Revolution
Many observers have noted the surprising resilience of certain ideas in American history. "Liberty," the belief that individuals should live free from most external restraints, is one particularly powerful American touchstone. "Enterprise," the virtue of hard work, business acumen, and wealth accumulation, is another. The belief that all people should share these ideas has prohibited Americans from ever accepting the world as it is. The assumption that individuals will, when capable, choose these "self-evident" propositions has made the nation a force for revolution. America's foreign policy has consistently sought to remake the external landscape in its own image.
As early as the eighteenth century, New World influences helped inspire revolutionary upheavals throughout the old empires of Europe. This pattern continued in the nineteenth century as thinkers from diverse cultures studied the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to guide modern state building. During the first half of the twentieth century, American soldiers fought to undermine authoritarian regimes and revolutionize the workings of the international system. By the end of the twentieth century, American cinema, music, and fashion challenged traditional values in all corners of the globe.
Self-confidence and ignorance of the wider world fed the nation's revolutionary aspirations. These qualities also made Americans intolerant of the diversity of revolutionary experience. The imagery of the thirteen colonies' fight for independence from British rule in the late eighteenth century provided a template for acceptable foreign revolutions that became more rigid over time. The whole world had to follow the American revolutionary path. Heretical movements required repression because they offered destructive deviations from the highway of historical change.
Enthusiasm for revolution, in this sense, produced many counterrevolutionary policies. These were directed against alternative models, especially communism, that violated American definitions of "liberty" and "enterprise." In the second half of the twentieth century this paradox became most evident as the United States employed revolutionary concepts like "development" and "democratization" to restrain radical change in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. "Globalization" came to reflect the dominance of the American revolutionary model, and the repression of different approaches. Paraphrasing French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, America has forced much of the world to be free, but only on American terms.
A Diplomatic Revolution Before the Break With Britain
Decades before Americans contemplated a break with the British Empire, influential figures planned to promote a revolution beyond the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies. French, Spanish, Russian, British, and Indian groups uneasily interacted with one another in what eighteenth-century observers called the "western territories," then comprising more than two-thirds of what would later be the U.S. mainland. French and Indian encroachments on British settlements, in particular, threatened to encircle the residents of the colonies, imperiling their security and economy. Assembling in Albany, New York, between 19 June and 10 July 1754, representatives from seven of the colonies (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York) responded to these circumstances. They outlined an agenda for the future political unity and diplomatic expansion of American society. Although never officially implemented, the socalled Albany Plan created the foundation for a future revolution on the North American continent and abroad.
Benjamin Franklin, the charismatic Pennsylvania entrepreneur and politician, drafted much of the Albany Plan. He began with a call for unity among the colonies, under the leadership of a president general. This figure would work with a grand council of colonial representatives to "make peace or declare war with the Indian Nations." Beyond issues of territorial defense, the president general would also purchase lands for new settlements outside of the original colonies. On the expanding American frontier, the president general would "make laws" regulating commerce and society. Franklin and the other contributors to the Albany Plan devoted little attention to the interests of the Indians or the French. This was a scheme designed to make the residents of the "western territories" live by American (and British) laws. Trade would be organized according to American customs of contract. Settled farming and industry would replace the migratory livelihoods of many indigenous communities. Most significantly, land would be apportioned as personal property, demarcated, and defended with government force.
The historian Richard White has shown that before the second half of the eighteenth century, the various groups encountering one another in the western territories engaged in a series of careful compromises. European traders negotiated with Indian communities as mutual dependents. They exchanged gifts, accommodated their different interests, and intermixed culturally. White has called this the "middle ground" that naturally existed where diverse peoples, each with expansionist aims, came together.
The Albany Plan was one of the first instances when Americans acted self-consciously to convert the middle ground into clearly American ground. Benjamin Franklin and his successors would not tolerate the uncertainty that came through constant compromise with diverse interests. They rejected a strategy of balance among various groups. The Albany Plan sought to remake the frontier in America's image. It marked a revolutionary application of liberty and enterprise beyond America's then-limited boundaries.
Franklin's 1754 proposals set a precedent for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and subsequent policies that unified the territories later comprising the United States as a single economic market, under a single set of "civilized" laws. Liberty and enterprise became the touchstones for legitimate authority in lands previously occupied by peoples with different traditions of political organization.
Americans had clear economic and security interests in the West, but they also felt a sense of racial and cultural superiority that was exemplified in Franklin's references to "savages" on the frontier. In the next century these assumptions would find expression in an asserted American manifest destiny to revolutionize the "backward" hinterlands.
American policy after 1754 emphasized westward expansion and the export of revolution. This translated into explicit territorial occupation, forced population removals, and the extension of a single nation. Before independence these ideas were recognizable. They became most evident, in North America and across the Atlantic Ocean, at the dawn of the nineteenth century. American support for revolutionary activities would soon extend far beyond the nation's western frontier.
Independence and Revolution Abroad
In the months following the first clashes between American and British forces at Lexington and Concord, the nascent United States made two surprising efforts to convert its struggle into a broader international movement. On 28 July 1775 the Continental Congress, representing the colonies in rebellion, addressed "the people of Ireland," similarly subjects of British imperial rule. According to the Americans, King George III's ministers had converted the citizens of colonial lands "from freemen into slaves, from subjects into vassals, and from friends into enemies." Members of the Continental Congress asserted that they shared a "common enemy" with the Irish population. They expected a "friendly disposition" between the two peoples, and a similar struggle for freedom: "God grant that the iniquitous schemes of extirpating liberty from the British Empire may soon be defeated."
This call for international revolution was much more than idle rhetoric. As they struggled to raise the forces necessary to challenge the British military on the eastern seaboard, American soldiers attempted to carry their revolution beyond their borders. On 4 September 1775 an army of two thousand men invaded British-controlled Canada. In the middle of November, they occupied Montreal. The Americans did not rape and pillage the Canadian population but instead created a "virtuous" government that would allow the people to elect their leaders ("liberty") and protect their commerce ("enterprise"). Many residents of Montreal and other surrounding areas welcomed this imposed revolution.
American expansionism in 1775 reflected naive but serious enthusiasm for radical international change. Despite their relative weakness in relation to the British Empire, the former colonists felt that their revolution marked a turning point in world history. They believed that their cause would inspire men and women in Canada, Ireland, and other areas. Encouraging radical change abroad was not altruistic, but necessary for what the Continental Congress called the "golden period, when liberty, with all the gentle arts of peace and humanity, shall establish her mild dominion in this western world." The historian Joyce Appleby has demonstrated that even skeptics of political idealism like John Adams were "profoundly influenced by their belief in the unity of human experience and the general application of universal truths."
Revolutionary Realism
The failure of the Irish population to rise in response to foreign overtures, and the rapid British success in recapturing the invaded areas of Canada, forced American leaders to rethink their tactics for securing independence. Men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson continued to believe that their cause was international in scope. They also understood that revolutionary ends called for pragmatic means. This required revolutionary realism: a willingness to make compromises and exhibit patience without corrupting ideals.
In February 1778, American leaders concluded a treaty of amity and commerce with the kingdom of France. This alliance brought the revolutionary colonists together with the conservative ancien régime of Louis XVI for the purpose of defeating British power. The French monarchy surely had no interest in seeing the cause of revolution spread beyond the British dominions. Nonetheless, most historians agree that without French aid the American Revolution might not have reached a successful conclusion. Paris supported American independence to promote its self-interest in the larger European balance of power.
Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson recognized the necessity of maintaining friendly but distant relations with unsavory regimes like that of France. Americans traded and procured aid from monarchical states. They generally avoided close political collaboration with these governments for fear of corrupting America's revolutionary principles. This explains, in part, the tradition of U.S. diplomatic aloofness, often termed "neutrality," that carried from the late eighteenth century up to World War II. While Americans sought to conduct profitable commerce with societies of all varieties—including France and Britain in the late eighteenth century—they attempted to remain separate from the politics of the conservative Old World.
President George Washington articulated this point of view in his Farewell Address, published on 19 September 1796. He called upon citizens to spread the virtues of commerce while avoiding "permanent alliances" that might threaten the new nation's security. American leaders like Washington were realistic enough to understand that they could never afford to isolate themselves from the international system. Through commerce and calculated political detachment from the powerful European monarchies, they hoped to protect their revolution, patiently spreading their principles abroad as opportunities opened.
The outbreak of revolution in France during the summer of 1789 offered Americans one of their first and most extraordinary opportunities. Louis XVI's attempt to increase his international power by supporting the American revolutionaries had the paradoxical effect of bankrupting his monarchy and opening the door to upheaval in his society. Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson came to symbolize for many French thinkers the enlightened possibilities of liberty and enterprise, unfettered from the chains of despotism. As violence spread and the monarchy crumbled, revolutionary leaders and propagandists in France looked to the American government for support.
Jefferson, then serving as America's minister to France, encouraged the initial spread of unrest against the ancien régime. Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense (1776) had inspired many Americans to join their independence struggle, also traveled (in an unofficial capacity) to Paris to support the cause of revolution. Jefferson and Paine were the most eloquent American exponents of the ideals embodied in popular French attacks on monarchy, aristocracy, and political tradition. The two advocates of revolution were not, however, unique in their sympathies. French revolutionary figures—particularly Edmond Charles Genêt, a diplomat from the new regime—received the adulation of American crowds throughout the United States. Even early skeptics of the events in France, notably John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, sympathized with those who wished to throw off the repression of the Bourbon regime and replace it with a society of liberty and enterprise.
Adams, Hamilton, and other members of the Federalist Party in America differed from Jefferson and Paine in their fear that the French Revolution would careen out of control. They perceived the violence in Paris and other cities as a threat to the very ideals the revolution wished to serve. They also understood that revolutionary chaos during the Jacobin period after the execution of the king would open the door for dictatorship, which is what occurred, first in the hands of the Directory and later under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Jefferson, Paine, and the early Republicans were slower than their Federalist counterparts to see these dangers. When they did, in the mid-1790s, they also separated themselves from the extremism of the French Revolution. Both the Federalists and the Republicans supported a revolution against the ancien régime, but the two parties came to despair the violence, anarchy, and seeming irrationality of events in comparison to America's less disruptive experience.
Federalists and Republicans exaggerated their differences over the French Revolution to gain support from different domestic groups. Northern merchants generally felt threatened by French revolutionary attacks on their commerce. Southern planters, in contrast, expected new opportunities for export to France under a revolutionary regime that denounced mercantilism. These sectional differences contributed to partisan acrimony in the late eighteenth century.
The breakdown in the American political consensus during this period reflected little change in attitudes toward revolution. Americans supported the overthrow of monarchy in France. They applauded appeals to liberty. They exhibited suspicion of excessive violence and social disruption. Most importantly, they denounced revolutions that appeared more radical than their own.
Land Acquisition and Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the United States established itself as a dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. This was no small accomplishment for a young nation with fragile unity and a minuscule military. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe exploited Europe's preoccupation with the Napoleonic wars and the relative weakness of potential rivals in North America. They constructed what Jefferson called an "empire of liberty" that combined force and commerce with a sincere commitment to enlightened government in "savage" lands.
America's self-confidence in the righteousness of its revolutionary model motivated many of the bloodiest massacres and dispossessions of native communities during this period. For Jefferson in particular, those who resisted democratic government and economic penetration threatened the American cause. Resistance justified temporary repression and, when necessary, brutalization. Nonwhite races received the most violent treatment. They appeared "immature" and "unprepared" for the blessings of liberty. Americans defined themselves as paternalists, caring for blacks and Indians until these groups were ready (if ever) for democratic self-governance. In this curious way, American sincerity about revolutionary change inspired more complete domination over nonwhite communities than that frequently practiced by other, less ideologically imbued imperial powers.
The American acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 doubled the size of the country. It allowed Jefferson to make his "empire of liberty" a reality. With full control of the Mississippi River, the United States could conduct commerce along the north-south axis of the continent free from European interference. Exploring, apportioning, and eventually settling the vast western territories, the United States would now "civilize" its surroundings, as envisioned in Franklin's Albany Plan of 1754. Foreign powers and Indian communities had, in American eyes, prohibited the spread of liberty and enterprise. By sponsoring a famous cross-continental "journey of discovery" directed from 1804 to 1806 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Jefferson provided a foundation for altering the West with the creation of national markets, state governments, and, very soon, railroads. The transformation of the territories acquired with the Louisiana Purchase involved the rapid and forceful extension of America's Revolution.
