groups. Moreover, by the early twenty-first century, the United States would be engaged in costly protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while facing the greatest national and global crisis since the Great Depression.
The United States emerged from World War II as the dominant military and economic power amid proclamations of the “American Century.” Several decades later, the demise of the Detroit automotive industry that had served as the nations arsenal during wartime would symbolize the end of American supremacy in manufacturing. Once the world’s wealthiest creditor, the United States became a debtor nation (with, in mid-2008, a national debt of $9.5 trillion and a federal budget deficit of $410 billion). The export of manufacturing jobs, the decline of the dollar in relation to foreign currencies, the nation’s dependency on foreign-produced oil, and the nation’s borrowing from China to finance its deficit spending have made connections between U.S. foreign policy and the nation’s domestic life and politics visible to many Americans. Many undoubtedly recall with nostalgia how the U.S. entry into World War II pulled the country out of a prolonged economic crisis. But other aspects of the relationship between foreign policy and the way Americans live have remained mysterious to many Americans. How many know, for example, that the unprecedented expansion of wealth in the 1950s and the benefits of a consumer society depended on U.S. domination of strategic and manufacturing resources?
Conceptualizations of connections between domestic politics and U.S. foreign relations—military, economic, and diplomatic—have changed dramatically over time. At moments defined by national crisis, such as restrictions on civil liberties during the cold war, or more recently, during the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks, the connection between domestic and foreign affairs seems abundantly clear. Less well known are the more routine socioeconomic ties that have historically bound the United States to foreign peoples and their societies. The material abundance of a domestic U.S. consumer society founded on cheap energy, industry’s access to raw materials, and foreign sweatshop labor has fostered in many Americans an innocence about the relationship between inflated military spending and a neglected national infrastructure and public sphere. Similarly, this innocence of past ties between foreign relations and domestic politics emerges in the unwillingness of anti-immigration forces to consider the impact of past U.S. foreign wars and economic policies as a catalyst for immigration. Yet it is impossible to consider U.S. politics and culture outside of the history of the United States on the world stage.
The relationship between U.S. foreign and domestic policy tends to enter the American political arena and public consciousness primarily in times of war or crisis, while significant realms and operations of U.S. power remain on the periphery of public discourse and awareness. One reason is that some momentous foreign policy actions were carried out covertly, such as the 1953 CIA overthrow of the Iranian elected government of Muhammad Musaddiq and the installation of Shah Reza Pahle-vi’s U.S.-friendly dictatorship. Beyond this, the actions of powerful nonstate actors who are nonetheless sanctioned or promoted by the government—from the Hollywood film industry in the twentieth century, which accepted State Department guidelines for cinematic content in exchange for the global distribution of films, to corporations contracted to secure the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq—remain hidden to most Americans, and beyond the reach of U.S. legal and regulatory authority.
Although contemporary historians of the United States have vigorously challenged earlier tendencies to separate the foreign and domestic spheres and have raised awareness of America’s intricate global connections, the story of the post-World War II economic boom, demographic and social shifts such as the growth of the suburbs, the population shift to the Sun Belt, and the unprecedented material affluence experienced by that generation of Americans is often told without considering how profoundly these shifts depended on U.S. policies that aggressively promoted a globally integrated, U.S.-led capitalist economy. Americans simply would not have had the automobiles, refrigerators, and air conditioning that enabled these massive demographic shifts without ready Western access to resources in southern Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The growth of commercial air travel would not have developed without cobalt, an essential material for jet engines. Like uranium, diamonds (without which computers could not operate), and countless other metals, the vast majority of cobalt reserves were in southern Africa. Then, as now, the classic American freedom of the open road depended on Middle Eastern oil production. The 1970s energy crisis exposed U.S. oil dependence, a dependency again well in evidence as the world market price of oil and unprecedented gas prices reached new highs in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Global dependencies structured daily consumption as well as fundamental economic and social shifts. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans consumed millions of frozen TV dinners, no doubt for the most part unaware of the origins of the aluminum tins in Jamaican bauxite mines, acquired during World War II by the U.S.-based Reynolds Metals corporation; the fried chicken processed under the dismal working and living conditions of the undocumented immigrants in southern poultry farms; and the fruit dessert harvested by migrant farm workers in the West. Today, the U.S. presence within a web of global labor relations, including past and present wars and global entanglements, is reflected in myriad seemingly mundane consumer decisions such as whether to order Vietnamese or Cambodian food for takeout. Many American cultural and culinary tastes are shaped by the history of the nation’s expansive global involvement, as well as its high consumption of energy and natural resources.
