From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (45 page)

The Union's triumph in the Civil War positioned the nation to exploit its enormous economic assets: rich land; a wealth of natural resources; a growing and energetic population; the absence of foreign threat or other obstacles to growth. Possessing numerous advantages and few disadvantages, the United States transformed itself at near miraculous pace. Agricultural and industrial production soared. By 1900, the United States surpassed even Britain in manufacturing output. The nation began to pour its agricultural and industrial products across the world while maintaining a high tariff to protect its own industries from foreign competition. American "hyperproductivity," along with recurrent and increasingly serious economic crises, fed rising fears among elites that the home market could not absorb a mounting surplus, the so-called glut thesis, provoking agitation for the acquisition of new markets abroad and a more active foreign policy. Only in military power did the United States lag behind the Europeans, but even here the gap was closing by the turn of the century. In any event, America's smaller military expenditures provided an advantage obscured in an age where the trappings of power often masked its essentials. The costs of maintaining an empire in fact could be a source of weakness rather than strength. The rapid expansion of two new powers caused Europeans increasingly to fret about a world order dominated by a crude and backward Russia and a rich and vulgar America. The explosive growth of the United States—an "entire rival continent"—provoked the first of repeated European warnings about the Americanization of the world.
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Once dismissed by internationalist historians as an isolationist backwater and the nadir of statesmanship, Gilded Age diplomacy has been rehabilitated in recent years. Revisionist writers have found in the post–Civil War era the roots of the modern American empire. Drab and colorless the diplomatists may have been, it is argued, but they were hardworking and dedicated public servants who pursued the national interest with dogged determination. Concerned with the economic crisis produced by mounting agricultural and industrial surpluses, they were especially energetic in searching out foreign markets. They developed the rationale and began to create the instruments for the acquisition of overseas territory in the 1890s.
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Foreign relations have thus been brought back into the mainstream of Gilded Age history and the Gilded Age into the mainstream of U.S. foreign relations. To be sure, as critics have pointed out, "the era was marked by uncoordinated diplomacy, amateurish emissaries, shallow rhetoric, and much public and congressional indifference."
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There was strong opposition to international involvement and especially commitment. Anti-imperialists defeated numerous expansionist initiatives. There was no master plan for empire. Still, diplomacy was much more important, active, systematic, and deliberate than previously allowed. During this period, the ideology and instruments that provided the basis for America's global involvement in the twentieth century took form. The Gilded Age was a transition period between the continental empire of Jefferson and Adams and the insular empire of the early twentieth century.
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Attitudes toward the outside world were paradoxical. For the first time in its short history, the new nation did not face a major external threat. Its position in North America was firmly established. Europe was retreating from the Western Hemisphere. The relative stability on the Continent spared the danger of a general European war. America's headlong economic growth and consolidation of the Union absorbed the energies and attention of its people after the Civil War. Under these circumstances, world events naturally receded in the scale of national priorities. Americans did not think of themselves as isolationists—indeed, the term
isolationism
was just beginning to creep into the national political vocabulary
by the end of the century. But the nation's leaders did speak in reverential tones of the foreign policy principles bequeathed by Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe. Our "traditional rule of noninterference in the affairs of foreign nations has proved of great value in past times and ought to be strictly observed," President Rutherford B. Hayes proclaimed in 1877, a mantra ritualistically repeated by his Gilded Age successors.
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Some ultra-nationalists even echoed in less qualified terms Jefferson's dream of scrapping an unrepublican and allegedly unnecessary diplomatic corps.

In the Gilded Age, as before and after, of course, Americans were anything but isolated from the outside world. From the beginning of the republic, U.S. foreign relations had been driven as much by private citizens as by government, and in these years, a society bursting with energy sent Americans abroad in varied roles.
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The growing ease of travel, increased wealth, and the emergence of a tourism industry produced an explosion of overseas travel after the Civil War. By the end of the century, the State Department issued thirty thousand passports each year. Children of the elite took a Grand Tour modeled on that long practiced by the British aristocracy. Students flooded prestigious European universities. Immigrants returned home for visits. Some critics worried that foreign travel might taint the purity of the American character; the rude behavior of some of these travelers eternally stereotyped Americans to their European hosts. Visitors from the United States still found through exposure to foreign cultures confirmation of the virtues of their own society. After an extended stay in Europe, a young Harvard graduate and future ambassador to Germany and Britain in 1888 "bade adieu . . . to the 'effete despotisms of the old world.' " A year later, humorist Mark Twain boasted that "there is today only one real civilization in the world."
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Nevertheless, the burst of tourism helped broaden America's perspectives and break down its parochialism. The experience of foreign travel significantly shaped the views of those who made up the nation's foreign policy elite in the twentieth century.
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Often on their own, sometimes with public sponsorship, Americans took part in multifarious activities in distant lands. The charting of North America completed, adventurers set off to explore the new frontier in Alaska. The government sponsored expeditions into the Arctic region. Private groups explored the Holy Land and the rain forests of South America.

