Populism, Imperialism, and the United States as a World Power

Chapter Opening

Lease was one of the most celebrated orators of the Populist movement — a woman who had famously urged farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." Her audiences were people who had mortgaged their homesteads to plant wheat or cotton, only to watch crop prices fall year after year while railroad freight rates, loan interest, and the cost of machinery seemed only to climb. They were people who believed, in the language of their movement, that "the producing classes" — the farmers, workers, and debtors who made the nation's wealth — received far too little of it in return.

The Populist movement — formally organized as the People's Party — was one of the most ambitious reform movements in American history. It arose from the desperation of rural America in the 1870s, 1880s, and early 1890s, when the industrial transformation of the United States was producing enormous wealth for a small class of industrialists, financiers, and railroad magnates, while farmers across the South and the Great Plains struggled under falling commodity prices, rising debt, and what they perceived as the tyranny of monopoly corporations. The Populists proposed sweeping solutions: government ownership of the railroads, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, the secret ballot, shorter working hours, a flexible currency tied to silver as well as gold, and a postal savings system to free farmers from the grip of private banks. These were radical proposals for their time, and the Populist platform of 1892 remains one of the most ambitious statements of democratic economic reform in the history of American politics.

At nearly the same moment that American farmers were organizing against the railroad barons and bankers of the Gilded Age, the United States was also beginning to look outward. The 1890s marked a decisive turning point in American foreign policy. After a century of continental expansion — the purchase of Louisiana, the conquest of northern Mexico, the settlement of the Great Plains — the United States began to project military and economic power across the Pacific and the Caribbean. In 1898, a brief, dramatic war against the Spanish Empire transformed the United States almost overnight into a colonial power with territories stretching from Puerto Rico in the Atlantic to the Philippines in the Pacific. American politicians, military leaders, intellectuals, and businessmen argued that the United States had both the right and the obligation to govern, develop, and "civilize" the peoples of these new territories — arguments that mirrored the racial hierarchies and imperial ideologies that European powers had used for centuries to justify their own colonial projects.

The collision of these two great stories — the farmers' revolt against industrial capitalism at home and the assertion of American imperial power abroad — defines the history of the 1890s. They were not entirely separate stories. Many of the same economic forces that impoverished American farmers also drove American overseas expansion: the search for new markets, the demands of industrial capitalism, the crisis of overproduction, and the pressure to find outlets for American goods and investment abroad. Some Populists supported overseas expansion, seeing new markets as a solution to the agricultural depression. Others were among the most powerful voices against imperialism, arguing that a republic could not govern distant peoples without the consent of the governed and remain faithful to its own founding ideals.

This chapter examines both developments in depth. It traces the origins of the farmers' crisis, the rise and fall of the Populist movement, the decisive election of 1896, and the United States' transformation into a global imperial power through the Spanish-American War, the annexation of Hawaii, and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It also examines the fierce debate over empire that erupted among Americans at the end of the nineteenth century — a debate about race, democracy, liberty, sovereignty, and the meaning of the republic itself.

The 1890s were years of deep crisis and decisive change. The economic depression that began in 1893 was the worst the country had yet experienced, throwing millions out of work, collapsing banks and businesses, and pushing the farmers' crisis to its most desperate point. It was in this context of economic catastrophe and political upheaval that the Populists made their most ambitious bid for national power — and lost. The defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 effectively ended the Populist movement as a major national force, though many of its ideas would be revived and partially enacted in the Progressive Era and New Deal. Meanwhile, the Spanish-American War of 1898 opened an age of American overseas empire that would shape U.S. foreign policy, military power, and racial politics for decades to come. The world that emerged from the 1890s was the world of twentieth-century America: industrialized, globally powerful, deeply unequal, and still contested.

Learning Objectives

Guiding Historical Questions

Historical Context

To understand the 1890s, students must understand the economic transformation that the United States underwent in the decades after the Civil War. The industrial revolution that reshaped American life between roughly 1865 and 1900 created enormous wealth — but it distributed that wealth very unevenly. Corporations grew to enormous size, controlling railroads, oil, steel, and finance. The railroad network, which expanded from roughly 35,000 miles of track in 1865 to nearly 200,000 miles by 1900, knit the nation together into a single national market — but it also gave railroad corporations enormous power over the farmers and merchants who depended on them. Farmers who wanted to ship their wheat, corn, or cotton to distant markets had little choice but to pay whatever rates the railroads charged, since in many regions a single railroad company held a monopoly over local transportation.

American farmers in this period also faced the structural problem of falling commodity prices. As American agriculture expanded westward onto the Great Plains, and as agricultural technology improved, the total output of American farms rose dramatically. More wheat, more corn, and more cotton flooded into national and global markets — but demand did not keep pace with supply, and prices fell. A bushel of wheat that sold for $1.00 in 1867 might sell for fifty cents or less by the 1890s. For a farmer who had borrowed money to buy land, equipment, and seed — and who had to repay that loan in fixed dollars regardless of crop prices — falling prices meant a tightening vice.