In 1933 the global economic depression temporarily stalled America’s earlier imperial expansions and disrupted the Wilsonian project of making the world safe for American democracy and institutions. During World War I, Wilson had waged explicit and fierce economic competition with America’s military allies, and changed the United States from a debtor nation to a creditor nation with legislation that freed U.S. banks and corporations from Progressive Era restrictions. The establishment of the Federal Reserve and its central banking system provided U.S. industries with a competitive global advantage. Wilson’s missionary zeal for reshaping the world in America’s image was further reflected in his response to the 1917 Russian revolution and Vladimir Lenin’s call for a worldwide revolution against imperial powers. In response to Lenin, Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech offered an anticolonial politics that challenged Europe’s privileged access to markets and investment.
Compelled to focus on the domestic crisis of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt also looked outward as the first president to recognize the Soviet Union, and through his attempts in the face of isolationist opposition to build new alliances in aiding opponents of Japanese and German aggression. World War II sparked social conflict within the United States, notably in the forced internment of Japanese American citizens and in the widespread white resistance to the movement of African Americans into cities and the West with the opening of factories and jobs. At the same time, the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union enabled a second flowering of the popular front culture of the 1930s, as leftist-inspired labor and social movements vigorously debated the appropriate character of U.S. internationalism. The period of World War II through the early cold war marked the ascendance of the United States as a global superpower at precisely the moment that European colonialism collapsed, and in the midst of a related cold war with the Soviet Union. Both superpowers struggled to win the allegiance and resources of formerly colonized peoples. Many Americans, including such black radicals as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, and Roosevelt’s first vice president, Henry Wallace (the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 election), envisioned a worldwide New Deal in which future peace and prosperity hinged on ending colonialism and raising the standard of living of colonized peoples as well as continued cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Others revived the ambitious Wilsonian internationalism of World War I to argue that the priority in a new American-led internationalism was the safety of American investments and Americas access to resources needed for economic growth. For Time-Life publisher Henry Luce and his allies, the “American Century” would usher in a world where American values, culture, and consumer products peacefully conquered the world. This vision profoundly influenced U.S. wartime and postwar objectives, as U.S. policy makers envisioned an American-led, globally integrated capitalist economy. Committed to ensuring the West’s privileged access to the world’s markets, industrial infrastructure, and raw materials, this group embraced President Harry Truman’s ambitious declaration that the United States had the right and responsibility to intervene in external and internal threats everywhere across the globe.
Scholars generally agree that despite Joseph Stalin’s notorious brutality toward the Soviet people, the Soviet Union was not expansionist in the early years of the cold war, forced instead to rebuild internally after the enormous casualties and destruction of infrastructure during World War II. (This would change dramatically in the 1960s under Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who declared support for national liberation movements worldwide.) Yet at the end of World War II, with conservatives throughout Europe tarnished by collaborations with the Nazis, and Communists and Socialists hailed as the core of resistance to fascism, the European left emerged from the war greatly strengthened, and anticapitalist ideologies had enormous appeal for anticolonial movements. In the eyes of many U.S. policy makers, this represented a serious threat to American economic and political objectives.
The Truman Doctrine, announced before Congress on March 12, 1947, specifically funded beleaguered anti-Communist governments in Greece and Turkey but more broadly asked Americans to accept the “great responsibilities” entailed in a global struggle against communism. The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations and the Loyalty Oath declared the criticism of American foreign policy beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. The cold war repression of political dissent intensified during the early 1950s, under the leadership of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who used the spotlight of nationally televised hearings to promote the idea of a conspiracy of Communists who had infiltrated the nation’s foreign policy establishment. McCarthy’s witch hunts had a far-reaching, intimidating influence on critical institutions such as the press and education from the elementary to university level, and in setting up a bipartisan cold war foreign policy consensus.
