588 Chapter 22 From Isolation to Empire
Lodge had married into a navy family and was close
with the head of the new Naval War College,
Commodore Stephen B. Luce. In 1883 he helped
push through Congress an act authorizing the build-
ing of three steel warships, and he consistently advo-
cated expanding and modernizing the fleet. Elevated
to the Senate in 1893, Lodge pressed for expansionist
policies, basing his arguments on the strategic con-
cepts of Mahan. “Sea power,” he proclaimed, “is
essential to the greatness of every splendid people.”
Lodge’s friend Theodore Roosevelt was another
ardent supporter of the “large” policy, but he had lit-
tle influence until McKinley appointed him assistant
secretary of the navy in 1897.
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Toward an Empire in the Pacific
The interest of the United States in the Pacific and East
Asia began in the late eighteenth century, when the
first American merchant ship dropped anchor in
Canton harbor. After the Treaty of Wanghia
(1844), American merchants in China enjoyed
many privileges and trade expanded rapidly.
Missionaries began to flock into the country—
in the late 1880s, over 500 were living there.
The Hawaiian Islands were an important
way station on the route to China, and by
1820 merchants and missionaries were making
contacts there. As early as 1854 a movement
to annex the islands existed, although it
foundered because Hawaii insisted on being
admitted to the Union as a state. Commodore
Perry’s expedition to Japan led to the signing
of a commercial treaty (1858) that opened
several Japanese ports to American traders.
The United States pursued a policy of
cooperating with the European powers in
expanding commercial opportunities in East
Asia. In Hawaii the tendency was to claim a
special position but to accept the fact that
Europeans also had interests in the islands.
This state of affairs did not change radically fol-
lowing the Civil War. Despite Chinese protests
over the exclusion of their nationals from the
United States after 1882, American commer-
cial privileges in China were not disturbed.
American influence in Hawaii increased
steadily; the descendants of missionary fami-
lies, most of them engaged in raising sugar,
dominated the Hawaiian monarchy. While
they made no overt effort to make the islands
an American colony, all the expansionist ideas
View theImageof the era—manifest destiny, Darwinism, Josiah
Strong’s racist and religious assumptions, and the
relentless force of American commercial interests—
pointed them in that direction. In 1875 a reciprocity
treaty admitted Hawaiian sugar to the United States
free of duty in return for a promise to yield no terri-
tory to a foreign power. When this treaty was
renewed in 1887, the United States obtained the
right to establish a naval base at Pearl Harbor. In
addition to occupying Midway, America obtained a
foothold in the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific.
During the 1890s American interest in the Pacific
area steadily intensified. Conditions in Hawaii had
much to do with this. The McKinley Tariff Act of
1890, discontinuing the duty on raw sugar and com-
pensating American producers of cane and beet sugar
by granting them a bounty of two cents a pound,
struck Hawaiian sugar growers hard, for it destroyed
the advantage they had gained in the reciprocity treaty.
The following year the death of the complaisant
King Kalakaua brought Queen Liliuokalani, a deter-
mined nationalist, to the throne. Placing herself atQueen Liliuokalani (1838–1917) succeeded her brother as ruling monarch of
Hawaii in 1891. In 1893 she was deposed by a consortium of American and
European business interests.