During this same period, residents of French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Western Hemisphere revolted against European authority. While Americans remained wary of revolutions directed by nonwhite peoples, the U.S. government supported independence in Haiti, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and other former imperial possessions. Nonwhite revolutionaries, like Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, received aid, goodwill, and, most importantly, inspiration from Americans.
Fearful that the European powers, including Russia, would attempt to repress the Latin American revolutions, President James Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, worked to exclude this possibility. On 2 December 1823 the president announced what later became known as the Monroe Doctrine in his annual message to Congress. It explicitly prohibited "future colonization by any European powers" in the Western Hemisphere. The doctrine asserted the predominance of U.S. interests. The president and his secretary of state believed that the security of American borders, trading lanes, and revolutionary principles required freedom from Old World intervention.
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the British navy enforced the Monroe Doctrine in order to weaken London's European rivals; American words and British seapower sheltered revolutionaries from their previous imperial oppressors. At the same time, the United States stepped into the place of the colonial empires, assuring that political and economic change followed its model. Americans intervened south of their border to support revolutions that promised democratic governance and free trade. They repressed revolutions that entailed extreme violence, limitations on commerce, and challenges to U.S. regional domination. As in their policies toward France during the late eighteenth century, Americans welcomed rapid change throughout the Western Hemisphere, but only on their own terms.
1848 and "young America"
The year 1848 witnessed a string of upheavals throughout most of the major cities in Europe, including Paris, Naples, Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna. In a matter of weeks, urban revolutionaries forced the French king Louis-Philippe and Austrian prince Klemens von Metternich to flee from power. Inspired in part by the example of the American Revolution, many citizens of Europe were poised for a bright new democratic future.
Americans rejoiced at this prospect, as illustrated by the frequent parades and proclamations on behalf of popular liberty in Europe. Foreign revolutionaries, particularly the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth, emerged as national celebrities. Their names replaced the previous names for many towns throughout Indiana, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania, areas with large recent immigrant populations from the European continent. Small groups of Americans organized themselves for possible military action overseas on behalf of their revolutionary heroes. While most of this private militia activity came to very little, a small contingent of U.S. citizens joined the failed rebellion in Ireland. As in 1775, Americans believed that the long-term success of their Revolution was connected with events in Europe, and Ireland in particular.
At the highest levels of government, the United States supported the European uprisings with diplomatic means short of force. In May 1848, John C. Calhoun, the former secretary of state and prominent U.S. senator from South Carolina, used his connections with the Prussian minister-resident in America to encourage the formulation of "constitutional governments" upon the "true principles" embodied in the American federal system. The construction of new political institutions on this model, according to Calhoun, was necessary for "the successful consummation of what the recent revolutions aimed at in Germany" and "the rest of Europe." The White House also indulged in revolutionary enthusiasm. On 18 June 1849, President Zachary Taylor sent a special envoy, Dudley Mann, to support and advise Kossuth. When the ruling Habsburg government learned of the Mann mission, it protested to Washington. Secretary of State Daniel Webster publicly defended American action on behalf of the European revolutionaries. In response, Vienna severed its connections with the United States. Americans accepted this temporary break in their foreign relations for the purpose of articulating their sympathies with the brave men and women who hoped to overturn the old European political order.
These revolutionary hopes, however, failed to reach fruition. By the end of 1849 the established monarchies of Europe had reasserted their control over the continent. When necessary, they used military force to crush the reformers who had taken to the streets. Dismayed by this course of events, but conscious of its inability to affect a different outcome, the U.S. government reaffirmed its commercial relations with the conservative regimes. Americans condemned the brutality in Europe, but they took advantage of postrevolutionary stability to increase cotton and other exports across the Atlantic. This was another case of America's revolutionary realism: sympathy and support for political change overseas, but a recognition that compromise and patience were necessary. The United States took advantage of opportunities to push its ideals, and it also exploited existing markets to sell its products. This was an unavoidable balance.
After 1848 many Americans worried about the implications of their nation's failure to support the cause of revolution more concretely. A faction of dissatisfied Democrats came together at this time to form a group identified as Young America. In using this name they meant to differentiate their interventionist program from the caution of their party's so-called Old Fogies. Young America argued that the nation could only secure its ideals through more forceful "expansion and progress." Stephen A. Douglas, the U.S. senator from Illinois who would run against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, became the leading political figure for citizens who wished to make America a more effective beacon of revolution overseas. Douglas, however, failed to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1852. Another Democrat, Franklin Pierce, was elected to the White House that year after making numerous appeals to Young America sentiment. Pierce advocated U.S. expansion for the purpose of opening markets and spreading American principles. The Democratic Party platform explained that "in view of the condition of popular institutions in the Old World, a high and sacred duty is devolved with increased responsibility upon the Democracy in this country." Americans believed that the vitality of their ideals required more effective support for political and economic change overseas. The spread of liberty and enterprise across the globe became more important as the United States suffered a profound crisis of identity in the years before the Civil War.
For American advocates of what the historian Eric Foner has identified as the ideology of "free soil, free labor, and free men," the post-1848 repressions in Europe threatened to reinforce unenlightened policies at home. This appeared most evident in the case of southern slavery. Transforming monarchies into democracies and liberating human beings from bondage became part of a single project. At home and abroad, free labor promised increased productivity, higher wages for workers of all races, and more democratic politics. Support for monarchy overseas and slavery in the American South constrained markets, depressed wages, and empowered conservative families.
Agitation around Young America in the 1850s, and broader attempts to foster the spread of liberty and enterprise, contributed to the American Civil War. The bloodshed between 1861 and 1865 resulted, at least in part, from a Northern attempt to enforce radical socioeconomic change in the South. Slavery and the South's "peculiar" precapitalist structure, according to Eugene Genovese, hindered the development of industry and democracy. The period of Reconstruction after the defeat of the Confederacy is, not surprisingly, called by many historians America's second revolution, when southern institutions—including slavery, voting restrictions, and property concentration in a landed aristocracy—were all radically dislocated by an interventionist Union government.
This second revolution went hand in hand with a more assertive U.S. foreign policy in Europe and Asia. Like Reconstruction at home, American activities abroad sought to eradicate "peculiar" obstacles to liberty and enterprise. "Free soil, free labor, and free men" was a global worldview that required U.S. supported revolutions in the most tradition-bound empires, especially in Asia.
Between 1840 and 1870, American envoys forced China and Japan to open official contacts with Washington. In 1844, Caleb Cushing, U.S. representative from Massachusetts and longtime advocate of U.S. expansion, negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia with the Chinese emperor. This agreement guaranteed American trade access to key ports in Asia. Equally important, the treaty protected the legal rights of missionaries proselytizing on the mainland. For Cushing and his contemporaries, relations with China promised both wealth and the spread of America's "Christian" ideas of liberty. Commodore Matthew Perry's mission to the then-closed kingdom of Japan in 1853 served similar purposes. In 1858, Perry's successor, Townsend Harris, negotiated a treaty to open Japan for U.S. trade and ideas.
The upheavals in China and Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century were influenced significantly by these inroads. In both societies, Americans sought to undermine traditional political and economic institutions. Missionaries argued for new restrictions on monarchical authority. Merchants emphasized personal profit and private property. Intellectuals extolled the virtues of a learned and participatory citizenry. In all of these ways, the expansionist ideology of Young America encouraged U.S. style liberty and enterprise to take root in some of the world's oldest civilizations. American ideas undermined conservative worldviews.
The "new Empire"
The historian Walter LaFeber wrote that the decades after the Civil War marked the beginning of modern American diplomacy. The dominance of northern and western economic interests, America's expansionist ideology, and the nation's growing industrial might made the United States a truly global power during this period. In the Philippines, Midway Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska the nation formed in a struggle for independence became, despite significant domestic opposition, a colonial overseer. The United States built an imperium that soon rivaled the empires of old.
The American empire was not only "new" in its chronology, according to LaFeber. It was also "new" in its structure and governing ideology. This was an empire predicated on the assumption that all of the world could become like the United States. William Henry Seward, secretary of state from 1861 to 1869, envisioned an almost unlimited expanse of liberty and enterprise. Railroads, ships, and other government-sponsored projects would allow for the free movement of people and products. Education and the rule of law would protect the freedom of the individual and the property of the merchant. Most importantly, Seward believed that America's model of a democratic society would improve the lives of citizens across the globe, even if it required violence and repression in the short run. This was a revolutionary vision that, like others, required sacrifice (usually most burdensome for non-Americans) on behalf of a higher cause. Democracy and markets were the perceived wave of the future, uprooting traditional hierarchies in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other continents.
Seward's revolutionary vision served America's material and strategic interests, but it also had sincere racial and religious roots. Belief in an Anglo-Saxon mission to "Christianize" the world came through in one of the most widely read books of the post–Civil War years: the Reverend Josiah Strong's Our Country. Published in 1886 on behalf of the American Home Missionary Society, the first edition sold more than 130,000 copies (an astronomical figure for the time) and was serialized in countless newspapers. Like Seward, Strong affirmed the importance of expanded American influence throughout the world. Industrialization had brought the world closer together, Strong argued. Nations had to prepare for more intense international competition. Strong affirmed Seward's vision of a democratic and market-driven empire. He also elaborated on the importance of this imperial turn for America's "Anglo-Saxon Christian mission." In language that appealed to the prejudices of many readers, Strong asserted: "There is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon is to exercise the commanding influence in the world's future."
Struggling as he saw it against "heathen" influences in Asia and other parts of the globe, Strong assured readers that "I cannot think our civilization will perish…. I believe it is fully in the hands of the Christians of the United States, during the next ten or fifteen years, to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years." For Strong and his many thousands of followers, the Anglo-Saxon "race" was uniquely suited to bring civilization to the rest of the world. Our Country contained extended "scientific" discussion about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon physiques, the adaptability of settlers from this stock, and, most importantly, the positive influence of Protestantism. Free from the oppression of a Roman Catholic Church, an emperor, or any superstitious deities, Anglo-Saxons developed unique qualities of liberty and enterprise. They were self-governing and capable of creative production, according to Strong. Our Country tapped into popular anxieties that the growth of competing empires, the migration of "inferior races," and the spread of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century threatened Anglo-Saxon virtues. In this context Strong wrote that "the destinies of mankind, for centuries to come, can be seriously affected, much less determined, by the men of this generation in the United States." A global American empire would protect the essential qualities of Anglo-Saxon civilization by remaking the rest of the world in the U.S. image. Racial characteristics were inherited, according to Strong, but they could be overcome by the socializing qualities of Christian doctrine. Converted believers in far-off lands could receive grace from God. American expansion and colonization in places like Hawaii and the Philippines promised, in Strong's words, to "mold the destinies of unborn millions."
This was God's revolution on an international scale. Strong's words reflected a popular American disposition to dislodge "heathen" elites overseas. Businessmen claimed they were doing God's work when they seized local resources and established trading posts in formerly closed societies. Missionaries asserted divine sanction when they disregarded local traditions and proselytized their beliefs to native citizens. Most significantly, U.S. military forces in Asia, Latin America, and other areas argued that violence was a necessary means of building God's kingdom. Citing Charles Darwin on the "survival of the fittest," Strong claimed that resisting populations would be routed in a contest "of vitality and of civilization." As on the western frontier in earlier years, after the Civil War Americans built an extensive new empire, employing brutality for the sake of revolutionary ends.
The Early Twentieth Century
The Spanish-American War of 1898 was, according to Walter LaFeber, a natural outgrowth of America's revolutionary expansion in prior decades. When Cuban residents revolted in early 1895 against Spanish rule, the government of President Grover Cleveland offered support for the aspirations of the island's citizens. Cleveland did not advocate immediate Cuban independence—he condescendingly believed that the dark-skinned inhabitants of the island were unprepared for self-rule. However, the president pushed the Spanish government to initiate political and economic reforms that would make Cuba more like America. Cuban exiles residing in the United States and labor union leaders—especially Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor—went beyond Cleveland's caution, advocating an immediate revolution against Spanish authority. By 1897 newspaper publishers picked up on these sentiments. They demanded a U.S. war aimed at destroying the Spanish empire.