The monetary system made this problem worse. After the Civil War, the United States moved toward a "hard money" policy, gradually contracting the currency supply by withdrawing the paper "greenback" dollars that had been issued to finance the war. The goal was to return to the gold standard, in which every dollar was backed by gold. "Hard money" advocates — primarily Eastern bankers and creditors — argued that a stable, gold-backed currency was essential for sound economic growth and international credit. But for farmers and debtors, a shrinking money supply meant deflation: prices fell, which made it harder to earn the dollars needed to repay loans. In effect, a farmer who borrowed $1,000 in 1870 and repaid it in 1890 was paying back dollars that were worth significantly more — in terms of what they could buy — than the dollars he had originally borrowed.

The political system of the Gilded Age offered farmers little relief. Both the Republican and Democratic parties were dominated by elites with close ties to corporate and financial interests. Congress was widely seen as corrupt. The Senate in particular, elected by state legislatures rather than directly by voters, was described by critics as a "millionaires' club." The Supreme Court had consistently ruled against state efforts to regulate railroad rates. Farmers who organized through the Grange in the 1870s and the Farmers' Alliance in the 1880s increasingly concluded that neither major party would address their grievances, and that a new political movement — a third party — was needed.

Beyond the farmers' crisis, the 1890s were shaped by global economic depression and the beginning of a new era of imperial competition. European powers — Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy — were carving up Africa and Asia into colonial empires with increasing speed and aggression. American strategists, particularly Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, argued in his influential 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power upon History that a nation's greatness depended on naval power and access to overseas markets. American businessmen looked at stagnant domestic demand and glutted markets and saw in overseas territories — in the Pacific, in Latin America, in Asia — potential outlets for American goods and investment. The crisis of the 1890s pushed the United States toward a new, more aggressive foreign policy.

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Major People, Groups, and Places

Core Vocabulary Preview

The following key terms appear throughout this chapter. Students should understand each term before proceeding to the main sections.

Farmers and the Crisis of the Countryside

The Structural Squeeze

The crisis that produced the Populist movement was not a sudden catastrophe. It was the slow, grinding product of structural forces that had been building for decades. American farmers in the post–Civil War era were caught in a trap: they farmed within a national and global market economy that they could not control, and they borrowed from banks and purchased from merchants who could set terms the farmers were powerless to refuse.

The basic problem was overproduction. As homesteaders poured onto the Great Plains and as technology improved — steel plows, mechanical reapers, threshers — American agricultural output rose dramatically. Between 1870 and 1900, the acreage of cultivated land in the United States roughly doubled. Total wheat production more than doubled. Cotton production expanded rapidly across the South and into the Southwest. But commodity prices did not rise to match this increased output. When supply outpaces demand in a market economy, prices fall — and for American farmers, prices fell sharply and persistently. Wheat that brought $1.00 per bushel in the late 1860s brought fifty cents by the late 1880s and might fall to thirty-five cents by the mid-1890s. Cotton prices followed a similar downward path.

These falling prices would have been manageable had farmers been operating without debt. But almost all were not. Homesteading on the Plains required capital: land, seed, tools, animals, and the years of waiting before a farm became productive. Few farmers had this capital saved. They borrowed — from local banks, from mortgage companies, from merchant-creditors who extended credit against future crops. These loans were typically at high interest rates, often eight to twelve percent or higher in the West and South, where capital was scarce. They were repayable in fixed dollar amounts regardless of what happened to crop prices.

The railroad system, essential for getting crops to market, added another dimension of vulnerability. Most Plains farmers depended on a single railroad line to move their crops. Railroad companies, holding regional monopolies, set freight rates that farmers had no power to negotiate. A farmer might pay more to ship grain from western Kansas to Chicago than a competing shipper paid to move grain from Chicago to Liverpool. Grain elevator operators — who stored wheat before it was loaded onto trains — also colluded with railroads and charged rates farmers could not evade. The system, farmers argued, was designed to extract maximum value from agricultural producers while enriching a small class of railroad owners, financiers, and merchants.

Regional Dimensions of the Crisis

The crisis was sharpest in two regions: the Great Plains and the South. In the Plains states — Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas — drought was an additional catastrophe. The 1880s, when homesteaders had flooded onto the semi-arid plains encouraged by unusually wet years, gave way to years of drought in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Crops failed. Farms were abandoned. In some Kansas counties, half the population left during this period, returning east in wagons with signs reading "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted." The combination of drought, falling prices, and debt was devastating. Bank foreclosures rose sharply. Thousands of farm families lost their land.

In the South, the crisis took a different form, shaped by the legacy of slavery and Reconstruction. Southern agriculture was dominated by the cotton economy and by the crop-lien system. Under crop liens, farmers — both Black and white, but disproportionately Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers — received supplies and credit from local merchants in exchange for a lien, or claim, on the coming crop. The merchant set prices for the supplies provided on credit, charged interest, and then settled accounts after harvest. Since the merchant controlled both the prices charged and the accounts kept, many farmers found themselves perpetually indebted — owing more at the end of each year than at the beginning. The crop-lien system trapped Black farmers in a form of debt peonage enforced by the violence of the Jim Crow South.

