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| On May 1, 1898 American ships cornered the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and destroyed it. Philippine capital, Manila, fell on August 13, 1898. Santiago, was where the Spanish fleet was anchored, became the key to the military campaign. The main battle on July 1, 1898, occured near Santiago on the heights commanded by San Juan Hill. Roosevelt’s dismounted Rough Riders seized Kettle Hill.America won. On July 3, 1898 Cervera’s fleet in Santiago harbor made a daylight attempt to run the American blockade and was destroyed. Convinced that Santiago could not be saved, the Spanish forces surrendered. The 2 nations signed an armistice in which Spain agreed to liberate Cuba and cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the U.S. American forces occupied Manila pending a peace treaty. |
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| days before ratifying the Treaty of Paris, fighting broke out in Manila. Confronted by American annexation, rebel leader, Emilio Aguinago asserted his nation’s independence and turned his guns on the occupying American forces. Atrocities became commonplace on both sides. War lasted 3 years. 4,200 Americans died and many thousands of Filipinos. Howard set up a civilian administration. |
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Who- U.S. Secretary of State John Hay
What- Commercial interest dominated American policy in East Asia, especially the China market. By the late 1890s Japan, Russia, Germany, France and Britain had carved out spheres of influence in China and claimed informal dominance. Hay sent Japan, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain an Open Door note claiming the right of equal trade access, an open door, for all nations that wanted to do business with China. They all gave him vague responses and Hay chose to interpret them as accepting the American Open Door Policy
When -1899
Why-Scared of being frozen out from making business with China
How-Open Door note claim the right of equal trade access |
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| Secretary of State under Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, imagined an American Empire extending from the Caribbean to Hawaii. He wanted expansion so America could reach the Asian market. Convinced Congress to buy Alaska in 1867. |
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Who- Naval officer. Mahan argued “a great highway...over which men pass in all directions”.
What: Mahan proposed a battleship fleet capable of striking anywhere around the world. Congress appropriated funds for three battleships as the first installment on two-ocean navy. Cleveland took up the naval program and pressed for more battleships(five were authorized).
When: 1890
Why: Nation’s commercial vitality and overseas bases. What Mahan envisioned was not colonial rule over populations, but control of strategic points in defense of America’s trading interest.
How: Wrote “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” |
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| American Expansion in the Pacific: 1865-1902 |
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What- This was the economical expansion through foreign trade. The total value of goods and services quadrupled between 1870 and 1900. Between 1880 and 1990, the industrial share on exports jumped from 15% to 30%. American firms began to plant overseas. In 1868 SInger Sewing Machine Company established a factory in Glasgow, Scotland. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was doing business with European branches. In Asia Standard Oil cans, converted into utensils and roofing material, became visible signs of American market. Kodak, McCormick, and Ford became household words around the world. The U.S attracted a lot of foreign capital. The U.S. needed to export more goods than import goods in order to have a good profit. This balanced was achieved in 1876. The bulk of American exports in the late 19 century (80%) went to Europe and Canada.
When:1865-1902
Why: America was growing and there was overproduction. |
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needed a faster way to get from the Atlantic to Pacific, so wanted to build a canal. At the time, the land was part of Colombia.
- When- US seized Panama from Colombia in 1903 in order to build the canal.
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Daughter of the middle class. She might have lived a life of ease, which was what her parents intended when she went to Rockford College. But Addams came home in 1881 sad and unfulfilled, feeling “simply smothered and sickened by advantages.”
- What: In 1889, with Ellen Gates Starr, she established Hull House on Chicago’s West Side. The dilapidated mansion that they called Hull House was the model for settlement houses that sprang up in the nation’s cities, serving community centers and spark plugs for neighborhood betterment. The settlement house was a hallmark of social progressivism.
