“How the U.S.A. Became the World's Policeman.”
By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
Review of with Commentary on Warren Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp.
Given at Book Review Group, Uplands Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, May 15, 2006.
Betty: Frank, why did we choose this particular book, Warren Zimmermann's, The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002? What was our motive?
Frank: Zimmermann's point is that an aggressive U.S. foreign policy aimed at making the U.S. the world’s policeman originated in and has persisted since the Spanish American War, 1898. In that war, for the first time, we took on and defeated a European power, Spain. We consequently acquired strategic naval bases in the Caribbean and Pacific. We planned a Panama Canal which opened in 1914. That war and control of the Panama Canal led to our becoming a world power
Betty : In that 3 month imperial thrust--April 25 to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired directly and indirectly overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. The imperial U.S. foreign policy then formed still guides us.
Frank: Who was Warren Zimmerman? What does the title mean: The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power?
Betty: Warren Zimmermann (1935-2004) was a Yale graduate and a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England. He was briefly a journalist and for 33 years a U.S. diplomat, including ambassador to Yugoslavia during the Bosnian civil war. He later taught International Diplomacy at Columbia University.
Frank: The book's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a June 15, 1898 letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1
Betty: Theodore Roosevelt--first of Zimmerman's…Five Americans [who] Made Their Country a World Power—was frail as a child. He overcame asthma, poor eyesight, and a weak heart through exercise and a strenuous outdoor life. His vigorous personality, staunch Republicanism, ambition for high office, and his certainty that the U.S. must reach outside its borders for world leadership were infectious.
Frank: Like-minded influential Republicans saw Roosevelt as an unstoppable ally and helped him climb the political ladder. Roosevelt's career choices were guided mainly by Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee member. Sen. Lodge was the second of Zimmerman's…Five Americans [who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, 8 years older than Roosevelt, more jingoistic than Roosevelt, was the son of two patrician Boston families. Heir to a shipping fortune, he was a Harvard graduate and a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.
Frank: Lodge won a U.S. congressional seat (1886), then a U.S. Senate seat (1892), and served 30 years on the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge, supreme political tactician, and Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist, helped foment the Spanish American War.
Betty: You may recall Lodge's grandson and namesake, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, 1902-85. He was U.S. representative to the United Nations under Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1960) and Richard M. Nixon's (1913-) running mate as vice president when they both lost to John F. Kennedy (1917-63) in 1960.
Frank: The older Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt headed a rising Republican expansionist cabal determined to reach beyond U.S. borders for unlimited U.S. commercial success and unhampered world power. Twenty years later as Pres. Woodrow Wilson's nemesis Senator Lodge helped defeat the League of Nations. Why? Because to Senator Lodge U.S. sovereignty should not be limited by any international body.
Betty: Back to Theodore Roosevelt: at age 24 he was New York State Assembly minority leader (1882-84). At 26 he went west to raise cattle and hunt big game in North Dakota (1884-86);
Frank: At 34 he was U.S. Civil Service Commissioner (1889-95). At 36 he was New York City Police Commissioner (1895-97). He then helped elect as U.S. president Ohio Republican William McKinley (1843-1901).
Betty: Pres. McKinley named Roosevelt at age 38 Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1897-98). Having sparked the Spanish American War, Roosevelt resigned, recruited, and led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, Cuba.
Frank: As a war hero, Roosevelt at 40 was elected New York State governor (1898-1900). As vice presidential candidate, he helped Pres. McKinley win a second term in 1900. When Pres. McKinley was assassinated (Sept. 14, 1901), Vice President Theodore Roosevelt at 43 became the youngest U.S. President. He was president during 1901-04 and re-elected during 1904-08.
Betty: We Americans don't like to hear our county called an imperial nation, or our president called an imperial president. Yet historians, including Zimmermann, say it has always been so.
Frank: For example: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all the North American land we could get. American Revolutionary raiding parties captured Montreal but lost at Quebec. We wanted to take all of Canada several times but we could not do so.
Betty: George Washington in 1783 referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." In 1786 he said: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2
Frank: With the Louisiana Purchase from France (1803), Pres. Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore (1803-06) the Pacific Northwest. Why? So that Americans could settle, develop, and profit from western lands and commerce.
Betty: John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State under Pres. James Monroe, influenced the U.S. to buy Florida from Spain (1819). He also helped Pres. Monroe issue the Monroe Doctrine (1823) which declared the Western Hemisphere to be an exclusive U.S. sphere of influence closed to any further European exploitation.
Frank: Avid expansionist Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." By winning the Mexican War (1846-48), he added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S. Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) used gunboat diplomacy in sending Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan (1853).
Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln was imperial in suspending habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailing subversives without trial, actions that were unconstitutional. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against blacks, Indians, Chinese, and other minorities.
Frank: National U.S. post-Civil War energy went into settling the West, building roads, canals, railroads, and the telegraph to connect our vast nation. Immigrant labor abounded, business boomed; fortunes were made by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, others. U.S. "Manifest Destiny" seemed unstoppable.
Betty: Wisconsin history Prof. Frederick Jackson Turner saw in the U.S. Census of 1890 a slight but significant shift in the U.S. center of population. His 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History," said that the American frontier was gone, but that frontier characteristics remained: rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profit, and dominance.
Frank: Prof. Turner said prophetically in 1896, two years before the Spanish American War: [Frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3
Betty: Prof. Turner was right. With the frontier gone, believers in "Manifest Destiny'" looked overseas for increased trade. To protect that trade, they needed strategic overseas bases and naval protection. Military power outside U.S. boundaries then meant naval power.
Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would expand overseas was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists, embracing Darwinian evolution, saw struggle for survival as natural and believed it right and proper for the U.S. to become the fittest, strongest, first, most dominant of nations.
Betty: U. S. naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) was the third of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. Mahan was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.
Frank: Born in West Point, N. Y., where his father taught, young Mahan graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1859. Having served in the Civil War on antiquated wooden Union warships, Mahan later irritated superiors by publishing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. His superiors tried unsuccessfully to muzzle Mahan. One called him derisively "a pen and ink sailor."
Betty: Mahan's model was the British Navy. He wanted more, larger, better-gunned steam-driven steel-hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.
Frank: The U.S. Navy, he wrote, must be mobile, flexible, with quick passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.
Betty: Mahan's big chance came when Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce (1827–1917), under whom Mahan once served, established the world's first Naval War College at Newport, R.I. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there (1885), spent 9 months in libraries steeped in historical studies, and arrived at the Naval War College (1886) to find himself its acting head and later president.
Frank: In his second year (1887), needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt, whom he did not know, had published in1882, age 24, a book titled The Naval War of 1812. In his lecture series Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. These two men thereafter reinforced each other; Mahan was Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.
Betty: Mahan's lectures were published by publisher Little, Brown & Co. The editor wisely suggested a new introductory chapter that tied his historical themes to U.S. Navy shortcomings. Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783, published in 1890, won rave reviews. That book and Mahan's subsequent books became required reading in major navy departments worldwide.
Frank: Some quotes about Mahan: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 [Again]…"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 [Again]…"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…"6
Betty: To Mahan's new naval strategy was added the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad. Ohio Governor William McKinley said, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7 Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927) in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War, said: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8
Frank: Expansionist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge said: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii].., Samoa, [and] Cuba….The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…"9
Betty: Thus, during William McKinley's presidency (1896-1901) Republican expansionists determined to advance U.S. world status by increased overseas trade protected by strategic bases in territories abroad. Wanting a pretext for war, hawkish Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10
Frank: Spain then was weakened by guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martí (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964). U.S. Americans sympathized with oppressed Cubans, were angered at Spain's brutality, concentration camps, and resulting deaths. U.S. American anger was fanned by U.S. yellow press sensational accounts of Spanish atrocities.
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a decorated Civil War major, wanted to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened U.S. residents. Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force. On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors. A U.S. Navy investigation, March 21, 1898, reporting that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine, stirred U.S. anger. The U.S. jingo press, bent on war, headlined that Spanish agents had deliberately sunk the Maine.
Frank: Yielding to public clamor, Pres. McKinley on April 11, 1898, asked Congress to declare war on Spain. On April 22, 1898, the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports. Spain on April 24, 1898; and the U.S the next day (25th), declared war.
Betty: Seventy eight years later (1976) a re-sifting of the evidence attributed the Maine explosion to coal dust which accidentally ignited nearby gunpowder.
Frank: The cry, "Remember the Maine," sparked the Spanish American War. It was comparable to the firing on Fort Sumter in the Civil War, the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I, the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Vietnam, and Weapons of Mass Destruction charge in the Iraq War.
Betty : The Spanish American War, 1898, was based on larger U.S. motives than the Maine explosion: 1-to acquire more territory for more trade, 2-more territory for refueling bases, 3-to attain greater U.S. status, 4-to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—a reason given for the first time: 5-to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippines was an afterthought. Following Mahan's strategic advice, and in the absence of his superior, Navy Secretary John D. Long, Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared. Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. On May 1 in a 7 hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.
