60 ChaPter 2
powerful but not militarily strong country like the U.S.—could profit from
commerce with those colonial areas.
Prior to actually invading other lands, liberal American theorists, similar to
the “experts” who appear on talk shows today, created the ideas that would
motivate expansion and imperialism. Some argued that it was America’s
Christian duty to bring salvation and order to non-white peoples [similar to
“Manifest Destiny” in the 1840s]; others advocated “Social Darwinism,” which
was the idea that the most “civilized country,” the U.S., would, naturally, move
abroad and take over weaker societies. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan believed
that the United States had to create a large navy and acquire bases all over in
order to protect American merchant ships as they expanded into new markets.
Most importantly, there were economic reasons for expansion, especially over-
production and surplus capital. To many politicians, bankers and industrialists,
overproduction had to be addressed immediately. It was the result of chang-
es in technology and organization [the rise of corporations], which made it
easier and less expensive to produce both industrial goods and agricultural
commodities—too many to be consumed inside the United States, in fact.
Others, like financial expert and influential banker Charles Conant were con-
cerned that there was too much surplus capital, money that was basically just
“sitting there” and not being invested into new enterprises. If capital was not
continually reinvested, if it was stagnant, the economy would go flat. American
financial men had been buying up European securities—investments that
wealthy men and bankers from England, France, German and elsewhere had
earlier purchased in the U.S.—and thus had more money than ever. As
Conant and many others saw it, Asia would be an excellent place to create
“empire” and use that capital to create new economic opportunities, much
like the “globalization” period of the 1990s and early 21st Century. The need
to find new markets where American merchants could sell the goods brought
on by overproduction and where bankers and others could invest surplus
capital were then, and would remain, the most important motivation for U.S.
involvement internationally from that point onward.
Before the 1890s, many Americans had already gone abroad, especially
Christian missionaries who moved to other countries to convert the local
people but opened up business and became prosperous capitalists. In Hawai’i,
for example, missionaries in the early 1800s were trying to convert, or “civi-
lize,” the natives but realized that there was great wealth to be made in the