| Reading Guide for Week 12 | |
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Tuesday A friend of future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Thayer Mahan was an enormously influential naval theorist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mahan strove to extract from the British imperial model the most effective and cost-effective means of amplifing the United States’ global power. The U.S. Army had “won the West” in decimating many Indian nations and Native American communities, but Mahan looked to the U.S. Navy as a global force — once that navy was more properly built up, as he urged. Once he became President, Roosevelt would deliver on that urging, in dispatching a “Great White Fleet” of new battleships on a flamboyant circumnavigation of the world from 1907 to 1909. Like many other American policy-makers and -influencers in this era, Mahan viewed the Pacific as an attainable new stepping-stone toward American world dominance. U.S. President Roosevelt propounded the so-called “Roosevelt Corollary” in 1904, as a significant upgrade of the so-called “Monroe Doctrine” of 1823. That 1823 doctrine had warned European empires against pursuing any new colonies in Latin America amid an outbreak of rebellions against Spanish imperial rule. Roosevelt’s corollary went a step further in licensing American military intervention in Latin America whenever it was deemed supposedly necessary. The safe space for American business corporations would thereby extend beyond the country’s North American borders, repeatedly violating in the early 20th century any countervailing sovereignty belonging to other countries. A crucial component of American Pacific dreams was the Panama Canal, as built from 1904 to 1914. This is a 1912 promotional news-reel conveying a selective, celebratory portrait of the canal as it neared completion. Thursday Albert Beveridge was, similar to Teddy Roosevelt, a Progressive reformer and a racist imperialist. In these essays, Beveridge grappled with the United States’ potential position in the world; with the factor of the Pacific and the Philippines in affecting that position; and with an imperative for (white) young men to optimize themselves. In examining all three essays, as with the Mahan and Roosevelt documents, you should keep your eyes open for themes of being and becoming with respect to maleness as well as to empire. Even if the 1898 defeat of the Spanish empire and acquisition of its colonies marked a new situation for the United States, Beveridge firmly situated both the nation and the young men unavoidably and firmly in the wider world. The question was: could young men and could the nation meet the new challenges of global entanglement, and of global ambition? |