Part Three: Transitions · The End of the Frontier: The Emergence of an American Empire

IN 1891, THE CENSUS BUREAU announced that the frontier no longer existed. Americans now reached beyond what Jefferson called the "Stony mountains" and were settling the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This conquest over nature had led to the building of what Max Weber called "the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order." What had happened was the explosive formation of an industrial economy. Between 1815 and 1860, the value of manufactured goods increased eightfold. By 1890, U.S. manufacturing production had surpassed the combined total of England and Germany. American labor patterns reflected these economic changes. In 1840, agricultural workers had constituted 70 percent of the labor force, while those in manufacturing, trades, and construction represented only 15 percent. Sixty years later, the number of workers in agriculture decreased to 37 percent, while those in manufacturing and related areas such as transportation and public utilities increased to 35 percent.¹ This dynamic industrial order generated cycles of economic instability, massive unemployment, and production gluts. Businessmen had been expanding the operation of their plants beyond the needs of the market. "It is incontrovertible," reported the chief of the National Bureau of Labor, "that the present manufacturing and mechanical plant of the United States is greaterfar greater-than is needed to supply the demand; yet it is constantly being enlarged, and there is no way of preventing the enlargement." Expansion was not accompanied by an increase of employment, however. During the 1894 depression, 18 percent of the labor force was unemployed, and Secretary of State Walter Gresham warned: "We cannot afford constant employment

for our labor .... Our mills and factories can supply the demand by running seven or eight months out of twelve." Then he added anxiously: "It is surprising to me that thoughtful men do not see the danger in the present conditions." Social unrest and violent class conflicts had become increasingly prevalent. The Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, and the bloody Homestead Strike of 1892 shook society. Time and again, hundreds of thousands of workers went out on strike. In confrontations between labor and capital in Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, and other cities, dozens of protesting workers were killed and hundreds were wounded by the police, militia, and Pinkerton detectives. ² These industrial class tensions alarmed the Reverend Josiah Strong, author of the 1885 bestseller, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. In his jeremiad on the grave peril facing America, this leading Protestant minister warned that class conflict was hardening and that cities were becoming huge, festering sores of social ills. Catholic immigrants from southern Europe were flooding the land and threatening to overwhelm society. An illiterate, ignorant, immoral, and "criminal" population, dominated by their "appetites," was swelling the ranks of the working class. Factory workers were laboring in "unsanitary" conditions, in "confined" situations where they did "one thing over and over again." Living in congested cities, these exploited workers constituted a "tenement population," a class attracted to "socialism." On their backs, men of great wealth were rising-millionaires who possessed "oppressive" and "despotic" power to raise prices and close factories. This new elite represented a "modern and republican feudalism." The cause of the "crisis" was the ending of the frontier. The West had historically provided an "abundance of cheap land," the basis of the "general welfare and contentment" of the people. "When the supply [ofland] is exhausted," Strong predicted gloomily, "we shall enter upon a new era, and shall more rapidly approximate European conditions of life."³ What would the future hold for a frontierless America? During this time of social disintegration and urban turmoil, there emerged a leader with a solution. In 1890, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which went through fifteen editions in eight years and was read all over the world. His aim was to boost funding for a "New Navy." Its impact was immediate: that year, Congress authorized the construction of three battleships and the rebuilding of the navy.

In his carefully constructed study, Mahan observed that before the end of the frontier, the energies of the nation had been directed inward. The settlement of the West and the cultivation of the wilderness had turned the "eyes of the country" away from the sea. But now the nation stretched from coast to coast, and the time had arrived for America to turn outward, beyond the continent. Americans had the character and capacity for colonization - "the instinct for commerce, bold enterprise in the pursuit of gain, and a keen scent for the trails" to new territories. With the end of the frontier and the need for new markets overseas, Mahan argued, the United States should develop "colonies" to serve as coaling stations for the navy and increase the country's commerce. The history of sea power was largely a narrative of conflicts and wars between nations seeking to expand their wealth through international commerce. Thus, in Mahan's view, it was critical for the United States to become a major sea power and build "an armed navy, of a size commensurate with the growth of its shipping," and to pursue "warlike preparation."⁴ Embedded in his naval and commercial strategy was Mahan's view on race. The "distant unsettled commercial regions" were located in Asia. In seeking "possession" and "control" of territory in the Far East, the "civilized" and "virile" men of the United States would enter a "region rich in possibilities, but unfruitful through the incapacity or negligence" of its inhabitants, where the "inferior race" would fall back and disappear before "the persistent impact of the superior." No one had a "natural right" to land: the right to own and control territory depended on "political fitness." Only men who utilized the land were entitled to it. Here Mahan was echoing John Winthrop's solemn pledge not to let the earth's natural resources lie in "waste." What had happened to the American Indian was, in Mahan's judgment, a consequence of a civilized people trespassing upon the inhabitants' "technical" rights of possession. Like Andrew Jackson, Mahan asked: "Will anyone seriously contend that the North American continent should have been left forever in the hands of tribes whose sole use of their territory was to contravene the purposes of human life?" The dispossession of the Indian in the winning of the West was a model for the colonization of Asia: both expansions represented the triumph of the superior white race. ⁵

of his book on sea power, the navy had only one first-rate ship. The remaining ones were inferior. Due to a budget cut, Mahan, along with a number of other officers, had been relieved from duty. Humiliated, he protested bitterly in letters to a friend: "In a healthy condition of naval affairs, I should by this [time] be going to sea but the low ebb to which the navy is now reduced ... gives me no hope of even such commands as we have for some time to come." "Immersed as our people are in peaceful and material pursuits, the military establishment is necessarily one of our lesser interests .... Practically we have nothing. Never before has the navy sunk so low."⁶ Determined to restore the honor and status of the navy through the rearming of America, Mahan became a strident imperialist. Mahan was the chief architect of the 1898 war against Spain. In 1890, The Influence of Sea Power upon History was read by an emerging political leader named Theodore Roosevelt. In a letter to Mahan, Roosevelt praised the study as "the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind, and wished that "the whole book could be placed where it could be read by the navy's foes, especially in Congress." A working relationship developed between the two men. After Roosevelt had been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897, Mahan advised him: "I would suggest ... that the real significance of the Nicaragua canal now is that it advances our Atlantic frontier by so much to the Pacific." Asia, not Europe, had become vital to America's interests. Mahan also urged Roosevelt to place the "best admiral" in the Pacific, for "much more initiative may be thrown on him than can be on the Atlantic man." Roosevelt disseminated Mahan's advice in circles of power. A month before the United States declared war on Spain, on March 21, 1898, Roosevelt thanked Mahan for his guidance: "There is no question that you stand head and shoulders above the rest of us! You have given us just the suggestions we want .... You probably don't know how much your letter has really helped me clearly to formulate certain things which I had only vaguely in mind. I think I have studied your books to pretty good purpose."⁷ At the end of the Spanish-American War, Mahan realized his dream of empire, with the annexation of the Philippines, where a coaling station would be built for his "New Navy." But he had also helped to set the United States on a collision course with Japan, a clashing of two great sea powers that would lead to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.