After decades of careful documentation of cold war repression within the United States, some scholars have more recently contended that the cold war’s impact on the narrowing of political and cultural expression has been overemphasized. Certainly, some social processes and intellectual and political traditions transcended cold war divides. But a fundamental issue remains: despite sometimes heated debates over strategy, such as Eisenhower’s critique of Truman’s execution of the Korean war, the United States consolidated its position as the world’s dominant power largely without scrutiny of means or ends. For 20 years following the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the ruling assumptions and objectives of American foreign policy to contain communism went unopposed in Congress or within any significant sector of the American people. The substantially narrowed anti-Communist political discourse during the 1950s helped account for the episodic nature of American citizens’ engagement with foreign affairs, as well as the explosive social conflict that occurred in the 1960s. Most important, the institutional patterns of secrecy and lack of democratic accountability established in the early cold war years posed profound challenges to not only the broader vibrancy of a democratic culture where citizens feel engaged and empowered in matters that affect their lives, but the most basic tenets of liberal procedural democracy.
The leading international alternative to the cold war’s bipolar vision of global politics, the nonaligned movement of newly independent Afro-Asian nations, had little traction within U.S. politics. The most far-reaching demands for political and economic equality of the World War II era, including the linking of civil rights to anticolonial struggles abroad, were abruptly altered and in many cases thoroughly repressed in the early cold war. While such radical advocates of anticolonialism as Robeson and DuBois were prosecuted and had their passports seized, others, such as the NAACP’s Walter White, became architects of a new anti-Communist liberalism, promoting an anticolonialism that was justified by anticommunism, arguing that the abuses of colonialism opened the doors to Communists and that Asia and Africa must remain in the Western orbit.
Despite strong rhetoric denouncing the abuses of domestic racism, such as Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson’s warning that the United States could not neglect the “international implications of civil rights violations,” advocates for civil rights and desegregation found the range of debate sharply constrained, despite the Truman administrations unprecedented endorsement of a civil rights agenda. Truman’s embrace of civil rights acknowledged Acheson’s understanding of civil rights as a national security issue. But in focusing more on the cold war than on civil rights, Truman presided over the contraction of public debate and the collapse of the left during the early cold war years. As early as 1946, with the formation of Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, White and others began to craft the dominant argument of the anti-Communist civil rights liberals. The new argument seized on international criticism, in the world press, of American racism to argue that antidiscrimination measures were vital for the United States in its struggle against communism. The dominant liberal argument against racial segregation, using anticommunism to justify the fight against racism and for civil rights, conceded the high ground to anticommunism.
Scholars have traced a powerful remobilization of business between 1946 and 1948, which afforded anti-Communist labor leaders power within the circles of the corporate elite and blocked the radical social agenda of labor and civil rights evident during World War II. The growing conservatism of the labor movement and the narrowing of labor’s agenda had a critical impact on global politics. As Communists and progressives were expelled from unions in America, American labor supported anti-Communist unions abroad even when that meant collaborating with former Nazis and other fascists. In 1949 CIO unions left the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and both the AFL and CIO took the lead in setting up the new anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. CIO support for African labor during World War II had been an important feature of the globally inflected civil rights activism that had also supported anticolonial movements. But after the CIO’s departure from the WFTU, the role of U.S. labor in Africa, as well as in the well-documented European cases, would be filtered through a close collaboration between the AFL-CIO (under director George Meany) and the State Department—with covert support from the CIA.
The debate over the significance of the cold war in shaping American politics rests in part on the very definition of the term cold war. To grasp the implications of U.S. cold war policies it is necessary to look beyond the bipolar U.S.-Soviet conflict. From the U.S. entry into World War II through the early cold war, the United States ascended as the hegemonic power while competing with the Soviet Union for the allegiance and resources of formerly colonized peoples. In theory, colonialism had no place in the vision of American democratic capitalism. U.S. policy makers not only objected to the resources and markets that colonialism afforded the European powers but also came to see American race relations as the Achilles’ heel in the cold war battle for hearts and minds overseas, and sought to distinguish themselves from European colonizers.
