Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 - Brossura

Jacobson, Matthew Frye

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0809016281 ISBN 13: 9780809016280

Casa editrice: Hill & Wang Pub, 2001

Riassunto

How a new American identity was forged by immigration and expansion a century ago.

In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson offers a keenly argued and persuasive history of the close relationship between immigration and America's newly expansionist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century. Jacobson draws upon political documents, novels, travelogues, academic treatises, and art as he recasts American political life. In so doing, he shows how today's attitudes about "Americanism" -- from Border Watch to the Gulf War -- were set in this crucial period, when the dynamics of industrialization rapidly accelerated the rate at which Americans were coming in contact with foreign peoples.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American Studies at Yale, is the author of Whiteness of a Different Color and Special Sorrows. He lives in New York City.

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Barbarian Virtues

The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917By Matthew Frye Jacobson

Hill & Wang

Copyright © 2001 Matthew Frye Jacobson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780809016280

Chapter One

Export Markets: The World's
Peoples as Consumers

A savage, having nothing, is perfectly contented so long as he wants nothing. The first step toward civilizing him is to create a want. Men rise in the scale of civilization only as their wants rise.

?Josiah Strong, Our Country (1886)

    I am an exporter, I want the world.

?Charles Lovering, textile manufacturer (1890)

We thank thee for national prosperity and progress," intonedBishop Matthew Simpson in his convocation for Philadelphia'sCentennial Exposition in 1876, "for valuable discoveriesand multiplied inventions, for labor-saving machinery relievingthe toiling masses." If progress had become an article of religious faith by1876?discovery, invention, and machinery its miraculous manifestations?thenthe exposition in Philadelphia was its most magnificent temple. Herevisitors could see the splendid Corliss engine, "that giant wonder ..., [propelling]an endless system of belts and wheels," as the centennial commissionerput it; "silent and irresistible," it seemed fully to realize "the fabledpowers of genii and afrit in Arabian tales." Here they could thrill to the roarand the hum of all sorts of technical innovations in the processes of production?shingle-cuttingmachines, quartz mills, sugar mills, harvesting machinery,and printing presses. They could examine great slabs of crude metal,gaze upon the polish of a shiny new railway car, or wonder at the power andthe workings of a hydraulic ram. They could look over a cornucopia of newconsumer items?cutlery, felt hats, silverware, dentifrice, glassware, mince-meat,tobacco, sewing machines, and "show-cases filled with dresses thatwere enough to drive an ordinary woman crazy." They could view the newtools of commerce, innovative technologies of communication and shipping,including telegraphic equipment, lighthouse service and weather equipment,and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. And here at the fair, not incidentally,they could also become acquainted with what would turn out to beamong the most important tools of all in the quest for worldwide markets?Gatlingguns, projectiles, torpedoes, and twenty-inch Rodman guns.

    The idea of the world market was largely the point of this exposition.This national celebration took place, after all, in the midst of a rather severedepression cycle that had begun in 1873. And so, if over the course of 159days the Centennial Exposition introduced nearly ten million visitors toAmerica's wares, as it was meant to do, discussion all around the expositionalso introduced new staples of American economic thought: the fear of domestic"overproduction" and the appetite for foreign markets to absorb theresulting surplus of American goods. "Unquestionably international tradeand commerce will be promoted," declared one orator at the exposition's end."The ingenuity and excellence of our mechanics and inventors will be madebetter known." Throughout the exposition, Philadelphia newspapers had repeatedlyreferred to the saturation of domestic markets and the importanceof cultivating foreign?particularly Asian?markets for American manufacturedgoods in order "to prevent continued depression." Asia, as one newspaperhad it, represented "an almost unlimited field for disposal of manyarticles of American manufacture, where up to this very moment, such goodsare almost unknown."

    In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith had cautioned against creatinga great national empire "for the sole purpose of raising up a nation ofcustomers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers."By the late nineteenth, Americans seemed to have created preciselysuch an empire; but even this "nation of customers" did not have the spendingpower to support its shopkeepers. If the attendant revolution of valueshad its liberating aspects at home, as Americans harvested the blossomingconsumer culture for undreamed-of amusements and conveniences, so did itironically enslave the United States to social forces abroad, as American producersfelt themselves more and more dependent upon the spending habitsof little-known consumers in distant lands.