Farmers Organize: The Grange and the Farmers' Alliance

Farmers did not passively accept their situation. Beginning in the late 1860s, they began to organize. The Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange, was founded in 1867 and grew rapidly in the early 1870s. At its peak, the Grange had more than 800,000 members. It was originally a social and educational organization, but it quickly moved into economic and political action. Grangers organized cooperatives, buying seed and machinery collectively to bypass merchants and manufacturers' middlemen. They pressured state legislatures to regulate railroad freight rates, winning the "Granger laws" in several Midwestern states. The Supreme Court initially upheld these laws in Munn v. Illinois (1877), though it later struck down state regulation of interstate commerce in Wabash (1886), driving the demand for federal regulation.

The Grange declined in the late 1870s, in part because cooperatives struggled financially. Its place was taken by the Farmers' Alliance, which emerged in Texas in the late 1870s and spread explosively across the South and the Plains in the 1880s. By 1890, the Southern Alliance claimed more than three million members. The Alliance was a more explicitly political and economically radical organization than the Grange. Its most innovative proposal was the Sub-Treasury Plan, developed by Charles W. Macune. Under this plan, the federal government would build warehouses in every county where farmers could store non-perishable crops. Farmers would receive government-issued treasury notes — paper currency — equal to eighty percent of the market value of their stored crops. They could then sell the crops when prices were favorable, repaying the loan and releasing the collateral. The Sub-Treasury Plan was a sophisticated response to the farmers' credit problem that would point toward later federal agricultural policy emerging in the New Deal of the 1930s.

Black Farmers and the Alliance

The Farmers' Alliance organized along racial lines. The Southern Alliance was for white farmers only. Black farmers formed their own organization, the Colored Farmers' Alliance, which grew to perhaps one million members by 1890. The two alliances cooperated to some degree on economic demands, but their relationship was complicated by the power structures of the Jim Crow South. The tension between racial solidarity and economic solidarity would prove one of the central challenges of the Populist movement.

The Populist Movement

The People's Party Forms

By 1890, many Alliance members had concluded that working within the two existing political parties was futile. Both Republicans and Democrats were too beholden to corporate and financial interests. A third party was needed. In 1890, the Alliance threw its organizational weight behind independent candidates and captured control of several state legislatures. In 1892, representatives of the Alliance, labor organizations, and reform groups met in Omaha, Nebraska, to formally create the People's Party — better known as the Populists.

The Omaha Platform of 1892 was a remarkable document. Written in part by Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, the platform's preamble described a nation "brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin" by corruption dominating "the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench." It described a nation divided between "two great classes — tramps and millionaires" — a vision of American society in crisis, of democracy corrupted by concentrated wealth.

The platform's specific demands fell into several categories. On money and credit, the Populists demanded an increase in the money supply through the free coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one of gold — the so-called "free silver" demand. They also called for a graduated income tax. On transportation, they demanded government ownership of the railroads and telegraphs. On land, they demanded that land owned by corporations beyond their actual needs be reclaimed by the government and made available to actual settlers. They also proposed postal savings banks. And they included several political reforms: the direct election of U.S. senators, the secret ballot, the initiative and referendum, and a single presidential term.

Many of these demands seemed radical in 1892. Yet the graduated income tax was enacted by the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), direct election of senators by the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), the initiative and referendum spread to many states, and the postal savings system was enacted in 1910. Many of the credit and agricultural price-support mechanisms that Populists had first proposed reappeared as federal policy in the New Deal. The Populist platform has been called the blueprint for the reform era that followed — not because the Populists succeeded, but because the problems they diagnosed proved real and persistent.

The 1892 Campaign

In 1892, the People's Party nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa as its presidential candidate. Weaver received over one million popular votes — about 8.5 percent of the total — and 22 electoral votes, making him the first third-party candidate since before the Civil War to win electoral votes. The Populists also elected several U.S. senators, a handful of congressmen, and several governors. But in the South — where the Alliance had been strongest — Populist candidates were beaten back by Democratic political machines that used violence, fraud, and the manipulation of the Black vote to suppress Populist challenges.

Race, Populism, and the Southern Problem

The question of race was the central weakness and the central moral challenge of the Populist movement. Tom Watson of Georgia, one of the most prominent Populist leaders in the South, initially argued that poor white and poor Black farmers had common economic interests that transcended race. "You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings," Watson told interracial Populist audiences. It was a moment of genuinely radical possibility — a white Southern political leader attempting to build an interracial coalition of the poor against the rich.

But the effort failed. White Democrats used racial fear to break up Populist coalitions: Black voters who tried to vote Populist faced violence and intimidation; white Populist supporters who crossed racial lines faced social ostracism and physical danger. The Democratic Party in the South controlled the machinery of elections and used it with ruthless efficiency against Populist challengers. By the mid-1890s, Tom Watson — once an advocate of interracial democracy — had abandoned his earlier positions and was moving toward virulent racism. The defeat of the Populists in the South contributed to the tightening of Jim Crow — a terrible historical irony, as the failure of interracial democratic politics was followed by the legal codification of white supremacy.

Women in the Populist Movement

Women played a remarkable role in the Populist movement — more visible and more central than in either major party. Mary Elizabeth Lease, Annie Diggs, and others toured the Plains states as organizers and orators. Lease in particular became a national celebrity, her blunt, passionate speeches drawing enormous crowds. Women could not vote in most states in 1892, but they organized, wrote, canvassed, and spoke for the cause. The Populist movement's emphasis on community, mutual aid, and the family farm gave women a platform to argue that their economic survival depended on political change. For many women Populists, the movement also connected to the suffrage movement — if women's labor sustained the farm economy, surely women should have the vote.