Thus, for the most part, U.S. policy makers did not seek to take over European models of colonialism as they withered in the face of anticolonial challenges and the straitened conditions of wartime. Asserting instead the right of the United States to lead the “free world,” they pursued global economic integration through modernization and development. American policy makers committed themselves to making sure that the West had privileged access to the world’s markets, industrial infrastructure, and raw materials. And like the Wilsonian promotion of self-determination that had no trouble reconciling the invasions of Haiti and Mexico when U.S. interests and investments were at stake, policy makers in the post-1945 period interpreted democracy to mean capitalism first and foremost, and consistently supported dictatorships friendly to capitalism over democratically elected nationalist governments in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East or U.S. economic imperialism in Latin America.
In the face of persistent attempts by formerly colonized peoples to regain control of their resources, U.S. policy makers made repeated use of (often covert) military force; the “cold” war was in fact a bloody and protracted conflict for the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, where democratic challenges often met with violent suppression by either U.S. proxies, covert operatives, or both. By the mid-1950s, the CIA had already carried out covert actions to oust elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala, and by the mid-1960s, had waged counterinsurgencies in Indonesia, Syria, the Congo, Cuba, Guyana, and Vietnam. Certainly many policy makers viewed these actions as a necessary evil. The “common sense” of covert action depended on a worldview of the Soviet Union as a dangerous enemy that fundamentally threatened “the American way of life.” But in confronting a seemingly ubiquitous Soviet threat, American policy makers repeatedly conflated nationalism and communism. Moreover, U.S. opposition to leaders throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America often reflected ethnocentric and paternalistic assessments of non-Western leaders that prohibited American policy makers from viewing them as independent political agents. From the CIA overthrow of Muhammad Musaddiq in Iran to the ouster and assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, U.S. officials tended to see leaders in these regions as pawns or potential pawns of the Soviets. Despite the complexity of Americas global relationships, when control over crucial strategic resources such as oil and uranium were at stake American officials brooked no ambiguity in assessing the allegiances of national leaders.
The enormous reach of U.S. foreign policy entailed highly porous boundaries between the government and purportedly private corporations and cultural industries. As the Soviet Union sent classical orchestras and ballet companies around the world and the United States responded with jazz, dance, and other cultural forms, the circulation of culture became part of the cold war battle for hearts and minds. The United States Information Agency produced and distributed films, radio programs, and vast numbers of pamphlets and news releases aimed at showing the world the superiority of the American way of life and American democracy. By 1955 the Voice of America brought American music and culture to an estimated 30 million people in more than 80 countries. In the next decade, that number would triple. The State Department sponsored cultural presentations involving a multitude of artists, from jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie to dancers and choreographers Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, and Paul Taylor to the Cleveland Orchestra, high school marching bands, and rhythm and blues and soul groups. While such tours were highly publicized, the CIA clandestinely funded cultural institutions from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to radio, newspapers, and the motion picture industry. Touring jazz ensembles closely followed an itinerary tracking the cold war commodities of oil and uranium; some appearances occurred practically simultaneously with U.S. backed coups and interventions. As the U.S. government courted neocolonial elites, musicians traveled with remarkable frequency to places where the CIA operated, from Iran and Iraq to the Republic of the Congo to other areas of America’s northern perimeter defense zone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey.
As the U.S. government secured access to oil for American companies by means from coups to concerts, precursors of Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, and Mobil exported U.S. segregationist race relations in their worker-management relations throughout the Western hemisphere. In the segregated workforces the oil companies assembled in Mexico and Venezuela, workers were paid differently according to race. These same companies owned the conglomerate Arabian American Oil Company, which styled itself as a private enterprise version of the Marshall Plan as it extended such arrangements into former parts of the British and French empires, transplanting segregationist labor and housing laws to the oil fields and refineries of Saudi Arabia, where Arab workers labored under Jim Crow—style discrimination.
As these private enterprises thrived throughout Central America and the Middle East, in the many areas where the accelerated anticolonial activity of World War II carried into armed conflict between independence movements and colonial powers, ultimately the United States nearly always backed up its colonial allies when they faced challenges to their rule. Only in rare cases—such as Indonesia, where the United States judged the Dutch to be so intransigent as to be driving the Indonesians into the hands of the Communists, and the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, in which the United States defied Britain and France and eventually forced them to withdraw troops they had amassed to challenge Gamel Abdel Nasser after he nationalized the canal—did the United States directly challenge its European allies in matters of colonial control.
