688 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroadthe United States in the “ un- American”
position of “crushing with mili-
tary force” another people’s desire
for “liberty and self- government.”
George S. Boutwell, president of the
Anti- Imperialist League, declared
that the most pressing question in
the election was the nation’s future
character—“republic or empire?”
But without any sense of contra-
diction, proponents of an imperial for-
eign policy also adopted the language
of freedom. Anti- imperialists were
the real “infidels to the gospel of lib-
erty,” claimed Senator Albert Beveridge
of Indiana, because America ventured
abroad not for material gain or national
power, but to bring “a new day of free-
dom” to the peoples of the world. Amer-
ica’s was a “benevolent” imperialism,
rooted in a national mission to uplift
backward cultures and spread liberty
across the globe. Beveridge did not, how-
ever, neglect more practical consid-
erations. American trade, he insisted,
“henceforth must be with Asia. The
Pacific is our ocean.... Where shall we
turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is
our natural customer.” And the Philippines held the key to “the commercial
situation of the entire East.” Riding the wave of patriotic sentiment inspired
by the war, and with the economy having recovered from the depression of
1893–1897, McKinley in 1900 repeated his 1896 triumph.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised
to take its place among the world’s great powers. Writers at home and over-
seas confidently predicted that American influence would soon span the
globe. In his 1902 book The New Empire, Brooks Adams, a grandson of John
Quincy Adams, predicted that because of its economic power, the United
States would soon “outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.”
Years would pass before this prediction was fulfilled. But in 1900, many fea-
tures that would mark American life for much of the twentieth century were
already apparent. The United States led the world in industrial production.An advertisement employs the idea of a White
Man’s Burden (borrowed from a poem by Rud-
yard Kipling) as a way of promoting the virtues
of Pears’ Soap. Accompanying text claims that
Pears’ is “the ideal toilet soap” for “the cultured
of all nations,” and an agent of civilization in “the
dark corners of the earth.”