The Organizational Infrastructure of Populism

One of the most striking features of the Populist movement was its attempt to build alternative economic institutions alongside its political organizing. Alliance cooperatives bought and sold goods collectively, establishing cotton gins, flour mills, and retail stores in some areas. Alliance newspapers spread movement ideas and information to rural communities. The Alliance's "Alliance lectures" brought political education to farm families across the Plains and South. Traveling speakers connected isolated rural communities to a larger movement. This combination of economic self-help, community organization, and political action made the Populist movement something more than an election campaign — it was, in its peak years, a genuine social movement with roots in the daily lives of its members.

Gold, Silver, and the Election of 1896

The Money Question

Nothing seemed more arcane — and nothing was more genuinely important — than the currency debates of the 1890s. Whether the United States dollar should be backed exclusively by gold or by both gold and silver may seem like a technical question for economists, but in the 1890s it was the defining political question of the age, touching as it did on the distribution of wealth, the power of banks, the fate of farm families, and the future of American democracy.

The story began with the "Crime of '73." In 1873, Congress quietly demonetized silver — removing it from the list of metals that the government would accept for coinage. At the time, silver was relatively scarce and the measure attracted little attention. But in the following years, silver mines in Nevada and elsewhere began producing enormous quantities of the metal, and the price of silver fell. Suddenly, farmers and debtors realized what the demonetization of silver meant: it had locked the country into a gold-only currency, restricting the money supply at exactly the moment when an expanded currency was most needed. They called the 1873 act the "Crime of '73" — a conspiracy, they believed, engineered by Eastern banking interests to benefit creditors at the expense of debtors.

The debate over gold versus silver was at bottom a debate about monetary policy and its distributional effects. Gold standard advocates argued that a currency backed solely by gold was essential for stable prices, international credit, and sound financial management. Silver advocates — "Silverites" — made the opposite argument: an expanded currency would raise prices for farm goods, making it easier to repay debts, and stimulate business activity across the economy. The battle over money was a battle over who would bear the costs of economic adjustment: debtors who struggled under deflation, or creditors who feared inflation.

The Panic of 1893

In 1893, the question became both more urgent and more politically complicated. A severe financial panic broke out, triggered by the collapse of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the bankruptcy of several major corporations. Banks failed across the country. In the most severe economic depression the United States had yet experienced, unemployment reached perhaps eighteen percent. Businesses closed, workers lost jobs, and farm foreclosures accelerated. President Grover Cleveland — a Democrat and a committed gold standard advocate — responded by repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which had required the government to buy a fixed amount of silver each month. Cleveland's repeal satisfied Wall Street but enraged the silver wing of his party and the Populists.

William Jennings Bryan and the "Cross of Gold"

The pivotal moment of the 1890s political drama came in July 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Democratic Party was bitterly divided between its gold-standard Eastern wing, loyal to the Cleveland administration's conservative economics, and its silver-oriented Southern and Western wing, which had been radicalized by the depression. The contest for the presidential nomination was unresolved until a thirty-six-year-old congressman from Nebraska took the floor to speak.

William Jennings Bryan was not yet nationally famous, but he was already one of the most gifted orators in American political life. His speech to the 1896 convention built slowly, moving through the arguments for silver, for farmers, for debtors, for the West and South against the East, for democracy against plutocracy. Then he reached his conclusion, in words that became the most famous political speech of the Gilded Age: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." The convention erupted. Bryan was nominated on the fifth ballot.

The Populist Party, meeting shortly after the Democrats, faced an agonizing choice: nominate their own candidate and split the silver vote, or support Bryan and risk being absorbed into the Democratic Party. They chose Bryan, though they nominated a different vice-presidential candidate. The "fusion" of Populists and Democrats behind Bryan was the Populists' great strategic gamble — and their great strategic mistake.

The Election of 1896

The election of 1896 was one of the most consequential in American history. William McKinley, the Republican nominee, was backed by the full weight of corporate America. His campaign manager, Mark Hanna, organized an unprecedented fundraising operation, collecting millions of dollars from corporations terrified of a Bryan victory. McKinley ran a "front porch campaign" from his home in Canton, Ohio, receiving delegations of voters in a carefully controlled, dignified performance. Bryan, in contrast, barnstormed the country, traveling 18,000 miles and giving hundreds of speeches. It was the most energetic personal campaign in American presidential history to that point.

McKinley and the Republicans ran a sophisticated campaign that combined defense of the gold standard with a promise of economic recovery and high protective tariffs. They targeted urban workers, arguing that a Bryan victory would bring financial chaos and unemployment. Many industrial workers — who bought goods priced in gold-standard dollars and worked for wages in manufacturing cities — were not persuaded by the free silver argument. McKinley carried the Northeast, the Midwest, and the industrial states. Bryan swept the South and most of the West. McKinley won comfortably: 271 electoral votes to Bryan's 176.