Simultaneously, an uprising against Madrid's rule in the Philippines attracted American attention. In this case, American interest did not derive from geographical proximity to the United States but instead from the Philippines' location near China. As Britain, France, Germany, and Japan divided up the economic markets of China, businessmen and policymakers in the United States worried that they would be excluded. The United States lacked the imperial springboard that Hong Kong, for example, provided to the British. A revolution in the Philippines promised, in many American eyes, to create a regime both friendly and compatible with the nation's economic interests in China. Secretary of State John Hay expected that a Philippine revolution against Spanish rule would ensure the continued spread of liberty and enterprise in Asia. This was the basic assumption of Hay's famous Open Door Notes (1899–1900), which connected American interests with assured access to the people and markets of foreign societies.
Drawn into the Cuban and Philippine uprisings, the United States went to war with Spain in April 1898 to expand its "new empire" and assure that revolutions overseas followed the American model. This meant the destruction of monarchy and other inherited authorities. U.S. occupation armies replaced traditional institutions with free markets, personal property protections, and promises of democratic self-rule. Racist American fears that nonwhite populations would not properly govern themselves if left to their own devices meant that, in practice, democratic reforms were virtually nonexistent in Cuba and the Philippines after 1898. While the Caribbean island attained nominal independence, the Platt Amendment of 1901 (named for Connecticut senator Orville Platt) guaranteed American military and economic dominance. In the Philippines, the United States did not rely upon informal mechanisms of control. The archipelago became an American colony, where U.S. soldiers fought a bloody four-year war against Filipino rebels. America supported revolution in Cuba and the Philippines, but it also suppressed revolution when it challenged core assumptions about liberty and enterprise.
Washington would not tolerate radicalism that jeopardized markets and assumptions about just government. Americans remained revolutionary thinkers, as they had been since before 1776. Their nation continued to inspire unprecedented social transformations across the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Americans encountered numerous competing revolutionary models. These included the nationalism of many independence fighters (especially the Chinese Boxer rebels of 1900), the anti-industrialism of peasant activists, and the socialism of international-minded thinkers.
None of these forces was new. All three, particularly socialism, gained momentum from the disruption that accompanied heightened rivalries among the European imperial powers and the emergence of the United States as an important international player. Americans could begin to build a truly global empire of liberty and enterprise after 1898, but they quickly became aware of contrary, more radical tendencies throughout the world. For the United States the twentieth century was a struggle to spread the American Revolution and repress alternatives. Cuba and the Philippines were preludes to what lay ahead.
Wilsonianism
On 15 March 1917, Czar Nicholas II, fearing the spread of domestic revolution, abdicated from the throne of imperial Russia. A provisional government, led by a recently formed party known as the Constitutional Democrats, asserted authority over the country. Inspired by British and other European liberals, the Constitutional Democrats promised to replace centuries of near absolute monarchy in Russia with a democratic society. They hoped to copy the social-market economies of western Europe that mixed industrial enterprise and private property with guarantees of basic public welfare.
The United States was far removed from events in Russia, but the nation and its leaders immediately expressed sympathy with the liberal revolution against the czar. Many immigrants in cities like New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago had come to America as a refuge from czarist tyranny and the frequent ethnic violence encouraged by the old regime. In earlier years these groups had pressured President Theodore Roosevelt to protest against Russian pogroms. In 1917 they applauded the overthrow of the czar and supported friendly American gestures toward the revolutionaries now in power.
President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisers shared much of this sentiment. On 22 March 1917, only seven days after the czar had abdicated, the United States officially recognized the legitimacy of the new government. Wilson was one of the first leaders to make this move because he hoped to encourage the spread of American-style liberty and enterprise in Russia and other areas emerging from long histories of autocratic rule. He followed the counsel of his confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, who explained that by supporting "the advancement of democracy in Russia," Wilson would accelerate "democracy throughout the world." Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that the president spoke of the Russian Revolution as a "glorious act."
Wilson's vision of American-supported "democracy throughout the world" permeated his declaration of war against Germany on 2 April 1917, less than a month after the "glorious" Russian Revolution. After more than two years of bloody conflict on the European continent, accompanied by increasing attacks on American shipping, the president announced to Congress that "autocratic government," like that in Germany, was more than just distasteful to U.S. sensibilities. Autocratic militarism, repression, and economic nationalism had become profound threats to the life of democracy. Without the spread of American-style liberty and enterprise, the historian Frank A. Ninkovich has explained, Wilson feared the degradation and destruction of his society. World revolution on the American model was necessary for U.S. survival. This is what Wilson meant when he proclaimed that the "world must be made safe for democracy." The future of "civilization" had reached an apparent turning point. The president's Fourteen Points, announced on 8 January 1918 in a speech to Congress, outlined a program that sought to revolutionize the basic structure of international relations for the purpose of spreading democracy. Emphasizing the liberated "voice of the Russian people," Wilson called for political openness, free trade, disarmament, "independent determination" for oppressed peoples, and a "general association" of peace-loving nations. Liberty and enterprise, not balance of power or divine right, would govern the international system. Affairs between nations would evolve to look more like the relations among citizens in the United States.
In late 1917, just as the first American soldiers began to arrive on the European continent, a small group of communist, or Bolshevik, revolutionaries overthrew the new government in Russia. Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Bolsheviks pledged to destroy capitalism and American-style democracy. Liberty and enterprise, according to Lenin, allowed for the strong and the wealthy to repress the weak and the poor. A global proletarian revolution, starting in Russia, would create a new international structure guaranteeing equality and individual welfare, not the empty promises of bourgeois democracy. In order to establish their regime, the Bolsheviks made many short-term compromises, particularly the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany on 3 March 1918, but they were as serious as Wilson in their aspiration to revolutionize the international system.
This second, Soviet phase of the Russian Revolution elicited reactions similar to those inspired by the Jacobin period of the French Revolution more than a century earlier. Americans sympathized with Russian citizens who sought to overthrow the czar, but they recoiled from the sight of violence, property confiscation, and civil war. Wilson believed that his program for a democratic peace after World War I was the only one worth pursuing. Lenin's contrary vision challenged basic assumptions about liberty and enterprise. The Bolsheviks promised to make the world profoundly unsafe for democracy on American terms. Russia's communist revolution endangered the American revolution.
On 6 July 1918, Wilson authorized a small American expeditionary force to join British, French, and Japanese soldiers supporting the anti-Bolshevik White armies in Russian Siberia. This intervention followed a model that the president had applied, more than any of his predecessors, throughout the Western Hemisphere during his two terms in office. Small groups of U.S. soldiers entered a foreign country to assist favored revolutionary elements against their opponents. In Siberia—as in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Central American states—Wilson hoped to ensure the kind of political order that would allow liberty and enterprise to take shape. N. Gordon Levin, Jr., has explained that the president and his advisers convinced themselves that they were not threatening Russia's self-determination because the U.S. force was so small. Wilson viewed limited American intervention as the action required to nurture legitimate revolutionary impulses threatened by domestic competitors and foreign predators.
In this context historians have noted the conservative implications of the president's revolutionary rhetoric, especially at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The Versailles settlement negotiated by the victors in World War I broke apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, as well as the German imperium outside of Europe. It established self-determination for the Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and other longrepressed peoples. It also created a League of Nations that the United States, despite Wilson's efforts, refused to join. These constituted significant changes in the international system, but they paled in comparison to what the Versailles settlement left intact. Fearful that Bolshevism and other nonliberal revolutionary movements in places like Germany, Hungary, and China would create anarchy, Wilson and his counterparts allowed the major world empires—Britain, France, and Japan—to grow. American influence—formal and informal—also expanded, especially in Asia. Local elites in China, Korea, and Indochina found their expectations for national independence under the terms of Wilson's Fourteen Points disappointed. Through military and economic means, the great powers worked to constrain political change that challenged basic liberal-capitalist assumptions.
Wilson carried the paradox of Jeffersonian politics into the twentieth century. American leaders and citizens naturally applauded the overthrow of old regimes, particularly those of King Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II. They expected that governments ensuring liberty and enterprise on the American model would replace centuries of despotism and autocracy. Because of his young nation's relative weakness, Jefferson had to rely largely on rhetoric to support overseas revolution. Wilson, in contrast, matched emotional words with extended military commitments.
When the revolutionary visions of Jefferson and Wilson encountered more radical ideas, especially Jacobinism and Bolshevism—these two men proved intolerant of diversity. They worked to repress rivals and eliminate the conditions that produced uncertainty instead of orderly change. Away from the American continent, this involved mostly rhetoric for Jefferson. Wilson, however, took advantage of his influence at the Paris Peace Conference to bolster efforts aimed at repressing challengers to American-style liberty and enterprise. In the early twentieth century, the United States had the power to enforce its worldview throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in parts of Europe and Asia. Wilsonianism revolutionized these areas by making them more like America and less like other revolutionary alternatives. U.S. policy followed this Wilsonian pattern in succeeding decades, albeit with important variations.
Liberal Developmentalism
The 1920s are traditionally identified with alleged American "isolationism." Recent scholarship has shown that this picture is far too simple.
Wilson's successors in the White House avoided foreign military commitments, but they pursued a consistent policy that the historian Emily S. Rosenberg has called "liberal developmentalism." This ideology, shared by U.S. leaders and citizens, assumed that "other nations could and should replicate America's own developmental experience." Businesses, philanthropic groups, labor unions, and government figures worked together after World War I to spread the "American dream" in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. This included encouraging the development of free markets, democratic institutions, and popular culture on the American model.
The last element of this triad proved most revolutionary. Manufacturers and advertisers—often working with government subsidies—contributed to a global diffusion of American-style automobiles, radios, and movie technologies, among other products. Rising criticisms of Americanization during this period attested to the ways in which U.S. cultural influence revolutionized foreign societies. The new popular culture made the nation of Jefferson and Wilson a focus of global attention. It disrupted social hierarchies by appealing to the desires of the average individual. Most significantly, it undermined traditional values by glorifying liberty and enterprise.
Contrary to the "isolationism" often associated with the White House during this period, American presidents shared public enthusiasm for the cultural spread of the American revolution abroad. As secretary of commerce and later as president, Herbert Hoover encouraged investment overseas, creating the foreign infrastructure and dependence that would guarantee access for American products and ideas. Instead of assuring fair competition among a variety of firms, the U.S. government supported the foreign expansion of near monopolies like J. P. Morgan, Standard Oil, and General Electric. These companies exerted strong influence over Republican presidential administrations. They also acted as "chosen instruments" for America's policy of supporting overseas revolution through economic and cultural means. Spreading the American dream in the 1920s promised massive profits and radical changes in the ways foreign societies functioned. Historians have generally avoided the temptation to glorify Americanization, but they have recognized that the nation's liberal developmentalism revolutionized international society.
Fascism and the "american Way of War"
During the Great Depression of the 1930s American culture lost some of its glow. In addition to Soviet communism, fascism emerged as a powerful challenger to America's revolutionary model. Scholars have long debated whether fascism constituted an alternative revolutionary paradigm or an antimodern regressive influence. Regardless of their position on this issue, historians agree that it sought to smother the influence of American-style liberty and enterprise in countries like Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan. In all of these nations, fascists condemned the decadence of imported cars, radio programs, and movies. Fascist leaders sought to create more nationalist—and often racial—cultural forms.
Unlike the citizens of many European and Asian countries, Americans never showed much sympathy for fascism. As early as 1933, prominent figures, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, expressed strong distaste for the "uncivilized" behavior of the Nazis in Germany. Mired in an economic depression, the United States offered little material support to antifascist fighters, but the leaders of the nation consistently criticized the violent infringements on individual liberty and free enterprise that accompanied the policies of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Americans hoped for a string of antifascist revolutions.
When these upheavals failed to materialize and the regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan began to undermine neighboring democracies, President Roosevelt initiated a policy of antifascist intervention overseas. He used a mix of foreign assistance, trade embargoes, and military expansion to bolster American influence. This included close cooperation with Britain, and after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the USSR. Like the revolutionary realists of the eighteenth century, Roosevelt recognized that alliance with unsavory regimes—in this case a communist state—was necessary to defeat a more pressing danger to American ideals.