The Gilded Age also saw the first organized and officially sponsored efforts to export Yankee know-how, especially in Japan. As part of its effort to beat the West by joining it, the Japanese government recruited some three thousand foreign experts (
oyatoi
) to facilitate its rush toward modernization. Japanese leaders were not drawn to American democracy, preferring the German system of government. They relied mainly on Europeans to build a Western-style military establishment, although Japanese students did enroll at the U.S. Naval Academy and a U.S. citizen directed Japan's first naval school. Americans also assisted the Japanese in mastering Western diplomatic protocol and international law as a means to free them from the burdens of the Western-imposed unequal treaties. Americans played their most important role in education and agriculture. They helped establish a system of public education modeled loosely on that recently instituted in the United States. Experts from U.S. colleges, sponsored by the commissioner of agriculture, disseminated the latest methods of dairy farming and growing corn and wheat. Specialists from the Massachusetts agriculture college sought to extend the land grant model to Japan by helping establish at Sapporo an experimental farm and agricultural school that would become the University of Hokkaido. Americans brought to Japan such things as the McIntosh apple and Concord grapes. As expatriates seeking recreation, they introduced the Japanese to baseball, helping to start teams that in time would compete with Americans residing in that country. To the dismay of British observers, baseball by the end of the century had become more popular in Japan than cricket.
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Born earlier in the century, the Protestant missionary movement exploded after the Civil War. The number of foreign missions jumped from eighteen in 1870 to ninety in 1890. In China alone, the number of missionaries increased from 81 in 1858 to 1,296 in 1889. The missionaries fanned out across the world, from Catholic South America to the Muslim
Middle East. They were especially active in "pagan" China and Japan and even began to establish an American presence in Africa.

The role and impact of American missionaries have been subjects of much controversy. Persuaded that God had blessed them with modern technology to facilitate their evangelizing of the world and fervently committed to "bring light to heathen lands," they brought to their task a self-righteous arrogance that would make them an easy target for critics in later centuries. In some areas, they were the advance guard for American commercial penetration. While spreading their gospel, they were often guilty of the worst kind of cultural imperialism. They invariably ran afoul of local customs and provoked nationalist opposition that, in places like Japan, sharply limited their influence. On the other hand, they stimulated American philanthropy. They opposed the introduction of opium into treaty ports in China and took the unpopular position of opposing exclusion of Chinese immigrants in debates that raged across the United States in these years. For better or worse, they introduced the modernization process into lands where they served. They were among the leading agents of the internationalization of America. They brought distant areas to the attention of a sometimes parochial nation and shaped popular attitudes toward other peoples. Their appeals for support and protection sometimes forced the government to act in areas where its role had been nonexistent.
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Missionary work provided opportunities abroad for Americans whose roles were constricted at home. African American missionaries sought converts in Africa while promoting colonization schemes with distinctly imperialist overtones. Increasingly frustrated with their place in U.S. society, ministers such as Alexander Crummell and Henry McLeod Turner advocated missionary work in Africa
and
"back to Africa" colonization schemes like those Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln had once endorsed. They sought through return to the continent from which their race had come escape from their growing oppression in the United States and a means to establish their American national identity. While hailing Africa's higher morality, they shared with European colonialists a belief that the "dark continent" was in need of a civilizing mission and brought to their task a sense of their own superiority. Some even rationalized that slavery had been part of a divinely inspired master plan to prepare African Americans to regenerate a backward Africa. In the 1890s, Turner promoted
missions in Liberia and Sierra Leone as bases for his larger colonization project. Crummell went to Liberia as a missionary and proposed a U.S. protectorate over the nation founded by freed American slaves. These early pan-African schemes got little support from the African American middle class—the churches were dubious precisely because they smacked too much of earlier colonization plans. "We have no business in Africa," a bishop protested.
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An indifferent U.S. government provided no backing. The only results were to provide intellectual justification for and indirect encouragement to European colonialism of Africa.
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Missionary work and other international charitable activities offered outlets and opportunities for women still denied full equality at home. By 1890, wives of male missionaries or groups of unwed women operating on their own made up roughly 60 percent of the total number. Their contributions were unique. Their approach to missionary work was more personal than that of men, resembling the sort of nurturing work they did in the domestic sphere at home. In China, women more often than men identified with and expressed concern for the powerlessness of the local population in dealing with the West. Dominated by their husbands, they protested the way outsiders dominated Chinese. By standing up for China, they stood up for themselves. In doing so, they took an important step toward their own liberation. Paradoxically, although empathizing with the Chinese, by promoting Westernization they exercised authority over them.
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Women also took a leading role in late-century international relief programs. When famine struck Russia in 1891, women at the local and national level under the leadership of legendary Civil War nurse and American Red Cross president Clara Barton organized a massive campaign to get corn and flour to the victims. Congress refused to appropriate funds, so the entire effort had to be privately financed. The women managed to secure some free transportation from the railroads and steamship companies. Some women traveled to Russia with the food to ensure that good meals were prepared for recipients. Critics groused that the autocratic tsarist government had inflicted the disaster on its own people, but the organizers appealed to the nation's humanitarian instincts, traditional
Russian-American friendship, and Russia's timely support during the Civil War. Americans helped feed as many as 125,000 people in one of their first major overseas relief efforts. Women's involvement in the famine relief campaigns expanded their area of influence by pushing them into the traditionally male-dominated realm of international relations.
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In an era and nation where business reigned supreme, no segment of American society was more active abroad. It would be wrong, of course, to exaggerate the commitment of U.S. business to overseas expansion. Preoccupied with production for the home market, many businessmen were among the last to appreciate the importance of foreign markets. Congress was sometimes indifferent. The Republican devotion to a protective tariff hampered foreign trade. Americans were rank amateurs at overseas marketing, and the dumping of inferior and even dangerous products sometimes deservedly gave them a bad name.