    Thus the common perception of the nation's economic needs became entangledwith a web of myths and stereotypes regarding the diverse peoples ofthe new global marketplace. Isolation is the mother of barbarism, wroteJosiah Strong in his popular tract of nationalism and Christianity, Our Country.For Strong, as for many of his compatriots, the notion of Americangrandeur entailed not only establishing a global presence by reaching out toother regions and peoples of the world, but fully transforming the ways inwhich those peoples lived. The transformation, rather loosely envisioned underthe imprecise rubric of "civilization," would be both spiritual and material:conveniently, the export of Christian ideals would go hand in hand withthe export of finished textiles and manufactured goods. "The mysteries ofAfrica are being opened," wrote Strong; "the pulse of her commerce is beginningto beat. South America is being quickened, and the dry bones ofAsia are moving; the warm breath of the Nineteenth Century is breathing aliving soul under her ribs of death. The world is to be Christianized and civilized."Lest the reader miss the crucial connection between the nation's rolesas both spiritual savior and industrial supplier to these benighted nations,Strong went on to ask rhetorically, "What is the process of civilizing but thecreating of more and higher wants?" Commerce, he concluded, would follow themissionary: "The millions of Africa and Asia are someday to have the wantsof a Christian civilization." And "with these vast continents added to ourmarket," surely the United States would become "the mighty workshop ofthe world, and our people `the hands of mankind.'"

    During this period, as transportation routes and communication linesbecame more extensive, not only did the nation's regional economies becomemore thoroughly integrated with one another, but the national economy itselfbecame more thoroughly integrated into a world economic system. TheUnited States went out into the world of international trade and empire-buildingin a complex ideological position: in terms of racial and cultural allegiances,the United States entered world arenas as a European offshoot withsome fancied affinity to the Old World. In terms of nationalist propensitiesand economic necessities, on the other hand, the United States embarked onthis ambitious program as the European powers' most menacing rival. Theemergence of the United States on the world stage, then, was marked byboth a bitter competition among the European and Euro-identified nations,and an articulated kinship among these same powers in their self-proclaimedcivilizing mission among the savages, semisavages, and barbarians of Africa,Asia, and Latin America.

Industrial Production and "Terrible Surplus"

The United States' spectacular economic growth at the turn of the centurywas attended by an equally spectacular pattern of downturns and failures:nearly half of the years between the 1870s and World War I were depressionyears?1873-79, 1882-85, 1893-97, 1907-8, and 1913-15. The story ofthe nation's fantastic accumulation of wealth in this period is also a story ofcrushing poverty. In this context, social and economic remedies were at apremium; indeed, this was a time of frenetic activity in inventing, proposing,and debating solutions of all sorts?distributive innovations like thesingle tax; remonetizing plans like greenbacks and free silver; protectionistmechanisms like tariffs on international trade; or political programs likepopulism, socialism, and anarchism.

    One of the mainstays of economic discussion throughout these years wasthe fevered talk of "overproduction" and the need to secure foreign markets.Economic depression, in this formulation, was a sign not of capitalism's failure,but of its stunning and unabsorbed success: the wheels of industry weresimply churning out more goods than Americans could hope to consumethemselves, and so other markets would have to be sought and secured. Inthe 1870s, Commander Robert Shufeldt, long interested in opening the"Hermit Kingdom" of Korea to American interests, had put the matter moststarkly: "At least one-third of our mechanical and agricultural products arenow in excess of our wants, and we must export these products or deport thepeople who are creating them." "Our manufactures have outgrown or areoutgrowing the home market," concurred the National Association of Manufacturersin an atmosphere of crisis in the mid-1890s; "expansion of our foreigntrade is the only promise of relief."

    Not everyone subscribed to the "overproduction" thesis. Advocates offree silver and many labor leaders, notably, felt that the problem was best understoodnot as a case of overproduction but of "underconsumption": the domesticmarket could indeed absorb the nation's vast output, if only wagescales and reigning patterns of indebtedness were altered to allow it to do so.Among the sharpest?and funniest?critiques of the overproduction thesiswas James Jeffrey Roche's parodic poem, "The Terrible Surplus," writtenamid vigorous national debate over free trade and tariff policy in the 1890s.Roche was the editor of the Boston Pilot, an Irish immigrant journal; and itwas perhaps his Irish-nationalist sensibility, in which a keen sense of justicewas derived from the mythic precedents of tenancy and famine on the EmeraldIsle, that led him to question the premise of so much want amid plenty.His poem is an extreme extension of the logic by which, earlier, Senator JohnKasson had warned that, if the United States failed to secure sufficient foreignmarkets, "our surplus will soon roll back from the Atlantic coast uponthe interior, and the wheels of prosperity will be clogged by the very richnessof the burden which they carry, but cannot deliver." Such an analysis, forRoche, was the stuff of apocalyptic comedy:

Abundance clutched, with ruthless hand, The nation's throat like an iron band; Silver rivers with golden sand Inundated the hapless land In the year of the Terrible Surplus.