On 14 August 1941 the president issued a public statement announcing what became known as the Atlantic Charter to guide the great powers during World War II and the postwar settlement. Negotiated during a three-and-one-half day meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland, this document pledged Washington and London (as well as Moscow, they hoped) to the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, free trade, disarmament, and a "permanent system of general security." In addition, the Atlantic Charter included promises of "improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security" inspired by Roosevelt's domestic New Deal policies. The president sought to assure "that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want." This was an extraordinary moment in the history of great power diplomacy. Roosevelt had pledged to support Britain against Nazi Germany, but in return he had extracted concessions that would revolutionize what was then the world's largest empire. Self-determination, as outlined in the Atlantic Charter, justified independence movements in Britain's Indian, Southeast Asian, and East African colonies. Free trade undermined the imperial preference system that had formerly allowed London to dominate the economies of its empire. A "permanent system of general security," soon to be named the United Nations, diminished the global predominance of the European capitals. Most significantly, New Deal guarantees of economic security and social welfare included in the Atlantic Charter helped to legitimize human rights, only a nascent concept before 1941.
Like Wilson, Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II with the purpose of making the world safe for democracy. This involved bloody battlefields on two fronts, in Europe and Asia, with frequent compromises concerning strategy and principle. The war was "total" for Americans because they saw no alternative but to eliminate their fascist enemies completely. All alliances and compromises served this purpose. Under American tutelage, political life in Europe and Asia had to start anew, infused with the principles of liberty and enterprise that foreign elites had resisted for too long.
Total annihilation of enemies and a revolutionary reconstruction of society on American terms was, according to historian Russell F. Weigley, "the American way of war." Acting to destroy threats to their way of life, U.S. leaders conquered much of Europe and Asia. They followed the same pattern pursued when men like Jefferson and Lincoln annexed the western territories during the nineteenth century and defeated the South during the Civil War. Operating under the guidance of the Atlantic Charter, U.S. soldiers forced foreign societies to accept American ideas of liberty and enterprise. They followed the vision of figures like Josiah Strong, who had proclaimed a global mission to make the Old World new. World War II was, in this sense, a conflict fought by the United States for worldwide revolution on American terms.
Reconstruction and Containment
If the Civil War was America's second revolution, the years after World War II marked a third revolution. Having created a new form of government and expanded it across much of North America, the United States now rebuilt western Europe, Japan, and South Korea from the ground up. Historians have devoted extensive attention to the vital role that local citizens and leaders played in charting new directions for these societies. This is undeniable, but the revolutionary impact of American policy deserves serious consideration as well. Men like George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, Lucius Clay, and Douglas MacArthur forced the defeated societies to reconstruct themselves on America's model. In West Germany and Japan this meant the formulation of new constitutions that enshrined free speech, democratic elections, and capitalist markets. In western Europe as a whole, Washington pushed for regional integration along lines that resembled American federalism. Most importantly, through the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, the United States provided societies devastated by war with the material resources to finance private enterprise and citizen welfare. Life for those vanquished by war in western Europe and Japan changed radically after 1945, largely along lines compatible with American sensibilities.
Americanization of this kind was revolutionary, but it also had conservative consequences. Washington chose to work with local elites that had strong anticommunist credentials. In many cases, this resulted in the repression of radical ideas. The Communist Party in Italy, for example, suffered electoral defeat in April 1948 after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency provided the Christian Democratic Party and the Catholic Church with a large infusion of covert campaign funding. Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea were ripe for revolution after World War II, and the United States worked to make certain that these areas followed America's model. Democratic liberties and capitalist enterprise provided the foundation for U.S. directed reconstruction.
Soviet efforts to consolidate revolutionary change along communist lines in Eastern Europe, North Korea, and China inspired fears—some legitimate, some exaggerated—that Moscow would subvert the states in America's sphere of influence. The clash between American and Soviet revolutionary models gave rise to what contemporaries called the Cold War. In this prolonged ideological struggle, the lands devastated during World War II became the battlegrounds where the superpowers competed to influence the course of future developments. Both Washington and Moscow believed that they could only make the world safe for their respective ideals if key strategic areas in Europe and Asia followed their particular model of political organization. Americans expected that a Europe of liberal democracies would ensure long-term peace and prosperity. Soviet leaders hoped that a Europe of communist states would provide the resources needed to build something approximating Karl Marx's vision of a workers' paradise.
The incompatibility of these visions made the Cold War a prolonged period of Soviet-American hostility. Following the often-quoted advice of George Kennan—the chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff between 1947 and 1949—Americans sought to protect their revolutionary ideals by containing the spread of communist influence. This meant increasing support for allies who appeared to share American sensibilities, while limiting the influence of dissidents. From a geopolitical point of view, it also required a permanent mobilization of force to deter Soviet incursions. The policy of containment, in this sense, militarized America's revolutionary influence overseas, adding to the nation's already evident distrust of diversity. It also created a short-term bias to the status quo. Social experimentation and cooperation with a devious enemy appeared too risky.
By the 1950s the Cold War had spread to what contemporaries called the Third World. These were former colonial possessions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that began to attain their independence in the aftermath of World War II. In general, the superpowers had limited strategic and economic interests in these areas. They drew extensive American and Soviet intervention, however, because they served as natural showcases for each government's revolutionary model.
The economist and policy adviser Walt Rostow was only one of many to argue for extensive U.S. sponsorship of Third World development in America's image. Prosperous markets and free societies, he explained, would increase the worldwide attraction of American-style liberty and enterprise. Otherwise, Rostow warned, newly independent states would fall prey to the "disease" of communist influence. On a strategic level, Rostow and others warned that Soviet advances in peripheral areas like Indochina would eventually jeopardize the survival of American-inspired values in critical strategic areas like Japan. This was the alleged threat of "falling dominoes."
Both Washington and Moscow used violence to reconstruct the Third World. In the American case, the Vietnam War was the clearest example of this phenomenon. Throughout the 1960s policymakers generally believed that they were bringing a positive revolution to the impoverished villagers of Indochina. Containment of communism and industrial development promised to create peace and prosperity, according to American assumptions. In pursuit of this vision, Washington deployed extensive military force to bludgeon local resistance.
Installing the American version of revolution in Vietnam involved the repression of all other varieties of revolution, nationalist and communist. The United States found itself destroying traditional villages and killing innocent civilians as it attempted, in vain, to build a new society in its own image. This was the perversity of American-sponsored revolution in the Third World. Many of the earliest and most consistent opponents of these policies were people who, like George Kennan, criticized the revolutionary and idealistic strains in U.S. foreign policy.
Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America the United States frequently hindered the process of decolonization because nationalists—like Ho Chi Minh—refused to accept the American model of liberal capitalism. Ideological dogmatism, economic interest, and cultural condescension combined when Washington lent its support to imperial powers and local "strong men." There were the counterrevolutionary consequences of America's inherited revolutionary narrow-mindedness, magnified by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. U.S. conceptions of liberty and enterprise tragically set the most democratic nation against the cause of national independence.
DÉtente and Its Critics
The difficulties of supporting overseas revolution during the Cold War contributed to a crisis of American confidence in the late 1960s. Citizens and leaders doubted whether they could make a world with nuclear weapons, ubiquitous protest movements, and profound economic inequalities safe for democracy. Many individuals—including President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser (and later secretary of state), Henry Kissinger—believed that inherited American sensibilities were out of touch with international realities. Radical critics condemned the nation's long-standing ideals for producing destruction and devastation instead of helping those most in need.
Nixon and Kissinger sought to curtail America's revolutionary ambitions. They emphasized an international balance of power rather than promises for positive change. Through a series of agreements with former adversaries—especially the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China—they created a framework for great power cooperation that limited conflict between different revolutionary models. At home they discredited critics who called for a more idealistic foreign policy. This period, called the era of détente by contemporaries, was one of unprecedented American pessimism and retrenchment. Nixon and Kissinger's foreign policy cut against the grain of basic American assumptions regarding the virtues of liberty and enterprise. After the turmoil of the 1960s, citizens grew skeptical about the application of these values overseas. Americans, however, were also uncomfortable with the empty realpolitik of détente. A foreign policy guided by balance of power considerations, rather than principles, promised only permanent struggle. Americans could not escape their inherited belief in progress. The stability promised by Nixon and Kissinger was not enough. The period of détente ended in the late 1970s as the nation began, yet again, to pursue revolutionary aspirations abroad.
Despite their significant differences, Presidents James Earl Carter and Ronald Reagan embodied this return to revolution in the wake of détente. They promised a more open and democratic foreign policy, one that embraced human rights and condemned communist infringements on liberty and enterprise. They pledged to fight when necessary to make the world safe for democracy. Most importantly, these two presidents spoke of remaking foreign societies in America's image. This is what Reagan meant when he repeatedly claimed that it was "morning in America."
Reagan's popularity at home and abroad speaks to the power of this idealistic message. When the Soviet government began to loosen its grip on Eastern Europe and its own society after 1985, his affirmations of American-style liberty and enterprise contributed to a new period of international optimism. In contrast to the 1960s, the United States now appeared poised to bring democracy and wealth to long-repressed and impoverished lands. The world had reached, in the frequently repeated words of Francis Fukuyama, the "end of history." According to this argument, America's liberal capitalism embodied a system of values that would finally revolutionize the entire world.
Most observers understood that they had not reached anything like the end of history. American ideals remained highly contested. Their applicability in various environments awaited demonstration. Nonetheless, American citizens found themselves drawn to Reagan's rhetoric because it promised international revolution on U.S. terms. It affirmed the messianic quality of America's political model. All of Reagan's successors in the late twentieth century, especially President William Jefferson Clinton, repeated his rhetoric.
The American Revolution Enters the Twenty-First Century
The twenty-first century offered a host of new opportunities and challenges for American foreign policy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War made the United States an unmatched international power. Its technology, economy, and culture exerted influence in virtually all corners of the globe. American dynamism produced a startling trend toward the Americanization of food, fashion, music, law, and even language. American notions of liberty and enterprise revolutionized education, work, and entertainment in many societies, replacing traditional assumptions about hierarchy and status. U.S. influence provided many people with new hopes of freedom and wealth, but also new difficulties in protecting cultural particularity.
The latter consequence of America's revolutionary impact overseas—international homogenization—has inspired determined and sometimes violent resistance among groups who find their values under siege. The long list of Americanization's opponents includes farmers, environmentalists, labor union activists, religious believers, nationalists, and social democrats—as well as terrorists like Osama bin Laden. For these groups, American-inspired liberty and enterprise have the effect of repressing contrary ways of life. American movies and other forms of popular culture, for example, undermine assumptions about religious piety and social roles in countries as diverse as Italy and Iran. The same can be said for many of Washington's claims about human rights. America's revolutionary presumptions may seem self-evident and universally beneficial to some, but they also appear self-serving and shallow to others.
Throughout their history, Americans have consistently emphasized the global virtues of their ideals. They have generally ignored the shortcomings and narrow-mindedness embedded in their political values. This duality has made the United States a far-reaching revolutionary force. Time and again, the nation has rejected ideological diversity. Instead, it has used persuasion, coercion, and force to impose its vision on others. Traditional points of view have appeared to Americans as fodder for radical change. Alternative revolutionary programs, especially communism, have suffered from extreme repression at the hands of freedom's advocates. Americans are revolutionaries because they wish to change the world in their own image, with very little compromise or variation. They are frequently dogmatic and self-righteous. There is little reason to expect these qualities to change in the twenty-first century.
Rousseau anticipated the paradox of America as a revolutionary power. Forcing freedom on the world, the United States has supported radical change while also repressing diversity. This paradox became more evident during the course of the twentieth century, but it surely dates back as far as Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan of 1754. Even before they attained independence, Americans conceived of their revolution as an ongoing, global process of democratization. On the continent of North America, in the Western Hemisphere, and across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, this has meant the spread of individual freedoms and free markets. Americans have scoffed at foreign traditions and assumed that all human beings will attain happiness and wealth when their societies are governed by politically aware citizens and energetic business owners.
