Exacerbating the difficulties of absorbing these immigrants was the problem that, contrary to the American mainstream, many arrived having internalized radical socialist and communist doctrines. Many failed to distinguish the difference between a tyrannical, autocratic European monarch and an American president. The reaction came in the form of nativism during the influx of Irish Catholics 1840–1860, which morphed into isolationism, and the persecution of Jews, Mexicans, and Asians occurring alongside Jim Crow–sanctioned separatism late in the nineteenth century . Yet this, too, was another element of America that virtually no other nation faced: a polyglot mix of people, ethnicities, religions, and cultures. For the first time, American exceptionalism had to be explained and taught, not merely taken for granted by those who had come from an English or Germanic background, and to be cherished as a foundational principle. However, the Progressive movement in the United States began to erode these principles and the value of an exceptional America, steering her to become a member of the international community and following Europe’s lead.
European countries, with their oligarchic governments and more homogenous populations, never developed the concept of freedom as Americans lived it. To a large degree, even in democratic European countries, the notion of freedom was limited to “freedom to serve the state.” This European failure to understand the American character—its definitions of liberty, its reliance on personal responsibility, and its emphasis on land ownership—constituted a difference in the definitions of freedom that proved profound.
America’s ascent to power from 1898 to 1945 not only reflected the “exceptional” traits that made her distinct from the Europeans, it embodied those traits. From the failed attempt at Prohibition—and its repeal, admitting a major national mistake—to the G.I. “can-do” attitude in World War II, the United States dared greatly. Her projects such as the Panama Canal seemed daunting to the point of impossibility, yet they were built where others failed. Her heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Peary, Sergeant Alvin York, Charles Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth all seemed giants whose exploits were incomparable. (Ruth’s single-season home run record stood until 1961.) Her artistic, business, and intellectual titans such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ford, A. P. Giannini, and Walt Disney, often augmented by immigrants such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, pushed America to world preeminence in architecture, industry, finance, film, and science. And by 1945, not only was it clear that the United States would be a superpower, but it seemed that her best years still lay well into the future.
A Patriot’s History of the Modern World follows the history of the last century to the end of World War II along three thematic lines: the struggle between Progressivism and Constitutionalism within America; the rise of American global power and its corollary in the decline of European constitutionalism and international influence; and the rise of new, non-Western powers challenging the United States for world leadership (or, perhaps, dominance).
What, then, constitutes the “modern” world in this context? We define it as the period after the United States stepped onto the world stage up to the present day. The year 1898, when the United States went to war with Spain over Cuba, marks the beginning of this era, as it was the first time America proved it could be an international power. Before then, the United States had confined itself to punitive expeditions against the Barbary Pirates and actions in the Western Hemisphere, mostly dealing with its neighbors Mexico and Canada. All European nations expected Spain to make short work of the impudent Americans and wreak utter havoc on the U.S. fleet. Only Great Britain was at all reserved in her judgment of the probable outcome, having been wrong three times (the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War) in her assessment of her Atlantic cousins. But when Spain was utterly defeated in a series of astounding victories in Manila Bay and the waters off Cuba, respect for American diplomats, soldiers, and sailors took a giant leap forward.
With the defeat of Spain, the United States broke the bonds that shackled her to the rest of the Western Hemisphere and limited America to a provincial, internal outlook. The limited national government soon found itself replaced by a federal colossus, requiring an income tax to provide the necessary revenues, a massive bureaucracy to manage its affairs, and a European-style central bank to control the economy. Like its European counterparts, the Federal Reserve, created under President Woodrow Wilson, was a private corporation, unaccountable to and uncontrolled by elected officials yet all too often seemingly in cahoots with the administration currently in office.
