During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s the United States (U.S.) pursued an aggressive policy of expansionism extending its political and economic influence around the world. What is imperialism? Why this policy was adopted and how it was rationalized. The major events that took place and which countries of the world the U.S. became involved due to this policy. Finally, we will see, not everyone supported foreign affairs by the U.S. and in 1899 they founded the American Anti-Imperialist League. I will discuss their view of Imperialism and discuss the outcome of the foreign policy going into the twentieth century.
Imperialism is the “acquisition of control over the government and the economy of another nation, usually by victory. The U.S. became an imperialistic world power in the late nineteenth century by gaining control over the Hawaiian Islands and, after the Spanish American War (1898), Guam, the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico” (Davison, Delay, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff, 2008, p. G-4). American Imperialism has been a big part of U.S. history ever since the American Revolution. The U.S. became an imperialist nation at the end of the 19th century because Americans wanted to expand overseas with their belief in manifest destiny. “As Democratic editor John L. O’Sullivan put it, that it had become the United States’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (2008, p. G-5). “Since the 1840’s expansionists had spoken of a manifest destiny to overspread the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific” (2008, p. 611). “But it flourished in the 1890s, when Mahan provided the naval theory necessary to make the leap and the vanishing American frontier supplied an economic rationale for extending Manifest Destiny” (2008, p. 615). The Industrial revolution was the ammunition for Imperialism which