The steady growth of U.S. diplomatic power since the end of British rule allowed Americans remarkable success in remaking the world. The international system at the dawn of the twenty-first century was disproportionately an American system. It produced many benefits for citizens of the United States and other nations, but it also undermined the diversity upon which liberty, enterprise, and most other values must ultimately depend. Global American influence seriously limited the range of human experience. Like other revolutionaries in the past, Americans confronted the possibility that their achievements had become self-defeating.
As early as the eighteenth century, New World influences helped inspire revolutionary upheavals throughout the old empires of Europe. This pattern continued in the nineteenth century as thinkers from diverse cultures studied the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to guide modern state building. During the first half of the twentieth century, American soldiers fought to undermine authoritarian regimes and revolutionize the workings of the international system. By the end of the twentieth century, American cinema, music, and fashion challenged traditional values in all corners of the globe.
Self-confidence and ignorance of the wider world fed the nation's revolutionary aspirations. These qualities also made Americans intolerant of the diversity of revolutionary experience. The imagery of the thirteen colonies' fight for independence from British rule in the late eighteenth century provided a template for acceptable foreign revolutions that became more rigid over time. The whole world had to follow the American revolutionary path. Heretical movements required repression because they offered destructive deviations from the highway of historical change.
Enthusiasm for revolution, in this sense, produced many counterrevolutionary policies. These were directed against alternative models, especially communism, that violated American definitions of "liberty" and "enterprise." In the second half of the twentieth century this paradox became most evident as the United States employed revolutionary concepts like "development" and "democratization" to restrain radical change in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. "Globalization" came to reflect the dominance of the American revolutionary model, and the repression of different approaches. Paraphrasing French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, America has forced much of the world to be free, but only on American terms.
A Diplomatic Revolution Before the Break With Britain
Decades before Americans contemplated a break with the British Empire, influential figures planned to promote a revolution beyond the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies. French, Spanish, Russian, British, and Indian groups uneasily interacted with one another in what eighteenth-century observers called the "western territories," then comprising more than two-thirds of what would later be the U.S. mainland. French and Indian encroachments on British settlements, in particular, threatened to encircle the residents of the colonies, imperiling their security and economy. Assembling in Albany, New York, between 19 June and 10 July 1754, representatives from seven of the colonies (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York) responded to these circumstances. They outlined an agenda for the future political unity and diplomatic expansion of American society. Although never officially implemented, the socalled Albany Plan created the foundation for a future revolution on the North American continent and abroad.
Benjamin Franklin, the charismatic Pennsylvania entrepreneur and politician, drafted much of the Albany Plan. He began with a call for unity among the colonies, under the leadership of a president general. This figure would work with a grand council of colonial representatives to "make peace or declare war with the Indian Nations." Beyond issues of territorial defense, the president general would also purchase lands for new settlements outside of the original colonies. On the expanding American frontier, the president general would "make laws" regulating commerce and society. Franklin and the other contributors to the Albany Plan devoted little attention to the interests of the Indians or the French. This was a scheme designed to make the residents of the "western territories" live by American (and British) laws. Trade would be organized according to American customs of contract. Settled farming and industry would replace the migratory livelihoods of many indigenous communities. Most significantly, land would be apportioned as personal property, demarcated, and defended with government force.
The historian Richard White has shown that before the second half of the eighteenth century, the various groups encountering one another in the western territories engaged in a series of careful compromises. European traders negotiated with Indian communities as mutual dependents. They exchanged gifts, accommodated their different interests, and intermixed culturally. White has called this the "middle ground" that naturally existed where diverse peoples, each with expansionist aims, came together.
The Albany Plan was one of the first instances when Americans acted self-consciously to convert the middle ground into clearly American ground. Benjamin Franklin and his successors would not tolerate the uncertainty that came through constant compromise with diverse interests. They rejected a strategy of balance among various groups. The Albany Plan sought to remake the frontier in America's image. It marked a revolutionary application of liberty and enterprise beyond America's then-limited boundaries.
Franklin's 1754 proposals set a precedent for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and subsequent policies that unified the territories later comprising the United States as a single economic market, under a single set of "civilized" laws. Liberty and enterprise became the touchstones for legitimate authority in lands previously occupied by peoples with different traditions of political organization.
Americans had clear economic and security interests in the West, but they also felt a sense of racial and cultural superiority that was exemplified in Franklin's references to "savages" on the frontier. In the next century these assumptions would find expression in an asserted American manifest destiny to revolutionize the "backward" hinterlands.
American policy after 1754 emphasized westward expansion and the export of revolution. This translated into explicit territorial occupation, forced population removals, and the extension of a single nation. Before independence these ideas were recognizable. They became most evident, in North America and across the Atlantic Ocean, at the dawn of the nineteenth century. American support for revolutionary activities would soon extend far beyond the nation's western frontier.
Independence and Revolution Abroad
In the months following the first clashes between American and British forces at Lexington and Concord, the nascent United States made two surprising efforts to convert its struggle into a broader international movement. On 28 July 1775 the Continental Congress, representing the colonies in rebellion, addressed "the people of Ireland," similarly subjects of British imperial rule. According to the Americans, King George III's ministers had converted the citizens of colonial lands "from freemen into slaves, from subjects into vassals, and from friends into enemies." Members of the Continental Congress asserted that they shared a "common enemy" with the Irish population. They expected a "friendly disposition" between the two peoples, and a similar struggle for freedom: "God grant that the iniquitous schemes of extirpating liberty from the British Empire may soon be defeated."
This call for international revolution was much more than idle rhetoric. As they struggled to raise the forces necessary to challenge the British military on the eastern seaboard, American soldiers attempted to carry their revolution beyond their borders. On 4 September 1775 an army of two thousand men invaded British-controlled Canada. In the middle of November, they occupied Montreal. The Americans did not rape and pillage the Canadian population but instead created a "virtuous" government that would allow the people to elect their leaders ("liberty") and protect their commerce ("enterprise"). Many residents of Montreal and other surrounding areas welcomed this imposed revolution.
American expansionism in 1775 reflected naive but serious enthusiasm for radical international change. Despite their relative weakness in relation to the British Empire, the former colonists felt that their revolution marked a turning point in world history. They believed that their cause would inspire men and women in Canada, Ireland, and other areas. Encouraging radical change abroad was not altruistic, but necessary for what the Continental Congress called the "golden period, when liberty, with all the gentle arts of peace and humanity, shall establish her mild dominion in this western world." The historian Joyce Appleby has demonstrated that even skeptics of political idealism like John Adams were "profoundly influenced by their belief in the unity of human experience and the general application of universal truths."
Revolutionary Realism
The failure of the Irish population to rise in response to foreign overtures, and the rapid British success in recapturing the invaded areas of Canada, forced American leaders to rethink their tactics for securing independence. Men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson continued to believe that their cause was international in scope. They also understood that revolutionary ends called for pragmatic means. This required revolutionary realism: a willingness to make compromises and exhibit patience without corrupting ideals.
In February 1778, American leaders concluded a treaty of amity and commerce with the kingdom of France. This alliance brought the revolutionary colonists together with the conservative ancien régime of Louis XVI for the purpose of defeating British power. The French monarchy surely had no interest in seeing the cause of revolution spread beyond the British dominions. Nonetheless, most historians agree that without French aid the American Revolution might not have reached a successful conclusion. Paris supported American independence to promote its self-interest in the larger European balance of power.
Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson recognized the necessity of maintaining friendly but distant relations with unsavory regimes like that of France. Americans traded and procured aid from monarchical states. They generally avoided close political collaboration with these governments for fear of corrupting America's revolutionary principles. This explains, in part, the tradition of U.S. diplomatic aloofness, often termed "neutrality," that carried from the late eighteenth century up to World War II. While Americans sought to conduct profitable commerce with societies of all varieties—including France and Britain in the late eighteenth century—they attempted to remain separate from the politics of the conservative Old World.
President George Washington articulated this point of view in his Farewell Address, published on 19 September 1796. He called upon citizens to spread the virtues of commerce while avoiding "permanent alliances" that might threaten the new nation's security. American leaders like Washington were realistic enough to understand that they could never afford to isolate themselves from the international system. Through commerce and calculated political detachment from the powerful European monarchies, they hoped to protect their revolution, patiently spreading their principles abroad as opportunities opened.
The outbreak of revolution in France during the summer of 1789 offered Americans one of their first and most extraordinary opportunities. Louis XVI's attempt to increase his international power by supporting the American revolutionaries had the paradoxical effect of bankrupting his monarchy and opening the door to upheaval in his society. Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson came to symbolize for many French thinkers the enlightened possibilities of liberty and enterprise, unfettered from the chains of despotism. As violence spread and the monarchy crumbled, revolutionary leaders and propagandists in France looked to the American government for support.
Jefferson, then serving as America's minister to France, encouraged the initial spread of unrest against the ancien régime. Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense (1776) had inspired many Americans to join their independence struggle, also traveled (in an unofficial capacity) to Paris to support the cause of revolution. Jefferson and Paine were the most eloquent American exponents of the ideals embodied in popular French attacks on monarchy, aristocracy, and political tradition. The two advocates of revolution were not, however, unique in their sympathies. French revolutionary figures—particularly Edmond Charles Genêt, a diplomat from the new regime—received the adulation of American crowds throughout the United States. Even early skeptics of the events in France, notably John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, sympathized with those who wished to throw off the repression of the Bourbon regime and replace it with a society of liberty and enterprise.
Adams, Hamilton, and other members of the Federalist Party in America differed from Jefferson and Paine in their fear that the French Revolution would careen out of control. They perceived the violence in Paris and other cities as a threat to the very ideals the revolution wished to serve. They also understood that revolutionary chaos during the Jacobin period after the execution of the king would open the door for dictatorship, which is what occurred, first in the hands of the Directory and later under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Jefferson, Paine, and the early Republicans were slower than their Federalist counterparts to see these dangers. When they did, in the mid-1790s, they also separated themselves from the extremism of the French Revolution. Both the Federalists and the Republicans supported a revolution against the ancien régime, but the two parties came to despair the violence, anarchy, and seeming irrationality of events in comparison to America's less disruptive experience.
Federalists and Republicans exaggerated their differences over the French Revolution to gain support from different domestic groups. Northern merchants generally felt threatened by French revolutionary attacks on their commerce. Southern planters, in contrast, expected new opportunities for export to France under a revolutionary regime that denounced mercantilism. These sectional differences contributed to partisan acrimony in the late eighteenth century.
The breakdown in the American political consensus during this period reflected little change in attitudes toward revolution. Americans supported the overthrow of monarchy in France. They applauded appeals to liberty. They exhibited suspicion of excessive violence and social disruption. Most importantly, they denounced revolutions that appeared more radical than their own.
Land Acquisition and Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the United States established itself as a dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. This was no small accomplishment for a young nation with fragile unity and a minuscule military. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe exploited Europe's preoccupation with the Napoleonic wars and the relative weakness of potential rivals in North America. They constructed what Jefferson called an "empire of liberty" that combined force and commerce with a sincere commitment to enlightened government in "savage" lands.
America's self-confidence in the righteousness of its revolutionary model motivated many of the bloodiest massacres and dispossessions of native communities during this period. For Jefferson in particular, those who resisted democratic government and economic penetration threatened the American cause. Resistance justified temporary repression and, when necessary, brutalization. Nonwhite races received the most violent treatment. They appeared "immature" and "unprepared" for the blessings of liberty. Americans defined themselves as paternalists, caring for blacks and Indians until these groups were ready (if ever) for democratic self-governance. In this curious way, American sincerity about revolutionary change inspired more complete domination over nonwhite communities than that frequently practiced by other, less ideologically imbued imperial powers.
The American acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 doubled the size of the country. It allowed Jefferson to make his "empire of liberty" a reality. With full control of the Mississippi River, the United States could conduct commerce along the north-south axis of the continent free from European interference. Exploring, apportioning, and eventually settling the vast western territories, the United States would now "civilize" its surroundings, as envisioned in Franklin's Albany Plan of 1754. Foreign powers and Indian communities had, in American eyes, prohibited the spread of liberty and enterprise. By sponsoring a famous cross-continental "journey of discovery" directed from 1804 to 1806 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Jefferson provided a foundation for altering the West with the creation of national markets, state governments, and, very soon, railroads. The transformation of the territories acquired with the Louisiana Purchase involved the rapid and forceful extension of America's Revolution.