Yet even as the United States stepped onto the world stage as a world leader, she refrained from active involvement. The war with Spain was confined to Cuba, only ninety miles from American territory, and a single naval battle in the Philippines. The Islands of Hawaii were annexed in 1898, and America’s participation in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Philippine Insurrection quickly followed, but these were seen as little more than police actions. Even after World War I, the U.S. Army was reduced to 150,000 men (only 50 percent larger than the size of the army permitted Germany by the Versailles Treaty).6 The Navy, however, while not gutted, remained in line with the Washington Naval Conference agreements of 1921–22. While Spain fought a civil war, which attracted participants from Italy, Germany, and Russia, the United States carefully stayed out. Italians conquered Africans and the Japanese brutalized the Chinese, but except for sanctions, America stood down. Only the immediate threat of Britain’s collapse against Hitler sparked enough concern to start Lend-Lease, and only a direct attack by Japan brought the United States into World War II. Yet by 1945, when no fewer than eight empires had been destroyed—the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, French, Dutch, British, and Japanese—America steadfastly refused to secure any of those territories as colonies, even to the point of denying aid to allies seeking to hold their lands. Instead, the United States, perhaps overconfident that the institutions so central to its exceptional character would be readily accepted throughout the world, insisted on open, Western democracies as the most just and efficient means to resist the new threat of Soviet communism. Often the conversion problems proved insurmountable in countries that lacked all of America’s pillars of democracy—common law, Protestant Christianity, a free-market capitalistic economy, and the sanctity of private property—but the United States cannot be faulted for not trying to spread the American Way.
But the American Way was not just democratic government. There is nothing magical about democracy. After all, a democratic nation produced Adolf Hitler, and phony democracies in the twentieth century have repeatedly given murderous thugs such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il “majorities” in faux elections. In contrast, some Middle Eastern kingdoms, whether through intimidation, fear, or resignation, function with a minimum of violence and some level of economic progress. International aid agencies have learned that merely imposing democratic systems in utterly undeveloped parts of Africa or Asia did not automatically yield peace, stability, or progress. Rather, America’s ascent to world power demonstrated that so long as the essence of American exceptionalism remained at the core of all efforts foreign and domestic, the likelihood of success was nearly guaranteed. Because that exceptionalism, as has been noted, consisted of more than merely democratic government; nations wishing to emulate America’s progress could not simply pick and choose one or two parts of the package. Rather, the elements reinforced one another in a mutually supporting relationship—a fact that would be made clear in the Second World War when America and her allies defeated two powers that had adopted some, or most, of the “Western way of war” but which still resisted the critical elements of liberty and free speech that completed the circle. Thus, for a writer such as Niall Ferguson to assert, for example, that the United States at the end of the Second World War “was still much less powerful than the European empires had been forty-five years before” is misguided, reflecting a certain nineteenth-century understanding of “empires.”7 That view also reste
d on a European-style understanding of colonialism, which, as historian Paul Johnson said, “was a highly visual phenomenon [abounding] in flags, exotic uniforms, splendid ceremonies, Durbars, sunset-guns, trade exhibitions at Olympia and Grand Palais, postage stamps and, above all, coloured maps.”8 The fact that American overseas expansion in the early twentieth century lacked precisely these “highly visual” trappings, but by World War II would export a much different type of symbol—Coca-Cola or Ford trademark images, for example—testified to the real influence the United States wielded.
America’s astounding success in World War II, and her preeminent position among all free nations in the decades afterward, meant that U.S. products, goods, services, and ideas would increasingly expand into Europe and Asia. Over the ensuing half century, Americanism would become global: Marriott would have hotels virtually everywhere; McDonald’s hamburgers and Disney movies would reach even remote areas of the world, and nations would define themselves largely in relation to their amity toward, or hostility to, the United States. Yes, Belgian chocolates, French cheeses, Japanese anime, Mexican cuisine, Canadian hockey, European soccer, and Korean cars would all carve out spots in American markets and culture. Yes, by 2012 one could find an (east) Indian actor or actress prominently featured on network television, or a Hong Kong Chinese turning out popular action movies, or an occasional foreign film that connected with the U.S. moviegoing audience.
