"The Platt Amendment and U.S. Occupation Policies in Latin America"

The years around the turn of the twentieth century saw a fundamental change in the global role of the United States. In just over seven years, from 1898 through 1905, the United States acquired authority of one kind or another over Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. The abrupt appropriation of dependencies stretching from East Asia to the Caribbean did not come about in "art of absence of mind," as had been said of the British Empire. Instead, it re?ected the steady, systematic construction of the United States as a Great Power. As different as they were in personality and politics, Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson each did his part to make the United States a signi?cant new player on the world stage, backed by a fractious but ultimately supportive Congress and public. The extension of American power over these far-?ung, tropical lands was part of a global trend in which industrialized nations took control of less-developed territories, from the division of sub-Saharan Africa among the powers of Europe to Japan's takeover of Taiwan and Korea. Many factors contributed to this trend, including the rapid industrialization of a handful of nations, vastly improved means of transportation on land and at sea, expanding global markets, and the stark differential in military power between the developed and less-developed world. It is no coincidence that Theodore Roosevelt, symbol in his own time and today of the new American imperialism, also championed making the U.S. Navy a war machine second only to Britain's hegemonic ?eet. By the time he left the presidency in March 1909, Roosevelt could boast that "the navy had become in every respect as ?t a ?ghting instrument as any other navy in the world."1 Global reach and military power went hand in hand. Acquiring territory was nothing new for the United States, of course. After independence, the young nation had steadily absorbed lands to the West until the United States spread "from sea to shining sea." In time all those new territories became states, however, whereas only one of the acquisitions after 1898, Hawaii, would do so. "For the ?rst time," in the words of George Kennan, "territories were acquired which were not expected to gain statehood at all . . . but rather to remain inde?nitely in a status of colonial subordination."2 The issue of "colonial subordination" did not sit well with many Americans. Was it justifiable, or even possible, for a democracy to rule over alien people without giving them a voice in government? A small but vocal minority of anti-imperialists answered with a resounding No. "Imperialism is not a question of crowns and scepters," a coalition that included Mark Twain and William Dean Howells declared on July 4, 1901. "Where . . . a President, a Congress or a nation claims the absolute right to rule a people . . . that is imperialism."3