During this same period, residents of French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Western Hemisphere revolted against European authority. While Americans remained wary of revolutions directed by nonwhite peoples, the U.S. government supported independence in Haiti, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and other former imperial possessions. Nonwhite revolutionaries, like Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, received aid, goodwill, and, most importantly, inspiration from Americans.
Fearful that the European powers, including Russia, would attempt to repress the Latin American revolutions, President James Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, worked to exclude this possibility. On 2 December 1823 the president announced what later became known as the Monroe Doctrine in his annual message to Congress. It explicitly prohibited "future colonization by any European powers" in the Western Hemisphere. The doctrine asserted the predominance of U.S. interests. The president and his secretary of state believed that the security of American borders, trading lanes, and revolutionary principles required freedom from Old World intervention.
Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the British navy enforced the Monroe Doctrine in order to weaken London's European rivals; American words and British seapower sheltered revolutionaries from their previous imperial oppressors. At the same time, the United States stepped into the place of the colonial empires, assuring that political and economic change followed its model. Americans intervened south of their border to support revolutions that promised democratic governance and free trade. They repressed revolutions that entailed extreme violence, limitations on commerce, and challenges to U.S. regional domination. As in their policies toward France during the late eighteenth century, Americans welcomed rapid change throughout the Western Hemisphere, but only on their own terms.
1848 and "young America"
The year 1848 witnessed a string of upheavals throughout most of the major cities in Europe, including Paris, Naples, Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna. In a matter of weeks, urban revolutionaries forced the French king Louis-Philippe and Austrian prince Klemens von Metternich to flee from power. Inspired in part by the example of the American Revolution, many citizens of Europe were poised for a bright new democratic future.
Americans rejoiced at this prospect, as illustrated by the frequent parades and proclamations on behalf of popular liberty in Europe. Foreign revolutionaries, particularly the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth, emerged as national celebrities. Their names replaced the previous names for many towns throughout Indiana, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania, areas with large recent immigrant populations from the European continent. Small groups of Americans organized themselves for possible military action overseas on behalf of their revolutionary heroes. While most of this private militia activity came to very little, a small contingent of U.S. citizens joined the failed rebellion in Ireland. As in 1775, Americans believed that the long-term success of their Revolution was connected with events in Europe, and Ireland in particular.
At the highest levels of government, the United States supported the European uprisings with diplomatic means short of force. In May 1848, John C. Calhoun, the former secretary of state and prominent U.S. senator from South Carolina, used his connections with the Prussian minister-resident in America to encourage the formulation of "constitutional governments" upon the "true principles" embodied in the American federal system. The construction of new political institutions on this model, according to Calhoun, was necessary for "the successful consummation of what the recent revolutions aimed at in Germany" and "the rest of Europe." The White House also indulged in revolutionary enthusiasm. On 18 June 1849, President Zachary Taylor sent a special envoy, Dudley Mann, to support and advise Kossuth. When the ruling Habsburg government learned of the Mann mission, it protested to Washington. Secretary of State Daniel Webster publicly defended American action on behalf of the European revolutionaries. In response, Vienna severed its connections with the United States. Americans accepted this temporary break in their foreign relations for the purpose of articulating their sympathies with the brave men and women who hoped to overturn the old European political order.
These revolutionary hopes, however, failed to reach fruition. By the end of 1849 the established monarchies of Europe had reasserted their control over the continent. When necessary, they used military force to crush the reformers who had taken to the streets. Dismayed by this course of events, but conscious of its inability to affect a different outcome, the U.S. government reaffirmed its commercial relations with the conservative regimes. Americans condemned the brutality in Europe, but they took advantage of postrevolutionary stability to increase cotton and other exports across the Atlantic. This was another case of America's revolutionary realism: sympathy and support for political change overseas, but a recognition that compromise and patience were necessary. The United States took advantage of opportunities to push its ideals, and it also exploited existing markets to sell its products. This was an unavoidable balance.
After 1848 many Americans worried about the implications of their nation's failure to support the cause of revolution more concretely. A faction of dissatisfied Democrats came together at this time to form a group identified as Young America. In using this name they meant to differentiate their interventionist program from the caution of their party's so-called Old Fogies. Young America argued that the nation could only secure its ideals through more forceful "expansion and progress." Stephen A. Douglas, the U.S. senator from Illinois who would run against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, became the leading political figure for citizens who wished to make America a more effective beacon of revolution overseas. Douglas, however, failed to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1852. Another Democrat, Franklin Pierce, was elected to the White House that year after making numerous appeals to Young America sentiment. Pierce advocated U.S. expansion for the purpose of opening markets and spreading American principles. The Democratic Party platform explained that "in view of the condition of popular institutions in the Old World, a high and sacred duty is devolved with increased responsibility upon the Democracy in this country." Americans believed that the vitality of their ideals required more effective support for political and economic change overseas. The spread of liberty and enterprise across the globe became more important as the United States suffered a profound crisis of identity in the years before the Civil War.
For American advocates of what the historian Eric Foner has identified as the ideology of "free soil, free labor, and free men," the post-1848 repressions in Europe threatened to reinforce unenlightened policies at home. This appeared most evident in the case of southern slavery. Transforming monarchies into democracies and liberating human beings from bondage became part of a single project. At home and abroad, free labor promised increased productivity, higher wages for workers of all races, and more democratic politics. Support for monarchy overseas and slavery in the American South constrained markets, depressed wages, and empowered conservative families.
Agitation around Young America in the 1850s, and broader attempts to foster the spread of liberty and enterprise, contributed to the American Civil War. The bloodshed between 1861 and 1865 resulted, at least in part, from a Northern attempt to enforce radical socioeconomic change in the South. Slavery and the South's "peculiar" precapitalist structure, according to Eugene Genovese, hindered the development of industry and democracy. The period of Reconstruction after the defeat of the Confederacy is, not surprisingly, called by many historians America's second revolution, when southern institutions—including slavery, voting restrictions, and property concentration in a landed aristocracy—were all radically dislocated by an interventionist Union government.
This second revolution went hand in hand with a more assertive U.S. foreign policy in Europe and Asia. Like Reconstruction at home, American activities abroad sought to eradicate "peculiar" obstacles to liberty and enterprise. "Free soil, free labor, and free men" was a global worldview that required U.S. supported revolutions in the most tradition-bound empires, especially in Asia.
Between 1840 and 1870, American envoys forced China and Japan to open official contacts with Washington. In 1844, Caleb Cushing, U.S. representative from Massachusetts and longtime advocate of U.S. expansion, negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia with the Chinese emperor. This agreement guaranteed American trade access to key ports in Asia. Equally important, the treaty protected the legal rights of missionaries proselytizing on the mainland. For Cushing and his contemporaries, relations with China promised both wealth and the spread of America's "Christian" ideas of liberty. Commodore Matthew Perry's mission to the then-closed kingdom of Japan in 1853 served similar purposes. In 1858, Perry's successor, Townsend Harris, negotiated a treaty to open Japan for U.S. trade and ideas.
The upheavals in China and Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century were influenced significantly by these inroads. In both societies, Americans sought to undermine traditional political and economic institutions. Missionaries argued for new restrictions on monarchical authority. Merchants emphasized personal profit and private property. Intellectuals extolled the virtues of a learned and participatory citizenry. In all of these ways, the expansionist ideology of Young America encouraged U.S. style liberty and enterprise to take root in some of the world's oldest civilizations. American ideas undermined conservative worldviews.
The "new Empire"
The historian Walter LaFeber wrote that the decades after the Civil War marked the beginning of modern American diplomacy. The dominance of northern and western economic interests, America's expansionist ideology, and the nation's growing industrial might made the United States a truly global power during this period. In the Philippines, Midway Islands, Hawaii, and Alaska the nation formed in a struggle for independence became, despite significant domestic opposition, a colonial overseer. The United States built an imperium that soon rivaled the empires of old.
The American empire was not only "new" in its chronology, according to LaFeber. It was also "new" in its structure and governing ideology. This was an empire predicated on the assumption that all of the world could become like the United States. William Henry Seward, secretary of state from 1861 to 1869, envisioned an almost unlimited expanse of liberty and enterprise. Railroads, ships, and other government-sponsored projects would allow for the free movement of people and products. Education and the rule of law would protect the freedom of the individual and the property of the merchant. Most importantly, Seward believed that America's model of a democratic society would improve the lives of citizens across the globe, even if it required violence and repression in the short run. This was a revolutionary vision that, like others, required sacrifice (usually most burdensome for non-Americans) on behalf of a higher cause. Democracy and markets were the perceived wave of the future, uprooting traditional hierarchies in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other continents.
Seward's revolutionary vision served America's material and strategic interests, but it also had sincere racial and religious roots. Belief in an Anglo-Saxon mission to "Christianize" the world came through in one of the most widely read books of the post–Civil War years: the Reverend Josiah Strong's Our Country. Published in 1886 on behalf of the American Home Missionary Society, the first edition sold more than 130,000 copies (an astronomical figure for the time) and was serialized in countless newspapers. Like Seward, Strong affirmed the importance of expanded American influence throughout the world. Industrialization had brought the world closer together, Strong argued. Nations had to prepare for more intense international competition. Strong affirmed Seward's vision of a democratic and market-driven empire. He also elaborated on the importance of this imperial turn for America's "Anglo-Saxon Christian mission." In language that appealed to the prejudices of many readers, Strong asserted: "There is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon is to exercise the commanding influence in the world's future."
Struggling as he saw it against "heathen" influences in Asia and other parts of the globe, Strong assured readers that "I cannot think our civilization will perish…. I believe it is fully in the hands of the Christians of the United States, during the next ten or fifteen years, to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years." For Strong and his many thousands of followers, the Anglo-Saxon "race" was uniquely suited to bring civilization to the rest of the world. Our Country contained extended "scientific" discussion about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon physiques, the adaptability of settlers from this stock, and, most importantly, the positive influence of Protestantism. Free from the oppression of a Roman Catholic Church, an emperor, or any superstitious deities, Anglo-Saxons developed unique qualities of liberty and enterprise. They were self-governing and capable of creative production, according to Strong. Our Country tapped into popular anxieties that the growth of competing empires, the migration of "inferior races," and the spread of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century threatened Anglo-Saxon virtues. In this context Strong wrote that "the destinies of mankind, for centuries to come, can be seriously affected, much less determined, by the men of this generation in the United States." A global American empire would protect the essential qualities of Anglo-Saxon civilization by remaking the rest of the world in the U.S. image. Racial characteristics were inherited, according to Strong, but they could be overcome by the socializing qualities of Christian doctrine. Converted believers in far-off lands could receive grace from God. American expansion and colonization in places like Hawaii and the Philippines promised, in Strong's words, to "mold the destinies of unborn millions."
This was God's revolution on an international scale. Strong's words reflected a popular American disposition to dislodge "heathen" elites overseas. Businessmen claimed they were doing God's work when they seized local resources and established trading posts in formerly closed societies. Missionaries asserted divine sanction when they disregarded local traditions and proselytized their beliefs to native citizens. Most significantly, U.S. military forces in Asia, Latin America, and other areas argued that violence was a necessary means of building God's kingdom. Citing Charles Darwin on the "survival of the fittest," Strong claimed that resisting populations would be routed in a contest "of vitality and of civilization." As on the western frontier in earlier years, after the Civil War Americans built an extensive new empire, employing brutality for the sake of revolutionary ends.
The Early Twentieth Century
The Spanish-American War of 1898 was, according to Walter LaFeber, a natural outgrowth of America's revolutionary expansion in prior decades. When Cuban residents revolted in early 1895 against Spanish rule, the government of President Grover Cleveland offered support for the aspirations of the island's citizens. Cleveland did not advocate immediate Cuban independence—he condescendingly believed that the dark-skinned inhabitants of the island were unprepared for self-rule. However, the president pushed the Spanish government to initiate political and economic reforms that would make Cuba more like America. Cuban exiles residing in the United States and labor union leaders—especially Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor—went beyond Cleveland's caution, advocating an immediate revolution against Spanish authority. By 1897 newspaper publishers picked up on these sentiments. They demanded a U.S. war aimed at destroying the Spanish empire.