The election of 1896 marked the end of the Populist movement as a major national political force. The People's Party slowly disintegrated after its fusion with the Democrats. Bryan continued to be a major figure in the Democratic Party — he was nominated again in 1900 and 1908 — but the specific Populist agenda was defeated. The defeat was not total, however: many Populist ideas reappeared in the Progressive Era, and the movement's diagnosis of the problems of industrial capitalism proved accurate enough to shape American reform politics for the next half-century.

The United States and Overseas Expansion

The Logic of American Expansion

The United States had been an expansionist power since its founding. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the country's size in 1803. The conquest of northern Mexico in 1848 added California, the Southwest, and the Pacific Coast. The purchase of Alaska in 1867 extended American sovereignty into the sub-Arctic. By the 1890s, the logic of expansion was taking a new form — and pointing outward, across the oceans, toward the Pacific and the Caribbean.

Several forces drove this new imperialism. First, there was the argument from markets. The United States was now the world's largest industrial economy, producing more steel, more coal, more manufactured goods than any other country. But domestic markets were periodically saturated — and the severe depression of 1893 demonstrated just how destabilizing economic downturns could be. American manufacturers, merchants, and farmers looked abroad for new customers. Second, there was the argument from strategy. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) argued systematically that naval power was the key to national greatness, and that naval power required overseas coaling stations, naval bases, and the control of strategic sea routes.

Third, there was the argument from race and civilization. The 1890s were the height of both scientific racism and the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Many American intellectuals, politicians, and clergy argued that white Anglo-Americans had a special capacity for self-government and a special obligation to bring order, Christianity, and civilization to darker-skinned peoples around the world. Josiah Strong's widely read 1885 book Our Country had argued that Anglo-Saxons were destined to dominate the world and that this was God's plan for human progress. Social Darwinism — the application of Darwinian ideas of natural selection to human societies — was used to argue that more "fit" nations had both the right and the obligation to dominate less "fit" ones. These racial arguments were present throughout the debates over imperialism in the 1890s.

American Interests in the Pacific and Caribbean

American commercial and strategic interests in the Pacific and Caribbean long predated the 1890s. American merchants had been trading in China since the 1780s. The United States had forced Japan to open its ports to American trade in 1854. American whalers, merchants, and missionaries had been active in Hawaii since the early nineteenth century. American sugar planters had established a powerful presence in Hawaii, growing wealthy from sugar production and trade with the American mainland.

In the early 1890s, the political situation in both Hawaii and Cuba became unstable in ways that created opportunities for American intervention. In Hawaii, a small group of American planters and businessmen, backed by the U.S. Marines from a warship in Honolulu harbor, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani in January 1893 and established a provisional government. They immediately petitioned for annexation to the United States. President Grover Cleveland withdrew the annexation treaty, ordered an investigation, and concluded that the overthrow had been illegal — carried out with improper assistance from U.S. naval forces. The situation remained unresolved for five years, until the McKinley administration and the political climate of 1898 made annexation possible.

In Cuba, the situation was even more explosive. Cuba had been fighting for independence from Spain intermittently since the Ten Years' War (1868–1878). The independence leader José Martí — a poet, journalist, and organizer who lived in exile in New York — organized the Cuban Revolutionary Party and launched a new uprising in February 1895. Martí was killed in battle in May 1895, but the uprising continued. Spanish forces responded with a policy of "reconcentration" — forcing hundreds of thousands of Cuban civilians into camps to deny the rebels their base of support. The resulting hunger and disease killed tens of thousands. American newspapers — particularly William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World — covered the Cuban crisis with vivid, often sensationalized accounts of Spanish atrocities, building American public sympathy for the Cuban cause.

Hawaii and Pacific Ambitions

The Strategic Prize

Hawaii's importance to American expansionists was not primarily economic, though the sugar trade was substantial. It was strategic. Hawaii sits roughly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, approximately 2,400 miles from California and a similar distance from Japan and the Asian coast. For American naval strategists following Mahan's argument, Hawaii was an essential coaling station and base for a Pacific fleet. Without Hawaii, the United States could not project meaningful naval power across the Pacific. With it, the United States could establish itself as a major Pacific power.

The American community in Hawaii — primarily descendants of Protestant missionaries and sugar planters — had been working to bring Hawaii under American control for decades. They dominated the Hawaiian economy and had significant political influence over the Hawaiian monarchy. In 1887, they pressured King Kalakaua into accepting a new constitution — called the "Bayonet Constitution" because it was forced at gunpoint — that stripped the monarchy of power and restricted voting rights to property owners, effectively disenfranchising most native Hawaiians and Asian laborers.

Queen Liliuokalani, who came to the throne in 1891, attempted to restore Hawaiian sovereignty and draft a new constitution that would restore native Hawaiians' political rights. The American planters, fearing the loss of their privileges and supported by the U.S. Minister to Hawaii, John Stevens, organized the Committee of Safety and requested the landing of U.S. Marines. Stevens ordered U.S. Marines from the USS Boston to land in Honolulu on January 17, 1893. The queen, knowing that resistance would lead to bloodshed, yielded under protest, stating explicitly that she was surrendering to "the superior force of the United States" — not to the provisional government — and expecting that the U.S. government would right the wrong.