Granaries groaned with weight of grain; Flocks and herds covered every plain; Oil wells flowed, and every vein Of mines and minerals swelled the gain In the year of the Terrible Surplus.

Other peoples, more blest than we, Joyed in their happy bankruptcy; Foreign paupers, whose trade was "free," Pitied our plethoric misery, In the year of the Terrible Surplus....

    But whether or not "overproduction" was the proper frame for understandingthe boom and bust of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era economy(many economists today question it), whether or not foreign markets indeedheld the key to national prosperity, it was true that this period marked a dramaticshift in the balance of U.S. trade. The years 1876 through 1880 representedthe first time in U.S. history when the country had a positive balanceof trade for five consecutive years. This was not an aberration, but a watershed:before 1876, there were only fourteen years in which the nation's exportsexceeded its imports; between 1876 and the 1970s, there were onlythree years (1888, 1889, and 1893) in which they did not. As a quick measureof the rise in U.S. productivity in these years, the nation's Gross NationalProduct for the five-year period 1869-73 was $9 billion; for the five-year period1897-1901, over $37 billion. Gross farm product, too, nearly tripledbetween the Civil War and the turn of the century.

    Agricultural products and textiles led the way in the United States' significantshift toward becoming an exporting rather than an importing nation.New technologies of cultivation and harvest and the opening of newlands after the 1860s dramatically increased the nation's overall agriculturalproduction. Cotton production nearly doubled between 1870 and 1890, forinstance; wheat production increased by over 30 percent in the decade of the1870s alone. Both crops accounted for a huge proportion of the nation's exports.But by the 1890s, even manufactured goods ran in this direction. In1880, agricultural items accounted for 84 percent of all U.S. exports; just afterthe turn of the century, that figure had fallen to about 67 percent, as minerals,ore, and manufactured goods gained ground. Interest in the exportmarket was especially sharp among oil producers: by the mid-1880s, StandardOil shipped over 90 percent of its kerosene abroad (70 percent to Europe,and another 21 percent to Asia). U.S. exports overall climbed by fitsand starts throughout this period, from $526 million in 1876 to over $1 billionper year by the late 1890s; exports continued to climb steadily, reaching$2 billion for the first time in 1911, and jumping to $5, $6, and $7 billionper year during the war years of 1916-19. Although the export market continuedto receive only a fraction of the foodstuffs and goods that the domesticmarket absorbed, the trends were still impressive. As of 1893, only GreatBritain's exports exceeded those of the United States.

    Earlier in the century, apostles of expansion and progress like WilliamSeward had nourished precisely such a vision of export markets and America'scapacity to exploit them. As early as the 1850s, Seward had proclaimed,"Multiply your ships, and send them forth to the east. The nation that drawsmost materials and provisions from the earth, and fabricates the most, andsells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations must be, and willbe, the great power of the earth." Seward believed that political supremacywould follow commercial ascendancy; and commercial ascendancy depended,in the end, upon access to and control of foreign markets.

    Thus, as secretary of state (1861-69), Seward stressed the importance ofinternational commerce and global reach, and he developed ambitious policiestoward those ends: he obtained the Midway Islands and Alaska ("thedrawbridge between America and Asia," as one enthusiastic observer put it);he had designs on Hawaii; he advocated construction of an isthmian canal;and he toyed with all manner of blueprints for Caribbean and Latin Americanexpansion. Antiexpansionists were able to block many of Seward's plansin the 1860s; but their counterarguments steadily lost force in the 1870s and1880s, as development of the interior effectively "closed" the frontier (atleast in popular imagination), and as agricultural and industrial productionthreatened to outstrip the capacities of the nation's domestic market. Seward'sexpansive vision thus formed an important foundation for the laterview, during the cycles of depression in the 1870s and after, that?global supremacyaside?the nation's economic survival itself would require an aggressiveconquest of foreign markets.