The case of America’s longest war, in Vietnam, starkly illustrates the tendency of the United States to ultimately back up its colonial allies. Historians have struggled to explain America’s participation in the Vietnam War, a war that would shape the character of American politics and society for decades to come. Scholars have analyzed the war as an inevitable by-product of cold war assumptions and even as an example of the sheer excess of liberal cold war ideology. While both of these views are important, historians have less often considered the war as an ill-advised by-product of the U.S. commitment to colonial France. With the United States initially sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary nationalism, when the French government of General Charles de Gaulle found itself both embattled by the Communist left and incapable of defending its colonial empire, the United States reversed its position and came to its aid, propping up successive South Vietnamese governments tottering precariously atop an inherited colonial state structure.
In his Farewell Address, President Dwight Eisenhower expressed concern that what he labeled “the military industrial complex” might imperil American democratic institutions. Over time, antiwar critics would extend this observation to charge that America had overinvested in military sectors at the expense of basic industry, manufacturing, and infrastructure. The most radical critics of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War linked the war to U.S. imperialism throughout the globe.
Scholars have discussed the irony of a government defending democracy from communism by creating a secret government accountable to no one. Certainly, the fact that so much U.S. foreign policy remained under the radar in the early cold war—such as the order by John F. Kennedy to depose President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in 1961, and the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident that led President Lyndon Johnson to ratchet up U.S. intervention in the war—contributed enormously to the outrage of the 1960s antiwar movement, as many Americans who had generally trusted their government and shared in the hopeful optimism projected by Kennedy began to discover that they did not have the whole story, and indeed, had been lied to. In 1965 high school students in Des Moines, Iowa, braved suspension and even death threats by wearing black armbands in an antiwar demonstration. Four years later the Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment Rights of students (and teachers) at school. Americans inundated by humanitarian appeals to sponsor impoverished children because poverty would lead them to communism now saw those children slaughtered by American troops. In 1967, the year of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, Americans also learned that the CIA had illegally funded such American organizations as the National Students Association and the American Society of African Culture, in addition to a multitude of foreign cultural organizations.
By 1968 the violence—whether covert or military—that had become integral to the pursuit of U.S. objectives abroad seemed endemic in U.S. society as well. In February of that year, police fired on African American students protesting segregation in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Domestic and international opposition to U.S. participation in the Vietnam War became a polarizing force, further undermining the liberal consensus for civil rights reform, fracturing the Democratic Party and sowing the seeds for the demise of the New Deal Coalition and the rise of the New Right. Martin Luther King Jr.’s antiwar speech on April 4, 1967, and his opposition to racism, poverty, and militarism divided the civil rights movement. In 1968 the unpopular war had forced President Johnson to withdraw his campaign for reelection. The assassination of King, and shortly afterward of Robert Kennedy, the leading antiwar contender for the Democratic nomination for president, hurled the nation into chaos.
President Richard M. Nixon, who parlayed the nation’s racial and antiwar conflicts to gaining the presidency in 1968, ordered the expansion of the conflict to Laos and the secret bombing of Cambodia. The term imperial presidency usually refers to Nixon’s use of unchecked executive power in his conduct of American involvement in the war, and his disregard for legislative oversight. The Watergate scandal, caused by the administration’s cover-up of the burglary of Democratic National Committee offices before the 1972 presidential campaign, proved to be Nixon’s undoing. He resigned when his claims of executive privilege on the withholding of evidence related to Watergate were rejected by the Supreme Court. And by firing Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor appointed by Congress, who investigated the scandal, Nixon had outraged critics by causing a constitutional crisis. To be sure, Nixon was a complex figure, a paranoid and mean-spirited politician eager to destroy his critics on the eve of his 1972 reelection campaign, but also an astute statesman whose policy of detente opened up relations with the China and the Soviet Union. But the view of Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger that managing superpower relations was the key to resolving all global conflicts extended the cold war conflation of nationalism and communism and failed its greatest test in Vietnam. The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy favored aggressive protection of U.S. access to key strategic and economic resources at the expense of democratic governments and movements. The administration supported military dictatorship in Pakistan in its war with India and its genocide in Bangladesh. Nixon supported the right wing dictatorship of Portugal in its colonial war in Angola, and backed white supremacist governments of southern Africa. Nixon and Kissinger also directed CIA support for the bloody 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist president of Chile. The coup, led by General Augusto Pinochet, killed more than 3,000, including Allende himself. Pinochet’s military dictatorship, marked by detention, torture, and murder, lasted until 1990.