Cleveland's attempt to reverse the coup failed. The provisional government refused to surrender power, and Congress would not support forcible restoration of the queen. Hawaii remained in political limbo until 1898, when the Spanish-American War and the strategic importance of Hawaiian bases created the political momentum for annexation. Congress passed a joint resolution of annexation in July 1898 — a joint resolution rather than a treaty, because the administration lacked the two-thirds Senate majority required for treaty ratification.

Hawaiian resistance to annexation was widespread and organized. The Hawaiian Patriotic League collected over 38,000 signatures on petitions opposing annexation — a remarkable figure given that the total Hawaiian population was only around 100,000. Native Hawaiians understood clearly what annexation meant: the formal end of their sovereignty, the loss of their land, and subordination to a government in which they had no meaningful voice. Their protests were ignored.

The Pacific Vision

Hawaii was the centerpiece of a larger American vision for the Pacific. American strategists wanted not just Hawaii but Midway, Samoa, Guam, and eventually the Philippines — a chain of bases and coaling stations that would allow the United States to project naval power across the Pacific and compete with Japan and the European powers for influence in China and East Asia. The "Open Door" policy that Secretary of State John Hay articulated in 1899 and 1900 — demanding equal commercial access for all nations to Chinese markets — was the diplomatic expression of this Pacific strategy. The United States did not seek colonies in China, but it sought equal access to Chinese trade — which required naval power, which required Pacific bases.

The Spanish-American War

The Road to War

By early 1898, American public opinion — inflamed by yellow journalism and genuinely moved by Cuban suffering — was pushing strongly toward intervention in Cuba. President McKinley was more cautious. He preferred diplomatic pressure on Spain, hoping Spain would make concessions that would allow Cuba a degree of autonomy without U.S. military intervention. Spain was in fact making concessions: by early 1898, Spain had recalled General Weyler, promised reforms, and offered Cuba a degree of autonomy.

But two events in February 1898 transformed the political situation. First, Hearst's New York Journal published a private letter by the Spanish minister to the United States describing President McKinley as "weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd." The letter caused a diplomatic scandal and a wave of anti-Spanish feeling. Then, on February 15, 1898, the USS Maine — an American battleship sent to Havana harbor as a show of force — exploded and sank, killing 266 sailors. The cause of the explosion remains uncertain; a naval investigation at the time concluded an external explosion was responsible, while later investigations have suggested the explosion was internal and accidental. But in 1898, "Remember the Maine!" became a rallying cry, and the explosion was widely attributed to Spanish sabotage.

McKinley sent Spain an ultimatum demanding an armistice with Cuban rebels and an end to the reconcentration camps. Spain agreed to most demands but would not grant Cuba independence. On April 11, 1898, McKinley asked Congress to authorize military intervention. Congress voted for war on April 19–25, 1898. In its declaration, Congress included the Teller Amendment, which explicitly stated that the United States did not intend to annex Cuba and would leave control of the island to its people.

The War in Cuba and the Caribbean

The Spanish-American War was brief — it lasted only about four months — but it was consequential. American forces were not well prepared for land warfare in tropical Cuba, and the war revealed serious logistical failures in the Army. But Spanish forces were weaker and more demoralized than expected.

The most famous engagement of the land campaign was the assault on San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill on July 1, 1898, near Santiago, Cuba. Theodore Roosevelt led the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry — the "Rough Riders" — in a charge up Kettle Hill that became one of the most celebrated moments of the war and launched his political career. Less celebrated in popular accounts were the Buffalo Soldiers — African American troops of the 9th and 10th Cavalry — whose performance was critical to the battle's success. African American soldiers fought with courage and skill throughout the war, though they returned home to a country that continued to subject them to segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence.

The decisive engagement of the war was naval. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey led the Asiatic Squadron into Manila Bay in the Philippines and destroyed the Spanish fleet there in a matter of hours. The Battle of Manila Bay brought the Philippines to the center of the war — and to the debates over American empire that followed it. On July 3, 1898, the Spanish Caribbean fleet attempting to break out of Santiago harbor was destroyed by the American fleet. With its fleets gone and its land forces pinned down, Spain quickly sued for peace.

The Peace and Its Consequences

The Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, ended the Spanish-American War. Spain agreed to give up Cuba, ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and — for $20 million — ceded the Philippines. Cuba became nominally independent, but under close American supervision embodied in the Platt Amendment (1901), which gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, restricted Cuba's ability to sign treaties or incur debt without American approval, and required Cuba to lease land to the United States for naval bases. The Platt Amendment effectively made Cuba an American protectorate. It would not be abrogated until 1934.

The United States had entered the war ostensibly to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny. It emerged as a colonial power — governing Puerto Rico and Guam as territories, and confronting the question of what to do with the Philippines. It was a transformation in the nature of American power, achieved in less than four months of fighting.

Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam

The Philippine Question

Of all the consequences of the Spanish-American War, none was more consequential, more contested, or more revealing of American racial ideology than the acquisition of the Philippines. The Philippines were not, like Puerto Rico or Guam, close to the American mainland. They were a vast archipelago of over 7,000 islands lying 7,000 miles from California, with a population of approximately 7 million people with their own languages, cultures, political organizations, and — crucially — an armed independence movement already fighting against Spanish colonial rule.

