170 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The expansion of American trade and military activity
abroad in the 1890s prompted a sustained debate
about the nation’s foreign commitments. To be sure,
the nation had been entangled with affairs beyond its
borders since its birth. With the Louisiana Purchase,
the war against Mexico, and the nineteenth-century
Indian wars, the United States had engaged with
foreign powers and extended its territorial domain.
But in each of these cases, this growth had been
limited to North America. By contrast, in the 1890s
the nation began to set its sights on more distant
arenas.
Much of this reorientation was brought by the
Spanish–American War. The name Americans gave to
the conflict is itself revealing, for it began with Cuba’s
fight for independence from Spain. When hostilities
broke out between Cubans and Spanish colonizers
in 1898, the US Navy sent the battleship USS Maine
to Havana harbor to protect Americans. An accidental
explosion destroyed the ship and killed hundreds of
servicemen aboard. American tabloids relentlessly
framed this as a national insult, prompting public
outrage and the cry “Remember the Maine, to hell
with Spain!” In April, President William McKinley
requested that Congress declare war. The “splendid
little war” that ensued was just long enough for
Theodore Roosevelt to raise a company of volunteers
and—very publicly and dramatically—charge up
San Juan Hill in Cuba. When Spain surrendered
that summer, the United States inherited a far-
flung collection of colonies from the Pacific to the
Caribbean.
The US officially granted Cuba independence,
though it retained a right to intervene in its affairs
until 1934 (the US still leases a portion of Guantánamo
Bay). The situation in the Philippines was far more
complicated, for the departure of the Spanish led to a
brutal and protracted war with the United States. This
ugly conflict prompted many Americans—including
Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and former
presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison—
to declare themselves “anti-imperialists.” Though they
had diverse motives and agendas, all agreed that it was
unacceptable for the US to intervene in the Philippines,
AN AMERICAN EMPIRE?
Rand McNally, map of US
acquisitions, 1904
much less to annex the islands. By the time the war
ended in 1902, 4,000 Americans and 20,000 Filipinos
had been killed in combat, and many times that number
had died from disease and starvation.
Though the anti-imperialists were vocal and
articulate, most Americans celebrated and supported
the nation’s activist foreign policy. Before his
presidency, Roosevelt pushed for an enlarged navy to
protect these new overseas territories. The nation’s
largest mapmaker, Rand McNally, even redrew its
national map to incorporate these new holdings.
Like contemporary maps of the British empire, this
one asserted overseas acquisitions as part of the
nation’s long history of expansion that began with
the thirteen colonies and continued westward. Rather
than convincing its readers to support the Spanish–
American War, Rand McNally simply framed the
territories as part of a national evolution. Through the
map, a divisive war was presented as the most recent
stage in the country’s history.
The enthusiasm for territorial expansion extended
to the inclusion of Alaska on the redesigned national
map. Though the purchase of that territory from
Russia had been negotiated by Secretary of State
William Seward in 1867, for decades skeptics
considered it an empty frozen wasteland. Only after
the discovery of gold in the Yukon did Alaska—
formerly derided as “Seward’s Folly”—regularly
appear on the map of the United States.
Rand McNally’s reconfigured map of the nation
proved immensely popular, and was reproduced
in contemporary atlases and textbooks as an
announcement of the nation’s arrival on the world
stage. The larger historical question is whether these
commitments abroad were a break or a continuation
with the past. Ten years before he was elected
president, Woodrow Wilson urged his country to
take its civilizing mission seriously. He considered
the Spanish–American War a turning point not for
Cuba and the Philippines but for the United States,
a country poised to share its hard-won wisdom with
peoples emerging from the yoke of imperialism
at the dawn of a new century. Like so many of his
contemporaries, Wilson saw his country as a source
of benevolence and uplift, motivated by idealism
rather than by commercial or political gain. This
combination of sincerity and arrogance would shape
American foreign policy for the next century.