Nixon’s use of executive power led to demands for transparency and congressional oversight. The War Powers Act (1973), passed over Nixon’s veto, called for congressional authorization of the president’s deployment of the armed forces. After a series of revelations, including the U.S. Army surveillance of civilians and covert CIA activities reported by Seymour Hersh in 1975, a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) unearthed extensive information on covert intelligence and counterinsurgency programs, including FBI domestic surveillance and CIA operations, plots to assassinate foreign leaders ordered by presidents, and a shared CIA-FBI program involving the surveillance of the mail of American citizens. The Church Committee inspired regulatory restraints, including an executive ban on U.S.-sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders. In addition, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) established court procedures and oversight for surveillance of foreign intelligence agents. The Church Committee’s efforts to impose limits on the CIA and executive authority were strongly resisted by President Gerald Ford’s advisors, including Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld.
The fact that Congress never debated, voted on, or declared an official U.S. war in Vietnam meant that its financing was concealed from public oversight. The high cost of the war led to the “stagflation” and economic crisis of the 1970s, unveiling longer patterns of global interdependence. The 1973 oil embargo led by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the cartel of oil-producing nations, unmasked America’s dependence on foreign oil. The triple shocks of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the oil crisis revealed the Western Fordist industrial economy to be in precipitous decline, with shrinking social welfare benefits for workers in Western industrial societies and the rise of new transnational corporations and financial institutions with rapidly diminishing accountability to states and nations. The long-term U.S. economic dependence on the extraction of raw materials in dangerous and exploitative conditions may not have been apparent to most Americans, but the loss of 500,000 auto jobs between 1978 and 1982, leading to widespread hardship, was highly visible.
Popular discontent at the failure in Vietnam, economic troubles, and the exposure of government improprieties led to the election of Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1978. Carter advocated U.S. foreign policy guided by concern for human rights and urged Americans to accept limits to the easy access to resources that many had taken for granted. Leading by example, Carter promoted energy conservation as a means of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil. Carter’s challenges to the American public provoked a backlash. And to many, Carter appeared generally inept at foreign policy, powerless to stop the erosion of the gains of detente and the escalation of the cold war as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and stepped up support for leftist governments and opposition groups. In 1979 the Iranian Revolution sent the U.S.-backed shah into exile, creating a vacuum filled by the Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini. When young Iranian militants seized 52 U.S. diplomats as hostages, Carter staged a military rescue mission that failed. While Carter brokered the hostages’ release before the end of his term, the 444-day national ordeal had doomed his reelection campaign.
Republican Ronald Reagan ran on two simple premises: getting the “monkey of government” off people’s back and restoring U.S. might and right. Although Reagan ran against big government, his administration increased military spending while scaling back the welfare state.
During the 1980s, with the nation deeply divided over U.S. foreign policy, the Reagan administration accelerated the cold war, particularly through support of anti-Communist counterinsurgencies in Latin America. Through the continuing and new proxy wars of the 1980s, the Reagan administration supported right-wing insurgencies in El Salvador and Nicaragua. When the Boland Amendment blocked Reagan’s support of the contras in Nicaragua, the White House, led by National Security Council staff member Lieutenant Oliver L. North, secretly funneled support to the contras as they sought to overthrow the democratically elected Sandinistas. The disclosure of North’s “shadow government” led to the Iran-Contra Affair, in which North diverted to the contras the proceeds of arms sales to moderates in Iran in exchange for the release of Americans held hostage there.