When Commodore Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May 1898, he invited Filipino independence leader Emilio Aguinaldo to return from exile and organize Filipino forces against the Spanish on the ground. Aguinaldo believed that the United States would support Filipino independence — as it had proclaimed for Cuba. He organized Filipino forces, proclaimed a Filipino republic, and declared independence from Spain on June 12, 1898 — a date still celebrated as Philippine Independence Day.

But the McKinley administration had other plans. The United States, McKinley later explained, could not give the Philippines back to Spain — "that would be cowardly and dishonorable." It could not give them to France or Germany — "that would be bad business and discreditable." It could not leave them alone — "they were unfit for self-government." The only option, McKinley concluded, was "to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them." This last argument was particularly ironic, since the Philippines were already overwhelmingly Catholic, having been under Spanish Catholic colonial rule for over three centuries.

The Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris, which included Philippine annexation, in February 1899 — by a margin of only one vote more than the required two-thirds. Even before ratification, fighting had broken out between American and Filipino forces. The Philippine-American War had begun.

The Philippine-American War

The Philippine-American War (1899–1902, though resistance continued for years after) was a brutal, prolonged colonial conflict that the United States has historically underemphasized relative to the Spanish-American War. American forces ultimately deployed over 100,000 soldiers to the Philippines. Filipino forces, unable to defeat the Americans in conventional battle, adopted guerrilla tactics. American commanders responded with increasingly brutal counterinsurgency measures, including the burning of villages, the torture of prisoners (the "water cure" — a form of waterboarding — was widely used), and the establishment of reconcentration camps that caused thousands of civilian deaths.

The war cost approximately 4,200 American lives — more than the Spanish-American War itself. Filipino casualties were far greater. The number of Filipino soldiers killed in combat was estimated at 20,000 or more. Civilian casualties from violence, disease, and famine were far higher — estimates range from 200,000 to more than one million Filipino civilians dead during the war years, though precise figures are uncertain. The reconcentration camps established by American forces in some areas mirrored the very Spanish tactics that had been used to justify intervention in Cuba.

Emilio Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901 by a daring American operation that penetrated his mountain headquarters through deception. He then swore allegiance to the United States and urged his followers to lay down their arms. Formal resistance largely ended by 1902, though Muslim Filipinos in the southern islands continued fighting for years.

The Philippines remained an American territory until 1946. During this period, the United States built roads, schools, and public health infrastructure, and established an English-language educational system. It also maintained control over Philippine foreign policy, trade, and defense. The contradictions of this "benevolent assimilation" — the phrase McKinley used to describe American rule — were never resolved.

Puerto Rico and Guam

Puerto Rico had been granted autonomy by Spain just months before the Spanish-American War, and its new autonomous government had barely begun to function when American forces occupied the island in July 1898. Puerto Ricans became, by the Jones Act of 1917, U.S. citizens — but they were not represented in Congress, could not vote in presidential elections unless they lived on the mainland, and remained in a status of legal ambiguity that has never been fully resolved. The Insular Cases (1901), in which the Supreme Court ruled that residents of unincorporated territories did not automatically have the full constitutional rights of American citizens, established the legal framework for this second-class status. The cases were decided by five-to-four margins, with dissenting justices arguing that the Constitution followed the flag — that anyone under American sovereignty was entitled to constitutional protections.

Guam, a small island in the western Pacific, was occupied by American forces in June 1898 without significant resistance. It became a U.S. naval station and territory. Its people, the Chamorro, were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1950.

Anti-Imperialism and the Empire Debate

The Anti-Imperialist Case

The acquisition of overseas territories at the end of the 1890s did not go uncontested. A powerful movement of Anti-Imperialists — including some of the most prominent figures in American public life — argued that empire was incompatible with American democratic ideals, practically dangerous, and racially and constitutionally unjust.

The Anti-Imperialist League was founded in 1898, initially in Boston, and quickly spread nationally. Its membership included industrialist Andrew Carnegie, philosopher William James, writer Mark Twain, former President Grover Cleveland, labor leader Samuel Gompers, and prominent politicians from both parties. Their arguments were varied and sometimes contradictory, but several themes recurred.

The most fundamental anti-imperialist argument was democratic: a republic that governed other peoples without their consent was violating its own founding principles. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" — the language of the Declaration of Independence — seemed to condemn the subjugation of Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians as clearly as it condemned the subjugation of colonists by the British crown. Mark Twain, who had initially supported the Spanish-American War, was horrified by the Philippine-American War and wrote devastating satirical pieces about American imperialism. His essay "The War Prayer" (not published until after his death) was a dark meditation on the moral consequences of war and conquest.

A second argument was practical: governing a distant archipelago of millions of people of a different language, culture, and religion would be enormously costly, would require a large standing army (which many Americans feared as incompatible with republican liberty), and would drag the United States into Asian and Pacific power politics far from American shores. A third argument was labor-based: Samuel Gompers and other labor leaders feared that incorporating territories with large populations of poorly paid workers would depress American wages and undermine American labor standards.

Racial Anti-Imperialism and Its Contradictions

Some anti-imperialists made racial arguments that revealed the deep racial contradictions of the period. Some white Southern politicians opposed annexation of the Philippines not because of democratic principles but because they did not want the United States to acquire more non-white subjects.

