Hi, everyone, and welcome
back to Heimler's History.
Now as America comes out
of the Gilded Age,
we are filthy rich and itching to flex our
collective strength on the world stage.
And when we looked around at the world,
it turns out that European countries had
been flexing their muscles for decades
in something called "Imperialism."
And so, not to be outdone,
America looked around and decided
to gather up some lands
for an overseas empire of her own.
Now, when I think of America's age
of imperialism, the best
metaphor to my mind is hunger.
"Daddy's hungry."
And in this lecture,
we're going to see what Daddy America was
hungry for, why Daddy America got so
hungry in the first place, and what it was
that Daddy found to stuff down his gullet.
Let's get to it.
(It's time to kick it old school).
[MUSIC]
So, what was Daddy hungry for? Well, first, Daddy was hungry for new markets.
You see, America had found a way to grow more food and produce more manufactured crap than the
American public could possibly consume. And so, what do you do in that case?
Well, you look for foreign markets, and so we trained our eyes on Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.
But Daddy was also
hungry for raw materials.
You see, despite the abundance
of resources packed under the crust
of the American continent,
we did not have it all,
and so if we were going to keep feeding
those factories, we needed to find other
lands that had raw
materials that we did not.
Okay, that was what Daddy was hungry for.
Now, why was it that Daddy was hungry?
Well, two reasons.
First, there was the lingering
idea of Social Darwinism.
You'll recall that guys like John D.
Rockefeller applied the principles
of survival of the fittest to his business
practices, but now he decided to apply
those principles at the level
of nations as well.
America had proved herself to be one
of the strongest and fittest in the world,
and therefore was justified in finding
the weak and consuming them.
"Daddy's hungry."
But the second reason Daddy was hungry was
because of that old idea
of manifest destiny.
That was the old idea that God had given
us the right to possess the entirety
of the continent from sea to shining sea,
and at this point, we had done it.
All the land, which we can now consider
the lower 48 states,
were in our possession.
The great expanse of America stretched
from the Atlantic
to the Pacific seaboards.
And listen, a hunger like
that doesn't just die off overnight.
For example, I love gummy bears,
and just because I eat a four-pound bag
of gummy bears today doesn't mean I'm
gonna be satisfied
for the rest of my life.
Next morning, I'm gonna wake up thinking,
"I could do that all over again."
So, even though the Civil War distracted
us for a little while,
now that everything was put back together
again, Daddy was hungry for more.
And since we had nowhere else to go on
this continent, we had to look elsewhere.
Now, not surprisingly,
this impulse got us into some skirmishes,
most notably
the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Now in order to tell this story,
we need to begin in Cuba.
Now Cuba had been part
of the Spanish Empire since the late
1400s, and the Cubans had had just
about enough of foreign imperial rule.
And so, the Cubans roused themselves
into a revolt against their Spanish lords.
Now, if you'll recall, way back in the day,
America embraced something
called the Monroe Doctrine.
And I compared the Monroe Doctrine
to a dog lifting its leg and peeing all
over the Western Hemisphere,
and here's why.
Because the Monroe Doctrine said
that everything in the Western Hemisphere
essentially belongs to America,
and therefore we don't want any
European intervention over here.
So, as it turns out,
Cuba happens to be
in the Western Hemisphere,
and therefore could not avoid the sprinkle
of the American urinary
habit of imperialism.
And so, America took up the Cuban cause.
Now why would America want to do this?
Well, at least one reason was something
that came to be known as "yellow
journalism," and essentially what was going
on is that people like Joseph Pulitzer
were publishing in their newspapers
accounts that were both spurious
and outlandish about Spanish atrocities
against the Cubans in order to arouse
public support for the Cuban cause.
Now in many cases,
there was a kernel of truth to these,
but they were blown way out of proportion.
So, at this point, the American public was
clamoring for a fight,
and so we sent our newest Navy destroyer
down to Cuba and just parked
it right in Havana Harbor.
Nothing going on here,
just came down to say, "Hay."
And as you can imagine,
this move caused an awful lot of tension
between America and Spain,
but nothing really happened until one day.
In the evening of February 15th, 1898,
the USS Maine exploded,
killing 260 American sailors.
Now, of course, Joseph Pulitzer and his
army of yellow journalists
jumped all over this.
They pumped out ream after ream
of newspapers accusing the Spanish
of destroying the Maine.
Now just so you know, in 1976,
the U.S. Navy did an extensive
investigation into the explosion,
and what they found was
that the overwhelming amount of evidence
suggested an internal explosion,
which is to say it was not
in fact caused by the Spanish.
But investigating the truth didn't
much matter to the American public.
We wanted Spanish blood.
Now to emphasize just how much Americans
wanted to get into a fight despite any
action that might lead to a diplomatic
solution, you should know that American
diplomats presented Spain with a list
of demands saying, "Do this,
and we will not go to war."
And apparently, Spain really did not want
to go to war with America,
because they complied with all
of the demands,
including the most stringent of them,
to which America said, "Hmm,
now, we really didn't
think you all would do all that.
You all still want to start a war?
All right, we're gonna go to war."
"Wait, what?"
Why?
Well, President McKinley knew how unwise
it would be to not start a war because,
hey, elections were coming up,
and if he didn't give the people what they
wanted, then they wouldn't reelect him.
And that is how you get
the Spanish-American War.
Now, I'll just cut to the end of what
McKinley called this splendid little war
because it only lasted for 114 days,
and I'll let you know that America
triumphed on behalf of the Cubans
and repulsed Spain from the last scrap
of their once vast New World empire.
And one of the strange strategies we
employed to win this battle
in the Caribbean was by invading another
Spanish possession way over in the
Pacific, namely the Philippine Islands.
And the freedom-loving
Filipinos were like-
"Yay, the Americans are
here to make us free!"
And as the war closed,
we sat across the treaty table from Spain
and took the Philippine Islands off
their hands for a cool 20 million.
And once President McKinley saw how
backwards and brown and un-Christian these
Filipinos were, actually,
don't tell anybody,
but their leader was highly educated
and the Filipinos were
already mostly Christians.
McKinley decided to do the right thing
and keep the Filipinos under American rule
until they became,
you know, more American.
And since the Philippine Islands were just
so dang far away,
we began to think that we needed a rest
stop, you know, some place between our
western coast and Asia
where we could just chill and eat some
coconut meat, maybe some place like,
I don't know, Hawaii.
So, in 1898, America went ahead and brought
a bunch of diseases to the native
Hawaiians and killed a bunch of them off
and was like, "So, if you all aren't using
these islands anymore, we'll take them."
And that's how you get the 50th
state of the United States.
Now with all this imperialistic activity,
there arose, not surprisingly,
a great clamor from a bunch
of people saying this is wrong.
The folks who were saying this were called
the Anti-Imperialist League,
and they argued that America should not be
taking over nations and ruling other
peoples because, in case you forgot,
there's a deep conviction in the soul
of America that people must be
governed by their own consent.
A philosopher during that time named
William James put it magnificently.
He said he couldn't believe that America
could puke up its ancient soul in five
minutes without a wink of squeamishness.
But on the other side of the argument
were the expansionists.
They raised arguments about patriotism
and about how America had a civilizing
mission in the world,
not to mention that the possibilities
for the expansion of trade
were positively fabulous.
And in the end, it was the expansionists
who won out, and on February 6th, 1899,
Congress approved the treaty with Spain
and America became an empire.
And that's all we have time for now.
I'll see you next time.