Simultaneously, an uprising against Madrid's rule in the Philippines attracted American attention. In this case, American interest did not derive from geographical proximity to the United States but instead from the Philippines' location near China. As Britain, France, Germany, and Japan divided up the economic markets of China, businessmen and policymakers in the United States worried that they would be excluded. The United States lacked the imperial springboard that Hong Kong, for example, provided to the British. A revolution in the Philippines promised, in many American eyes, to create a regime both friendly and compatible with the nation's economic interests in China. Secretary of State John Hay expected that a Philippine revolution against Spanish rule would ensure the continued spread of liberty and enterprise in Asia. This was the basic assumption of Hay's famous Open Door Notes (1899–1900), which connected American interests with assured access to the people and markets of foreign societies.
Drawn into the Cuban and Philippine uprisings, the United States went to war with Spain in April 1898 to expand its "new empire" and assure that revolutions overseas followed the American model. This meant the destruction of monarchy and other inherited authorities. U.S. occupation armies replaced traditional institutions with free markets, personal property protections, and promises of democratic self-rule. Racist American fears that nonwhite populations would not properly govern themselves if left to their own devices meant that, in practice, democratic reforms were virtually nonexistent in Cuba and the Philippines after 1898. While the Caribbean island attained nominal independence, the Platt Amendment of 1901 (named for Connecticut senator Orville Platt) guaranteed American military and economic dominance. In the Philippines, the United States did not rely upon informal mechanisms of control. The archipelago became an American colony, where U.S. soldiers fought a bloody four-year war against Filipino rebels. America supported revolution in Cuba and the Philippines, but it also suppressed revolution when it challenged core assumptions about liberty and enterprise.
Washington would not tolerate radicalism that jeopardized markets and assumptions about just government. Americans remained revolutionary thinkers, as they had been since before 1776. Their nation continued to inspire unprecedented social transformations across the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Americans encountered numerous competing revolutionary models. These included the nationalism of many independence fighters (especially the Chinese Boxer rebels of 1900), the anti-industrialism of peasant activists, and the socialism of international-minded thinkers.
None of these forces was new. All three, particularly socialism, gained momentum from the disruption that accompanied heightened rivalries among the European imperial powers and the emergence of the United States as an important international player. Americans could begin to build a truly global empire of liberty and enterprise after 1898, but they quickly became aware of contrary, more radical tendencies throughout the world. For the United States the twentieth century was a struggle to spread the American Revolution and repress alternatives. Cuba and the Philippines were preludes to what lay ahead.
Wilsonianism
On 15 March 1917, Czar Nicholas II, fearing the spread of domestic revolution, abdicated from the throne of imperial Russia. A provisional government, led by a recently formed party known as the Constitutional Democrats, asserted authority over the country. Inspired by British and other European liberals, the Constitutional Democrats promised to replace centuries of near absolute monarchy in Russia with a democratic society. They hoped to copy the social-market economies of western Europe that mixed industrial enterprise and private property with guarantees of basic public welfare.
The United States was far removed from events in Russia, but the nation and its leaders immediately expressed sympathy with the liberal revolution against the czar. Many immigrants in cities like New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago had come to America as a refuge from czarist tyranny and the frequent ethnic violence encouraged by the old regime. In earlier years these groups had pressured President Theodore Roosevelt to protest against Russian pogroms. In 1917 they applauded the overthrow of the czar and supported friendly American gestures toward the revolutionaries now in power.
President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisers shared much of this sentiment. On 22 March 1917, only seven days after the czar had abdicated, the United States officially recognized the legitimacy of the new government. Wilson was one of the first leaders to make this move because he hoped to encourage the spread of American-style liberty and enterprise in Russia and other areas emerging from long histories of autocratic rule. He followed the counsel of his confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, who explained that by supporting "the advancement of democracy in Russia," Wilson would accelerate "democracy throughout the world." Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that the president spoke of the Russian Revolution as a "glorious act."
Wilson's vision of American-supported "democracy throughout the world" permeated his declaration of war against Germany on 2 April 1917, less than a month after the "glorious" Russian Revolution. After more than two years of bloody conflict on the European continent, accompanied by increasing attacks on American shipping, the president announced to Congress that "autocratic government," like that in Germany, was more than just distasteful to U.S. sensibilities. Autocratic militarism, repression, and economic nationalism had become profound threats to the life of democracy. Without the spread of American-style liberty and enterprise, the historian Frank A. Ninkovich has explained, Wilson feared the degradation and destruction of his society. World revolution on the American model was necessary for U.S. survival. This is what Wilson meant when he proclaimed that the "world must be made safe for democracy." The future of "civilization" had reached an apparent turning point. The president's Fourteen Points, announced on 8 January 1918 in a speech to Congress, outlined a program that sought to revolutionize the basic structure of international relations for the purpose of spreading democracy. Emphasizing the liberated "voice of the Russian people," Wilson called for political openness, free trade, disarmament, "independent determination" for oppressed peoples, and a "general association" of peace-loving nations. Liberty and enterprise, not balance of power or divine right, would govern the international system. Affairs between nations would evolve to look more like the relations among citizens in the United States.
In late 1917, just as the first American soldiers began to arrive on the European continent, a small group of communist, or Bolshevik, revolutionaries overthrew the new government in Russia. Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Bolsheviks pledged to destroy capitalism and American-style democracy. Liberty and enterprise, according to Lenin, allowed for the strong and the wealthy to repress the weak and the poor. A global proletarian revolution, starting in Russia, would create a new international structure guaranteeing equality and individual welfare, not the empty promises of bourgeois democracy. In order to establish their regime, the Bolsheviks made many short-term compromises, particularly the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany on 3 March 1918, but they were as serious as Wilson in their aspiration to revolutionize the international system.
This second, Soviet phase of the Russian Revolution elicited reactions similar to those inspired by the Jacobin period of the French Revolution more than a century earlier. Americans sympathized with Russian citizens who sought to overthrow the czar, but they recoiled from the sight of violence, property confiscation, and civil war. Wilson believed that his program for a democratic peace after World War I was the only one worth pursuing. Lenin's contrary vision challenged basic assumptions about liberty and enterprise. The Bolsheviks promised to make the world profoundly unsafe for democracy on American terms. Russia's communist revolution endangered the American revolution.
On 6 July 1918, Wilson authorized a small American expeditionary force to join British, French, and Japanese soldiers supporting the anti-Bolshevik White armies in Russian Siberia. This intervention followed a model that the president had applied, more than any of his predecessors, throughout the Western Hemisphere during his two terms in office. Small groups of U.S. soldiers entered a foreign country to assist favored revolutionary elements against their opponents. In Siberia—as in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Central American states—Wilson hoped to ensure the kind of political order that would allow liberty and enterprise to take shape. N. Gordon Levin, Jr., has explained that the president and his advisers convinced themselves that they were not threatening Russia's self-determination because the U.S. force was so small. Wilson viewed limited American intervention as the action required to nurture legitimate revolutionary impulses threatened by domestic competitors and foreign predators.
In this context historians have noted the conservative implications of the president's revolutionary rhetoric, especially at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The Versailles settlement negotiated by the victors in World War I broke apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, as well as the German imperium outside of Europe. It established self-determination for the Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and other longrepressed peoples. It also created a League of Nations that the United States, despite Wilson's efforts, refused to join. These constituted significant changes in the international system, but they paled in comparison to what the Versailles settlement left intact. Fearful that Bolshevism and other nonliberal revolutionary movements in places like Germany, Hungary, and China would create anarchy, Wilson and his counterparts allowed the major world empires—Britain, France, and Japan—to grow. American influence—formal and informal—also expanded, especially in Asia. Local elites in China, Korea, and Indochina found their expectations for national independence under the terms of Wilson's Fourteen Points disappointed. Through military and economic means, the great powers worked to constrain political change that challenged basic liberal-capitalist assumptions.
Wilson carried the paradox of Jeffersonian politics into the twentieth century. American leaders and citizens naturally applauded the overthrow of old regimes, particularly those of King Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II. They expected that governments ensuring liberty and enterprise on the American model would replace centuries of despotism and autocracy. Because of his young nation's relative weakness, Jefferson had to rely largely on rhetoric to support overseas revolution. Wilson, in contrast, matched emotional words with extended military commitments.
When the revolutionary visions of Jefferson and Wilson encountered more radical ideas, especially Jacobinism and Bolshevism—these two men proved intolerant of diversity. They worked to repress rivals and eliminate the conditions that produced uncertainty instead of orderly change. Away from the American continent, this involved mostly rhetoric for Jefferson. Wilson, however, took advantage of his influence at the Paris Peace Conference to bolster efforts aimed at repressing challengers to American-style liberty and enterprise. In the early twentieth century, the United States had the power to enforce its worldview throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in parts of Europe and Asia. Wilsonianism revolutionized these areas by making them more like America and less like other revolutionary alternatives. U.S. policy followed this Wilsonian pattern in succeeding decades, albeit with important variations.
Liberal Developmentalism
The 1920s are traditionally identified with alleged American "isolationism." Recent scholarship has shown that this picture is far too simple.
Wilson's successors in the White House avoided foreign military commitments, but they pursued a consistent policy that the historian Emily S. Rosenberg has called "liberal developmentalism." This ideology, shared by U.S. leaders and citizens, assumed that "other nations could and should replicate America's own developmental experience." Businesses, philanthropic groups, labor unions, and government figures worked together after World War I to spread the "American dream" in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. This included encouraging the development of free markets, democratic institutions, and popular culture on the American model.
The last element of this triad proved most revolutionary. Manufacturers and advertisers—often working with government subsidies—contributed to a global diffusion of American-style automobiles, radios, and movie technologies, among other products. Rising criticisms of Americanization during this period attested to the ways in which U.S. cultural influence revolutionized foreign societies. The new popular culture made the nation of Jefferson and Wilson a focus of global attention. It disrupted social hierarchies by appealing to the desires of the average individual. Most significantly, it undermined traditional values by glorifying liberty and enterprise.
Contrary to the "isolationism" often associated with the White House during this period, American presidents shared public enthusiasm for the cultural spread of the American revolution abroad. As secretary of commerce and later as president, Herbert Hoover encouraged investment overseas, creating the foreign infrastructure and dependence that would guarantee access for American products and ideas. Instead of assuring fair competition among a variety of firms, the U.S. government supported the foreign expansion of near monopolies like J. P. Morgan, Standard Oil, and General Electric. These companies exerted strong influence over Republican presidential administrations. They also acted as "chosen instruments" for America's policy of supporting overseas revolution through economic and cultural means. Spreading the American dream in the 1920s promised massive profits and radical changes in the ways foreign societies functioned. Historians have generally avoided the temptation to glorify Americanization, but they have recognized that the nation's liberal developmentalism revolutionized international society.
Fascism and the "american Way of War"
During the Great Depression of the 1930s American culture lost some of its glow. In addition to Soviet communism, fascism emerged as a powerful challenger to America's revolutionary model. Scholars have long debated whether fascism constituted an alternative revolutionary paradigm or an antimodern regressive influence. Regardless of their position on this issue, historians agree that it sought to smother the influence of American-style liberty and enterprise in countries like Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan. In all of these nations, fascists condemned the decadence of imported cars, radio programs, and movies. Fascist leaders sought to create more nationalist—and often racial—cultural forms.
Unlike the citizens of many European and Asian countries, Americans never showed much sympathy for fascism. As early as 1933, prominent figures, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, expressed strong distaste for the "uncivilized" behavior of the Nazis in Germany. Mired in an economic depression, the United States offered little material support to antifascist fighters, but the leaders of the nation consistently criticized the violent infringements on individual liberty and free enterprise that accompanied the policies of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Americans hoped for a string of antifascist revolutions.
When these upheavals failed to materialize and the regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan began to undermine neighboring democracies, President Roosevelt initiated a policy of antifascist intervention overseas. He used a mix of foreign assistance, trade embargoes, and military expansion to bolster American influence. This included close cooperation with Britain, and after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the USSR. Like the revolutionary realists of the eighteenth century, Roosevelt recognized that alliance with unsavory regimes—in this case a communist state—was necessary to defeat a more pressing danger to American ideals.