    Notwithstanding the dissent of labor leaders or of parodists like JeffreyRoche, over the latter decades of the nineteenth century a formidable consensusdid develop on the overproduction thesis and the need for foreignmarkets. A series of articles by economist David Wells in 1887 and 1888(later published under the title Recent Economic Changes and Their Effects on theProduction and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-Being of Society) presented acyclical economic theory and analysis whose chief solutions included marketpenetration abroad. Charles Arthur Conant, too, Washington correspondentfor the New York Journal of Commerce and a financial editor of Banker Magazine,concluded that sustained domestic productivity and global expansionwere the only means to maintain both labor's wages and capital's profits. Industrialistslike Andrew Carnegie quickly agreed that export to foreign marketswas the only feasible way of alleviating the surplus.

    The interpretation's popularity and the attendant calls for action on thepart of policy-makers became particularly widespread during the harsh depressionof 1893 (a year, not incidentally, of trade deficit), and a few yearslater, when the recovery of 1897-98 rather portentously coincided with aboom in the nation's exports. The domestic setting of the 1890s, and particularlythe mounting labor radicalism of the decade, lent still more urgencyto the question of markets, as labor disaffection came to be seen as a chiefdanger in the era of overproduction. "We must have new markets," SenatorHenry Cabot Lodge argued, "unless we would be visited by declines inwages and by great industrial disturbances, of which signs have not beenlacking."

    Business and financial organs and organizations like Banker Magazine,Bradstreet's, the American Banking Association, and the National Associationof Manufacturers all became outspoken advocates of export trade as the newpanacea for the nation's woes of overproduction. The constituency thatcoalesced around the overproduction thesis ultimately included not onlybusiness and finance, but the conservative press and importantly placedpoliticians and State Department figures. President Grover Cleveland emphasizedthe need to "find markets in every part of the habitable globe";William Day, assistant secretary of state under McKinley, commented enthusiasticallyupon the "vast undeveloped fields of Africa and the Far East."

    As policy-making way back in the days of William Seward had suggested,a keen interest in foreign markets and a determination to conquerthem for the good of the country carried wide-ranging implications for state-buildingand for the conduct of foreign policy. In his Report upon the CommercialRelations of the United States (1880), Secretary of State William Evartsarticulated what would soon become a driving principle of American foreignpolicy: "The fostering, the developing, and the directing of our commerce bythe government should be laid down as a necessity of the first importance."It was scarcely a leap from here to William Howard Taft's "dollar diplomacy"three decades later. "The diplomacy of the present administration," Taftexplained, "has sought to respond to modern ideas of commercial intercourse....It is an effort frankly directed to the increase of American tradeupon the axiomatic principle that the government of the United States shallextend all proper support to every legitimate and beneficial American enterpriseabroad."

    The policy implications of the overproduction thesis were clearly spelledout by military and economic theorists like Alfred Thayer Mahan and BrooksAdams.

    In The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Mahan linked the nation'sgrowing agricultural and industrial productivity to the need for amodern navy that could protect the commercial fleet and control the waterways.The only choices the United States faced, in his view, were to absorbAmerican products at home through some "socialistic" mechanism, or to findnew markets for American goods across the seas. Mahan anticipated FrederickJackson Turner's notion of a new national order in the post-"frontier" era.The seas now constituted the frontier, a vast safety valve to drain off the nation'ssurplus production. In Mahan's view, production, shipping, and colonization(in that order) constituted the mainspring of historic activity amongpowerful, seagoing nations. Control of the seas was the key to controlling thenation's economic fate in a period of overproduction.

    Brooks Adams, too, started with the premise of overproduction, and,like Mahan, ended with a dramatic series of policy initiatives. As he put it inAmerica's Economic Supremacy (1900), the United States "stands face to facewith the gravest conjuncture that can confront a people. She must protectthe outlets of her trade, or run the risk of suffocation." Without significantchanges in economic and administrative arrangements, the United Statescould conceivably suffer gluts "more dangerous to her society than manypanics such as 1873 and 1893." In a frankly Darwinian discussion under thesubhead "The New Struggle for Life among Nations," Adams warned, "Onthe existence of this surplus hinges the future." He thus advocated a policy ofterritorial expansion and administrative concentration ("for governments aresimply huge corporations in competition"), including the consolidation ofthe West Indies under U.S. control, vigorously maintaining "Asiatic markets,"and building an isthmian canal as a key to traffic and communicationwithin this emergent trade empire. "If America is destined to win this battlefor life," he argued, "she must win because she is the fittest to survive underthe conditions of the twentieth century."