Ironically, as a president who presided over a dramatic escalation of the cold war, Reagan ended his second term benefiting from Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s campaign of Glasnost and Perestroika—political openness and economic reform—and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of Communist governments in the Eastern Bloc states led to profound changes in global politics. While activists demanded a “peace dividend” of investment in domestic social programs, in 1989 one commentator, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed “the end of history” marked by the universal triumph of Western liberal democracy and the demise of all ideological alternatives. Many U.S. policy makers shared Fukuyama’s thesis and believed that the fall of Communist states vindicated the values of free-market capitalism. But this triumphalist view of the cold war mitigated against an examination of failed policies on all sides of the conflict. Many have tended to view present dangers with nostalgia for the supposed stability of the cold war era. But one cannot neatly classify the wars and challenges of the twenty-first century as those of a distinct post—cold war moment with entirely new dynamics. State and nonstate wars, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, political violence in Africa, and the “war on terror” all suggest the limitations of Fukuyama’s bipolar cold war perspective.
The Reagan administration opposed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan by supporting the anti-Soviet Mu-jahadeen fighters in that country (including Osama bin Laden). Reagan also enlisted Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein as an ally against Iran after the overthrow of the shah of Iran. The arming of Africa and the Middle East by the United States and Soviet Union, and the dubious alliances between western powers and third world “strongmen,” contributed to continued instability in Africa and later electoral victories of leftist governments in Latin America, including those of Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The alliance with Pakistan in the “war on terror” was part of a longer history of U.S. military support for Pakistan that reaches back to partition and U.S hostility toward India and its nonaligned foreign policy.
The George W. Bush administration’s responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq not only marked a return to the government secrecy of the cold war but also deployed U.S. armed forces in the region where the United States first engaged in cold war—era covert operations. Some of the ardent cold warriors of the Reagan era, including Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, resurfaced in the administration of George W. Bush, implementing their “ends justify the means” vision of unchecked executive power in the pursuit of war and intelligence gathering. The publication of photographs taken by U.S. troops engaging in the torture of detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq sparked public outrage and congressional scrutiny. Further investigations revealed that despite widespread opposition within the administration itself; from members of Congress in both parties; and from people within the Justice Department, the State Department, and the CIA, a small but powerful group led by Vice President Dick Cheney extended a network of secret prisons and secret torture unprecedented in U.S. history in its scope and disregard for both the U.S. Constitution and international law.
In a sense, every presidential election since the end of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War has served as a referendum on American foreign policy and America’s place in the world. The crises of the early twenty-first century suggest that the country has yet to overcome the institutionalized patterns of secrecy and lack of democratic accountability established in the early cold war years. Many have argued that such patterns have profoundly damaged democratic institutions within the United States. For many citizens and elected officials, the use of torture, the erosion of civil liberties, and widespread electoral fraud of the 2000 and 2004 elections called into question the legitimacy of the electoral system, the basic functioning of procedural democracy, and the survival of the Constitution. Some hoped that the severity of the crisis would present a historic opportunity to restore transparency and democratic accountability, and to rethink U.S. foreign policy, the country’s dependence on global resources, and the future of the United States in a multilateral world.
See also anticommunism; globalization; immigration policy; war and politics.
FURTHER READING
Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: The Cold War and Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Saunders, Frances Stoner. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 1999.
Schmitz, David F. The United States and Right Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
____. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
PENNY M.VON ESCHEN
The Free Soil Party was an organization founded in 1848 to oppose the spread of slavery into the territories the United States had acquired in the recently concluded war against Mexico. Believing that, constitutionally, it could not challenge slavery in the existing slave states, the party supported the Wilmot Proviso, then under debate in Congress, to contain slavery within its existing boundaries. As a third party, it attempted to force Democrats and Whigs to stop catering to the interests of what it called the “Slave Power,” which demanded that slavery be legal in all territories.
The treaty ending the Mexican-American War, ratified by the Senate in February 1848, resulted in the acquisition of vast new southwestern territories that included California and expanded American boundaries westward from Texas and the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific. During the war, Representative David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, had proposed prohibiting slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. Although approved by the northern-dominated House, the proviso stalled in the Senate and debate raged as the presidential campaign began. When the conventions of both the Democratic and Whig parties refused to include Wilmot Proviso planks in their platforms, factions of both organizations seceded and joined with the small abolitionist Liberty Party to form the Free Soil Party at a mass convention in Buffalo attended by close to 20,000 people.
The Liberty Party, which had formed in 1840, joined the Free Soilers somewhat reluctantly, since its members stood for total abolition and considered joining those who sought only to contain slavery to be a sacrifice of principle. They were especially concerned that the new party was led by a former proslavery Democrat, Martin Van Buren. Yet most in the Liberty Party accepted the decision of their party leaders, knowing that a larger political organization would bring greater influence. Led by Salmon P. Chase and Gamaliel Bailey of Ohio, and joined by Massachusetts and New York Liberty men, the party attracted a more idealistic element and added the support of such leaders as poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Joshua Leavitt, and John P. Hale. Many Liberty women, including editor Jane Grey Swisshelm of Pittsburgh, added their support, even though they were denied the ballot. All worked strenuously and enthusiastically during the campaign. The party received its most enthusiastic support in New York, Massachusetts, and northeastern Ohio.
Under the leadership of Chase, the delegates adopted a platform calling for a host of reforms but stressing the Wilmot Proviso. They also called for a homestead bill, protective tariffs, and federal aid for internal improvements, and concluded with the slogan “FREE SOIL, FREE SPEECH, FREE LABOR, and FREE MEN.” The delegates chose a ticket of former president Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, son of the recently deceased John Quincy Adams, a longtime opponent of the war. The platform was silent on the issue of racial equality because many party members opposed extending civil rights to African Americans; yet many free blacks still endorsed it, including Frederick Douglass. For them, the Free Soil Party was the only viable alternative to proslavery candidates Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass and a continuation of Slave Power influence. Despite Liberty reluctance over Van Buren as the candidate, Leavitt concluded, “The Liberty party is not dead, but translated.” Many antislavery Democrats and Whigs resisted joining, however, fearing the loss of political influence in a party unlikely to be competitive. This group included Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Hannibal Hamlin, Thaddeus Stevens, and Benjamin Wade.
Late in organizing and low in campaign funds and editorial support, the third party was unable to resist the strength of Democratic and Whig organizations. It faced the inevitable charge that a vote for a third party was not only a wasted vote but in fact aided one of the two major parties by drawing support away from the other. The Free Soil Party gained only 10 percent of the vote in an election that placed Mexican-American War hero General Zachary Taylor in the White House. Although it won a dozen seats in the House and soon placed Chase and Charles Sumner in the Senate, the party proved unable to withstand the lure of political power and the trend toward North-South compromise in 1849 and 1850. Many members returned to their original parties. Especially damaging was the defection of the Van Burenites, who surrendered their antislavery principles and rejoined the New York Democratic Party.
The Free Soilers struggled in 1852 in reduced form with a presidential ticket of John P. Hale of New Hampshire and George W. Julian of Indiana, winning only half of their 1848 total. Without most of its Democratic component, the party was a more principled organization but proved incapable of countering the Democratic and Whig argument that the Compromise of 1850 had settled the important sectional issues.
A lull in sectional agitation, interrupted by fugitive slave rescues and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was shattered in 1854, when Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, proposed his Kansas-Nebraska bill repealing the Missouri Compromise ban on territorial slavery above 36°3o′ north latitude. With their key leaders, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, dead, the Whigs offered only ineffective opposition to the Douglas bill, and their decline accelerated. Northerners, seeking a new, more effective antislavery party, responded with the Republican Party, with Free Soilers Chase, Sumner, and Joshua Giddings of Ohio in the lead. The new party fought off a challenge from the anti-immigrant American Party (the Know-Nothing Party), and, by 1855, emerged as a member of the two-party system. In its first presidential campaign in 1856, the party platform stressed the Wilmot Proviso concept and succeeded in winning the support of many antislavery politicians who had earlier rejected the Free Soil Party, including Lincoln, Seward, Hamlin, Stevens, and Wade. When the party won its first presidential election four years later, with a ticket headed by Lincoln and Hamlin, it did so with a containment of slavery platform closely resembling that of the Free Soilers in 1848. Thus, as the country teetered on the brink of civil war, the founders of the party could claim with justification that Northerners had finally realized the need to challenge the Slave Power’s control over the federal government and prevent the spread of slavery.
See also American (Know-Nothing) Party; Whig Party.
FURTHER READING
Blue, Frederick J. The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–54. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Morrison, Chaplain W. Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Rayback, Joseph G. Free Soil: The Election of 1848. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970.
Richards, Leonard L. The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
Sewell, Richard H. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
FREDERICK J. BLUE