Betty: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. regular soldiers and volunteers, including Roosevelt's "Rough Riders," soon reached Cuba. Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet in a 4 hour sea battle. A month later, Aug. 4, 1898, U.S. forces took Puerto Rico.
Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead. Only 332 died in battle. The remaining deaths were from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, only 10% in battle or battle wounds, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.11&12
Betty: In the Treaty of Paris that ended the war (Dec. 10, 1898) Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We had earlier acquired Midway Island when we purchased Alaska (1867).
Frank: The U.S. Senate fiercely debated the Dec. 10, 1898 Treaty of Paris. Anti-expansionists argued that acquiring such distant non-contiguous areas peopled by alien races incapable of assimilation was against traditional U.S. isolationism. Taking the territories, they said, was inconsistent with the Monroe Doctrine and against U.S. principles of self-government. It was Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's dominant persuasion that won Senate approval by just two votes on Feb. 6, 1900.
Betty: Needing backing from Britain, then the world's leading power, President McKinley chose John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Frank: John Hay, born in Salem, IN, moved at age 3 with his parents to Warsaw, Ill. After graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., he joined his uncle's Springfield, IL, law firm next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager, John Nicolay (1832-1901) and John Hay had been classmates. Nicolay got Hay to help in the 1860 political campaign. Newly elected President Lincoln took Nicolay—and at Nicolay's urging, also Hay—to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries. Hay, in 1861 at age 23, found himself living in the White House.
Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail and drafted replies, including Lincoln's famous sympathy letter to Mrs. Bixby on the deaths of her two sons in the Civil War. John Hay briefed Lincoln on news press items, greeted visitors and job-seekers, arranged receptions, was sent on secret missions, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad. He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed. John Hay's Lincoln connection together with his own political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner, led him to high office.
Frank: After Lincoln's assassination Secretary of State William Henry Seward appointed John Hay foreign service officer (1865-70). He served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. After that, Hay's visit to a friend at the New York Tribune led to Hay's four years as New York Tribune journalist and editorial writer (1870-74). John Hay met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities through his millionaire father-in-law, made John Hay wealthy.
Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81), under Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93). In Washington, D.C., Hay renewed contacts with Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and other Republican expansionists.
Frank: In Cleveland, Hay wrote a best selling novel, The Breadwinners (1883), about urban labor turmoil. Back in Washington, D.C., he wrote with John Nicolay the important 10-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (N.Y.: Century, 1886).
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) would help win Britain's support.
Frank: John Hay smoothed over past U.S.-British animosities over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and Civil War angers over the Trent Affair and the Alabama Claims controversy. [Trent Affair: On Nov. 8, 1861, U.S. warship officers illegally and forcibly removed from the British ship Trent, in the Bahamas, four Confederate agents seeking arms and aid abroad. Pres. Lincoln disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoiding a U.S.-British war in the middle of the U.S. Civil War].
Betty: There was also the Civil War Alabama Claims friction with Britain: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought British made ships, renamed them Alabama, Florida, etc., outfitted them with guns as war raiders. Those British built Confederate raiders cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. $15.5 million indemnity (1871-72).
Frank: Thanks to John Hay, Britain backed U.S. rule over Spain's territories, supported a U.S.-built Panama Canal, and approved a U.S "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899), allowing U.S. to trade in China without paying high tariffs. Britain was glad for a friendly U.S. to perform international acts that also advanced Britain's interests.
Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged lasted through our late but crucial entrance into World War I against Kaiser-led Germany, World War II against Hitler's Nazism, the Cold War against USSR domination, the 1991 Gulf War, and the current (2003+) Iraq War.
Frank: Pres. Theodore Roosevelt praised John Hay as follows: "I wonder if you have any idea what your strength and wisdom and sympathy…have meant to me."13
Betty: Zimmermann described John Hay: "As a successful businessman, he caught the rising tide of America's economic expansion. As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."14
Frank: The U.S. Army initially administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted civilian administrators to replace Army rule. He looked for a Secretary of War to supervise civil administrators in nation building and to lead the colonial people toward self rule. John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Internationally minded Elihu Root was best at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to seemingly irreconcilable problems.
Betty: Here is how McKinley contacted Elihu Root: Pres. McKinley in the White House phoned Elihu Root in New York City. McKinley said to Root: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root said: I can't do that. I'm a lawyer. I don't know anything about war. I don't know anything about the Army. I have no experience with government. I have never been to Washington. McKinley said: I don't care about that. You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in the history of the United States charged with running colonies. I want somebody with good common sense, a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.
Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Pres. Roosevelt (1905-09) and was a one-term U.S. senator. He was our leading international lawyer of that time.
