America's New Spain Analysis

The United States: America’s New Spain As much of Latin America shed itself of Spanish colonial rule, the British and Americans soon preyed over the region much similarly to Iberian powers as portrayed in the 1914 Chicago Tribune cartoon, “What the United States has Fought For.” During the nineteenth century, the British exerted its dominance over Latin America through investment, half of the region’s ten billion dollar debt owed to the British by 1914. However, the United States soon eclipsed British presence while “[having] a more sanctimonious approach than their British counterparts” in the late 1800s, demonstrated in the Spanish-American conflict. Paralleling Spain’s initial religious justifications for seizing the continent, the cartoon
Fueled by the American public’s desire of “rescuing” the regions from Spain’s grip and Rudyard Kipling’s “[urging] the United States to take up the ‘white man’s burden’ of ‘civilizing’ non-Europeans during its expansion” , the United States beat a fatigued Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and eventually seized Cuba and Puerto Rico, stripping such regions of its autonomy to serve the United States’ empire. The people of the United States believed that unlike other European powers, their presence would be beneficial for the people of the regions they preyed on while simultaneously believing that the Western Hemisphere belonged to them, as exhibited in the earlier Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine where the United States essentially claimed the continent for their own benefit. Like the British, the United States would soon spread its influence across the world to augment its own wealth through means of intervention and investment. Yet, rather than simply approaching its imperialism in pragmatic terms such as the British, the Americans insisted on justifying their manifest destiny much as the Spaniards had done when they first stepped foot on the continent. Marked by their crusading mentality from the Christian re-conquest, Catholic Isabel enlisted Christopher Columbus for Spanish economic interests and secondarily spreading the influence of the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, it was the prospect of gold that lured the Spanish to the other side of the Atlantic. The Spanish after seizing much of the continent then claimed it was their duty to Christianize the natives. Moreover, the Spanish had even implemented the encomienda system that in