Expansionist Practices and Policies

? Even if there were fibrous historical forces in the United States pressing for expansionism, the actual institution of history depends on human beings making choices for discernible reasons, from the sentiment of historiography. McKinley, as the man at the helm of the country in this era, was a powerful character whose decisions clearly initiated another chapter in American expansionism, a foreign branch of Manifest Destiny. Historiography considers the procedure of such powerful men as a decisive element of its analysis. Historiography also considers whether expansionism was a necessary element of American history, a result of a perceived need to round for the sake of the nation's survival. The sources suggest that this was not the case in the expansionism prosecute by McKinley, although the electric chair certainly used such an contestation in def finale his policies.

In Walter LaFeber's The New Empire, the reader is left(p) with no doubt that both the process of the development of American history and the actions of powerful men seizing opportunity at a crucial stage of that process were the compelling forces underside McKinley's expansionism. Examining the rationale of Alfred Mahan for expansionism and his influence on McKinley, LaFeber finds that:

To Mahan, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, colonial possessions, as these men defined such possessions, served as stepping-stones to the two great(p) prizes: the Latin-American and A

Now, some things nurse happened in the past which . . . cannot be helped now. The treaty with Spain has been ratified. We have had xviii months of war in the Philippine Islands.

Instead of another Japan, taking its high rank among the powers of the earth; instead of Cuba, sending its offspring to our shores, grateful to us as their liberators from centuries of oppression, to sit docile learners at our feet, we have a sullen, angry and shattered people. . . . It is not whether we should directly withdraw from the Philippine Islands; it is not whether the abandonment of our claim to reach them in subjection be worth accomplishing at the damage of national bankruptcy, or financial distress, at the cost of openhanded trade and the ruin of our manufactures. . . .

"Business conditions," the new Chief administrator reported in his Inaugural Address, "are not the near promising." These conditions were not improved by a bloody Cuban revolution which consumed investments and trade and touched the tender hearts of American politicians. McKinley assumed power with the promise of restoring prosperity and the hope of ending the Cuban struggle. The President would find that the two issues were not disconnected.

George F. Hoar, ?President McKinley or President Bryan?? North American Review. Oct. 1900. 476.

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