- When:1889
- Why: In retrospect, Addams realized that hers was not an individual crisis but a crisis that afflicted her entire generation. In a famous essay, she spoke of the “subjective necessity” of the settlement house. She meant that it was as much for the young adult middle-class residents who were eager to serve as it was for needy slum dwellers. The generational crisis was also a crisis of faith. Jane Addams, for one, took up settlement-house work believing that by uplifting the poor, she would herself be uplifted -- she would experience “the joy of finding Christ” by acting “in fellowship” with the needy.
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Journalists whose stock-in-trade was exposure of the corruption of big business and government. Theodore Roosevelt gave them the name as a term of reproach.
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National Consumers’ League
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Founded by Josephine Shaw Lowell of New York City. Lowell’s organization spread to other cities and blossomed into the National Consumer’s League in 1899. At its head stood a feisty, outspoken woman, Florence Kelley, an early resident of Hull House and then chief factory inspector of Illinois. As she investigated the so-called sweated trades of Chicago, Kelley lost faith in voluntary reform; only factory legislation could rescue exploited workers. When she joined the National Consumers League, Kelley brought that focus to its work. Under her crusading leadership, The Consumer’s League became a powerful advocate for protective legislation for women and children. Among its achievements was the Supreme Court’s Muller v. Oregon decision in 1908, which upheld the Oregon law limiting the workday for women to 10 hours.
When: Founded in 1890.
Why: Goal was to improve the wages and working conditions of female clerks in the city stores by issuing a “White List” -- a very short list at first -- of cooperating shops.
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these liberals had safeguarded individual freedom and opportunity by bolstering the authority of the state and federal governments to control large business corporations.
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- What: President Wilson didn’t know how to deal with trusts so he relied heavily on Louis D. Brandeis, the celebrated “people’s lawyer.” Brandeis denied that bigness meant effciency. On the contrary, smaller firms that vigorously competed in a free market ran most efficiently. Strengthening the Sherman Act, the obvious course, proved hard to do. Was it feasible to say exactly when company practices became illegal? Brandeis decided that it was not, and Wilson assented. In the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914, amending the Sherman Act, the definition of illegal practices was left flexible, subject to the test of whether an action “substantially lessen[ed] to create a monopoly.”
- When: October 15, 1914
- Why: Preventing trusts from unfairly using their power to curb free competition.
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- Who: Born a slave, Washington suffered the indignities experienced by all blacks after emancipation. But having been befriended by several whites as he grew to manhood, he also understood what it took to gain white support - and maneuver around white hostility - in the black struggle for equality.
- What: In a famous speech in Atlanta in 1895 he advocated accommodation with the South. Washington considered “the agitation of the question of social equality the extremist folly.” The Atlanta Compromise, as his stance became known, avoided direct assault on white supremacy and urged blacks to start making themselves productive citizens. Despite the conciliatory face he put on before white audiences, however, Washington did not concede the struggle. Behind the scenes, he lobbied hard against Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement. In an age of sever racial oppression, no black dealt more skillfully with elite of white America or wielded greater influence inside the Republican Party. What Washington banked on was black economic progress. “There is little race prejudice in the American dollar.”
- When: Early 20th century/ Progressive Era
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- What: Prohibited discriminatory railway rates that favored preferred or powerful customers -- a practice Ida Tarbell reminded American in her muckraking articles, that had enabled Rockefeller to monopolize the oil industry.
- When:1903
- Why: The railroads posed a problem. As quasi-public enterprises, they had never been free of oversight by the states; in 1887, they became subject to federal regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). As with the Sherman Act, this assertion of federal authority was mostly symbolic. Then Roosevelt got started, pushing through the 1903 Elkins Act.
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Theodore Roosevelt & the Square Deal
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President Roosevelt’s domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the extreme demands of organized labor. Roosevelt was well aware that his Square Deal was built on 19th century foundations. In particular antitrust doctrine seemed inadequate in an age of industrial concentration. It would be better, Roosevelt thought, for the federal government to regulate big business than try to break it up.
- When: Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign
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