Betty: Elihu Root was born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College where his father taught and from which Elihu graduated (1864). He taught for a year (1865), graduated from New York University Law School (1867), and began a long, successful legal career. In his twenties Elihu Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties he was one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16
Frank: Before becoming U.S. president, William Howard Taft (1857-1930), was the first civil administrator to the Philippines. Elihu Root gave these instructions to William Howard Taft: "…the government which you are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures adopted should…conform to their customs, their habits, and…their prejudices."
Betty: Elihu Root first and foremost served U.S. interests. But Root also helped make Cuba independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, made sure that locally generated revenues were used locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools. In the Philippines Root and William Howard Taft began land reform, built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and have the first elected legislature in Asia.
Frank: Elihu Root founded the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, both still existing. Root's work led to the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1927. He inspired the creation of the Central American Court of Justice. His urging of a World Court, leading to the International Court of Justice in the Hague in 1945.
Betty: Elihu Root served the U.S. government on many international committees and courts. He won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for his tireless effort to establish the principles of compulsory international arbitration.18 &19 Root died in 1937 at age 92.
Frank: Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier (1905) for helping end the Russo-Japanese War. Of his earlier jingoism, those closest to him said, it was to live down his father's decision not to fight in the Civil War but to pay someone to take his place, a common practice then. Yet young, hawkish Roosevelt gave us a powerful Navy and stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.
Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the early maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I.
Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, and Renaissance man, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance.
Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, as previously mentioned, was the supreme tactical Republican expansionist politician. He, Roosevelt, and Mahan's naval strategy sparked the Spanish American War. Lodge died in 1924.
Frank: In grabbing colonies the U.S. was as ruthless as the most ruthless European powers. But, wrote Zimmermann, the U.S. did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent (May 20, 1902), although under conditions that assured U.S. interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state, (Aug. 21, 1959). Puerto Ricans consistently voted for closer ties with the U.S. The U.S. profited from its colonies, yes, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced economies. The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed.20
Betty: Author Zimmermann thus illustrated the weak U.S. before and the powerful U.S. after the Spanish American War: In 1891 in the True Blue Saloon, Valparaíso, Chile, 2 U.S. sailors were killed in a bar room brawl with local Chileans. U.S. Navy officials asked Capt. Alfred Mahan, who had been in and out of Chilean ports, for a contingency plan should the incident lead to war. Capt. Mahan, discovering that the Chilean Navy might actually defeat the U.S. Navy, advised his superiors to settle the matter by arbitration.
Frank: Now fast forward 18 years later to Feb. 22, 1909. The Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. battleships, returned from a year-and-a half cruise around the world; 45,000 miles, with stops at major world ports, the longest cruise taken by any navy before or since. This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., a column 7 miles long, greeted by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, a navy band, and resounding cheers. Theodore Roosevelt had shown the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy. The U.S. had arrived on the world stage. We were a world power, on the way to being the world's policeman. 21
Betty: The age of U.S. imperialism, Zimmermann wrote, lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War in 1991. What changed, he wrote, is that big corporations increasingly finance political campaigns, influencing U.S. presidents and Congress to advance business profit rather than humane needs at home and abroad. We are in transition, Zimmerman said, between the U.S. imperialist age that ended in 1991 and a new age that is unformed and undefined.
Frank: Zimmermann died in 2004. He said about the Middle East in a speech on June 14, 2002, 9 months before the U.S. invaded Iraq:"…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young Arabs everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."22
Betty: We end with Zimmermann's prophetic view above about Iraq today and his hope that the U.S. will always use its international power for altruistic, helpful purposes. 22
References
1-Zimmermann, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p.275.
2-Ibid., p. 6.
3-Ibid., p. 24.
4-Ibid., p. 94.
5-Ibid.
6-Uhlig, Jr., Frank. "The Great White Fleet," American Heritage, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), pp. 30-43.
7-Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. N.Y.: Perennial Classics, 1999 p. 299.
8-Ibid.
9-Ibid.
10-Ibid., p.297.
11-http://www.spanamwar.com/casualties.htm
12-http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
13-Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 419.
14-Ibid., p. 455.
15-Zimmermann, Warren. Speech, April 9, 2003, Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
16-Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 123.
17-Ibid.
18 and 19-Ibid ., pp. 487-488.
20-Zimmermann, Warren. "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire, Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 42-65.
21-Uhlig, op cit.
22-Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 503.
Used for Background
Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize post 9-11-2001 "Bush Doctrine" of unilateral preemptive strikes in Iraq).
"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927. html
Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.
Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
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