Embracing Colonialism in the 1890s
In the 1890s Manifest Destiny and aggressive expansionism experienced a revival, driven by a familiar combination of racial, class, and gender concerns. Racial unrest at home in the form of segregation and lynching, and the rise of a new doctrine of “Social Darwinism,” suggested to many white Americans that the continued survival of American Anglo-Saxons depended on the domination of other races at home and abroad.
Industrialization and a financial depression starting in 1893 led to declining conditions for workers, while labor unrest caused concern among the management classes. Women's ongoing struggle for political rights also took on a new intensity at the close of the century.[2366]As in the 1830s and 1840s, aggressive expansionism seemed to offer a solution to domestic problems and new opportunities for white men to assert their authority over those they considered their inferiors. With the West effectively settled, Americans looked abroad for a new frontier. The result was the open advocacy of gaining overseas territories as a means of strengthening American manhood and prevailing in the Darwinian struggle between the races that many white American intellectuals believed was underway.[2367]
America's “Manifest Destiny” took on worldwide dimensions and an even more racist character than in its pre-Civil War incarnation. In 1898 the standing army of 29,000 increased to nearly 200,000 regulars and volunteers as the United States went to war against Spain, stripping her of her remaining colonies. Soon after, it began a war of colonial subordination against the Philippines that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. Annexation proved a cataclysmic disaster, but the United States emerged from the Wars of 1898 in possession of Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico, each of which was held as colony.[2368]
The rebirth of territorial annexation was made possible by important shifts in ideas of empire and citizenship in the United States. Annexation in the antebellum era was predicated on the idea that the newly incorporated “Americans” would receive full political rights, although Mexican residents of the new Southwest after 1848, and Native Americans throughout the period, found those promises maddeningly empty. But the rise of Social Darwinism and the racial upheaval of Reconstruction left white Americans unwilling to acknowledge the political rights of non-white people at home or abroad. Colonial governance, decried as the cardinal sin of European empire in pre-Revolutionary America, became law in the territories taken from Spain in 1898.