    More pragmatic subscribers to the overproduction thesis were no lesssweeping in their proposals for a more vigorous state policy. The NationalAssociation of Manufacturers (NAM), founded in 1895 in response toprecisely the crisis of markets, advocated a strong, active role for thegovernment in securing and protecting foreign commerce, including acomprehensive network of reciprocity treaties, government subsidies tobuild a merchant fleet, the construction of a Nicaraguan canal, and the improvementof internal waterways. By the time the NAM emerged in the1890s, however, the state was already well oriented toward this general aimof securing the requisites of a seagoing commercial power. In the 1870s, theUnited States had concluded a reciprocity treaty with Hawaii with an eye towardsecuring "a resting spot in the midocean, between the Pacific coast andthe vast domains of Asia," and a treaty with Samoa securing use of the harborat Pago Pago in exchange for certain political protections. In the 1880s,Congress had set about building a modern navy, authorizing thirty-four steelvessels between 1883 and 1889; during this period, the nation had expandedand improved its consular service as well. The wars of 1898 and 1899 inCuba and the Philippines, then, would both consolidate this expansiveworld-view and accelerate the trends in American state-building, as themodern administrative state began to take shape under McKinley and Roosevelt.

    The newly energetic quest for markets would not only cast Americangovernment in an increasingly active role, but would also have tremendousimplications for those regions that represented the target of such economicaspiration. According to Africa enthusiast Henry Sanford, for instance, PresidentChester A. Arthur was "influenced by the idea of covering those uncladmillions [in Africa] with our domestic cottons." In 1883, Sanford cultivatedinterest in Washington in the notion of an African International Associationunder the sponsorship of Belgium's King Leopold II, and the United Statesdid participate in the Berlin Conference on the development of the Congo in1884-85. Finally, the African market proved far less important for Americanexporters than either Latin America or Asia?or, indeed, than the cherishedimage of those naked millions might have promised?largely because theflurry of imperialist activity on the part of the European powers in the regionleft U.S. goods at a decided disadvantage. But, however insignificant the effortsof men like Sanford, Senator John Kasson, and Secretary of State FrederickFrelinghuysen to translate a vague American interest in Africa intoactive markets and actual trade practices, it is no small matter that, as earlyas the 1880s, the United States had joined the colonial powers of Europe atthe conference table on the topic of "developing" the Congo. Increasingly,whether by informal means of economic penetration or by more overt methodsof territorial aggrandizement by conquest or treaty, the American questfor new markets would lead down the road of empire.

    If the desired global reach never did extend across the south Atlantic tothe "dark continent" of Africa, U.S. designs in other regions did take on adecidedly imperialistic cast, either in aspiration or in the actual conduct ofpolicy. The United States looked with feasting eyes upon two regions in particular.China occupied a central place in American economic fantasiesthroughout the period, although it never did become an actual outlet forU.S. goods on the scale suggested by its enormous population. And LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, if cutting a somewhat less spectacular figure inthe American imagination, in fact became a significant market for U.S. exportsand a significant proving-ground for those expeditionary forces associatedwith empire. One key architect of U.S. policy in the region was JamesBlaine, secretary of state during the assassination-shortened Garfield administration(1881) and then again under Benjamin Harrison (1889-92). Twoprinciples guided his actions in Latin America, he explained: "to bring aboutpeace" and "to cultivate such friendly commercial relations with all Americancountries as would lead to a large increase in the export trade of theUnited States." Bringing about peace, as it happened, surprisingly oftenmeant war; and so Latin America became the site of numerous political andmilitary interventions during this formative period in the cultivation of theexport trade.

    Taken together, China and Latin America nicely demonstrate two distinctdimensions of the imperial imagination that necessarily attended the"overproduction" thesis of American economic health and stability. The storyof the United States in China illumines the realm of imperialist fantasy, asthe fondest hopes of exporters reduced the whole of Chinese history and cultureto a series of "wants" whose particulars were as easily discerned by theWestern eye as they were fulfilled by Western industry. The story of theUnited States in Latin America, on the other hand, illumines the realm ofpure imperial power and its deployment, as policy-makers annexed entire nations,not only as consumers of North American goods but as elements in astrategic infrastructure for an export economy whose requirements includedcanals, harbors, coaling stations, and naval bases all beyond the proper bordersof the nation itself.

Continues...

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Hill & Wang Pub
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0809016281
• ISBN 13: 9780809016280
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 354
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile