Empire of Liberty

Last updated
Columbia (the American people) reaches out to help oppressed Cuba in 1897 while Uncle Sam (the U.S. government) is blind and does not use its great firepower. Judge magazine, Feb. 6, 1897 Judge-2-6-1897.jpg
Columbia (the American people) reaches out to help oppressed Cuba in 1897 while Uncle Sam (the U.S. government) is blind and does not use its great firepower. Judge magazine, Feb. 6, 1897

The Empire of Liberty is a theme developed first by Thomas Jefferson to identify what he considered the responsibility of the United States to spread freedom across the world. Jefferson saw the mission of the U.S. in terms of setting an example, expansion into western North America, and by intervention abroad. Major exponents of the theme have been James Monroe (Monroe Doctrine), Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk (Manifest Destiny), Abraham Lincoln (Gettysburg Address), Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt Corollary), Woodrow Wilson (Wilsonianism), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman (Truman Doctrine), Ronald Reagan (Reagan Doctrine), Bill Clinton, [1] and George W. Bush (Bush Doctrine).

Contents

In the history of U.S. foreign policy, the Empire of Liberty has provided motivation to fight the Spanish–American War (1898), [2] World War I (1917-18), [3] the later part of World War II (1941–1945), the Cold War (1947–1991), and the War on Terror (2001–present). [4]

Thomas Jefferson

View of Liberty, Bedford County, Virginia (1855), Edward Beyer The Peaks of Otter and the Town of Liberty.jpeg
View of Liberty, Bedford County, Virginia (1855), Edward Beyer

Jefferson used this phrase "Empire of Liberty" in 1780, while the American revolution was still being fought. His goal was the creation of an independent American state that would be proactive in its foreign policy while ensuring that American interventionism and expansionism would always be of a benevolent nature:

We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace [ending the American Revolution]...we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of Liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.

Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780 [5]

Jefferson envisaged this "Empire" extending Westwards over the American continent, expansion into which he saw as crucial to the American future. During his presidency, this was in part achieved by his 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French, almost doubling the area of the Republic and removing the main barrier to Westward expansion, stating that "I confess I look to this duplication of area for the extending of a government so free and economical as ours, as a great achievement to the mass of happiness which is to ensue". [6]

However, this was not necessarily a politically unified Empire. "Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part." [7] Despite this, Jefferson on other occasions seemed to stress the territorial inviolability of the Union.

In 1809 Jefferson wrote his successor James Madison:

we should then have only to include the North [Canada] in our confederacy...and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.

Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809

Even in his later years, Jefferson saw no limit to the expansion of this Empire, writing "where this progress will stop no-one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth". [8]

While Jefferson spoke loftily and idealistically about an Empire of Liberty abroad, he also envisioned creating a new form of American imperialism closer to home. The scholar Richard Drinnon observed that Jefferson spoke of establishing more amicable relations with Native Americans on America's Western Frontier at his "second inaugural address". [9] During this address, Drinnon claims that Jefferson was quoted as stating that "humanity enjoins us to teach them (the Native Americans) agriculture and the domestic arts". [10] In practice, however, Jefferson's imperial policy and implementation of the ideal of an Empire of Liberty for North America's Native American population was radically different. In Drinnon's view, there was a vast disparity between Jefferson's ideas and his actual actions. According to Drinnon, "Jefferson had initiated the Indian removal policy through his energetic efforts to "obtain from the native proprietors the whole left bank of the Mississippi." One major reason the lands of the aboriginal inhabitants had been so drastically reduced was Jefferson's acquisition of a hundred million acres in treaties shot through with fraud, bribery, and intimidation. And when Indians inter fered with white definitions of the national interest, as did the "backward" tribes of the Northwest in 1812, Jefferson's humanitarianism hardened: "These will relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want," he grimly predicted to John Adams, "and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains.". [11]

Monroe Doctrine

The Monroe Doctrine, a U.S. foreign policy initiative introduced in 1823, stated that efforts by European countries to colonise or interfere with states in the Americas will be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention, while the U.S. promised to refrain from interfering the affairs of established European colonies and respect the control of the European nations over their Caribbean colonies. Its justification was to make the "New World" safe for liberty and American-style republicanism, although many Latin Americans viewed the doctrine as simply justification for the United States to establish imperialistic relations with Latin America without having to worry about European interference. The Monroe Doctrine was invoked during the Second French intervention in Mexico and with the German Empire during the Zimmermann Telegram affair in 1917. After 1960 the Monroe Doctrine was invoked to roll back Communism from its new base in Castro's Cuba. Ronald Reagan emphasized the need to roll back Communism in Nicaragua and Grenada.

Reforming the world

American Protestant and Catholic religious activists began missionary work in "pagan" areas from the 1820s, and expanded operations worldwide in the late 19th century. [12]

European nations (especially Britain, France and Germany) also had missionary programs, with these focused mostly on subjects within their own empires. [13] Americans went anywhere it was possible, and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) were among the many groups involved in missionary work. Others included the student volunteer movement and the King's Daughters. Among Catholics, the three Maryknoll organizations were especially active in China, Africa, and Latin America. [14]

Religious reform organizations joined in attempts to spread modernity and worked to fight the corrupting effects of ignorance, disease, drugs and alcohol. For example, the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU), a spinoff of the WCTU, had both strong religious convictions and a commitment to international efforts to shut down the liquor trade. [15] By the 1930s the more evangelical Protestant groups redoubled their efforts, but the more liberal Protestants had second thoughts about their advocacy, especially after the failure of prohibition at home cast doubt on how easy it might be to reform the world. [16]

Other dimensions

Economic dimensions of the Empire of Liberty involved dissemination of American management methods (such as Taylorization, Fordism, and the assembly line), technology, and popular culture such as film. [17]

In the 1930s, the Congress passed the Neutrality Acts, which attempted to avoid entering in conflicts with other nations. The United States became involved in World War II two years after its start.[ citation needed ]

Writers on the Left often capitalized on anti-imperialistic ideals by using the label American Empire in as a criticism of the United States foreign policy as imperialistic. Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson are prominent spokesmen for this position, having long been critical of American imperialism. [18] Their argument is that an imperialistic America represents an evil, and indeed the very thing that the "Empire of Liberty" was conceived to counter, imperialism. They recommend an alternate course of "dismantling the empire", by which the United States foreign policy is moved in a different direction. [19] Puerto Rican poet and novelist Giannina Braschi proclaims the collapse of the World Trade Center as the end of the American Empire and its "colonial" hold on Puerto Rico in her post 9-11 work "United States of Banana" (2011). [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imperialism</span> Policy or ideology of extending a nations rule over foreign nations

Imperialism is the practice, theory or attitude of maintaining or extending power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing not only hard power, but also soft power. Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Monroe</span> Founding Father, 5th president of the United States

James Monroe was an American statesman, lawyer, diplomat, and Founding Father who served as the fifth president of the United States from 1817 to 1825, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party. He was the last president who was a Founding Father as well as the last president of the Virginia dynasty and the Republican Generation; his presidency coincided with the Era of Good Feelings, concluding the First Party System era of American politics. He is best known for issuing the Monroe Doctrine, a policy of limiting European colonialism in the Americas. Previously he served as governor of Virginia, a member of the United States Senate, U.S. ambassador to France and Britain, the seventh secretary of state, and the eighth secretary of war.

Pax Americana is a term applied to the concept of relative peace in the Western Hemisphere and later in the world after the end of World War II in 1945, when the United States became the world's dominant economic, cultural, and military power.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bush Doctrine</span> US foreign policy principles of President George W. Bush promoting preventive war and unilateralism

The Bush Doctrine refers to multiple interrelated foreign policy principles of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. These principles include unilateralism, preemptive war, and regime change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Truman Doctrine</span> Cold War-era American foreign policy aimed at containing the expansion of communism

The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that pledges American "support for democracies against authoritarian threats." The doctrine originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, and further developed on July 4, 1948, when he pledged to contain the communist uprisings in Greece and Soviet demands from Turkey. More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied American support for other nations threatened by Moscow. It became the foundation of American foreign policy, and led, in 1949, to the formation of NATO. Historians often use Truman's speech to Congress on March 12, 1947 to date the start of the Cold War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reagan Doctrine</span> Doctrine proposed by the Reagan administration

The Reagan Doctrine was stated by United States President Ronald Reagan in his State of the Union address on February 6, 1985: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth." It was a strategy implemented by the Reagan Administration to overwhelm the global influence of the Soviet Union in the late Cold War. The doctrine was a centerpiece of United States foreign policy from the early 1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1991.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manifest destiny</span> Cultural belief of 19th-century American expansionists

Manifest destiny was a cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American imperialism</span> Expansion of American political, economic, media, and cultural influence

American imperialism is the expansion of American political, economic, cultural, media and military influence beyond the boundaries of the United States. Depending on the commentator, it may include imperialism through outright military conquest; gunboat diplomacy; unequal treaties; subsidization of preferred factions; regime change; or economic penetration through private companies, potentially followed by diplomatic or forceful intervention when those interests are threatened.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roosevelt Corollary</span> Early 20th-century US foreign policy regarding Latin America

In the history of United States foreign policy, the Roosevelt Corollary was an addition to the Monroe Doctrine articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in his State of the Union address in 1904 after the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903. The corollary states that the United States could intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries if they committed flagrant wrongdoings that "loosened the ties of civilized society".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josiah Strong</span>

Josiah Strong was an American Protestant clergyman, organizer, editor, and author. He was a leader of the Social Gospel movement, calling for social justice and combating social evils. He supported missionary work so that all races could be improved and uplifted and thereby brought to Christ. He is controversial, however, due to his beliefs about race and methods of converting people to Christianity. In his 1885 book Our Country, Strong argued that Anglo-Saxons are a superior race who must "Christianize and civilize" the "savage" races, which he argued would be good for the American economy and the "lesser races".

United States non-interventionism primarily refers to the foreign policy that was eventually applied by the United States between the late 18th century and the first half of the 20th century whereby it sought to avoid alliances with other nations in order to prevent itself from being drawn into wars that were not related to the direct territorial self-defense of the United States. Neutrality and non-interventionism found support among elite and popular opinion in the United States, which varied depending on the international context and the country's interests. At times, the degree and nature of this policy was better known as isolationism, such as the interwar period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monroe Doctrine</span> US foreign policy regarding the Western Hemisphere first articulated in 1823

The Monroe Doctrine is a United States foreign policy position that opposes European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It holds that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is a potentially hostile act against the United States. The doctrine was central to American grand strategy in the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Great Rapprochement</span> Improving USA-UK relations (1895–1915)

The Great Rapprochement was the convergence of diplomatic, political, military, and economic objectives of the United States and the British Empire from 1895 to 1915, the two decades before American entry into World War I.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historiography of the British Empire</span> Studies and methods used by scholars to develop a history of Britains empire

The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of the British Empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and historical dates and episodes are covered in the article on the British Empire. Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation, its relations to the French and other empires, and the kinds of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists, together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire has attracted scholars of the histories of the United States, the British Raj, and the African colonies. John Darwin (2013) identifies four imperial goals: colonising, civilising, converting, and commerce.