But by and large what Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly said of non-Western militaries—that the British were in Zululand, but it was impossible to imagine the Zulu on the Thames—applies to American influence worldwide. Whether through its products, its democratic processes, or its self-confidence, America remains the world’s sole “exceptional” nation, which is to say, it alone has a self-written narrative that explains why the United States should—not just “could”—influence others. That self-definition remained alive, but largely contained within the Western Hemisphere between 1898 and 1941, with the exception of the brief foray into European conflict and the subsequent disastrous diplomatic solution America allowed to be imposed on a large part of the globe at Versailles. While the United States had the potential to become the world’s superpower in 1919, it had neither the desire nor the focus, and indeed in the immediate postwar aftermath, the tension between prewar Progressivism and the newly revived Constitutionalism of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge took center stage. Their emphasis on limited government, business growth, and restrained foreign interventions lasted a mere eight years, and stood out in sharp relief from the Progressive-dominated period that lasted from William McKinley’s death in 1901 through World War II.
Meanwhile, the Europeans, almost all possessed of democratic constitutions adopted long after the U.S. Constitution, but not modeled on it, had spread their version of democracy around the world through their colonies. Yet with no understanding of common law and its central role in expressing the will of the people, almost all of the European governments and their colonial clones drifted into constitutional autocracies, and in the Third World those governments quickly disintegrated further into dictatorships covered by fig-leaf constitutions.
The American ascent to superpower status that began innocuously with the rapid defeat of Spain in 1898 and culminated in the difficult and bloody victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945 had been accomplished largely because the Progressives stood aside at the right moments and permitted America to be America. Franklin Roosevelt’s antipathy to business during the Great Depression yielded to a commonsense liberating of the titans of industry from 1941 to 1945. While his misguided views of Joseph Stalin led him to make repeated concessions to the communists, he stopped short of ceding world supremacy. Harry Truman quickly righted the scale after Roosevelt’s death, and the nature of Soviet intentions was not seriously questioned by another American president until 1976 by Jimmy Carter. In short, having hamstrung aspects of American exceptionalism in the 1930s, Roosevelt restored them during the time of ultimate crisis.
What remained in 1945 was a stark contrast of free and unfree societies, one led by an exceptional American republic and culture, one dominated by communist tyranny. While it is likely that the war itself prolonged Soviet communism by decades (allowing Stalin to both appeal to Russian patriotism and simultaneously purge threats), by the end of the war there were few rosy-eyed visionaries outside of the hard-left Progressives and academicians who still advocated Soviet-style communism for the United States. The “Harvest of Sorrow” and the mass executions of the 1930s had shattered many illusions among fellow travelers as the truth about Stalin’s regime leaked out. Thus, across the American political spectrum in 1945 there was a sense that right had prevailed, that the path followed by the United States was the correct and moral one, and that American exceptionalism was indeed worth celebrating. America’s story from 1898 to 1945 is therefore nothing less than the triumph of American exceptionalism over liberal Progressivism, despite a few temporary victories by the latter. Few Americans who heard of Robert Peary planting the flag on the North Pole, or who knew of Charles Lindbergh’s astounding flight, or who watched Babe Ruth pound home run after home run ever thought another nation was capable of such greatness. No one who witnessed the atomic bombs could doubt the power of America’s wrath if turned on an enemy. The American ascent to world influence was the fastest in human history. Whether it was the best remained a question of how true the United States could stay to its founding values, and whether it would decide to remain…exceptional.