On 14 August 1941 the president issued a public statement announcing what became known as the Atlantic Charter to guide the great powers during World War II and the postwar settlement. Negotiated during a three-and-one-half day meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland, this document pledged Washington and London (as well as Moscow, they hoped) to the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, free trade, disarmament, and a "permanent system of general security." In addition, the Atlantic Charter included promises of "improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security" inspired by Roosevelt's domestic New Deal policies. The president sought to assure "that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want." This was an extraordinary moment in the history of great power diplomacy. Roosevelt had pledged to support Britain against Nazi Germany, but in return he had extracted concessions that would revolutionize what was then the world's largest empire. Self-determination, as outlined in the Atlantic Charter, justified independence movements in Britain's Indian, Southeast Asian, and East African colonies. Free trade undermined the imperial preference system that had formerly allowed London to dominate the economies of its empire. A "permanent system of general security," soon to be named the United Nations, diminished the global predominance of the European capitals. Most significantly, New Deal guarantees of economic security and social welfare included in the Atlantic Charter helped to legitimize human rights, only a nascent concept before 1941.
Like Wilson, Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II with the purpose of making the world safe for democracy. This involved bloody battlefields on two fronts, in Europe and Asia, with frequent compromises concerning strategy and principle. The war was "total" for Americans because they saw no alternative but to eliminate their fascist enemies completely. All alliances and compromises served this purpose. Under American tutelage, political life in Europe and Asia had to start anew, infused with the principles of liberty and enterprise that foreign elites had resisted for too long.
Total annihilation of enemies and a revolutionary reconstruction of society on American terms was, according to historian Russell F. Weigley, "the American way of war." Acting to destroy threats to their way of life, U.S. leaders conquered much of Europe and Asia. They followed the same pattern pursued when men like Jefferson and Lincoln annexed the western territories during the nineteenth century and defeated the South during the Civil War. Operating under the guidance of the Atlantic Charter, U.S. soldiers forced foreign societies to accept American ideas of liberty and enterprise. They followed the vision of figures like Josiah Strong, who had proclaimed a global mission to make the Old World new. World War II was, in this sense, a conflict fought by the United States for worldwide revolution on American terms.
Reconstruction and Containment
If the Civil War was America's second revolution, the years after World War II marked a third revolution. Having created a new form of government and expanded it across much of North America, the United States now rebuilt western Europe, Japan, and South Korea from the ground up. Historians have devoted extensive attention to the vital role that local citizens and leaders played in charting new directions for these societies. This is undeniable, but the revolutionary impact of American policy deserves serious consideration as well. Men like George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, Lucius Clay, and Douglas MacArthur forced the defeated societies to reconstruct themselves on America's model. In West Germany and Japan this meant the formulation of new constitutions that enshrined free speech, democratic elections, and capitalist markets. In western Europe as a whole, Washington pushed for regional integration along lines that resembled American federalism. Most importantly, through the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, the United States provided societies devastated by war with the material resources to finance private enterprise and citizen welfare. Life for those vanquished by war in western Europe and Japan changed radically after 1945, largely along lines compatible with American sensibilities.
Americanization of this kind was revolutionary, but it also had conservative consequences. Washington chose to work with local elites that had strong anticommunist credentials. In many cases, this resulted in the repression of radical ideas. The Communist Party in Italy, for example, suffered electoral defeat in April 1948 after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency provided the Christian Democratic Party and the Catholic Church with a large infusion of covert campaign funding. Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea were ripe for revolution after World War II, and the United States worked to make certain that these areas followed America's model. Democratic liberties and capitalist enterprise provided the foundation for U.S. directed reconstruction.
Soviet efforts to consolidate revolutionary change along communist lines in Eastern Europe, North Korea, and China inspired fears—some legitimate, some exaggerated—that Moscow would subvert the states in America's sphere of influence. The clash between American and Soviet revolutionary models gave rise to what contemporaries called the Cold War. In this prolonged ideological struggle, the lands devastated during World War II became the battlegrounds where the superpowers competed to influence the course of future developments. Both Washington and Moscow believed that they could only make the world safe for their respective ideals if key strategic areas in Europe and Asia followed their particular model of political organization. Americans expected that a Europe of liberal democracies would ensure long-term peace and prosperity. Soviet leaders hoped that a Europe of communist states would provide the resources needed to build something approximating Karl Marx's vision of a workers' paradise.
The incompatibility of these visions made the Cold War a prolonged period of Soviet-American hostility. Following the often-quoted advice of George Kennan—the chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff between 1947 and 1949—Americans sought to protect their revolutionary ideals by containing the spread of communist influence. This meant increasing support for allies who appeared to share American sensibilities, while limiting the influence of dissidents. From a geopolitical point of view, it also required a permanent mobilization of force to deter Soviet incursions. The policy of containment, in this sense, militarized America's revolutionary influence overseas, adding to the nation's already evident distrust of diversity. It also created a short-term bias to the status quo. Social experimentation and cooperation with a devious enemy appeared too risky.
By the 1950s the Cold War had spread to what contemporaries called the Third World. These were former colonial possessions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that began to attain their independence in the aftermath of World War II. In general, the superpowers had limited strategic and economic interests in these areas. They drew extensive American and Soviet intervention, however, because they served as natural showcases for each government's revolutionary model.
The economist and policy adviser Walt Rostow was only one of many to argue for extensive U.S. sponsorship of Third World development in America's image. Prosperous markets and free societies, he explained, would increase the worldwide attraction of American-style liberty and enterprise. Otherwise, Rostow warned, newly independent states would fall prey to the "disease" of communist influence. On a strategic level, Rostow and others warned that Soviet advances in peripheral areas like Indochina would eventually jeopardize the survival of American-inspired values in critical strategic areas like Japan. This was the alleged threat of "falling dominoes."
Both Washington and Moscow used violence to reconstruct the Third World. In the American case, the Vietnam War was the clearest example of this phenomenon. Throughout the 1960s policymakers generally believed that they were bringing a positive revolution to the impoverished villagers of Indochina. Containment of communism and industrial development promised to create peace and prosperity, according to American assumptions. In pursuit of this vision, Washington deployed extensive military force to bludgeon local resistance.
Installing the American version of revolution in Vietnam involved the repression of all other varieties of revolution, nationalist and communist. The United States found itself destroying traditional villages and killing innocent civilians as it attempted, in vain, to build a new society in its own image. This was the perversity of American-sponsored revolution in the Third World. Many of the earliest and most consistent opponents of these policies were people who, like George Kennan, criticized the revolutionary and idealistic strains in U.S. foreign policy.
Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America the United States frequently hindered the process of decolonization because nationalists—like Ho Chi Minh—refused to accept the American model of liberal capitalism. Ideological dogmatism, economic interest, and cultural condescension combined when Washington lent its support to imperial powers and local "strong men." There were the counterrevolutionary consequences of America's inherited revolutionary narrow-mindedness, magnified by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. U.S. conceptions of liberty and enterprise tragically set the most democratic nation against the cause of national independence.
DÉtente and Its Critics
The difficulties of supporting overseas revolution during the Cold War contributed to a crisis of American confidence in the late 1960s. Citizens and leaders doubted whether they could make a world with nuclear weapons, ubiquitous protest movements, and profound economic inequalities safe for democracy. Many individuals—including President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser (and later secretary of state), Henry Kissinger—believed that inherited American sensibilities were out of touch with international realities. Radical critics condemned the nation's long-standing ideals for producing destruction and devastation instead of helping those most in need.
Nixon and Kissinger sought to curtail America's revolutionary ambitions. They emphasized an international balance of power rather than promises for positive change. Through a series of agreements with former adversaries—especially the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China—they created a framework for great power cooperation that limited conflict between different revolutionary models. At home they discredited critics who called for a more idealistic foreign policy. This period, called the era of détente by contemporaries, was one of unprecedented American pessimism and retrenchment. Nixon and Kissinger's foreign policy cut against the grain of basic American assumptions regarding the virtues of liberty and enterprise. After the turmoil of the 1960s, citizens grew skeptical about the application of these values overseas. Americans, however, were also uncomfortable with the empty realpolitik of détente. A foreign policy guided by balance of power considerations, rather than principles, promised only permanent struggle. Americans could not escape their inherited belief in progress. The stability promised by Nixon and Kissinger was not enough. The period of détente ended in the late 1970s as the nation began, yet again, to pursue revolutionary aspirations abroad.
Despite their significant differences, Presidents James Earl Carter and Ronald Reagan embodied this return to revolution in the wake of détente. They promised a more open and democratic foreign policy, one that embraced human rights and condemned communist infringements on liberty and enterprise. They pledged to fight when necessary to make the world safe for democracy. Most importantly, these two presidents spoke of remaking foreign societies in America's image. This is what Reagan meant when he repeatedly claimed that it was "morning in America."
Reagan's popularity at home and abroad speaks to the power of this idealistic message. When the Soviet government began to loosen its grip on Eastern Europe and its own society after 1985, his affirmations of American-style liberty and enterprise contributed to a new period of international optimism. In contrast to the 1960s, the United States now appeared poised to bring democracy and wealth to long-repressed and impoverished lands. The world had reached, in the frequently repeated words of Francis Fukuyama, the "end of history." According to this argument, America's liberal capitalism embodied a system of values that would finally revolutionize the entire world.
Most observers understood that they had not reached anything like the end of history. American ideals remained highly contested. Their applicability in various environments awaited demonstration. Nonetheless, American citizens found themselves drawn to Reagan's rhetoric because it promised international revolution on U.S. terms. It affirmed the messianic quality of America's political model. All of Reagan's successors in the late twentieth century, especially President William Jefferson Clinton, repeated his rhetoric.
The American Revolution Enters the Twenty-First Century
The twenty-first century offered a host of new opportunities and challenges for American foreign policy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War made the United States an unmatched international power. Its technology, economy, and culture exerted influence in virtually all corners of the globe. American dynamism produced a startling trend toward the Americanization of food, fashion, music, law, and even language. American notions of liberty and enterprise revolutionized education, work, and entertainment in many societies, replacing traditional assumptions about hierarchy and status. U.S. influence provided many people with new hopes of freedom and wealth, but also new difficulties in protecting cultural particularity.
The latter consequence of America's revolutionary impact overseas—international homogenization—has inspired determined and sometimes violent resistance among groups who find their values under siege. The long list of Americanization's opponents includes farmers, environmentalists, labor union activists, religious believers, nationalists, and social democrats—as well as terrorists like Osama bin Laden. For these groups, American-inspired liberty and enterprise have the effect of repressing contrary ways of life. American movies and other forms of popular culture, for example, undermine assumptions about religious piety and social roles in countries as diverse as Italy and Iran. The same can be said for many of Washington's claims about human rights. America's revolutionary presumptions may seem self-evident and universally beneficial to some, but they also appear self-serving and shallow to others.
Throughout their history, Americans have consistently emphasized the global virtues of their ideals. They have generally ignored the shortcomings and narrow-mindedness embedded in their political values. This duality has made the United States a far-reaching revolutionary force. Time and again, the nation has rejected ideological diversity. Instead, it has used persuasion, coercion, and force to impose its vision on others. Traditional points of view have appeared to Americans as fodder for radical change. Alternative revolutionary programs, especially communism, have suffered from extreme repression at the hands of freedom's advocates. Americans are revolutionaries because they wish to change the world in their own image, with very little compromise or variation. They are frequently dogmatic and self-righteous. There is little reason to expect these qualities to change in the twenty-first century.
Rousseau anticipated the paradox of America as a revolutionary power. Forcing freedom on the world, the United States has supported radical change while also repressing diversity. This paradox became more evident during the course of the twentieth century, but it surely dates back as far as Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan of 1754. Even before they attained independence, Americans conceived of their revolution as an ongoing, global process of democratization. On the continent of North America, in the Western Hemisphere, and across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, this has meant the spread of individual freedoms and free markets. Americans have scoffed at foreign traditions and assumed that all human beings will attain happiness and wealth when their societies are governed by politically aware citizens and energetic business owners.
The steady growth of U.S. diplomatic power since the end of British rule allowed Americans remarkable success in remaking the world. The international system at the dawn of the twenty-first century was disproportionately an American system. It produced many benefits for citizens of the United States and other nations, but it also undermined the diversity upon which liberty, enterprise, and most other values must ultimately depend. Global American influence seriously limited the range of human experience. Like other revolutionaries in the past, Americans confronted the possibility that their achievements had become self-defeating.
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