History of United States foreign policy is a brief overview of major trends regarding the foreign policy of the United States from the American Revolution to the present. The major themes are becoming an "Empire of Liberty", promoting democracy, expanding across the continent, supporting liberal internationalism, contesting World Wars and the Cold War, fighting international terrorism, developing the Third World, and building a strong world economy with low tariffs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International relations (1814–1919)</span> Diplomacy and wars of six largest powers in the world

This article covers worldwide diplomacy and, more generally, the international relations of the great powers from 1814 to 1919. This era covers the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), to the end of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-imperialism</span> Political stance in opposition to interventionist or expansionist policies

Anti-imperialism in political science and international relations is opposition to imperialism or neocolonialism. Anti-imperialist sentiment typically manifests as a political principle in independence struggles against intervention or influence from a global superpower, as well as in opposition to colonial rule. Anti-imperialism can also arise from a specific economic theory, such as in the Leninist interpretation of imperialism, which is derived from Lenin's 1917 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. People who categorize themselves as anti-imperialists often state that they are opposed to colonialism, colonial empires, hegemony, imperialism and the territorial expansion of a country beyond its established borders.

This Timeline of European imperialism covers episodes of imperialism outside of Europe by western nations since 1400; for other countries, see Imperialism § Imperialism by country.

The Washington Doctrine of Unstable Alliances, sometimes called the caution against entangling alliances, was an early realist guide for US foreign policy and the nation's interaction with others. According to the policy, the United States should consider external alliances as temporary measures of convenience and freely abandon them when national interest dictates. The policy has been cited as a rare example of an explicit endorsement of what in international relations is known as renversement des alliances, a state abandoning an ally for an alliance with a recent enemy, sometimes against the former ally.

The following is a list of important scholarly resources related to James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States. for a comprehensive older guide see Harry Ammon, James Monroe: A Bibliography.

References

  1. Hyland says, "Jefferson's concept of an empire of liberty found an echo in Clinton's enlargement of democracies." William Hyland, Clinton's world: remaking American foreign policy (1999) p. 201
  2. Dominic Tierney, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010) p. 91
  3. Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty (2010) p. 158
  4. David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty (2009) pp. xvii, 304, 458
  5. See online source Archived 2009-12-07 at the Wayback Machine
  6. Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestley, 29 January 1804
  7. Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Joseph Priestley, 29 January 1804
  8. Jefferson to William Ludlow, 6 September 1824
  9. Drinnon, Richard (1975). "The Metaphysics of Empire-Building: American Imperialism in the Age of Jefferson and Monroe". The Massachusetts Review. 16 (4): 666–688. ISSN   0025-4878. JSTOR   25088593.
  10. Drinnon, Richard (1975). "The Metaphysics of Empire-Building: American Imperialism in the Age of Jefferson and Monroe". The Massachusetts Review. 16 (4): 666–688. ISSN   0025-4878. JSTOR   25088593.
  11. Drinnon, Richard (1975). "The Metaphysics of Empire-Building: American Imperialism in the Age of Jefferson and Monroe". The Massachusetts Review. 16 (4): 666–688. ISSN   0025-4878. JSTOR   25088593.
  12. Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Connie A. Shemo, Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (2010)
  13. Andrew Porter, The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (2003)
  14. Jean-Paul Wiest, Maryknoll in China: A History, 1918–1955 (1997) ISBN   0-87332-418-8
  15. Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World/Woman's Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 1999 ISBN   0-8078-1950-6)
  16. Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton University Press, 2010 ISBN   978-0-691-14521-1)
  17. Richard Pells, From Modernism to the Movies: The Globalization of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (2006)
  18. Another Leftist, Arno J. Mayer, once described the Roman Empire as a "tea party" in comparison to its American counterpart.
    Gabriele Zamparini; Lorenzo Meccoli (2003). "XXI CENTURY, Part 1: The Dawn". The Cat's Dream. 47:04. It [the American Empire] is an informal empire of the sort that, it seems to me, does not really have a precedent in history. I'm inclined to say that compared to the American Empire, even the Roman Empire may be said to have been something in the nature of a tea party.
  19. Chalmers A. Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (American Empire Project) (2010)
  20. Madelena Gonzales and Helene Laplace-Claverie, editors, Minority Theatre on the Global Stage: Challenging Paradigms from the Margins, 2012.

Further reading