African American perspectives on imperialism were more complex and more morally coherent. Black newspapers and leaders generally recognized the contradiction between America's suppression of non-white peoples abroad and the racial oppression of Black Americans at home. Booker T. Washington cautiously opposed imperialism. Ida B. Wells, who had been documenting lynching in the American South, drew explicit connections between racial violence at home and racial subjugation abroad. Some Black Americans, however, saw military service in the Philippines as an opportunity to demonstrate citizenship and patriotism — and African American troops served in the war despite the brutal racial contradictions it embodied. The Black soldier's dilemma — fighting for a country that denied them equal rights, to suppress the freedom of a non-white people — was agonizing and produced genuine debates within Black communities.

The Imperialist Case

Imperialists made their own arguments, and they were not without force in the context of the times. Alfred Thayer Mahan argued from strategy: the United States needed naval bases in the Pacific to protect American commercial and security interests. Theodore Roosevelt argued from a similar strategic position and added a cultural argument: vigorous expansion was a sign of national health, and a "strenuous life" of national assertion and expansion was the path to American greatness.

Imperialists also made economic arguments: the Philippines provided a stepping stone to the immense markets of China, which American manufacturers desperately wanted to access. Religious arguments were also prominent. Many Protestant missionaries and clergy believed that American rule would bring Christianity and civilization to what they described as backward peoples. The concept of the "White Man's Burden" — articulated by British poet Rudyard Kipling in a 1899 poem written explicitly about the Philippines — captured this ideology: it was the duty, Kipling argued, of white Anglo-Saxon peoples to govern and civilize darker peoples, regardless of those peoples' own wishes.

The United States as a World Power

The New International Position

By 1900, the United States had been transformed. At the beginning of the decade, it was the world's largest industrial economy but a relatively minor player in world politics — without a significant navy, without overseas possessions, and without the network of treaties and alliances that characterized the great European powers. By the end of the decade, it had the third-largest navy in the world, it governed territories in two oceans, it had declared its interest in equal commercial access to China through the Open Door Policy, and it had demonstrated both the will and the capability to use military force far from its own shores.

This transformation was not simply the result of the Spanish-American War, though that war was the crucial turning point. It was also the result of the years of strategic thinking that preceded the war — Mahan's arguments, the buildup of the "new navy" through the 1880s and 1890s, the growing economic interest in overseas markets, and the rise of a generation of political leaders — Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay — who shared a vision of American global power. The war with Spain created the opportunity; the strategic vision existed to exploit it.

The Open Door and East Asia

Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door Notes (1899, 1900) asserted that all great powers should have equal commercial access to China and that China's territorial integrity should be respected. The notes were addressed to Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and Italy — all of which had carved out spheres of influence within China. The Open Door Policy was not entirely altruistic: it reflected American commercial interests in Chinese markets, and it was backed by the implicit threat of American naval power from the Philippines.

The Boxer Uprising of 1900 — a Chinese nationalist movement that attacked foreign missionaries, businesses, and diplomatic compounds — tested the new American position. The United States contributed troops to an international relief force that marched to Beijing to relieve the besieged foreign legations. American participation in a multinational military expedition in East Asia would have been unthinkable ten years earlier. By 1900, it was simply the consequence of being a Pacific power.

Theodore Roosevelt and the New America

William McKinley, who had presided over the Spanish-American War and the beginning of overseas empire, was assassinated in September 1901 by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. Theodore Roosevelt, forty-two years old, became the youngest president in American history. Roosevelt was a passionate advocate of naval power, American expansion, and the "strenuous life" — his term for the vigorous assertion of American national character and power. As president, Roosevelt would continue and extend the transformation of the United States' global position: mediating the Russo-Japanese War (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize), asserting American power over the Caribbean through the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and building the Panama Canal. The muscular, global America of the early twentieth century was in many ways the product of the decisions and strategies that had emerged in the 1890s.

The Legacy of 1898

The events of 1898 left a complex and contested legacy. For the United States, they marked the beginning of a century of global power — and global responsibility, global entanglement, and global controversy. The strategies and ideologies that justified 1898 — the assertion of American benevolence toward other peoples, the equation of American power with civilization and progress, the belief in the special responsibility of Anglo-American civilization — would shape American foreign policy for decades, through World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and beyond.

For the peoples of the territories acquired in 1898, the legacy was equally complex. Puerto Ricans became American citizens in 1917 but remained in a status without full political rights that persists to the present. Hawaiians lost their sovereignty and saw their land and culture marginalized; only in the late twentieth century did Hawaiian sovereignty and cultural revival movements emerge with significant force. Filipinos gained formal independence in 1946 but remained in a close and sometimes troubled relationship with the United States — a relationship shaped by decades of colonial rule, military bases, and entangled economies.

Cuba, nominally freed from Spanish rule, found itself subject to a different kind of American dominance. The Platt Amendment's provisions were used repeatedly to justify American military intervention in Cuban affairs — in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1921. American corporations dominated the Cuban sugar economy. The contradictions between Cuban sovereignty and American power would fuel anti-American sentiment in Cuba for decades, contributing eventually to the revolution of 1959 and the Cold War confrontation that followed.

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