CHAPTER ONE
American Emergence Amid European Self-Absorption
Time Line
1898: American battleship Maine blown up in Havana harbor; Spanish-American War; Battle of Omdurman (British Sudan); French submarine sinks stationary battleship; U.S. annexes Hawaii
1899: Boxer Rebellion begins (ends 1901); Philippine Insurrection begins (ends 1913); Second Boer War begins (ends 1902)
1900: U.S. population reaches 70 million; first Zeppelin flight; quantum physics born
1901: Commonwealth of Australia formed; Spindletop gushers begin Texas oil production; Hay-Pauncefote Treaty; William McKinley assassinated, Theodore Roosevelt assumes presidency
1902: Roosevelt Corollary
1903: Wright brothers successfully demonstrate controlled flight; first World Series played
1904: Entente Cordiale allies Britain and France; Trans-Siberian Railroad completed; Russo-Japanese War (ends 1905)
1905: Russian revolution; First Moroccan Crisis (Germany and France); Norway formed; Treaty of Portsmouth ends Russo-Japanese War
1906: HMS Dreadnought launched; Germany launches first submarine (U-boat); San Francisco earthquake; first feature film released in United States
1907: Panic of 1907 (U.S.); Dominion of New Zealand formed; triode amplifier starts birth of electronics industry
1908: Boy Scouts formed; oil discovered in Middle East; Young Turk revolution in Turkey; Henry Ford produces Model T; Bulgaria declares independence from Ottoman Empire
1909: Anglo-Persian Oil Company (British Petroleum, or BP) founded; U.S. Supreme Court upholds right of city government to regulate height of buildings in Welch v. Swasey; corporate income tax passed by Congress; Robert Peary reaches North Pole
1910: George V becomes king of England; Union of South Africa created; Japan annexes Korea; Montenegro gains independence; Portugal declares itself a republic; Mexican revolution against Porfirio Díaz; Norman Angell writes The Great Illusion
1911: Agadir Crisis (Germany and France); Wuchang Uprising (China) ends Qing (Manchu) Dynasty; Italy declares war on Ottoman Empire, annexes Tripoli; Roald Amundsen reaches South Pole
1912: Titanic sinks; Republic of China established; France imposes protectorate for Morocco; First Balkan War (Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia vs. Turkey)
1913: U.S. income tax amendment ratified; Federal Reserve Act passed; President Francisco Madero assassinated in Mexico; three-way struggle for power in
Mexico between Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza, and Pancho Villa; Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring ballet performed in Paris
1914: Woodrow Wilson intervenes in Mexico; United States occupies Veracruz; Kiel Canal deepened, allowing transit of German battleships between North and Baltic seas; Gavrilo Princip assassinates Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (June 28), sparking World War I; Antoni Gaudí creates Parc Güell
The Pacific moon hung like a fat lemon, an ironic symbol marking what would become the dawn of the American global era, at 11:30 on the night of April 20, 1898. Eight ships of Admiral George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron slipped into the Boca Grande Channel in Manila Bay, where the crew intended to lay waste to the Spanish vessels in the harbor. Although Dewey, the son of a Vermont doctor, had a reputation as a practical joker and low-level troublemaker at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, this evening he stood grimly, watching his column silently plow through the Pacific waters en route to its deadly rendezvous. Feeling all of his sixty-one years, with his droopy white mustache and wise eyes, Dewey could have passed for a manager of one of the new American baseball teams, or a doctor, which would have made his father proud. He could barely remember his mother, dead at a young age from tuberculosis, but he expected she too would have gushed over her brave son, now leading a flotilla into battle. Now it was his turn to be proud.1
Having survived the academy—one of only fifteen out of the sixty who had entered with him as “plebes”—Dewey had commanded the USS Mississippi during the short combat in 1862 that led to the surrender of New Orleans by Confederate forces. He then quite literally barely survived his next assignment, when a Rebel shell exploded on the quarterdeck of the Monongahela, where he was the executive officer. The explosion killed the captain and four other officers, but Dewey walked away unharmed. With the end of the Civil War, Dewey marched through a series of tedious assignments: lighthouse inspector, commander of a rickety steam sloop headed for Asia, Washington bureaucrat. His role in several innovations related to electric searchlights and signaling apparatus led to his appointment to the Board of Inspection and Survey, where he was responsible for inspecting all new warships. Though he remained desk-bound, it was here that he became familiar with the latest naval technology, including newfangled gadgets such as John Holland’s submarine. A promotion to commodore seemed hollow, until the post of commander-in-chief of the Asiatic Squadron opened up in May 1896.
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